What Kind of Creatures are We?

1. For all references, see the chapters from which the quotations are taken. On the relation between language and thought, Chomsky, though he now thinks it to be even closer than he once did, does not think it is necessary to assert something as strong as “identity” between them, as Humboldt does. Descartes and Darwin, who also figure in Chomsky’s discussion of the relation, did not go that far.

2. Although Chomsky mentions E-languages by way of contrast with I-languages, he doubts the coherence of the very idea and therefore whether they exist. In a number of his essays, he is critical of the most basic assumptions that philosophers make about their coherence, in giving accounts of them.

3. In making this point about study at a level of abstraction with a view to an eventual account in terms of the brain, Chomsky points out how the approach is no different in the scientific study of language than it is, for instance, in insect navigation. In other work, Chomsky cites some progress that might have been made in the inquiry into biological underpinnings, but also cites how there may also be some fundamentally wrong assumptions being made by brain scientists about what the object of study is. On this last point, see his reference to Charles Gallistel’s work in chapter 2.

4. I owe this example to Carol Rovane. See Carol Rovane and Akeel Bilgrami, “Mind, Language, and the Limits of Inquiry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky, ed. James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 181–203.

5. This should be qualified by pointing out that Chomsky, at the end of this chapter, actually discusses an argument in Peirce that appeals to biological considerations—in particular, evolutionary considerations based on natural selection (which he finds completely fallacious). This would suggest that Peirce was himself somewhat ambivalent about whether or not to see his overall methodological claim regarding admissible hypotheses and limits on them as owing to our biology.

6. And before Newton, motion was considered to be “the hard problem” by William Petty and others.

7. Chomsky was the first to stress this side of Smith many decades ago, a side of him that has been pursued in some detail much more recently in scholarship by Emma Rothschild and commentary by Amartya Sen.

8. One might add that there are issues on which the state can be justified because it may protect not just the marginalized and impoverished but everyone from their folly and doom, issues such as those of the environment, for instance, and more generally protect citizens from the cultural detritus and psychological desolation (issues of “alienation,” in a word) that afflict capitalist societies.

1. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: Murray, 1871), chap. 3.

2. Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), xi.

3. The term is mine. See Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (New York: Praeger, 1986). But I defined it almost vacuously, as any concept of language other than I-language.

4. A source of misunderstanding may be that in early work, “language” is sometimes defined in introductory expository passages in terms of weak generation, though the usage was quickly qualified, for reasons explained.

5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916; repr., New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 13–14; Leonard Bloomfield, “Philosophical Aspects of Language” (1942), in A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology, ed. Charles F. Hockett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 267–70; Bloomfield, A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language (In dianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926); Bloomfield, “A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language,” Language 2, no. 3 (1926): 153–64; William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science (London: King, 1875); Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 8.

6. Martin Joos, comments in Readings in Linguistics: The Development of Descriptive Linguistics in America Since 1925, ed. Martin Joos (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1958).

7. Zellig Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).

8. A regression, I think, since it confuses the fundamentally different notions competence and performance—roughly, what we know and what we do—unlike Harris’s system, which does not.

9. Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson, “On the Antiquity of Language: The Reinterpretation of Neandertal Linguistic Capacities and Its Consequences,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 397 (2013): 1–17, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397.

10. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), end of “The First Day.”

11. For references and discussion, see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, 3rd ed., ed., with introduction, James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

12. Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, trans. Peter Heath (1836; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 91.

13. Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar (New York: Holt, 1924).

14. Mariacristina Musso et al., “Broca’s Area and the Language Instinct,” Nature Neuroscience 4 (2003): 774–81, doi:10.1038/nn1077.

15. Neil Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 136. See also Neil Smith and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli, The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995).

16. Robert C. Berwick, Paul Pietroski, Beracah Yankama, and Noam Chomsky, “Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited,” Cognitive Science 35, no. 7 (2011): 1207–42, doi:10.1111/j.1551–6709.2011.01189.x.

