Stuart: “Yes, I’m well aware

Stuart:
“Yes, I’m well aware of Chris Knight’s criticisms (together we interviewed Chomsky for Radical Anthropology journal, http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/new/Journal.html), but I’m no longer convinced that the criticisms are even relevant to Chomsky’s concerns. Basically, Knight is asking what social conditions are necessary before we might expect language to evolve, given current sociobiological theories. Chomsky says, well, we know next to nothing about that, beyond speculation. It doesn’t impact on Chomsky’s concerns, which is, as he says in New Scientist, constructing theories that might tell us something nontrivial about the genetic predisposition for langauge and how it works.”
Well we’ll just have to disagree over what Knight is doing. Even so, I still maintain that Chomsky is not the last bit ‘open minded’, and he isn’t averse to a little speculation himself — much of it highly implausible.