William S. Lear wrote: > Since when is Chomsky a defender of Cartesian dualism? He has stated > that since nobody has a definite conception of "body", even posing the > problem is impossible. > I think you are partly right. What Chomsky means by "Cartesian dualism" is different from the meaning that is ordinarily attributed to it. Consider: "Recall that Cartesian dualism was straight science: postulation of something beyond the bounds of body is right or wrong. In fact, right, though not for Descartes reasons. Rather, for reasons that were considered most distressing, if not outrageous and intolerable by leading scientists of the day-- Leibniz, Huygens, Bernoulli and others, even Newton himself. Newton's trialism is also straight science right or wrong. and the same is true of the 'man-machine' hypothesis of La Mettrie and others, and the various efforts to develop 'Locke's suggestion' " The crucial discovery was that bodies do not exist. It is common to riducule the idea of the 'ghost in the machine'( as in Gilbert Ryle's influential work, for example). But this misses the point. Newton exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact. Furthermore, nothing has replace the machine..." in Power and Prospects p42 Kind of puzzling, but the point seems to be that there is no meaningful distinction between mind and body because there is no way of conceiving how something could exist and be non-physical.By definition, when something exists it is physical.Chomsky also says things like: " Newton demonstrated that the mechanical philosophy could not account for the phenomena of nature; the Cartesians only argued--not implausibly , but not conclusively--that aspects of the world fell beyond these limits" Ibid p6 Chomsky's dualism is of the epistemological rather than the ontological variety i.e more about what we can know rather than what exists. I still find Chomsky's philosophical views very confusing. Sam Pawlett