17. W. Tecumseh Fitch, “Speech Perception: A Language-Trained Chimpanzee Weighs In,” Current Biology 21, no. 14 (2011): R543–46, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.06.035.

18. Charles Fernyhough, “The Voices Within: The Power of Talking to Yourself,” New Scientist, June 3, 2013, 32–35.

19. William Uzgalis, “John Locke,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/locke/.

20. Tue Trinh, “A Constraint on Copy Deletion,” Theoretical Linguistics 35, nos. 2–3 (2009): 183–227. I also put aside here several topics that raise a variety of further questions, among them “covert operations” in which only the first-merged copy is externalized.

21. Patricia S. Churchland, foreword to W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (1960; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), xiii.

22. Luigi Rizzi, Issues in Italian Syntax (Dordrecht: Foris, 1982).

1. Owen Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 313. See also “New Mysterianism,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mysterianism.

2. Noam Chomsky, “Problems and Mysteries in the Study of Human Language,” in Language in Focus: Foundations, Methods and Systems: Essays in Memory of Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, ed. Asa Kasher (Boston: Reidel, 1976), 281–358. An extended version is in Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1975), chap. 4.

3. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 78–79.

4. Michael D. Gershon, The Second Brain: The Scientific Basis of Gut Instinct and a Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

5. For more on this topic, and some of the other matters discussed later, see chapter 4.

6. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), chap. 37; C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World-Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (New York: Scribner, 1929).

7. Galen Strawson, The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 56.

9. John Locke, “Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Bishop of Worcester’s [Edward Stillingfleet] Answer to his Second Letter,” in The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, 12th ed. (London: Rivington, 1824), 3:191, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1724, discussed in Andrew Janiak, Newton as Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121.

10. Janiak, Newton as Philosopher, 9–10, 39.

11. On “Locke’s suggestion” and its development through the eighteenth century, culminating in Priestley’s important work, see John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and some further elaboration in chapter 4.

12. Charles Darwin, Notebook C166, 1838, in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 291, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=image&itemID=CUL-DAR122.-&keywords=brain+the+of+secretion&pageseq=148.

13. Paul Churchland, “Betty Crocker’s Theory,” review of The Rediscovery of the Mind, by John R. Searle, London Review of Books, May 12, 1994, 13–14. Churchland associates Searle’s views with Descartes’s in ways that are not entirely clear, in part because of a misinterpretation of the mechanical philosophy and its fate. On Priestley and others, see Yolton, Thinking Matter; and chapter 4.

14. Vernon B. Mountcastle, “Brain Science at the Century’s Ebb,” in “The Brain,” special issue, Dædalus 127, no. 2 (1998): 1.

15. Charles R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

16. Thomas Nagel, “The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos,’” New York Times, August 18, 2013; Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

17. David Hume, The History of England (1756), 6:chap. 71.

18. Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

19. Donald D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (New York: Norton, 1998), 159.

20. Richard Lewontin, “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer,” in An Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol. 4, Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues, ed. Don Scarborough and Saul Sternberg, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 108–32.

21. Marc Hauser et al., “The Mystery of Language Evolution,” Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 401 (2014): 1–12, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401.

22. Laura-Ann Petitto, “How the Brain Begets Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky, ed. James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 86.

23. Peter Strawson, “On Referring,” Mind 59, no. 235 (1950): 320–44; Julius Moravcsik, “Aitia as Generative Factor in Aristotle’s Philosophy,” Dialogue 14, no. 4 (1975): 622–36; Akeel Bilgrami, Belief and Meaning: The Unity and Locality of Mental Content (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

24. Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 8:3; De Anima, book 1:1.

25. Noam Chomsky, “Notes on Denotation and Denoting,” in From Grammar to Meaning: The Spontaneous Logicality of Language, ed. Ivano Caponigro and Carlo Cecchetto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 38–45, and sources cited there.

