Bilgrami, Chomsky & She Hulk- part II

At the end of my last post we discovered Bilgrami poised to write this-

This confluence of simplicity of assumptions in accounting for the Basic Property and the accompanying claim of the optimal design of language may help to give substance to what is the most plausible hypothesis on the limited evidence we possess about the origins of language, viz., that language emerged not gradually, but suddenly (and relatively recently).

Like other speciation events. But we are speaking of a co-evolved process. We may equally say there was a sudden emergence of a new fitness landscape for a particular phylum.

Such a sudden ‘great leap forward’

is nothing of the sort. Evolution does not distinguish between forward or backward.

it may now be speculated was perhaps caused by a ‘slight rewiring of the brain that yielded MERGE in its simplest form, providing the basis for unbounded and creative thought’, hitherto unpossessed.

Thought does not matter. Inclusive fitness does. Rewiring is all very well. But if it does not raise inclusive fitness, the thing is not reinforced.

Lecture II consolidates some of these conclusions by first elaborating on another central theme in his work: the limits of human cognition.
There is a locution we have all used frequently: ‘the scope and limits of…. ‘.

No we haven't. Few of us are pedants. That is why our material standard of living has been able to rise.

Chomsky takes it very seriously and gives it a crucial twist in elaborating his understanding of our cognitive abilities. These abilities, which in their scope are wider and deeper than those of any other creature we know, are so partly because they are also subject to limits,

which are unknowable to us iff they genuinely exist

limits owing to our nature or, as the title suggests, the kinds of creatures we are—in particular, the fact that our cognitive abilities have a biological basis.

One may as well say She-Hulk has a biological basis. Yet, she could leap through the TV screen and marry me. There are limits to what she can do, however. If I take her to an Indo-Pak cricket match, it will appear that the supports the wrong side because her skin is green. She can't change that color to Saffron.

We had already implicitly come across this point in the first lecture, though it was restricted there to the human ability for language, in particular. The theoretical account of language presented there presupposed this notion of limits, i.e. presupposed that we are genetically endowed with innate structures that afford us our unique capacity for language, structures which at the same time constrain what language is for us, what possible I-languages there are.

My theoretical account of my future married life with She-Hulk is based on presuppositions re. genetically endowed innate structures that afford us a unique sexual capacity. However, at the same time, they constrain what sex is for us, what possible imaginary babies we might have. To be clear, I'm saying I-languages are imaginary babies like the rug-rats I will have with She-Hulk.

It is for the characterization of these innate structures that the technical term ‘UG’ is intended;

and the term 'ugh!' characterizes your reaction to having to watch me deflower She-Hulk

and it is within the framework of the scope and limits set by this genetic endowment, that language as a computational power is explained in the generative account summarized above.

Since a genome's 'scope and limits' are unknowable and since language is not a computational power, what Bilgrami is actually saying is 'Chomsky's generative account uses an unknowable framework to explain something which can't be true'. In other words, my account of my deflowering She-Hulk after she leapt out of my TV screen has as much truth value as Chomsky's nonsense.

What is true of language is just a special case of a perfectly general set of scopes and limits that come from the fact of being creatures with a biology.

Which is why it could also relate to farting or marrying She-Hulk.

The idea seems to raise no controversy when it comes to physical ability: what makes us suited to walk limits us, so that we are not suited to slither like snakes.

What make me suited to deflower She-Hulk also limits me to not extending the same courtesy to Thor, the Mighty Avenger.

You may say, 'Vivek, you can't fuck She-Hulk. She does not exist.' But She-Hulk exists in Chomskian I-language. Either I can fuck her or Chomskian I-language does not exist. Both me and Chomsky are wankers. We haven't really accomplished anything to boast about.

Chomsky thinks that it is a prejudice to deny that what is obvious in the case of such physical abilities is not obvious (as the incessant controversies around innate ideas would suggest) in the case of cognitive abilities.

