Book contents
Chapter 5 - Language and freedom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Explanation and dissent: the common threads
… working in a science is useful because you somehow learn … what evidence and argument and rationality are and you come to be able to apply these to other domains.
(Chomsky, 1988c: 696)Relentless dissent
The pressure to conform is great. It takes courage to speak or act in contradiction to the majority of one's fellows. Chomsky's work in all Welds can be described as an unrelenting refusal to follow the herd: a book of interviews with him is entitled Chronicles of Dissent and a recent political biography has the title A Life of Dissen. His dissent is no mere obstinate rejectionism, as it is combined with a passionate defense of alternatives: scientific creativity in the case of his linguistics; anarchist humanity in the case of his politics; the centrality of explanation in both. In his words “the task of a scientific analysis is to discover the facts and explain them.” In this final chapter I look at the strands linking Chomsky's scientific work to his political activism: his commitment to rationality, his refusal to take things at face value, his passionate defense of what he conceives to be right, and his dispassionate analysis of relevant alternatives. I begin with a glance at the tension between common sense and scientific explanation, and give a brief overview of his intellectual background, before turning to a more detailed analysis of the main areas of his polemical work.
Common sense and theory
It is obvious that two people can speak the same language; that it makes sense to talk of English from medieval times to the present; that children are taught their first language, or at least learn it from their parents and peers; that language is somehow socially defined and is designed for communication.
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- ChomskyIdeas and Ideals, pp. 177 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999