26. Cited in Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974).

27. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), book 2, chap. 27.

28. On women, see Linda K. Kerber, “Why Diamonds Really Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Another American Narrative,” Dædalus 141, no. 1 (2012): 89–100; and Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522 (1975). On African Americans, see Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Michelle L. Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2012). On aliens, see Rasul v. Myers, Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, January 2008, April 2009. On corporations, see sources in Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), 30–31; and David Ellerman, “Workplace Democracy and Human Development: The Example of the Postsocialist Transition Debate,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24, no. 4 (2010): 333–53.

29. Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Indeterminacy and Mental States,” in Perspectives on Quine, ed. Robert Barrett and Roger Gibson (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 98–109.

30. Charles R. Gallistel, “Representations in Animal Cognition: An Introduction,” Cognition 37, nos. 1–2 (1990): 1–22.

31. Daniel C. Dennett, “Sakes and Dints,” Times Literary Supplement, March 2, 2012.

32. Noam Chomsky, “Derivation by Phase,” in Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed. Michael J. Kenstowicz (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 1–52.

33. Thiel, Early Modern Subject.

34. An inquiry that Colin McGinn has undertaken in several books and papers, among them Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

35. Susan Carey, The Origin of Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

36. For sources, see chapter 4.

37. David Hilbert, “Logic and the Knowledge of Nature” (1930), in From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. William B. Ewald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:1157–65. I am indebted to Richard Larson for this reference.

38. David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (New York: Viking, 2011); David Albert, “Explaining It All: How We Became the Center of the Universe,” New York Times, August 12, 2011.

39. Chomsky, Language and Mind.

40. Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (The examination of men’s wits; 1575–1594). See Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, 3rd ed., ed., with introduction, James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Javier Virués Ortega, “Juan Huarte de San Juan in Cartesian and Modern Psycholinguistics: An Encounter with Noam Chomsky,” Psicothema 17, no. 3 (2005): 436–40, http://www.psicothema.com/pdf/3125.pdf.

1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (1776; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), book 5, chap. 1, part 3, art. 2 (ii, 302–3).

2. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; New York: Penguin, 2009); “vile maxim”: Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 3, chap. 4 (i, 437).

3. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938).

4. Nathan Schneider, “Introduction: Anarcho-Curious? Or, Anarchist America,” in On Anarchism, by Noam Chomsky (New York: New Press, 2013), xi.

5. United States Army, School of the Americas, May 1999, cited in Adam Isacson and Joy Olson, Just the Facts: A Civilian’s Guide to U.S. Defense and Security Assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington, D.C.: Latin America Working Group, 1999).

6. John H. Coatsworth, “The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, Endings, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 221.

7. David Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992).

8. Biorn Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of the Possible: The Brazilian Rural Workers’ Trade Union Movement, 1964–1985 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

9. Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012); Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).

10. Elizabeth Rosenthal, “Health Care’s Road to Ruin,” New York Times, December 21, 2013; Gardiner Harris, “In American Health Care, Drug Shortages Are Chronic,” New York Times, October 31, 2004.

11. Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, April 2009. On polls, see Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books / Holt, 2006), chap. 6. On constitutional right, see Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 239.

12. Conor Gearty, Liberty and Security (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2013).

13. Quotations from Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

14. For more on Mill’s and related views, see David Ellerman, “Workplace Democracy and Human Development: The Example of the Postsocialist Transition Debate,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24, no. 4 (2010): 333–53.

15. Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840–1860: The Reaction of the American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (1924; repr., Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964).

16. See, among others, Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

17. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).

18. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, in The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, ed. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 91–92; Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright, 1928); Harold Lasswell, “Propaganda,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin Seligman (New York: Macmillan, 1937); Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilaterial Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).

19. Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 1787, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1904. For further references to Madison and sources, see Noam Chomsky, “Consent Without Consent: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Democracy,” Cleveland State Law Review 44, no. 4 (1996): 415–37.