If you deny I am fucking She-Hulk, you are prejudiced. I will report you the Racial Equality Commission. Just coz I iz bleck don't mean I can't get it on with a green skinned gal.

To possess some cognitive abilities necessarily means that other cognitive abilities may be missing, cognitive abilities that other sorts of minded subjects could conceivably possess.

Nonsense! Chomsky can write shite. But he can also fart. Incidentally, something which is necessarily the case case must be the case. You can't say 'may be' the case. Furthermore 'conceivably', if Chomsky is right, can't be limited at all.

It is only if we ignore the fact of our biology when we study human cognition that we would contrive to deny these limits.

No. The facts of biology say nothing about limits. 'Studying human cognition' is itself 'human cognition'. But such cognition is defeasible. There are no grounds for affirming limits to it because that affirmation is itself infinitely defeasible.

And the second lecture proceeds to look at the question of such limits on our cognitive abilities quite generally beyond the specific domain of language, though returning at various points to draw conclusions about language again.

Which is cool if you are looking for arguments to prove that you did too shack up with She-Hulk and anyone who denies it happened is prejudiced and ignorant.

It explores the methodological upshot of this idea of cognitive limits by first recalling a distinction Chomsky made almost five decades ago between ‘problems’ and ‘mysteries’.

A worthless distinction unless, like me, you don't want to get into how come She Hulk leapt out of my TV screen but didn't leap out of your TV screen. That's not my problem. It is a mystery. Yea, I say unto you, the ways of Marvel Comic Book characters surpass all comprehension.

Invoking, Peirce’s understanding of scientific method and scientific growth that appeals to the concept of abduction which puts limits on what count as ‘admissible hypotheses’,

by which Pierce only meant things like Chomsky's I-language, so wholly intensional as to be independent of pragmatics, and my rug-rats with She-Hulk.

he argues that innate structures that are determined by our genetic endowment set limits to the questions that we can formulate.

Which is why we must accept 'mysteries' bila kaifa'- without asking why. It seems Bilgrami has rediscovered his ancestral Islamic theology in Chomsky's atheistic oeuvre.

The questions we can tractably formulate are called ‘problems’, but given the limits within which their formulation is so much as possible, there will be things that escape our cognitive powers and to the extent that we can even think them we will, given our current conceptual frameworks and knowledge, find ourselves unable to formulate them in a way that a tractable form of scientific inquiry of them can be pursued. These he calls ‘mysteries’.

Which would be cool if he'd discovered something or invented something which had made our lives better. But Chomsky failed. The man is a cretin.

The omnibus title of the lectures “What kind of creatures are we?” is directly addressed by this since other sorts of creatures, with a different biological endowment from ours, may be able to formulate problems that remain mysteries for us.

Which is how come angels and genies and such like have supernatural powers.

Thus, for Chomsky, if not for Peirce, (who, in speaking of admissible hypotheses, may have given less of a determining role to the fact of our being biological creatures[5]) the distinction between ‘problems’ and ‘mysteries’ is an organism-relative distinction.

Coz angels and genies and the Silver Surfer are all real. Thus my boss should have no problem granting me paternity leave coz my wife, She-Hulk, has just given birth to our son, the Incredible Sulk whose super-power is to resist toilet training by non-violent means. Like father, like son, I guess.

It is a very important part of this methodological picture that we should learn to relax with the fact of our cognitive limits and the ‘mysteries’ that they inevitably force us to acknowledge. The lecture, along with the companion essay in this volume, ‘The Mysteries of Nature”, traverses vital moments in the history of science to draw this methodological lesson.

Chomsky is trawling for cases where guys who achieved something fucked up in another department.

One crux moment is when Newton overturned the contact-mechanical assumptions of the Early Modern science that preceded him and posited a notion of gravity that undermined the earlier notions of matter, motion, and causality which were scientific consolidations of our commonsense understanding (presumably determined by the cognitive limits of our biology) of the world of objects.

Nonsense. Henry More, also from Grantham, and also at Cambridge, had already posited a fourth dimension. Chomsky's erudition is fake. It may have fooled us in the pre-Wikipedia age but now it is just sad.

