The “Whig Historian’s Fallacy”

The Case of Noam Chomsky and His Cartesian Linguistics (1966)

Authors

  • Emiliano Battista Universidad de Buenos Aires - CONICET

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2236-4242.v32i1p59-79

Keywords:

Chomsky, History, Linguistics, Whig Interpretation, Historiography

Abstract

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.

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Published

2019-04-11

Issue

Vol. 32 No. 1 (2019): An Invitation to the History of Sciences of Language

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2019 Linha D'Água

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How to Cite

BATTISTA, Emiliano. The “Whig Historian’s Fallacy”: The Case of Noam Chomsky and His Cartesian Linguistics (1966). Linha D’Água, São Paulo, v. 32, n. 1, p. 59–79, 2019. DOI: 10.11606/issn.2236-4242.v32i1p59-79. Disponível em: https://periodicos.usp.br/linhadagua/article/view/151592.. Acesso em: 19 may. 2024.

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