20. John Foster Dulles, telephone call to Allen Dulles, June 19, 1958, “Minutes of Telephone Conversations of John Foster Dulles and Christian Herter,” Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home, Abilene, Kansas.

21. Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 245, citing Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).

22. Banning, Sacred Fire of Liberty, 333.

23. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1975), 60.

24. Quoted in Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 269–70.

1. David Hume, The History of England (1756), 6:chap. 71; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), book 4, chap. 3. Locke’s reasons, of course, were not Hume’s but relied on the boundaries of “the simple ideas we receive from sensation and reflection,” which prevent us from comprehending the nature of body or mind (spirit).

2. Renée Baillargeon, “Innate Ideas Revisited: For a Principle of Persistence in Infants’ Physical Reasoning,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (2008): 2–13.

3. I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 155.

4. Ernan McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1978), 52ff. McMullin concludes that because of Newton’s vacillation in use of the terms “mechanical,” “spirit,” and others, it is “misleading… to take Newton to be an exponent of the ‘mechanical philosophy’” (73).

5. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding; and correspondence with Edward Stillingfleet, cited in Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 73. On the development of “Locke’s suggestion” through the eighteenth century, culminating in Joseph Priestley’s work (discussed later), see John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

6. Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, On the Relations Between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, vol. 1 (1802; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

7. Quoted in V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: Morrow, 1998), 227.

8. Isaac Newton, Principia, General Scholium (1713).

9. E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961; repr., Prince ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 479–80.

10. Ibid., 488; Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley, 1693, in Newton: Philosophical Writings, ed. Andrew Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 102–3.

11. For more detailed analysis, see McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity, chap. 3.

12. Thomas Nagel, “Searle: Why We Are Not Computers,” in Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969–1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 106.

13. For varying perspectives on the “explanatory gap,” see Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?, ed. Anthony Freeman (Charlottesville, Va.: Imprint Academic, 2006).

14. Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (New York: Random House, 1957), 259; Heinrich Hertz, quoted in McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity, 124.

15. Dijksterhuis, Mechanization of the World Picture, 489.

16. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 139–40, 213.

17. Bertrand Russell, Analysis of Matter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927; repr., New York: Dover, 1954), 18–19, 162.

18. Paul Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 10. I am indebted to John Frampton for this reference.

19. Peter Machamer, “Introduction” and “Galileo’s Machines, His Mathematics, and His Experiments,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, ed. Peter Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17, 69.

20. Cited in Pietro Redondi, “From Galileo to Augustine,” in ibid., 175–210.

21. Daniel Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Recall that Newton hoped that there might be a scientific (that is, mechanical) solution to the problems of matter and motion.

22. On these topics, see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, 3rd ed., ed., with introduction, James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), chap. 1. Note that the concerns go far beyond indeterminacy of free action, as is particularly evident in the experimental programs by Géraud de Cordemoy and others on “other minds” (see Cartesian Linguistics).

23. René Descartes to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1647, in Principia Philosophiæ, vol. 8 of Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Cerf, 1905). For discussion, see Tad Schmaltz , Malebranche’s Theory of the Soul: A Cartesian Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 204ff.

24. Noam Chomsky, “Turing on the ‘Imitation Game,’” in The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence, ed. Stuart Schieber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 317–21.

25. Desmond Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 12. See also Rene Descartes to Marin Mersenne, 1641, on the goal of the Meditations, cited in Margaret Wilson, Descartes (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 2.

26. Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind, 258.

27. Nancy Kanwisher and Paul Downing, “Separating the Wheat from the Chaff ,” Science, October 2, 1998, 57–58; Newton, General Scholium.

28. Eric R. Kandel and Larry R. Squire, “Neuroscience,” Science, November 10, 2000, 1113–20.

29. Charles R. Gallistel, “Neurons and Memory,” in Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences, ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 71–89; Gallistel, “Symbolic Processes in the Insect Brain,” in An Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol. 4, Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues, ed. Don Scarborough and Saul Sternberg, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 1–51.