He points out that with Newton a new framework emerged in which –by the lights of those limits—something inconceivable was being proposed.

This is simply not true. Chomsky is either lying or is ignorant. Bilgrami is a professional philosopher. He should know better.

Newton himself admitted to this inconceivability, even calling it an absurdity, and nobody since Newton has done anything to redeem things on just this score.

Nonsense! Liebniz was on the case as were loads of other people.

Rather the absurdity has simply been subsumed into our scientific picture of the world.

Has this fucker never heard of Einstein? Guys like me and Bilgrami and Chomsky don't have a 'scientific picture of the world'. We have a 'She-Hulk Comic Book' type picture of the world. We are as stupid as shit. That's why our lucubrations have not added anything to the sum of human happiness.

Newton never let it deter him, constructing explanatory laws, ignoring the lack of a deeper underlying understanding that would, if we had it, make sense of what were, by these admissions on his (and others’) part, described as an ‘occult’ force. It was sufficient to construct intelligible theories of the world. And to do so, it was not necessary to find the world intelligible in the deeper sense that our cognitive limits frustrate.

'Cognitive limits'? Fuck off! What was lacking was sufficiently advanced Scientific equipment. Technology had to progress a lot before the Michelson-Morley experiment showed there probably wasn't any ether. A more recent example is the Bell inequality. It has only recently been proved. Why? Technology had to advance. Chomsky was supposed to help that happen. He failed despite having quite a high I.Q. Bilgrami had a low IQ. He is a diversity hire. He likes Chomsky's 'bila kaifa' mysteries and now babbles about 'Enchantment'. You can take the boy out of dehat, you can't take dehat out of the boy. For all his vaunted atheism, Bilgrami is now a credulous dehati.

Subsequent thinkers (Priestley, in particular, comes through as a most shrewd and comprehending commentator) made explicit this methodological outlook and drew consequences for issues in the philosophy of mind that vex philosophers today, but which, were they to take in what Priestley had to offer, might make them reconsider what they present as the mind-body problem or ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness. Philosophers have a tendency to stamp some issue as uniquely ‘hard’ and rest complacently in that frustrated register.

But everybody has come to see that Philosophers are as stupid as shit.

Chomsky appeals to precisely this history to show first of all that there is nothing unique about finding something ‘hard’ in just this way.

Like She-Hulk did just now. Ooooh She-Hulk, you are naughty!

Thus, for instance, what the introduction of ‘gravity’ did in physics was conceived to be just as hard in the aftermath of Newton, including by Newton himself.

But this conception did not matter. What mattered was that Technology improved as the Economy changed.

The significance of this to the so-called mind-body problem is that it puts into doubt whether it can any longer –since Newton– even be formulated coherently.

The thing has always been silly. Bilgrami's ancestors embraced Occassionalism before Descartes, Liebniz & c started down that road.

The initially anxiety-inducing introduction of something ‘mysterious’ like ‘gravity’ eventually became essential to our understanding of material bodies and their acting upon each other without contact and so it simply got incorporated into science, indeed the new common sense of science.

No. Science was formulae and empirical observations and predictions and discovering useful new instruments or machines. Talking shite about 'mysteries' may have helped some pedants keep their jobs in Church & State funded Institutions.

From this, we should, if anything, conclude philosophically that everything is immaterial, so nothing clear can remain of a mind-body problem. In a memorably eloquent reversal of Ryle’s slogan, he says that far from the ghost having been sent to oblivion, the machine was discarded and the ghost remained intact.

Both Ryle and Chomsky were part of failed research programs. This was not always obvious. The Pentagon may have hoped both might end up helping create a Super-Soldier who could operate weapons systems with his mind. But then they also funded men to stare at goats till the goats' heads exploded.

As for consciousness, the philosopher’s tendency to require that much of our mentality be conscious, a tendency explicit in philosophers as different as Quine and Searle, is brought into question by looking at the operations of the rule-bound abilities of both language and vision.

No. It is brought into question by the fact that they were stupid wankers who contributed nothing useful because their discipline was shit.

Chomsky feels particularly strongly about this since even much of our conscious thought interacts with aspects of mind that are hidden from consciousness, and so to restrict oneself to what is conscious would hinder a scientific understanding of even the conscious mind.

Yes! That's what I'm saying! I did too fuck She-Hulk! I sent you video evidence! You say all you saw was me humping a body pillow. But that's because the evidence of your eyes was tampered with by something hidden from consciousness. That's why you don't know what you actually saw!

Given his concern with a scientific account, he is concerned too to show that some ways of thinking about language, and thought more broadly, are not scientifically sound.

Like his own. But any type of thinking which does not lead to scientific and technological progress is not scientifically sound.

There is, in particular, an extended discussion of the atomic elements of computation.

Fuck has Chomsky contributed to the machine on which I type this?

Invoking points established in the previous lecture, he points out that these are misleadingly described as ‘words’ and as ‘lexical’ items in the literature because –as they feed into the conceptual-intentional interface, which has been shown to be primary in contrast with the sensorimotor interface

No such thing has been shown as opposed to deduced on the basis of stupidity

—they are not constructed by the processes of externalization. Even more startling for philosophers is the claim that, except for some explicitly stipulative exceptions in mathematics and the sciences, they don’t have any referential properties and are not to be thought of as bearing constitutive relations to mind-independent objects in the external world.

Anything which solves a coordination or discoordination problem has referential properties. If my fart causes the Symposium to disperse, it has not just referential but reverential properties. We may well venerate that holy fart which terminated an utter waste of everybody's time.

I-language, which is the only scientifically accountable notion of language,

but which can't exist save in an Occassionalist Universe whose God insists on it

thus, is thoroughly internal. This point is explored via a discussion of historical views, such as those of Aristotle and Hume, and via a discussion of examples of such atoms, ranging from the relatively concrete such as ‘house’ and ‘Paris’ to relatively abstract such as ‘person’ and ‘thing’.

Relatively concrete or abstract to whom? A fucking cretin. Why bother with this shite?

Reference or denotation is shown by these discussions to be too contextual to bear scientific study

Yet Alexa and Siri and so forth exist. That's the result of actual Science based on 'e-language'. Chomsky's 'i-language' approach was useless.

and should be seen as relevant to the use that language is put to rather than a constitutive aspect of language itself. All this leads to a different taxonomy than is found among philosophers, relegating almost all of what they have in mind by ‘semantics’ to pragmatics.

Sadly, Evolution means only Utility- pragmatics- matters. 'That's just Semantics' is what people have been saying since the Seventies, in order to dismiss objections by suggesting the objector is a fucking cretin.

These conclusions are relevant to the question of the origin of language. Animal signals to each other are caused by direct links they have to objects in the external world.

Nonsense! A signalling mechanism only has utility if it is tested from time to time. That is why we have fire-alarm drills.

There is no understanding them if one left these causal links out,

We can't understand Chomsky or Bilgrami unless we understand they are paid to babble shite so more cretins pay for worthless credentials- which originally were supposed to serve a screening and signalling function.

whereas, the burden of the discussion above was to show precisely that there are no such constitutive causal links to a mind-independent reality for the atoms of human computation. This gives further reason to conclude that the kind of creatures we are, possessed of the kind of powers for language and thought we possess, should get an evolutionary account of the sort presented in the first Lecture rather than what Chomsky, citing Lewontin in this lecture, describes as the ‘storytelling’ about gradual evolution from our creaturely ancestors, a mode of explanation that one would only indulge in if one does not pay enough prior and scientific attention to the nature of the phenotype being explained. It is storytelling partly also, as Lewontin is cited as saying, because of the ‘tough luck’ of not having access to any evidence on which these explanations could be based.

