Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (Current Studies in Linguistics)

Language and Problems of Knowledge is Noam Chomsky's most accessible statement on the nature, origins, and current concerns of the field of linguistics. He frames the lectures with four fundamental questions: What do we know when we are able to speak and understand a language? How is this knowledge acquired? How do we use this knowledge? What are the physical mechanisms involved in the representation, acquisition, and use of this knowledge?

Starting from basic concepts, Chomsky sketches the present state of our answers to these questions and offers prospects for future research. Much of the discussion revolves around our understanding of basic human nature (that we are unique in being able to produce a rich, highly articulated, and complex language on the basis of quite rudimentary data), and it is here that Chomsky's ideas on language relate to his ideas on politics.

The initial versions of these lectures were given at the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua, Nicaragua, in March 1986. A parallel set of lectures on contemporary political issues given at the same time has been published by South End Press under the title On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. Language and Problems of Knowledge is sixteenth in the series Current Studies in Linguistics, edited by Jay Keyser.

In these "somewhat extended versions" of lectures originally delivered in Nicaragua in 1986, Chomsky gives the nonspecialist his most accessible statement yet of his thinking on language and knowledge. Chomsky is not afraid to tackle some of the main problems of philosophy, for example, "Plato's problem" of how knowledge is possible. His approach is unique, grounded throughout in linguistic analyses (here, mostly of parallel constructs in Spanish and English). As a result of these analyses Chomsky concludes that our ability to know, to understand, and to use language must be innate, "a part of our biological endowment." Stimulating, though professional philosophers will likely denigrate the approach. Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, D.C.
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