OAO - Chomsky

[theapportioner]

Yeah I am pretty skeptical of Pinker's and Fodor's ideas on the existence of an internal language. Pinker's arguments, though making significant challenges to Sapir-Whorf, do not advance his theory of a mentalese, in my view. I think that a lot of what Pinker cites as evidence of mentalese could be explained in a different way from this rather cumbersome idea. At any rate, calling it a language is extremely misleading, and I take Wittgenstein's position that there can't be a private language because we would not be able to assign meaning to it.