Evolutionary Biology are welcome to talk shite and tell 'just so stories' iff they carry on with their Scientific work. Why? This has turned out to be useful in Medicine. The thing saves lives. It 'pays for itself'.

They are hidden from human cognitive access, another form of our limitation.

But they are not hidden from Scientific investigation. On the other hand my getting it on with She Hulk is not hidden from human cognitive access at all. You can picture it for yourself right now.

Thus limits on our cognition are inevitable for a variety of reasons, chief among which is the taking seriously of the sheer fact that we are biological creatures.

As opposed to what? Comic book characters who marry She Hulk?

Unlike Locke, Priestley, Hume, Russell, Peirce, and Lewontin, who are among the heroes of this lecture, Hilbert most explicitly (“There are absolutely no unsolvable problems”) and much of contemporary philosophy more implicitly deny that there are mysteries, thereby denying a truism based on this sheer fact.

A sheer fact insisted on by the first Vatican Council. Chomsky is now more extreme than the Catholic Church which since 1965 insists only on mysteries of Faith not Knowledge.

What is fascinating is that Chomsky, having presented all this, takes an interesting combination of attitudes towards it. On the one hand, the very idea of cognitive limits that lands us human beings with ‘mysteries’, which other sorts of subjects may find perfectly tractable, is a commitment to what philosophers call a realist metaphysics.

No it doesn't. It is a commitment to some silly type of mysterium fidei not metaphysics.

As he says, “Given mysterian truisms, what is inconceivable for me, is no criterion for what does not exist”.

The only criterion is empirical.

But on the other hand, taking his cue from Newton, his attitude, once this is acknowledged, is thoroughly pragmatist. Just because what we study, the world, may not be ultimately intelligible, does not mean that we should be inhibited from striving to produce intelligible scientific theories of the world. Even the concept of free human action, he says, which may go beyond any of the concepts we possess (crucially, determinacy and randomness) might one day, he says, be scientifically tractable, though we are far from anything like that understanding at present. This is quite different from the attitude of Kant, who declared freedom to be thinkable but never knowable. Like Peirce and before him Newton, and unlike Kant, Chomsky does not want his own mysterianism and his own insistence on the limits of our cognitive powers, to place, as Peirce once put it, “roadblocks on the path to knowledge”.

Very kind of him, I'm sure. But he isn't on the path to knowledge. He is removing roadblocks on the path to nonsense. Science is utile.

Lecture III lifts the restriction on our natures, considered in terms of individual capacities (for language and cognition), and considers us as social creatures, seeking to explore what is the common good and which political and economic arrangements promote or thwart it.

This is the subject matter of mechanism design- a field of inquiry which only took off after Chomsky had stuck his ostrich head in the sands of 'Cartesian linguistics', 'libertarian socialism' and other such oxymorons.

The Enlightenment figures large in the pursuit of these questions, though what Chomsky has in mind by the Enlightenment is capacious including the familiar ‘liberal’ figures of Adam Smith[7] and Mill as well as those in a broadly Romantic tradition such as Humboldt and Marx.

But them guys were stupid and ignorant and died a long time ago. Why bother with them?

And its interpretation is capacious too, stressing not only the side of Adam Smith that is often suppressed by most of his liberal and radical critics as well as his conservative devotees, but also stressing principles that allow it to be seen as a precursor of a later anarchist tradition in Europe as well as John Dewey in America.

But the 'later anarchist tradition' in Europe was shit. Dewey was a nice guy and not as crazy as a shithouse rat. Why toss him into the mix?

The starting point of these inquiries is in fact individualist and has ties to the earlier lectures. Even within their biologically determined limits, the creative capacities that each individual possesses (and which were discussed in the first lecture in the specific domain of language) are precisely the sort of thing whose full development makes individuals flower as subjects.

But that flowering is social. It has nothing to do with 'biologicial limits'.

The social question of the common good necessarily comes in when one asks what sorts of institutions hinder such development within the individual.

Institutions don't matter. Whether they operate in an efficient and incentive compatible manner is all that counts.

