Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1991 Page: 1
244 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Language, Politics, and Composition:
A Conversation with Noam Chomsky
GARY A. OLSON AND LESTER FAIGLEY
Ever since the publication in 1957 of Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
has been a towering eminence in linguistics and the philosophy of language;
and since the 1960s, he has remained an astute and outspoken social critic.
Compositionists familiar with Chomsky's work only through his transforma-
tional grammar and its compositional application, sentence combining, may
not be aware of how profoundly Chomsky has influenced modern thought on
language. It would be fair to say that Chomsky's scholarship over the last
three decades has forever altered our notions of the integral relationship
between language and the human mind.
Especially noteworthy about Chomsky's positions as recorded in the
interview below is that in this age of social construction, meaning relativity,
and Derridean indeterminacy, Chomsky tenaciously contends that at the
heart of most human cognitive operations is a fixed, structured, biological
directiveness. In an age in which the preferred target of many intellectuals is
Plato, Chomsky serenely declares that "the reasoning in the Platonic dia-
logues ... is valid if not decisive," and he holds up "Plato's problem" as the
key strategy for studying most phenomena in the human sciences. Dismissing
poststructuralist thought as "uninteresting," Chomsky notes that the ques-
tion of indeterminacy is not new, that "people have come at the question of
indeterminacy from many points of view," and that it's just part of the age-old
philosophic debate over the analytic/synthetic distinction. Yes, to a certain
extent "elements of fluidity and indeterminacy do enter," he concedes, but
also "there is a highly determinate, very definite structure of concepts and of
meaning that is intrinsic to our nature and as we acquire language or other
cognitive systems these things just kind of grow in our minds, the same way
we grow arms and legs."
In fact, Chomsky complains of a "pernicious epistemological dualism,"
in that "questions of mind are just studied differently than questions of
body." Certainly, there is "an element of truth" to theories such as the social
construction of knowledge, but we seem, he argues, to ignore the powerful
evidence that "systems of knowledge in particular [are] substantially directed
by our biological nature." For example, if we want to study a physical
phenomenon such as puberty, "we allow our conception of rational inquiry
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1991, periodical, 1991; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28604/m1/7/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .