Nov. 11, 2021 - Jim Fetzer
06:53
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I've done a great deal of work on the nature of mind and the development of communication and all that. | |
| And work I've done is complemented by work by a fellow named Tom Shoneman. | |
| My research indicates that the key notion is that of concepts. | |
| Concepts are when we bring Certain properties together in characterizing a kind of thing. | |
| For example, a child has the capacity to put together something that's round with something you can throw, something you can roll, something you can chew on, something you can squish. | |
| And they may only later in their developmental history acquire the habit of referring to that thing or things of that kind as a ball. | |
| Or you learn to suckle at the breast and you associate with warmth and love and tenderness and affection and only later come to associate that source with the word, say, mother. | |
| Or you can learn to draw on hard surfaces, on walls and so forth with multicolored different sizes and shapes and only later put together or start to develop a linguistic habit of referring to those things as chalk. | |
| Now, if we have the capacity to acquire concepts, We don't have to have either an innate grammar or an innate vocabulary or semantics, which is the view that Jerry Fodo, who has extended Chomsky's theory from syntax to semantics. | |
| But most importantly, what Tom Shoneman has proposed and what work I have done on the evolution of mentality in a book entitled The Evolution of Intelligence, Are Humans the Only Animals with Minds?, is that syntax appears to be an emergent phenomenon, that it's only when you have acquired So many concepts or so many properties like for heights, shapes, colors and so forth that you need to be able to organize your thoughts in such a way that you know what the subject is to which you're attributing these properties. | |
| If you're dealing with a relatively simple world where there's a small number of things and not many properties and so forth, you don't really need syntax because you can just call on your concepts and And there are few enough of them that you don't need to be so highly organized. | |
| Syntax appears to be a late development in language and not the foundation thereof. | |
| It certainly does not appear to be innate. | |
| As Chomsky maintains, I've often been bemused by Chomsky's declarations that syntax is species-specific, innate, genetic, inborn, and his difficulty to tell us what it is that is this innate, genetic, inborn syntax, because he has published book after book after book trying to tell us what is the innate syntax. | |
| If there were an innate syntax, he ought to have been able to discover it by now. | |
| Moreover, In the course of 35 years of college teaching of logic, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning, I've discovered how extremely difficult it is to bring students to the point where they can analyze sentences and arguments from the point of view of their syntax. | |
| If we had an innate syntax, it ought to be something we could do effortlessly. | |
| In fact, it's something that requires a great mental effort, which suggests to me that the very thesis of an innate syntax is a hopelessly undermined by empirical data available to every teacher and | |
| every student of logic. | |
| How do you explain Chomsky's lack of ability to look at 9-11? | |
| I've been profoundly disturbed by Noam Chomsky's role as a public intellectual | |
| because while he's been wonderful at the intermediate range of issues, | |
| and he'll frequently offer devastating critiques of the government, | |
| when it comes to the mega issues, the ones that are truly of historic importance, | |
| such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the events of 9-11. | |
| He somehow suddenly can't see the evidence, he can't appreciate policy implications, he doesn't think there's anything to it. | |
| The assassination was a crime and an atrocity, but the idea that there was any kind of high-level conspiracy behind it seems to me I can assure you that he is as wrong as wrong could be. | |
| Indeed, in a book I co-authored on the death of Paul Wellstone, I made a point during the comparisons I was elaborating about how the government fakes evidence and covers things up, how Chomsky had played a role here in not recognizing the major policy issues involved with JFK. | |
| Uh, wanting to reform or abolish the Federal Reserve, cutting the oil depletion allowance, getting rid of even abolishing the CIA, not invading Cuba, pulling our troops out of Vietnam. | |
| I mean, we're talking about some of the most important policy issues of our time. | |
| And yet, Noam Chomsky has said that even if there was a conspiracy to kill him, since, so far as he can see, it had no policy ramifications, not important, even if it took place. | |
| I mean, it just doesn't make any... I mean, even if we're true, which is extremely unlikely, who cares? | |
| I mean, even if we're true, which is extremely unlikely, who cares? | |
| I mean, it doesn't make any significance. | |
| I mean, it doesn't make any significance. | |
| But it's a little bit like the huge energy that's put out on trying to figure out who | |
| killed John F. Kennedy. | |
| I mean, yeah, who knows? | |
| And who cares? | |
| I mean, yeah, who knows? | |
| And who cares? | |
| I mean, plenty of people get killed all the time. | |
| Why does it matter that one of them had to be John F. Kennedy? | |
| He ought to have a lot of things to say about these, but he does not, which has caused me to look at Chomsky not only as an intellectual in relation to his work on linguistics, but also as an intellectual in the public arena, where it seems to me he has acutely let down the American people by failing to fulfill a responsibility we had grown accustomed to his exercising. | |
| In my opinion, it's an utter disgrace. | |
| On the 9-11 event, you have to make a distinction, a crucial distinction between two things. | |
| The earlier question, at least as I understood it, was whether the Bush administration was involved in planning it. | |
| For that, I think it's outlandish. | |
| Morally irresponsible? | |
| And in my opinion, a flagrant failure to fulfill the duties he assumes as a public intellectual. | |
| Did they plan it in any way or know anything about it? | |
| This seems to me extremely unlikely. | |
| I mean, for one thing, they would have been insane to try anything like that. |
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