Introduction

Chomsky's arguments for the relevance of language to issues in philosophy and psychology derive their force from the strength of their linguistic foundation. The perception that he has formulated and solved a range of descriptive and explanatory problems in the formal study of language ensures that his other ideas are taken seriously. This attitude makes sense: his arguments for innateness and rationalism, for instance, rest crucially on the validity of his views on language. By rationalism is meant the idea, best represented in the work of his intellectual ancestor Descartes, that reason has precedence over the senses in the acquisition of knowledge, and that much of this knowledge must be innate. Chomsky has provided the best evidence in existence for the innateness of some aspects of our knowledge of language, and hence for Cartesian rationalism. In contrast, no such direct relation holds between his linguistics and his politics. As we shall see in detail in chapter 5, there are connections between the strands of his different activities, but the intellectual justification for his political work does not rest on his syntactic insights in the way his philosophical work does, and he frequently emphasizes that there is at best a tenuous relation between his two careers.

It is of course unsurprising that people who know and admire one strand of his output should be sympathetic to the other.