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Half of Businesses to Cut Jobs and Hike Prices After Budget Thu Dec 05, 2024 17:00 | Will Jones More than half of British businesses expect to put up prices?and cut jobs to cope with the costs imposed by Rachel Reeves's Budget and National Insurance raid, according to a Bank of England survey.
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Church of England Spending ?Excessively? on Diversity, LGBT and Net Zero Officers, Report Warns Thu Dec 05, 2024 15:24 | Will Jones The?Church of England?is overspending on HR and "politicised roles" such as diversity,?social justice,?LGBT?and Net Zero officers at the expense of parishes, a report has warned.
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Voltaire, international edition
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Voltaire, International Newsletter N?109 Fri Nov 22, 2024 14:00 | en Voltaire Network >>
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Chomsky Reconsidered
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other press
Friday February 04, 2011 18:44 by Chris Knight - Radical Anthropology Group

Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group continues his examination of Chomsky's life and work. In particular he analyses an early work by Chomsky: Cartesian linguistics. He also looks at some sources Chomsky tapped for funding in his early days. Full text at link.
In 1966, Noam Chomsky (pictured) published his Cartesian linguistics. The book was a survey of rationalist conceptions of language and mind, focusing heavily on the French mathematician and philosopher, Réné Descartes (1596-1650). In his early years, Chomsky had been working within the structuralist tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Leonard Bloomfield and his own teacher, Zellig Harris. Chomsky wrote Cartesian linguistics in order to signal to the world his change of mind. His distinctively 'Cartesian' approach, he now clarified, was a rebellion against the entire 20th century tradition of structural linguistics. ... A brief round-up of Chomsky's most celebrated ideas will confirm that his point of departure is invariably the soul, with the corollary that this strange entity, being perfect, is autonomous with respect to man's intrinsically imperfect body.
Take Chomsky's admission that, superficially, language does not look perfect at all: "One massive case," he notes, "is the phonological system: the whole phonological system looks like a huge imperfection; it has every bad property you can think of."[34] Phonology makes languages sound different. This is obviously anomalous: "strong minimalism", after all, would predict just one language spoken by everyone. Does this mean that the theory is falsified by the data? Not at all, claims Chomsky. Humans really do speak just one common language. Yes, he admits, they sound different. Variations exist in choice of sounds and also in arbitrary sound-meaning associations. "These," he says, "are straightforward and need not detain us." ...
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