Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Noam Chomsky

  • Thoughts on the Nature of Language and Meaning

    by Mark English In 1936 the high-profile publisher and promoter of humanitarian and radical causes, Victor Gollancz, published a little book called Language, Truth and Logic. The author was A. J. (Freddie) Ayer, then in his mid-twenties, an Old Etonian and graduate of the University of Oxford. The work was crisply and provocatively written. It…

  • Two Kinds of Diversity: Identity and Ideological

    by Robert Gressis ___ Libertarians, like Robert Nozick, care most of all about negative freedom, i.e., freedom from interference. If you have little money, but the appropriate agency protects you from force and fraud, then you have negative freedom, even if you find yourself unable to do much of what you want to do. Consequently,…

  • Conceptualizing Language

    by Mark English ____ Complex language is a precondition not only for the kinds of interaction which characterize human societies but also for many kinds of thinking. It is both social and biological. A language only develops in a context of social continuity over an extended period of time, though it is typically learned very…

  • Notes on Culture and Language

    by Mark English Having written recently about shared narratives and their role in creating a common culture, I thought it might be worthwhile to try to develop a few of the points I have been making and to clarify the foundation – personal and intellectual – upon which my claims rest. Now, the idea of…