The “Whig Historian’s Fallacy”
The Case of Noam Chomsky and His Cartesian Linguistics (1966)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2236-4242.v32i1p59-79Keywords:
Chomsky, History, Linguistics, Whig Interpretation, HistoriographyAbstract
This paper has a double purpose. In one hand, we seek to analyze the “mode of historicization” (Auroux, 2006) practiced by Noam Chomsky in his Cartesian Linguistics (1966), a work of strong propagandizing motivation in which he tried to interpret the evolution of certain ideas about language that, in his opinion, acted as antecedents of generative grammar; we observed that, when he considered the facts of the past from the perspective of his time, Chomsky fell into the “whig historian’s fallacy” (Butterfield, 1931; Kragh, 1987) and offered an absolutely selective, anachronistic, auxiliary representation, and deliberately functional to his theoretical proposal. On the other hand, we try to reconstruct the scenario in which the work appeared, whose methodological inadequacy was so marked in historiographical terms that contributed to the opening of a specific debate (Aarsleff, 1970; Koerner, 1978; Newmeyer, 1980; among others) in which it is possible to identify the emergence and consolidation of the epistemological foundations of linguistic historiography.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Linha D'Água
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The Editorial Board authorizes free access to and distribution of published contentes, provided that the source is cited, that is, granding credit to the authors and Linha D'Água and preserving the full text. The author is allowed to place the final version (postprint / editor’s PDF) in an institutional/thematic repositor or personal page (site, blog), immediately after publication, provided that it is available for open access and comes without any embargo period. Full reference should be made to the first publication in Linha D'Água. Access to the paper should at least be aligned with the access the journal offers.
As a legal entity, the University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto School of Philosophy, Sciences and Languages owns and holds the copyright deriving from the publication. To use the papers, Paidéia adopts the Creative Commons Licence, CC BY-NC non-commercial attribution. This licence permits access, download, print, share, reuse and distribution of papers, provided that this is for non-commercial use and that the source is cited, giving due authorship credit to Linha D'Água. In these cases, neither authors nor editors need any permission.
Partial reproduction of other publications
Citations of more than 500 words, reproductions of one or more figures, tables or other illustrions should be accompanied by written permission from the copyright owner of the original work with a view to reproduction in Linha D'Água. This permission has to be addressed to the author of the submitted manuscript. Secondarily obtained rights will not be transferred under any circumstance.