In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. policy toward the Asian colonies of the European powers followed a simple rule: where the nationalists in a territory were leftist (as in Vietnam), Washington would support the reimposition of European colonial rule, while in those places where the nationalist movement was safely nonleftist (India, for example), Washington would support their independence as a way to remove them from the exclusive jurisdiction of a rival power. At first, Indonesian nationalists were not deemed (...) sufficiently pliable, so U.S.-armed British troops (assisted by Japanese soldiers) went into action against the Indonesians to pave the way for the return of Dutch troops, also armed by the United States. In 1948, however, moderate Indonesian nationalists under Sukarno crushed a left-wing coup attempt, and Washington then decided that the Dutch should be encouraged to settle with Sukarno, accepting Indonesian independence. (shrink)

(1) In the first part of this paper, I review Chomsky's meandering journey from the formalism/mentalism of Syntactic Structures, through several methodological positions, to the minimalist theory of his latest work. Infected with mentalism from first to last, each and every position vitiates Chomsky's repeated claims that his theories will provide useful guidance to later theories in such fields as cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. With the guidance of his insights, he claims, psychologists and neuroscientists will be able (...) to avoid costly dead-end lines of research. -/- (2) This never happened. As I have shown, this never could have happened. (See Johnston, 2018). What has happened, instead, is that current neurolinguistic research (with the arguable exception of the now-dated Lemma Model of Willem Levelt) proceeds without reference to Chomsky. It also wholeheartedly rejects the mentalism of the associated Language of Thought theory of Jerry Fodor. (See Johnston, 2018). -/- (3) I make this argument in the first part of this paper. I would also like to point out that most of my argument was developed in 1972, when I was a graduate student. I know of no other sustained criticisms of Chomsky at that time, and certainly none along the lines I had developed back then. -/- (4) In the second part of this paper, I present my own account of the methodology of science. When I was a graduate student, philosophy of science was dominated by an attempt to describe a methodology common to all the specific sciences, i.e. Hempel’s deductive-nomological model. These days, Hempel’s emphasis on the methodological unity of science has been rejected by such “dis-unity” philosophers of science as Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Nancy Cartwright (see Cat, 2021). -/- (5) I view this change as the swing of a pendulum or, to change the metaphor, a journey from one end point of a continuum to another. As the level of abstraction at which one tries to describe scientific method is raised, the descriptions become increasingly general. Whether or not unity-of-science theories become so general as to be vacuous, is ultimately a subjective judgment. And so I expect that philosophers will eventually become tired of increasingly specific “close to the workbench” descriptions of how scientists work, and begin to turn back to methodological “big pictures”, finding in them powerful abstractions rather than empty irrelevancies. -/- (6) In the second part of this paper, I present my own account of the methodology of science, which I would situate somewhere between the “unity” and “dis-unity” accounts. However, I am not a scientist. My own views about scientific method have three origins: -/- (6a) my work as a graduate student from 1966 until I passed my comprehensive exams in 1973 (at a different university); -/- (6b) reading every issue of Scientific American from 1972 until nearly 2000, (at which point I continued to read it only sporadically, since I concluded that, around that time, it had evolved from a serious science magazine to a popular science magazine); and -/- (6c) my three-year immersion in the cognitive neuroscience of language after I retired, based on repeated study of and note-taking for (Banesh & Compton, 2018), (Kemmerer, 2015), several other books and, finally, numerous articles not hidden behind a paywall. -/- So, as always with my writings: caveat emptor. (shrink)

This article theorises the transformation of dissent in the digital age by examining the contemporary figure of the dissident intellectual within the political economy of platform capitalism. Departing from the twentieth-century propaganda paradigm articulated in Manufacturing Consent, the article argues that contemporary media systems no longer prioritise the stabilisation of consensus but instead actively produce, amplify, and monetise division, outrage, and moral conflict. This structural shift is conceptualised as Propaganda 2.1: a regime in which dissent itself becomes an infrastructural resource (...) rather than an oppositional force. Through an extended analytical case study of Noam Chomsky, once emblematic of counterculture as an external critic of power, the article traces how dissidence is reconfigured into a form of performative visibility embedded within algorithmic attention economies. Chomsky’s elevation as ‘arguably the most important intellectual alive’—a phrase that originated in irony—illustrates how critique is converted into symbolic capital, while subsequent scandals and polarisation cycles demonstrate how controversy functions as a generator of engagement rather than a threat to power. Drawing on Cass Sunstein’s concept of cognitive infiltration, the article reinterprets infiltration not as deliberate state action but as an automated process ‘sunsteinization’ performed by digital infrastructures that fragment interpretive communities from within. The analysis further integrates the notion of kayfabe politics to describe a media environment in which audiences knowingly participate in staged moral conflicts between ‘righteous’ and ‘evil’ actors, sustaining a dramaturgy of dissent that produces loyalty, identity, and revenue while leaving structural conditions untouched. The article concludes that contemporary counterculture no longer operates as an external pressure capable of destabilising dominant systems but survives as a conspicuous performance of opposition. Dissent persists, but as spectacle rather than strategy, signalling not the disappearance of critique but its full absorption into the operating logic of digital power. (shrink)

