Chomsky’s System of Ideas

This book is an examination of the philosophical and methodological ideas behind Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary theory of human linguistic competence–ideas which are increasingly influential in cognitive and perceptual psychology, and which can be seen as the basis for a distinctive view of the human condition.
Chomsky claims that language is an essentially subjective phenomenon: that is constituted by the largely unconscious beliefs of language users. This subjectivism leads him to assert that human languages must be explained in terms of the linguistic competence of individual users. Language use, says Chomsky, is creative, and from his account of normal linguistic creativity can be drawn an illuminating account of true human creativity. In addition, Chomsky’s view of human linguistic phenomena forms the basis for what he feels is a broadly libertarian account of human political arrangements.