30. Semir Zeki, “Art and the Brain,” Daedalus 127, no. 2 (1998): 71–104.

31. Nagel, “Searle,” 106. For some cautionary notes on “sharp logical separation between the nervous system and the rest of the organism,” see Charles Rockland, “The Nematode as a Model Complex System” (working paper [LIDS-WP-1865], Laboratory for Information and Decisions Systems, MIT, April 14, 1989), 30.

32. John Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory,” History of Science 24 (1986): 335–81; Alan Kors, “The Atheism of D’Holbach and Naigeon,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunger and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 273–300; Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Yolton, Thinking Matter, 199. For Voltaire and Kant, see McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity, 113, 122–23 (from Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science [1786]); Michael Friedman, “Kant and Newton: Why Gravity Is Essential to Matter,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science, ed. Phillip Bricker and R. I. G. Hughes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 185–202; and Howard Stein, “On Locke, ‘the Great Huygenius, and the Incomparable Mr. Newton,’” in ibid., 17–48. Friedman argues that there is no contradiction between Newton and Kant because they do not mean the same thing by “essential,” Kant having discarded Newton’s metaphysics and making an epistemological point within his “Copernican revolution in metaphysics.”

33. Friedrich Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1865), 3rd expanded ed. translated as The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925).

34. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958), 210.

35. George V. Coyne, “The Scientific Venture and Materialism: False Premises,” in Space or Spaces as Paradigms of Mental Categories (Milan: Fondazione Carlo Erba, 2000), 7–19.

36. Russell, Analysis of Matter, chap. 37. Russell did not work out how percepts in their cognitive aspect were assimilated into the “causal skeleton of the world,” leaving him open to a counterargument by mathematician Max Newman (Russell to Newman, April 24, 1928, in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2, 1914–1944 [Boston: Little Brown, 1967]).

37. Democritus, quoted in Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 89. I am indebted to Jean Bricmont for this reference.

38. Daniel Stoljar and Yujin Nagasawa, “Introduction,” in There’s Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument, ed. Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 1–36.

39. On Hume, see John Mikhail, “Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy: A Study of the ‘Generative Grammar’ Model of Moral Theory Described by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2000); Mikhail, Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Mikhail, “Universal Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence, and the Future,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 4 (2007): 143–52. On the irrelevance (and as it is formulated, even incoherence) of the doctrine of “accessibility to consciousness,” see Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1975); Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On the rules of visual perception, inaccessible to consciousness in the interesting cases, see Donald D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (New York: Norton, 1998).

40. Frank Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know” and “Postscript,” in There’s Something About Mary, ed. Ludlow, Nagasawa, and Stoljar, xv–xix, 410–42.

41. Charles S. Peirce, “The Logic of Abduction,” in Essays in the Philosophy of Science, ed. V. Tomas (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957). For discussion of Peirce’s proposals, and fallacies invoking natural selection that led him to the ungrounded (and implausible) belief that our “guessing instinct” leads us to true theories, see Chomsky, Language and Mind, 90ff.

42. Quoted in Wilson, Descartes, 95.

43. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772), vol. 2.1. On dubious modern efforts to formulate what had been a reasonably clear project before the separation of philosophy from science, see Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, 79–80, 144–45, and generally chaps. 5 and 6 (reprinted from Mind 104 [1995]: 1–61).

44. On Joseph Black, see Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 226; William Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry (New York: Norton, 1993), 271; and Arnold Thackray, Atoms and Powers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 37–38, 276–77.

45. Brock, Norton History of Chemistry. For sources and further discussion, see Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins, and Use (New York: Praeger, 1986), 251–52; and David Lindley, Boltzmann’s Atom: The Great Debate That Launched a Revolution in Physics (New York: Free Press, 2001). Some argue that even if quantum-theoretic unification succeeds, “in some sense the program of reduction of chemistry to [the new] physics fails,” in part because of “practical issues of intractability” (Maureen Christie and John Christie, “‘Laws’ and ‘Theories’ in Chemistry Do Not Obey the Rules,” in Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives on Chemistry, ed. Nalin Bhushan and Stuart Rosenfield [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 34–50).