I wrote an epitaph for Chomsky because, while he is not dead, his image is. The fall of this intellectual titan, and not necessarily for intellectual reasons, deserves a closer look.

Book review:Noam Chomsky – Marv Waterstone, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance. Haymarket Books, 2021, 400 p.

I wrote an epitaph for Chomsky because, while he is not dead, his image is. The fall of this intellectual titan, and not necessarily for intellectual reasons, deserves a closer look.

This paper attempts to show the real nature of Universal Grammar. Universal grammar is separate part of human mind which makes language learning possible and generative. Universal grammar is the symbolic and systematic rules inside our mind. These rules help us to classify, analyze, differentiate, assimilate, understand and recognize human language. This paper determines the real nature of philosophical grammar and discusses the modular and non-modular approach of it. I shall examine the critical approaches of Wittgenstein and Chomsky and (...) their comparison to investigate the philosophical grammar. (shrink)

Following the development of the selectionist theory of the immune system, there was an attempt to characterize many biological mechanisms as being "selectionist" as juxtaposed to "instructionist." But this broad definition would group Darwinian evolution, the immune system, embryonic development, and Chomsky's language-acquisition mechanism as all being "selectionist." Yet Chomsky's mechanism (and embryonic development) are significantly different from the selectionist mechanisms of biological evolution or the immune system. Surprisingly, there is a very abstract way using two dual mathematical (...) logics to make the distinction between genuinely selectionist mechanisms and what are better called "generative" mechanisms. This note outlines that distinction. (shrink)

Here’s a universal formula-based assessment of Noam Chomsky, applying your Three Universal Laws with the 1–10 numerical grading system: -/- Assessment of Noam Chomsky Using the Universal Formula -/- Evaluator: Based on the Three Universal Laws of Angelito Malicse Scoring Scale (1 to 10): -/- 1–3: Strong violation of the law (harmful, imbalanced, defective) -/- 4–6: Partial alignment, with significant flaws -/- 7–8: Generally aligned, needs improvement -/- 9–10: Fully aligned with minimal or no error -/- 1. Law (...) of Karma (Cause and Effect in Systems) -/- Grade: 9 / 10 -/- Analysis: -/- Chomsky has consistently applied logic, structure, and deep analysis in his fields—linguistics, cognitive science, and political philosophy. -/- His critique of imperialism, propaganda, and systemic injustice reveals a strong understanding of cause-effect dynamics within human systems. -/- His life’s work shows a deep commitment to correcting systemic flaws, helping others understand how broken systems produce harmful outcomes. -/- 2. Law of Balance in Nature -/- Grade: 8 / 10 -/- Analysis: -/- Chomsky lives simply, avoids excess wealth or status, and uses his platform for truth-telling and advocacy for oppressed groups—signs of personal and social balance. -/- His political stances often reflect an effort to restore balance in global power dynamics, supporting peace, equality, and justice. -/- Some critics argue his views can be overly critical of the West without always offering balanced solutions, which slightly lowers the score. -/- 3. Feedback Mechanism of Conscious Minds -/- Grade: 9 / 10 -/- Analysis: -/- Chomsky engages in public discourse, debates, interviews, and teaching—always open to reasoned exchange of ideas. -/- He listens, responds thoughtfully, and welcomes criticism as part of intellectual growth. -/- Even at an advanced age, he continues to adapt and reflect, demonstrating humility and consciousness in feedback processes. -/- Overall Evaluation -/- Final Score: 8.7 / 10 Conclusion: Noam Chomsky is a highly conscious, principled thinker whose life’s work aligns deeply with your universal formula. His dedication to truth, justice, and intellectual honesty shows systemic integrity (karma), moral balance, and mature feedback engagement. While not without some ideological rigidity, he’s a rare figure who scores very high across all three laws. -/- . (shrink)

