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J.
M. E. MORAVCSIK
romantic, subjectivistic individualism so rampant in the West. It
emphasizes not what appears to separate men as individuals but
rather what they have in common, and it finds, furthermore, that what
they have in common is distinctive, in that it is tied to reason rather
than to man's nonrational aspects. The nai:ve scientism of the empiricists
is thus shown to be incompatible with real work in the social sciences,
and the goal of the humanities becomes to uncover what we have
intellectually in common rather than what might separate us. In sum,
while today's humanist claims that each individual is different and the
scientist that not even the species
is
drastically different from others,
Chomsky says that not the individual but the species has distinctive
capacities, which are revealed in the creative use of language.
Chomsky's humanism, like the humanism of Plato or Aristotle,
implies that self-knowledge shows us what we share with other members
of the species. It is to discover of what our humanity consists, and the
crucial element here is the use of reason. One of the reasons for the
contemporary turn
to
the irrational as the seat of individuality has been
the myth that the partial simulation of cognitive skills by the computers
has shown there is nothing distinctly human about rationality. Chomsky's
work shows that to know ourselves is partly to know how we reason,
what concepts we use; and that this can be understood best by finding
out more and more about the language we use.
Debates about the nature of the mind and the self have tradition–
ally been conducted as debates over the existence of physical and
mental substances. Lyons correctly points out that according to Chom–
sky such debates are empty of content. As knowledge of the world
increases - and with it knowledge of the workings of the mind - there
have been changes in conceptions of what is matter and what might
be regarded as mental. Many things have been added to the idea of
matter since the time of Descartes. Thus, the real issue is not about
the use of words like mental and material, it is whether the structure
and organization of cognitive processes and capacities are similar to or
different from those of other biological phenomena or physical processes.
Of
course, many questions can be raised about language, but
only some of them have theoretical significance. Bertrand RusseIl–
though in quite a different context - once characterized theoreticians
who ask the right type of conceptual questions as "having a good nose
for reality," and this description seems particularly apt when one con–
siders Chomsky's original way of calling attention to what he regards as
"the fundamental underlying facts" about language. The creative lin–
guistic competence (our ability to understand utterances that we never
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