Scholarship and Politics – The Case of Noam Chomsky

A reminder of the scholar that Chomsky is, and a good overview of his recent lectures where he discussed: What is Language?, What can We Understand?,  What is the Common Good?

While much of the article refers to the separate academic and political roles, the more interesting part is a thoughtful discussion on our human limits and constraints, as captured in this quote:

In his second lecture (“What Can We Understand?”), Chomsky took up the question of what humans are capable of understanding and his answer, generally, was that we can understand what we can understand, and that means that we can’t understand what is beyond our innate mental capacities. This does not mean, he said, that what we can’t understand is not real: “What is mysterious to me is not an argument that it does not exist.” It’s just that while language is powerful and creative, its power and creativity have limits; and since language is thought rather than an addition to or clothing of thought, the limits of language are the limits of what we can fruitfully think about. Nor, Chomsky declared, are those limits capable of being enlarged or transcended in time. This is as good as it gets. There is “no evolution in our capacity for language.” These assertions are offered as a counter to what Chomsky sees as the over-optimistic Enlightenment belief — common to many empiricist philosophies — that ours is a “limitless explanatory power” and that “we can do anything.” Our limits, he concluded, should not be lamented, for the fact of limits enables perception and predication, “If there were no limits,” everything would be mush, and “there would be no scope” for definite action. (Here we might think of Wordsworth’s great sonnet, “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.”)

Scholarship and Politics – The Case of Noam Chomsky – NYTimes.com.