The Concept Of Human Nature As The Basis For Chomsky’s Linguistic Ideas And Social Views

This dissertation, based on a systematical study of the concept of human nature, Chomsky’s linguistic ideas and his social views, claims that it is the concept of human nature that underlines Chomsky’s linguistic ideas and social views, thus relating them to the Platonic Problem and the Orwellian Problem that Chomsky tries to answer in his linguistic and social studies, namely, "Why does man know so much while his experience is so poor"? and "Why does man know so little while his experience is so rich"?Chomsky finds that the Platonic Problem arises in language acquisition as there are many complicated linguistic features and the creative use of language demonstrated by a child that cannot be explained with the scattered linguistic data that he has encountered. He therefore proposes the concept of "innate knowledge" or" innate structure" to bridge the gap between the highly articulated and organized linguistic system a person has acquired and the limited amount of data that he has been exposed to. He believes that the "innate knowledge" is the basic component of human nature that enables a child to derive his language from the limited amount of linguistic data. What is more, Chomsky suggests that there are similar innate principles guiding human behavior, individual, social or intellectual. They are also the basic parts of human nature.More interestingly, Chomsky believes that these biologically constrained principles are likely to be found some day in the future with the advance of science. And he strives to formalize these principles, in an attempt to transform the concept of human nature into a scientific concept, as what Descartes and Newton did. True, Chomsky doesn’t deny the role that social factors play in shaping human behavior, but he insists that these biological foundations not only delimit the scope of human knowledge, but also the range of variation under the influence of social factors. But as these biological constraints go unconsciously, human beings can still experience and enjoy the access to free choice and creation. This is why he highlights freedom and creativity in his discussion of human nature.Closely related to the Platonic Problem is the Orwellian Problem. For Chomsky, problems like ideological control and deprivation of freedom, as described by Orwell, exist in America as well. In face of the obedient public, Chomsky believes that his mission is to reveal this irrationality and the mechanism that has produced it. Consequently, he exposes from different angles how American society suppresses human nature and keeps the public from pursuing the truth and participating in politics in the real sense. To solve the Orwellian problem, Chomsky pictures an anarcho-syndicalism, a decentralized federated free association, in which the intrinsic creativity of human nature can be brought to full play within the scope determined by its biological foundations.True, this picture of an ideal society based on Chomsky’s concept of human nature is still vague and controversial, but the attempt itself is intrinsically valuable. Remote as the goal might seem from us, we shoud make for a robust public discourse open to criticism and conducive to the birth of theories of social reforms and transformations.