Chomsky: One of Grice´s Two Mentors

by JL Speranza
for the GC

---- AGAIN THIS IS MEANT AS COMMENTARY ON Avram Noam Chomsky (one of Grice´s two mentors -- the other being Quine) by L. K. Helm, THIS BLOG. For some reason, I was unable to paste this in the relevant thread. Sorry about that.

Thanks, Larry. It will take me some time to digest the meta-political commentary. All I know about Chomsky, mainly, is that his father wrote a book called "The Eternal Language" (Hebrew). Just joking!

Readers of the minutes and proceedings of the Grice Club will be amused to learn that Larry and I share other fora and we were recently discussing Grice´s claim to the effect that he had TWO mentors in his whole long life:

1. Quine

2. Chomsky.

Grice writes thus in his irreverent, "Prejudices and predilections, which become the life and opinions of Paul Grice", aka as "Reply to Richards"! --

What amused me bunches in Grice´s memoir is that he compares Chomsky to "Otto Jesperson" (sic). I never knew if this is a typo in Grice´s handwriting (as I hope it is) or not. Surely he was JespersEn. But in any case, Grice goes on to compare Jesperson with Chomsky, and of course Chomsky comes out very favoured in the comparison.

Chomsky was an author who held a strong appeal to the Oxonians of Grice´s day. Most historians of philosophy retell that Austin had chosen "Syntactic Structures" (a booklet with Mouton) as "reading" material for the "Saturday Mornings" -- and as the wiki entry notes, Chomsky gets the idea of "transformation rule" (this should interest R. B. Jones) from Carnap via Zellig Harris.

Chomsky´s politics is quite a different animal, but Helm is right in pointing to this as "political philosophy", for if Griceanism disallows us to face the big issues of American academia (to which Grice ended up belonging) what would the ultimate good of it be?