46. Russell, Analysis of Matter, 388.

47. See note 39. Sometimes misunderstanding and distortion reach the level of the surreal. For some startling examples, see Noam Chomsky, “Symposium on Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, Oxford, 2006,” Artificial Intelligence 171 (2007): 1094–1103. On “the rigidity rule and [Shimon] Ullman’s theorem,” see Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, 159. Needless to say, the rule is inaccessible to consciousness.

48. Vernon B. Mountcastle, “Brain Science at the Century’s Ebb,” in “The Brain,” special issue, Dædalus 127, no. 2 (1998): 1. For sources, see Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, chap. 5.

49. Joseph Priestley, “Materialism,” from Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), in Priestley’s Writings on Philosophy, Science, and Politics, ed. John Passmore (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1965).

50. Similar ideas appear pre-Newton, particularly in the Objections to the Meditations, where critics ask how Descartes can know, “without divine revelation… that God has not implanted in certain bodies a power or property enabling them to doubt, think, etc.” (Catherine Wilson, “Commentary on Galen Strawson,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, 178).

51. Priestley, “Materialism.” For later discussion, see Yolton, Thinking Matter, 113. Julien Offrey de La Mettrie had drawn similar conclusions a generation earlier but in a different framework, and without addressing the Cartesian arguments to which he was attempting to respond. The same is true of Gilbert Ryle and other modern attempts. For some discussion, see Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics.

52. For discussion and illustrations, see Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. For “hyperdualism,” see Galen Strawson, “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, 3–31.

53. Thackray, Atoms and Powers, 190. Priestley’s reasons for welcoming “this extreme development of the Newtonian position” were primarily theological, Thackray concludes.

54. Yolton, Thinking Matter, 114.

55. Ibid., 125. For discussion, see chaps. 5 and 6. Yolton writes that “there was no British La Mettrie,” but that exaggerates La Mettrie’s contribution, I believe. See note 51.

56. Nagel, “O’Shaughnessy: The Will,” in Other Minds, 94.

57. Strawson, “Realistic Monism” and “Panpsychism? Reply to Commentators with a Celebration of Descartes,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, 3–31, 184–280. Printers errors corrected (Strawson, pers. comm.). For further discussion, see the essays in this volume.

58. Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” “Panpsychism,” and commentary.

59. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 199–200; for much more extensive discussion, see Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics. On the accuracy of interpretations of the empiricist theory of ideas by Reid and others, see John Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), chap. 5.

60. Stephen Yablo, “The Real Distinction Between Mind and Body,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, suppl. 16 (1990): 149–201.

61. Quotations from Strawson, “Realistic Monism” and “Panpsychism.”

62. Quotations in this paragraph from Daniel Stoljar, “Physicalism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2001/entries/physicalism/.

63. Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination, 56, 58.

64. Ibid., 17ff, 56–57, 104. Stoljar understands the “traditional problem” to be derived from the Meditations (45), hence not a problem of the sciences. But though a conventional reading, it is questionable, for reasons already discussed.

66. Daniel Stoljar, “Comments on Galen Strawson,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, 170–76.

67. Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” 11n.21.

68. John A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994); H. P. Stapp, “Commentary on Strawson’s Target Article,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, 163–69.

69. Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination, 139.

70. Richard C. Lewontin, “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer,” in Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues, ed. Scarborough and Sternberg, 107–32.

71. Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, 94ff. On Cartesian and neo-Platonist conceptions of the role of “cognoscitive powers,” see James McGilvray, “Introduction to the Third Edition,” in Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, 1–52. For review and sources on referring, see Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; on Shaftesbury, Hume, and forerunners, see Mijuskovic, Achilles of Rationalist Arguments.