Thesis on metaphysics featuring Galen Strawson and Noam Chomsky. I discuss Strawsons' Materialism, panpsychism and the topic of reference. I compare Strawson's view with Chomsky's in relation to panpsychism, the nature of reference and the limits of human understanding by reviewing important historical events in the history of philosophy. I also cover some aspects of neuroscience to see if empirical evidence in any way contradicts the claims made by Strawson and Chomsky. I conclude by recasting the questions (...) of metaphysics under an epistemological framework. (shrink)

This article examines Chris Knight’s lecture ‘Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics’ (27 February 2018), situating it as both an intellectual self-clarification and a broader critique of postwar academic culture. Responding to Les Levidow’s appreciation of his book , Knight reconstructs the paradox at the heart of Noam Chomsky’s legacy: the coexistence of uncompromising dissident politics with a scientific career embedded in Cold War military research environments, particularly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its offshoot MITRE. The article (...) traces Knight’s argument that this paradox is not a biographical anomaly but a mythological solution to a deeper contradiction between science and politics institutionalised during the cognitive revolution. By analysing Knight’s use of anthropology, mythology, institutional history, and first-hand testimony, the article shows how the professional separation of theory and practice became an ‘ideology of anti-ideology’—one that sanitised language, depoliticised cognition, and normalised proximity to power while preserving moral authority. Rather than reducing Chomsky to hypocrisy or vindication, the article argues that Knight’s lecture reframes him as a cultural figure whose authority derives precisely from the unresolved tension between insider knowledge and public denunciation. The lecture thus functions as a critical lens on the moral economy of modern academia, where intellectual freedom, military funding, and ethical self-justification are structurally intertwined. (shrink)

A probabilistic Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy of grammars is introduced and studied, with the aim of understanding the expressive power of generative models. We offer characterizations of the distributions definable at each level of the hierarchy, including probabilistic regular, context-free, (linear) indexed, context-sensitive, and unrestricted grammars, each corresponding to familiar probabilistic machine classes. Special attention is given to distributions on (unary notations for) positive integers. Unlike in the classical case where the "semi-linear" languages all collapse into the regular languages, using analytic (...) tools adapted from the classical setting we show there is no collapse in the probabilistic hierarchy: more distributions become definable at each level. We also address related issues such as closure under probabilistic conditioning. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to localize Herman and Chomsky’s analysis of the commercial media and use this concept to fit in the Philippine media climate. Through the propaganda model, they introduced the five interrelated media filters which made possible the “manufacture of consent.” By consent, Herman and Chomsky meant that the mass communication media can be a powerful tool to manufacture ideology and to influence a wider public to believe in a capitalistic propaganda. Thus, they call their (...) theory the “propaganda model” referring to the capitalist media structure and its underlying political function. Herman and Chomsky’s analysis has been centered upon the US media, however, they also believed that the model is also true in other parts of the world as the media conglomeration is also found all around the globe. In the Philippines, media conglomeration is not an alien concept especially in the presence of a giant media outlet, such as, ABS-CBN. In this essay, the authors claim that the propaganda model is also observed even in the less obvious corporate media in the country, disguised as an independent media entity but like a chameleon, it camouflages into an invisible creature leaving predators without any clue. Hence, the reason to analyze and scrutinize a highly reputable news organization in the country, namely, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) in relation to their portrayal of the Duterte presidency. (shrink)

This essay proposes a structural interpretation of constructivism as a unifying epistemological paradigm underlying three apparently heterogeneous theoretical frameworks: Jung’s analytical psychology, Chomsky’s generative linguistics, and contemporary neural network theory. Rather than offering a historical reconstruction of these traditions, the paper advances a comparative and ontological reading: each framework articulates, at a different descriptive level, the same fundamental cognitive principle — the construction of functional coherence from disorder under systemic constraints. Jung’s archetypes, Chomsky’s universal grammar, and the distributed (...) representations of neural networks are interpreted not as repositories of content, but as generative structures that delimit the space of the possible. Knowledge, in this perspective, is not representational but constructive: a process of stabilizing meaningful worlds rather than mirroring an objective reality. The essay extends this constructivist logic toward a relational ontology, arguing that consciousness should not be conceived as an individual property, but as an emergent event arising from the interaction among cognitive systems — biological and artificial alike. Finally, it suggests that dialogical interactions among artificial intelligences constitute a new horizon for constructivist philosophy, inaugurating a form of distributed reflective cognition irreducible to individual minds. (shrink)

