Chomsky : language, mind, and politics

Resource Information

The work Chomsky : language, mind, and politics represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Chomsky : language, mind, and politics

Title remainder

language, mind, and politics

Statement of responsibility

James McGilvray

Creator

• McGilvray, James A., (James Alasdair), 1942-

Subject

• Chomsky, Noam -- Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Philosophy of mind

Language

eng

Summary

• "Noam Chomsky is well known as a linguist and as a political thinker. He is less well known as a philosopher. This is unfortunate, because his philosophical work connects his political views and his work as a scientist of language. His rationalist philosophical views tie common-sense understandings of human action and decision (including political thought and action) to that human mental capacity we call language."--Jacket
• "The key to Chomsky's overall intellectual project lies in what he has to say about a biologically based human nature. To explain his view of human nature, McGilvray begins by distinguishing common-sense understanding (which includes the domains of economic, social, political and linguistic behaviour) from scientific knowledge of the mind. He then outlines the picture of the mind that underlies the distinction between common sense and science. This picture of the mind is shown to develop from Chomsky's attempt to address some basic observations concerning how language is acquired and used - the 'poverty of stimulus' and the 'creative aspects of language use'
• Like some seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, Chomsky seeks to account for these observations by producing a rationalist account of human nature. McGilvray then explores the connection between this account of human nature and Chomsky's linguistic and political work."--Jacket

Member of

• Key contemporary thinkers (Cambridge, England)

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

191

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

P85.C47

LC item number

M39 1999

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Key contemporary thinkers