Akeel Bilgrami

2005

Abstract

This paper explores a very general philosophical and methodological theme in Noam Chomsky’s work – the scope and limit of scientific inquiry in the study of mind and language. It is a conspicuous fact about Chomsky that accompanying the vast and driving intellectual ambition of his program in what he conceives as the science of linguistics, is a notable and explicit modesty about the extent to which he thinks he has given, indeed the extent to which one can give, scientific answers to fundamental questions. This modesty in terms of breadth of coverage is in a sense the other side of, and therefore indispensable to, the depth of what he has achieved in the area he has covered.

View the essay here: Mind, Language, and the Limits of Inquiry