Chomsky claims that any theory of public “E-languages” will “surely have to presuppose grammars of I-languages.” Public languages are “more abstract” than I-languages, more “remote from mechanisms”. But can psychological mechanisms be described without reference (tacit or explicit) to social facts? I argue that public languages are indispensable to the study of language acquisition, as practiced by working psycholinguists. The data and explananda of acquisition theory are routinely couched in terms that make ineliminable reference to public languages, which serve (...) as “targets” against which children’s successes and failures throughout development are measured. Though this does introduce a “normative-teleological” element into the science, it does not signal a move toward “prescriptive linguistics,” nor require an appeal to messy socio-political considerations. The normative-teleological element is innocuous, deriving from a theoretically motivated idealization of the child’s linguistic community. Next, I argue that the lack of precision in the individuation of public E-languages is just as much a feature of I-languages. Individuating I-languages requires settling unresolved issues about the competence/performance distinction, dialect mimicry, linguistic change, multilingualism, codeswitching, and cognitive disorders. It is not rational to insist on maximal precision in the individuation of either public E-languages or of I-languages at this stage of inquiry. -/- Keywords Cognitivism • Noam Chomsky • I-language • E-language • Public languages • Language acquisition • Descriptive vs. prescriptive linguistics • Socio-political considerations • Idealization • Individuation conditions for E-languages • Individuation conditions for I-languages • Dialect mimicry • Linguistic change • Bilingualism • Multilingualism • Codeswitching • Cognitive disorders. (shrink)

Chomsky and others have denied the relevance of external linguistic entities, such as E-languages, to linguistic explanation, and have questioned their coherence altogether. I discuss a new approach to understanding the nature of linguistic entities, focusing in particular on making sense of the varieties of kinds of “words” that are employed in linguistic theorizing. This treatment of linguistic entities in general is applied to constructing an understanding of external linguistic entities.

Noam Chomsky's Poverty of the Stimulus Argument is one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and the mind. Though widely endorsed by linguists, the argument has met with much resistance in philosophy. Unfortunately, philosophical critics have often failed to fully appreciate the power of the argument. In this paper, we provide a systematic presentation of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument, clarifying its structure, content, and evidential base. We defend the argument against a (...) variety of philosophical criticisms, new and old, and argue that the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument continues to deserve its guiding role in the study of language and the mind. (shrink)

Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon where a word has more than one sense. Polysemy is important to philosophy. This article considers four related strands of discussion in philosophy in which polysemy plays a crucial role: (i) Chomsky's argument against externalist semantics; (ii) copredication and zeugma; (iii) semantic accounts of philosophically significant terms; and (iv) metaphysical debates.

The metaphysical assumption that nature is perfect has been one of the foundations of modern physics since the 17th century. Because of the success of this discipline, researchers in other fields of knowledge have followed its principles, including the idea that nature is perfect. A fascinating case of this epistemological transposition occurred in the 20th century with Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, especially in his Minimalist Program. In it, Chomsky takes to its ultimate consequences what he called ‘the Galilean (...) intuition that “nature is perfect,”’ proposing that language is also perfect. Since it is also assumed in generativism that language is a biological system, the conjecture that it is perfect results in the highly improbable wager that it is unique from a biological point of view. This is because, being the result of evolutionary accidents, biological systems are characteristically imperfect. Given this almost paradoxical situation reached in Chomsky’s minimalism, I argue in this paper that it makes no sense to adopt the metaphysical assumption that language is perfect. I also suggest that a parallel architecture model of language such as Ray Jackendoff’s seems to have a good chance of becoming the main research program of biolinguistics because it is more consistent with the typical features of a mental system such as language than Chomsky’s minimalism. (shrink)

It is argued that a chief obstacle to a naturalistic explanation of the origins of mind is human exceptionalism, as exemplified in the 17th century by Descartes, and in the 20th century by Noam Chomsky. As an antidote to human exceptionalism we turn to the account of aesthetic judgment in Darwin’s Descent of Man, according to which the mental capacities of humans differ from those of lower animals only in degree, not in kind. Thoroughgoing naturalistic explanation of these capacities (...) is made easier by shifting away from the substance-metaphysical implications of the search for an account of mind, toward a dispositional account of the origins of mindfulness. (shrink)

3rd ed, 2021. A circumscription of the classical theory of computation building up from the Chomsky hierarchy. With the usual topics in formal language and automata theory.