Social frameworks such as capitalism that stress self-interest hinder rather than encourage the development of individual capacities.

Which is why people are fleeing South Korea for the North.

Adam Smith’s vivid excoriations of what the division of labour does to destroy our creative individuality

are purely imaginary. On the other hand, he did predict that I would marry She Hulk.

and Dewey’s harsh words on the shadow cast by corporate interests on just about every aspect of public and personal life are both invoked to establish this.

Corporations can act in restraint of trade. So can Unions. Economics explains this and the Law can take suitable action.

The tradition of anarchism (from Bakunin to Rocker and the anarcho-syndicalism of the Spanish Civil war period)

is to fuck up massively

combines socialist ideas with the liberal principles of the classical Enlightenment to construct an ideal –of cooperative labour, workers’ control of the workplace and the means of production, and a social life revolving around voluntary associations– that, if implemented, would sweep away the obstacles to the goal of human development which come from both free market capitalism and Bolshevik tendencies to a ‘red bureaucracy’.

Yes, yes. But it fucks up massively unless it just runs Enterprises in a sensible manner.

Dewey’s ideas on education reveal how by contrast with much of the contemporary practice found in educational institutions, the goal of human development can best be pursued from an early age.

Very true. Kids should be edumicated. By contrast, contemporary practice in educational institutions is to send them down coal mines. This is because Capitalism is very evil. On the other hand, it does cause She Hulk to leap out of the TV screen and have sex with me. Thus, it isn't all bad.

There are touching descriptions of how many of these ideals were central to the activism of a wide range of grass roots movements from the early radical parliamentary tradition in seventeenth century England to the ‘factory girls’ and artisans that Norman Ware wrote of in his study of the industrial workers in the American tradition to the liberation theologians in the Catholic tradition of Central America.

What was central to those grass roots movements was the obvious benefit which would flow from getting rid of an obnoxious social practice. Stupid philosophical shite has no role whatsoever coz grass roots types be unedumicated. No doubt, some Poindexters would jump on the bandwagon and claim all the credit.

These longstanding democratic labour traditions are contrasted in some detail with a different understanding of democracy in a tradition that begins in America with Madison’s ‘aristocratic’ strictures on who may govern

which had zero effect. Have these guys never heard of Andrew Jackson?

and updated in the vision of Walter Lippmann’s ideas of democratic rule by the ‘expert’, the American version of Leninist vanguardism,

which is exemplified by whom? Donald Trump?

ensuring –as Chomsky makes clear with a glance at the results of polls on various important issues such as healthcare– that what the people want is almost never what gets on the agenda of ‘democratic’ politics.

Nonsense! I want a Ferrari. But I don't want to pay for it. A Democracy may want Ferraris for everyone. But the median voter can't and won't pay for it.

Take 'worker control'. In theory, I might think it fine and dandy that a stupid guy like me has a voice in deciding Company policy. Then I discover that this is both boring and dangerous for my financial security.

This latter understanding of democracy,

is sheer stupidity

of course, dominates the practice

no it doesn't. Stupidity doesn't dominate anything. It sits drooling in a corner with a thumb up its ass.

of societies and governments in much of the Western world and Chomsky is keen to point out that even at its worst, it never lets up on the claim to be pursuing high sounding ideals of the common good, showing how the common good is universal in a quite paradoxical way: it is preached as applying to all, even as it is everywhere violated by those said to be representing all and who mostly pursue the interests of a few.

Who lets up on the claim that they are nice guys? Chomsky gets riled because people he thinks are scumbags are refusing to say they are great big scumbags and have tiny peckers and pay prostitutes to piss on them. This proves that Capitalism is not just a lying cheating scumbag with a tiny pecker, it also doesn't  have the balls to proudly proclaim this fact.

Given the fundamental starting point in human creativity and the importance of its unhindered flowering, Chomsky’s leaning towards anarchism is not surprising and his way of putting the point has always been to ask, as he does in this lecture again: any form of coercion that hinders it can never be taken for granted. It needs a justification. All arrangements that have coercive power, including centrally the state, must always be justified. The default position is that they are not justified –until and unless they are.

