Having Chomsky, of all people, accused of denying the importance of biology? Chomsky was the guy that said “we need psycholinguistics to verify predictions of linguistics”—and thus, along with Müller, basically created psycholinguistics. Chomsky remains the guy who radically inspects the field once in a while with a question of “yes, that’s cool, but how a child could learn it?” Chomsky expects progress of neurobiology due to linguistics, sure, but it does not mean that he believes that what we find in our brains is unimportant—quite the opposite, he believes that it is ultimately the same field (but we have too little data on brain—and we do have too little direct data).
(And on Cartesianity - I cringe at the mention of it but Chomsky said of Newton that the latter expelled the Machine out of the world and left the Ghost. Then again, this whole dualism thing seems rather fake to me.)
Having Chomsky, of all people, accused of denying the importance of biology? Chomsky was the guy that said “we need psycholinguistics to verify predictions of linguistics”—and thus, along with Müller, basically created psycholinguistics. Chomsky remains the guy who radically inspects the field once in a while with a question of “yes, that’s cool, but how a child could learn it?” Chomsky expects progress of neurobiology due to linguistics, sure, but it does not mean that he believes that what we find in our brains is unimportant—quite the opposite, he believes that it is ultimately the same field (but we have too little data on brain—and we do have too little direct data).
(And on Cartesianity - I cringe at the mention of it but Chomsky said of Newton that the latter expelled the Machine out of the world and left the Ghost. Then again, this whole dualism thing seems rather fake to me.)