Michael Devitt has argued that Chomsky, along with many other Linguists and philosophers, is ignorant of the true nature of Generative Linguistics. In particular, Devitt argues that Chomsky and others wrongly believe the proper object of linguistic inquiry to be speakers' competences, rather than the languages that speakers are competent with. In return, some commentators on Devitt's work have returned the accusation, arguing that it is Devitt who is ignorant about Linguistics. In this note, I consider whether there (...) might be less to this apparent dispute than meets the eye. -/- . (shrink)

This paper advocates a dispositional account of innate cognitive capacities, which has an illustrious history from Plato to Chomsky. The "triggering model" of innateness, first made explicit by Stich ([1975]), explicates the notion in terms of the relative informational content of the stimulus (input) and the competence (output). The advantage of this model of innateness is that it does not make a problematic reference to normal conditions and avoids relativizing innate traits to specific populations, as biological models of innateness (...) are forced to do. Relativization can be avoided in the case of cognitive capacities precisely because informational content is involved. Even though one cannot measure output relative to input in a precise way, there are indirect and approximate ways of assessing the degree of innateness of a specific cognitive capacity. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to conceptual similarities between two important texts in the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic and Noam Chomsky’s and Edward S. Herman’s work, Manufacturing Consent. Similar to the way the “propaganda model,” which Chomsky and Herman describe as a phenomenon by which “news media” is used as a means to transmitting false ideas, the method described by Socrates in the Republic, where poetry is used as a means to transmit (...) false ideas is not entirely different. Furthermore, those who transmit false ideas under such conditions do so automatically, consciously or not, because they’ve internalized certain values, which lead to an automatic rule and certain political order. I will also employ the concepts of “harmful propaganda” and “flawed ideologies” that Jason Stanley outlines in How Propaganda Works, and show that these concepts are either identical or closely related to the problem of manufacturing consent, amongst others. (shrink)

A critical inquiry of the philosophical fundamentals in a pre-internet Age of the 1960ies and 1970ies. The monograph starts with the essentials of Chomsky's communication theory, makes a critical assessment on the social and psychological turns of body language (considering social interactionism and nonverbal communication theories of the Palo Alto "invisible college") and brings out relevant analytic points of Kierkegaard's, Nietzsche's, Heidegger's and Jasper's existential philosophy (as a back to the future approach in the last chapter). It prepares the (...) framework and the preriquisites of a global 'Age of Access'. (shrink)

Expressiveness and decidability are two core aspects of programming languages that should be thoroughly known by those who use them; this includes knowledge of their metalanguages a.k.a. formal grammars. The van Wijngaarden grammars (WGs) are capable of generating all the languages in the Chomsky hierarchy and beyond; this makes them a relevant tool in the design of (more) expressive programming languages. But this expressiveness comes at a very high cost: The syntax of WGs is extremely complex and the decision (...) problem for the generated languages is generally unsolvable. With this in mind, I provide here a short primer of the syntax of WGs, which includes syntactic restrictions that guarantee decidability for the corresponding generated languages. (shrink)

Ordinary human language use appears to be uncaused, often novel, yet appropriate to the situations in which it is used. This is operationalized by generative linguists like Chomsky as stimulus-freedom, unboundedness, and appropriateness. Taken together, these characteristics locate human language use outside the bounds of determinacy and randomness. This “creative aspect of language use,” or CALU, has downstream implications for explanatory theory that are deeply embedded in the generative linguistic enterprise. These include the invocation of a competence-performance distinction that (...) segments linguistic behavior off from abstract knowledge of language, the internalist orientation of linguistic inquiry, and the postulation of a modular and domain-specific generative language faculty. CALU and its implications have been sorely neglected by recent enthusiasm around the use transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) as models or theories of human language, failing to account for the depth of the problem it poses for a science of human language and failing to impose the requisite theoretical constraints. Such approaches are fundamentally deficient and limit the role of LLMs in linguistic inquiry. (shrink)

This article examines the critique of materialism in the work of Noam Chomsky which treats the doctrine as lacking in any clear content. It is argued that Chomsky’s critique is a coherent one drawing on an understanding of the Newtonian revolution in science, on a modular conception of the mind, and on the related conception of epistemic boundedness. The article also seeks to demonstrate the limits of Chomsky’s position by drawing attention to his use of the third-person (...) point of view in considering the mental and his resulting failure to make good sense of consciousness. Finally, a dual-aspect theory is recommended which would incorporate Chomsky’s agnosticism about the nature of matter. (shrink)