Chomsky is not justified in taking a dump. He must justify taking a dump on each and every occasion. Furthermore, how can he justify flushing the toilet? Is this a sustainable way of using precious water resources?

And given the contingency of the ‘shoals of capitalism’ (his phrase) in all corners of the world, there is indeed a justification of a notion of the state that protects the vast numbers who are pushed to the margins of society (echoing Adam Smith himself who thought only the state could alleviate the oppressive life that industrial capital forces upon labour), very different from the actual state in most societies which, as Dewey is cited as saying, largely do the bidding of corporations and in doing so remove the socialist element from anarchism and allow only the libertarian element –as a result of which democracy becomes ‘neo-democracy’ (to match ‘neo-liberalism’) in which if one suffers in poverty it is because, as Hobbes might have put it, one has chosen to do so.

Replace the word 'Capitalism' and the word 'Corporation' with 'Jewry' and 'Socialism' with 'Aryan', and 'Anarchism' with 'the Weimar Republic' and 'Adam Smith' and 'Hobbes' and 'Dewey' with 'Hitler' and we get this

And given the contingency of the ‘shoals of Jewry’ (his phrase) in all corners of the world, there is indeed a justification of a notion of the state that protects the vast numbers who are pushed to the margins of society (echoing Hitler himself who thought only the state could alleviate the oppressive life that industrial capital forces upon labour), very different from the actual state in most societies which, as Hitler is cited as saying, largely do the bidding of Jewry and in doing so remove the Aryan element from the Weimar Republic and allow only the libertarian element –as a result of which democracy becomes ‘neo-democracy’ (to match ‘neo-liberalism’) in which if one suffers in poverty it is because, as Hitler might have put it, one has chosen to do so.

An argument which, mutatis mutandis, could be made by a Nazi is not a good argument. It is as stupid and paranoid.

Thus to turn one’s back on this and to justify the state as offering protections for those who suffer under Jewry, far from contradicting the Weimar Republic, is a consistent application of its principles in historical contingencies, a point that Chomsky presents with a marvelous metaphor which he says he has borrowed from the Brazilian rural workers’ movement and extended –the metaphor of an ‘iron cage’, whose floors one tries to extend as one tries to reduce the coercive power of the state, even as the cage protects one from the destructive forces outside the cage, forces which render us weak and impoverished and alienated, to say nothing of rendering our planet uninhabitable.

Because turning the Amazon into a Malthusian trap for millions of slash and burn small-holders will sure be great for the Planet.

I have tried, as best I can, to summarize a book whose intellectual complexity and power and whose breadth of knowledge and originality cannot possibly be captured in a summary

but can be comprehensively dismissed as paranoid, self-regarding, shite

–so, an exercise and duty that may not, in the end, aid the reader at all. But what I will say, without pause or condition, is that there was such pleasure and instruction in the exercise that I could do no better than ask the reader to study the book for herself –not only for the qualities I have just mentioned, but for its utter seriousness of purpose regarding the deepest questions in philosophy and science and, above all, its vast humanity.

Bilgrami writes in a footnote- Chomsky mentions E-languages (extensional language, like the ones we all use)  by way of contrast with I-languages (ideal, internal, intensional languages which don't exist) , he doubts the coherence of the very idea of E-languages (even though that is what he himself uses) and therefore whether they exist.

The reason this is cool is because it proves that She Hulk leapt out of the TV screen and fucked my brains out. You are wrong to be sceptical of my claim. You think I took the phrase 'She Hulk leapt out of the TV screen' from a particular comic book and then added 'fucked my brains out' from some some low social context featuring sad losers. But this belief of yours is predicated on the existence of E-language. If it doesn't exist, then what I said must be I-language. It must be compossible with the utilitarian world. How exactly must remain a mystery. You should accept it bila kaifa- without asking how.