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Anti-Empire

North Korea Increases Aid to Russia, Mos... Tue Nov 19, 2024 12:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

Trump Assembles a War Cabinet Sat Nov 16, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

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The Saker

A bird's eye view of the vineyard

Alternative Copy of thesaker.is site is available Thu May 25, 2023 14:38 | Ice-Saker-V6bKu3nz
Alternative site: https://thesaker.si/saker-a... Site was created using the downloads provided Regards Herb

The Saker blog is now frozen Tue Feb 28, 2023 23:55 | The Saker
Dear friends As I have previously announced, we are now “freezing” the blog.? We are also making archives of the blog available for free download in various formats (see below).?

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Lockdown Skeptics

News Round-Up Tue Jul 01, 2025 01:04 | Richard Eldred
A summary of the most interesting stories in the past 24 hours that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy about the ?climate emergency?, public health ?crises? and the supposed moral defects of Western civilisation.
The post News Round-Up appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Why Do 1,000 Refugees Get Free Wimbledon Tickets While Long Suffering Locals Get None? Mon Jun 30, 2025 19:37 | Jo-Anne Nadler
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The post Why Do 1,000 Refugees Get Free Wimbledon Tickets While Long Suffering Locals Get None? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Criminal Investigation Launched into Bob Vylan and Kneecap?s Glastonbury Performances as US Revokes ... Mon Jun 30, 2025 17:43 | Will Jones
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The post What is the Purpose of Sydney Sweeney’s Bathwater? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Chris Whitty Was Behind Covid Guidance That Triggered Care Homes Spread, FOI Emails Reveal Mon Jun 30, 2025 13:01 | Will Jones
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The post Chris Whitty Was Behind Covid Guidance That Triggered Care Homes Spread, FOI Emails Reveal appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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Voltaire Network

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Chomsky Reconsidered

international | miscellaneous | other press

Friday February 04, 2011 18:44

by Chris Knight - Radical Anthropology Group

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Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group continues his examination of Chomsky's life and work. In particular he analyses an early work by Chomsky: Cartesian linguistics. He also looks at some sources Chomsky tapped for funding in his early days. Full text at link.

In 1966, Noam Chomsky (pictured) published his Cartesian linguistics. The book was a survey of rationalist conceptions of language and mind, focusing heavily on the French mathematician and philosopher, Réné Descartes (1596-1650). In his early years, Chomsky had been working within the structuralist tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Leonard Bloomfield and his own teacher, Zellig Harris. Chomsky wrote Cartesian linguistics in order to signal to the world his change of mind. His distinctively 'Cartesian' approach, he now clarified, was a rebellion against the entire 20th century tradition of structural linguistics. ...

A brief round-up of Chomsky's most celebrated ideas will confirm that his point of departure is invariably the soul, with the corollary that this strange entity, being perfect, is autonomous with respect to man's intrinsically imperfect body.

Take Chomsky's admission that, superficially, language does not look perfect at all: "One massive case," he notes, "is the phonological system: the whole phonological system looks like a huge imperfection; it has every bad property you can think of."[34] Phonology makes languages sound different. This is obviously anomalous: "strong minimalism", after all, would predict just one language spoken by everyone. Does this mean that the theory is falsified by the data? Not at all, claims Chomsky. Humans really do speak just one common language. Yes, he admits, they sound different. Variations exist in choice of sounds and also in arbitrary sound-meaning associations. "These," he says, "are straightforward and need not detain us." ...

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