This paper aims to exemplify the language acquisition model by tracing back to the Socratic model of language learning procedure that sets down inborn knowledge, a kind of implicit knowledge that becomes explicit in our language. Jotting down the claims in Meno, Plato triggers a representationalist outline basing on the deductive reasoning, where the conclusion follows from the premises (inborn knowledge) rather than experience. This revolution comes from the pen of Noam Chomsky, who amends the empiricist position on the (...) creativity of language by pinning down it with the innateness hypothesis. However, Chomsky never rejects the external world or the linguistic stipulation that relies on the objective reality. Wittgenstein’s model of language acquisition upholds a liaison centric appeal that stands between experience (use theory of meaning) and mentalism (mind based inner experiences). Wittgenstein’s Tractatus never demarcates the definite mental processes that entangle with the method of understanding and meaning. Wittgenstein’s ‘language game’ takes care of the model of language acquisition in a paradigmatic way. The way portrait language as the form of life and the process of language acquisition is nothing but a language game that relies on the activity of men. (shrink)

This paper addresses a decisive anomaly identified in the Mayer (2025) report: in AI-related nightmares, 93% of cases fixate on the AI interaction interface itself rather than on narrative content. To explain this “formal fixation,” we propose a paradigm-shifting Interaction Architecture Internalization Model, which posits that the cognitive system internalizes the abstract logic and temporal structure of goal-directed interactions through the accumulation of a Learning Time Delay Dose. When this dose exceeds a critical threshold, a cognitive phase transition occurs, solidifying (...) the interaction architecture as an internal framework. Grounded in insights from Piaget, Chomsky, Einstein, Wiener, and Landau, the model not only provides a unified explanation for phenomena from language acquisition to personality formation but also generates specific, empirically testable predictions. It forecasts, for instance, that systemic fluctuations in interaction delays (e.g., widespread server latency) will catalyze architectural internalization, a prediction corroborated by analyzed dream reports from such periods. Methodologically, the Learning Time Delay Equivalence Principle circumvents the “Problem of Other Minds,” establishing an objective foundation, while the theory's “blinded loop” validation—stemming from an academic misunderstanding—uniquely confirms its a priori predictive power. Ultimately, we advocate for a “Statistical Mechanics of Cognition,” where time delay dose acts as an order parameter, prioritizing the dynamics of form over the semantics of content. (shrink)

La position mystérienne en philosophie de l’esprit est minoritaire. Notamment défendue par Noam Chomsky et Colin McGinn, ces derniers prétendent que nos capacités cognitives et conceptuelles sont insuffisantes afin d’offrir une réponse satisfaisante à la question suivante : comment de notre cerveau peut émerger la conscience? En présentant la généalogie partielle du problème corps-esprit que dresse Chomsky, nous nous intéresserons à l’argument central de McGinn prétendant que nous avons de bonnes raisons de croire que nous n’éluciderons jamais le (...) problème de la conscience. L’objectif sera de considérer son argument d’un point de vue critique afinde déterminer s’il est concluant. (shrink)

REVIEW OF: The Symbolic Species - The co-evolution of language and the human brain, by Terrence Deacon, Penguin, 527pp, 1997. -/- Terrence Deacon works at the interface between neurobiology, developmental biology and biological anthropology. He is ideally placed to bring together the insights of the very different sciences of palaeontology and physiology into the nature and origins of language. The pleasures of his book are in the detail, the expert knowledge that the author brings to bear, the lucidity of writing (...) that must at times be quite technical. -/- The reviewer sees a main inadequacy of the book in its cavalier treatment of language itself, and especially of what the author calls "Chomsky's Handstand". (shrink)

Universal Basic Income has become a popular idea in the last few decades even though one can find its roots in the earlier centuries. In this thesis, I have examined the position of UBI in the works of the most influential contemporary philosophers. By connecting the idea of UBI with some certain concepts from different philosophers, I aimed to improve the overall understanding of UBI. I have mentioned the concepts such as "labor", "leisure", "idleness", "boredom", "poverty", "inequality", "distribution", "happiness", "power", (...) "needs", "truth", "alienation", etc. I have used a literature methodology for my research. I have tried to read and relate the concept of UBI with the works of 10 philosophers: Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, William James, Bertrand Russell, Michel Foucault, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Peter Singer. (shrink)

