Explanation and dissent: the common threads

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 fields can be described as an unrelenting refusal to follow the herd: a book of interviews with him is entitled Chronicles of Dissent (1992b) and a political biography by R. F. Barsky has the title A Life of Dissent (1997). His dissent is no mere obstinate rejectionism, as it is combined with a sustained 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 we 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 and painstaking analysis of relevant alternatives. We 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 its purpose is communication.