342
J.
M. E.
MORAVCSIK
that many vital intellectual processes take place on a nonconscious level.
Chomsky's role here is analogous to Freud's: Freud stressed the impor–
tance of the subconscious for the understanding of the nonrational part of
the self; Chomsky can be construed as the Freud of cognitive psychology.
Again, the idea can be worked back to the classic conception of the
human mind. For both Socrates and Plato assumed that the most crucial
processes of reasoning and understanding take place at a level beneath
consciousness. They both regarded the formation of concepts that under–
lies our use of descriptive terms as a process for which we can have
only indirect evidence, for neither the formation of concepts nor their
content was thought to be open to introspection. Thus the dialogue
form, thus the laborious questioning by which the subject was sup–
posed to come to a deeper understanding of the concepts he employs–
and, thereby, of himself. The implication - again shared with Freud–
is that the subject may not himself be the best judge of his concepts
or his beliefs. Sharing these views, Chomsky further proposes that in
our use of language and in our mental processes the speaker himself
may not be the best judge of what his linguistic intuitions really are
and of what they indicate about his system of concepts. That Chom–
sky is concerned with intellectual processes and Freud primarily with
emotional ones, is not, of course, the only important difference between
them: Chomsky's procedure for arguing from the structure of a com–
petence to the partial structure of a mind possessing that competence
is cast in rigorous mathematical form, while no such formal procedure
can be used to illuminate Freud's propositions. Opponents of Chomsky
cannot quarrel with the formal properties of his analyses; their objec–
tions will have to be centered on the nature of the data that Chom–
sky is willing to employ.
Still another important part of Chomsky's hypothesis about the
mind is that a whole network of concepts is innate to it, some of
which are crucial for linguistic competence. The innateness hypothesis
too goes back to the classic conception: it is a more scientific version
of Plato's metaphoric theory of recollection as learning. It has, in fact,
a curious history in the development of the American social sciences,
and neither the early vigorous rejections of it nor the more recent sym–
pathetic attitudes toward it have really much to do with the sub–
stantive issues raised by serious discussion like Chomsky's. For the
rise
of the social sciences in America has been characterized by a deeply
and typically American attitude of optimism. Behaviorism, or any other
view that stressed the importance of the environment, recommended itself
as the most viable hypothesis, since Americans not only believed - and
perhaps many still do - that they could lick anything, they believed in