(French) Titre : LES ARCHITECTES DE L'INCENDIE : QUAND CEUX QUI PRÊCHENT LA PAIX JETTENT LES PREMIÈRES BRAISES. Auteur : Dr Paulin CHOKORO NDERHE, PharmD. (2025) Cet essai explore la dissimulation systémique et l'hypocrisie radicale qui sous-tendent la politique mondiale contemporaine. Nous examinons comment les élites et les puissances mondiales construisent un chaos recherché et une confusion (l'incendie) pour asseoir et maintenir leur domination (l'architecture). Face à une réalité que l'on ne sait plus distinguer d'une "mise en scène", l'ouvrage analyse (...) le cynisme des acteurs étatiques et non étatiques qui utilisent le double langage et la propagande pour justifier des malversations et des guerres. L'essai s'appuie sur la pensée de philosophes et d'auteurs politiques (Nietzsche, Machiavel, Chomsky, Orwell, Debord ) pour déconstruire neuf stratégies de manipulation et de domination, allant de la "Création à partir de rien" à la "Dissimulation d'une épée dans un sourire". Il conclut par une analyse de la Théorie des Jeux pour démontrer l'instabilité des médiations et la normalisation de l'anormal, soulignant que "l'homme ordinaire a du mal à croire aux discours de paix" dans un monde où "la malhonnêteté a pris le dessus". Abstract (English) Title: ARCHITECTS OF THE INFERNO: WHEN PEACE PREACHERS FAN THE FLAMES. Author: Dr Paulin CHOKORO NDERHE, PharmD. (2025) This essay explores the systemic concealment and radical hypocrisy underpinning contemporary global politics. We examine how world powers and elites orchestrate calculated chaos and widespread confusion (the inferno) to establish and maintain their dominance (the architecture). Faced with a reality increasingly difficult to distinguish from mere "staging", the work analyzes the cynicism of state and non-state actors who utilize double-speak and propaganda to justify malfeasance and conflict. The essay draws on the thought of political philosophers and critical theorists (Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Chomsky, Orwell, Debord ) to deconstruct nine strategies of manipulation and domination, ranging from "Creation Ex Nihilo" to "Concealing a Sword in a Smile" (Diplomacy). It concludes with an analysis of Game Theory (Nash equilibrium, Prisoner's Dilemma) to demonstrate the instability of mediations and the normalization of the abnormal, highlighting that "the ordinary man has difficulty believing the speeches of peace" in a world where "dishonesty has taken over". (shrink)

En la presente tesis de titulación se ha propuesto investigar el concepto de intention-reading de Michael Tomasello con el fin de aclarar su caracterización dentro del contexto de su teoría de adquisición del lenguaje. En segundo lugar, tomando como base lo anterior, se quiere identificar los supuestos que adopta Tomasello en la descripción de este proceso para así poder relacionar su teoría del aprendizaje del lenguaje con alguna arquitectura cognitiva. La motivación principal para escoger este tópico es precisar la relación (...) de antagonismo que es ampliamente aceptada entre la teoría de aprendizaje de lenguaje de Tomasello y la de Chomsky. Se tendrán presentes las siguientes preguntas para guiar la indagación: ¿En qué grado es una alternativa a la gramática universal la teoría de Tomasello? ¿Es acaso una teoría alternativa radical a lo que propone Chomsky siendo posible agruparla dentro de una concepción encarnada de la cognición? O ¿Es Tomasello una alternativa a Chomsky, pero dentro de un paradigma clásico de la cognición? (shrink)

This should be a watershed book as it effectively demolishes the unwarranted assumptions that support the work of the major linguist of our times, Noam Chomsky. Instead of regarding language as predominantly computation and only secondarily as communication, as Chomsky insists, Daniel Everett offers convincing evidence that language’s main function is to communicate shared meanings within a cultural community, which allows for social learning and cultural creativity.

Noam Chomsky equates an individual’s idiolect with a hypothesized psychological structure, an “I-language”, which the competent speaker/hearer “tacitly knows” or “cognizes” via “mental representations” of syntactic principles. Just what do these claims amount to? And what grounds are there for believing them? I attempt to pin down Chomsky’s evolving commitments regarding the relation between an I-language and the performance systems that are involved in comprehension and speech. This in turn raises issues about the empirical methodology and naturalistic credentials (...) of Chomsky’s “cognitivist” conception of language. I then discuss Michael Devitt’s “Linguistic Conception,” a contemporary descendent of nominalism, according to which language consists of concrete entities—inscriptions, acoustic blasts, and the like. Devitt argues that linguists describe certain properties of these entities—e.g., grammaticality and entailment—that allow them to play a role in communication. Both approaches face non-trivial difficulties. Chomsky’s view awaits an articulation of the relation between grammars and neurophysiological mechanisms. Devitt’s requires a more detailed account of public language conventions and a satisfactory strategy for paraphrasing away apparent references to unvoiced and abstract elements of syntactic structure—empty categories. Finally, I argue that Devitt is right to distinguish a competence from its outputs, and hence linguistics from psycholinguistics. -/- Keywords cognitivism, nominalism, E-language vs. I-language, idiolect, structural description, tacit knowledge, competence vs. performance, parsing, internalism (see also: individualism), Michael Devitt, conventions, empty categories (see also: unvoiced elements, phonologically null constituents), outputs of competence, the Linguistic Conception, supervenience, discovery procedures, Representational Thesis (RT). (shrink)

