Introduction

Many of Chomsky's arguments for the relevance of language to issues in philosophy and psychology derive their force from the strength of their linguistic foundation. The perception that he has formulated and solved a range of descriptive and explanatory problems in the formal study of language ensures that his other ideas are taken seriously. This attitude makes sense: his arguments for innateness and rationalism, for instance, rest crucially on the validity of his views on language. By rationalism is meant the idea, best represented in the work of his intellectual ancestor Descartes, that “there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience.” Chomsky has provided the best evidence in existence for the innateness of some aspects of our knowledge of language, and hence for a modern version of Cartesian rationalism. In contrast, no such direct relation holds between his linguistics and his politics. As we shall see in detail in Chapter 5, there are connections between the strands of his different activities, but the intellectual justification for his political work does not rest on his syntactic insights in the way that much of his philosophical work does, and he frequently emphasizes that there is at best a tenuous relation between his two careers.

It is of course unsurprising that people who know and admire one strand of his output should be sympathetic to the other. Chomsky himself was drawn into linguistics in part because of his interest in and sympathy for Zellig Harris's political views. Like many linguists, NVS became interested in his political ideas because of prior exposure to his linguistics, and he has more than once interviewed potential students for linguistics courses who had been made curious about the field because of their admiration for his political dissent. However, to be able to evaluate Chomsky's philosophical and psychological contribution it is necessary to have some understanding of the linguistic background, while no such background knowledge is necessary to evaluate his political contribution. What follows in this chapter is an (intermittently historical) overview of certain central notions in his linguistics.