Reflections on language

Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist whose work on generative grammar reshaped the field, offers these accessible essays on why language matters and what its study can reveal about the wider world. Rather than technical argument, the book takes up the broader intellectual consequences of linguistic research. Chomsky places his concerns within a long tradition, noting that thinkers from Plato onward have puzzled over how people, drawing on a limited range of experience, come to hold such intricate bodies of knowledge, belief, and value that shape how they act and interpret what happens to them.

His answer treats language as something that grows in a person much as a bodily organ develops, with its general shape largely set in advance by genes. The essays examine ongoing disputes among psychologists, philosophers, and linguists about how cognitive structures are acquired, how language connects with other mental faculties, and how those structures direct behavior. Chomsky also looks at the social and intellectual forces that have made some ways of thinking dominant, and he asks why the study of mind and behavior has so often strayed from the methods of the natural sciences.

In the final strand of the argument, Chomsky contends that the idea of human beings as endlessly malleable is mistaken, and that it helps prop up reactionary social views. The book suits readers interested in linguistics, the philosophy of mind, and debates over human nature.