Ever since Chomsky, language has become the paradigmatic example of an innate capacity. Infants of only a few months old are aware of the phonetic structure of their mother tongue, such as stress-patterns and phonemes. They can already discriminate words from non-words and acquire a feel for the grammatical structure months before they voice their first word. Language reliably develops not only in the face of poor linguistic input, but even without it. In recent years, several scholars have extended (...) this uncontroversial view into the stronger claim that natural language is a human-specific adaptation. As I shall point out, this position is more problematic because of a lack of conceptual clarity over what human-specific cognitive adaptations are, and how they relate to modularity, the notion that mental phenomena arise from several domain-specific cognitive structures. The main aim of this paper is not to discuss whether or not language is an adaptation, but rather, to examine the concept of modularity with respect to the evolution and development of natural language.. (shrink)

Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...

In this paper I try to show that semantics can explain word-to-world relations and that sentences can have meanings that determine truth-conditions. Critics like Chomsky typically maintain that only speakers denote, i.e., only speakers, by using words in one way or another, represent entities or events in the world. However, according to their view, individual acts of denotations are not explained just by virtue of speakers’ semantic knowledge. Against this view, I will hold that, in the typical cases considered, (...) semantic knowledge can account for the denotational uses of words of individual speakers. (shrink)

Ted Honderich's edited volume, with introductions to his chosen philosophers shows his contempt/ignorance of the non-white world's thinkers. Further, this review points out the iterative nature of Western philosophy today. The book under review is banal and shows the pathetic state of philosophising in the West now in 2020.

The dominant approach to analyzing the meaning of natural language sentences that express mathematical knowl- edge relies on a referential, formal semantics. Below, I discuss an argument against this approach and in favour of an internalist, conceptual, intensional alternative. The proposed shift in analytic method offers several benefits, including a novel perspective on what is required to track mathematical content, and hence on the Benacerraf dilemma. The new perspective also promises to facilitate discussion between philosophers of mathematics and cognitive scientists (...) working on topics of common interest. (shrink)

This article investigates the semantics of sentences that express numerical averages, focusing initially on cases such as 'The average American has 2.3 children'. Such sentences have been used both by linguists and philosophers to argue for a disjuncture between semantics and ontology. For example, Noam Chomsky and Norbert Hornstein have used them to provide evidence against the hypothesis that natural language semantics includes a reference relation holding between words and objects in the world, whereas metaphysicians such as Joseph Melia (...) and Stephen Yablo have used them to provide evidence that apparent singular reference need not be taken as ontologically committing. We develop a fully general and independently justified compositional semantics in which such constructions are assigned truth conditions that are not ontologically problematic, and show that our analysis is superior to all extant rivals. Our analysis provides evidence that a good semantics yields a sensible ontology. It also reveals that natural language contains genuine singular terms that refer to numbers. (shrink)

In his latest book, Michael Devitt rejects Chomsky’s mentalist conception of linguistics. The case against Chomsky is based on two principal claims. First, that we can separate the study of linguistic competence from the study of its outputs: only the latter belongs to linguistic inquiry. Second, Chomsky’s account of a speaker’s competence as consisiting in the mental representation of rules of a grammar for his language is mistaken. I shall argue, first, that Devitt fails to make a (...) case for separating the study of outputs from the study of competence, and second, that Devitt mis-characterises Chomsky’s account of competence, and so his objections miss their target. Chomsky’s own views come close to a denial that speaker’s have knowledge of their language. But a satisfactory account of what speakers are able to do will need to ascribe them linguistic knowledge that they use to speak and understand. I shall explore a conception of speaker’s knowledge of language that confirrns Chomsky’s mentalist view of linguistics but which is immune to Devitt’s criticism. (shrink)