This one I think is a pretty fun essay, it’s Peter Jones refuting Noam Chomsky’s work in biological determinism.

Biological Determinism and Epistemology in Linguistics: Some Considerations on the “Chomskyan Revolution” is an essay in which Jones argues that Chomsky’s views are not only incompatible with Marxism but “to any discipline in which the social and historical are essential and irreducible categories in the understanding and explanation of human behaviour, institutions, and thought.”

Jones asserts that biological determinism in general (not just Chomsky’s views) is incoherent, self-contradictory, and an inadequate foundation for human sciences.

This paper is not about Chomsky’s political contributions (however you may feel about that), but rather about linguistics (for those who are unfamiliar with autonomous syntax, Chomsky wrote extensively about the innate biological function of language in humanity).

Chomsky argues that the mind must be examined as any other biological structure. For Chomsky, there is extant in the human brain specific capabilities of understanding; fields that are “accessible” by the mind.

“Chomsky believes that the speed and precision with which children pick up new words “leaves no real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts available before experience with language and is basically learning labels for concepts that are already part of his or her conceptual apparatus””

This extends to all forms of understanding, all sciences. That everything a human may think, every choice a human may make, every idea a human may have or execute are all predetermined through genetic material. This extends even to social interactions and moral and ethical considerations; that there is a set limit of social interactions available to be accessed by the human brain, which, in this understanding of consciousness, exists merely as a series of biological functions predetermined by its genetic makeup.

Chomsky asserts: “A consistent materialist would consider it as self-evident that the mind has very important innate structures, physically realized in some manner” and thus that all aspects of a human’s development are governed through biological determinism.

A Marxist view is at direct odds with Chomsky’s assertion of biological determinism: to the Marxist view, as we’ve seen above, human’s are products of social and historical conditions, their relations and interactions influenced (if not directly caused) by the economic and the political. Chomsky refutes this, claiming instead that it is all a function of the biological. (Biological determinism is the predominant form of determinism in modern scientific thought, and is the form of determinism most argued even in Marxist circles, despite its contraposition with economic determinism).

By Chomsky’s arguments, no being that is not innately connected to the human syntax (for instance an alien, or some other species that does not share the genetic disposition for human syntax) would thus never be able to learn human language.

Chomsky’s argument, says Jones, relies heavily on Hume’s rejection of empiricism. Experience is not the source of human knowledge to a biological determinist. rather, human knowledge is determined by a “mental organ,” and any deficits in knowledge are explained by an absence or lack in the available data (think of a child learning language; they have access to the same mental organ as an adult, but their syntax is not developed, as they have not been exposed to enough data–conversations with others).

Chomskyan biological determinism, thus, is an understanding that knowledge itself is innate. The brain’s very genetics, it’s physical makeup, determines what is and is not knowable.

The main conundrum in Chomskyan theory, according to Jones, is that truth then, can only be arrived at through the coincidental intersection between knowledge and reality.

Jones argues that biological determinism is vulgar materialism (influenced heavily by Cartesian mechanical philosophy). “Its materialism lies in the acceptance of the existence of a mind-independent material reality, its vulgarity in the simple reduction of the mental to the material (the biological).” (4/4)

This is just a small sampling of Marxist positions on determinism, be it economic determinism or biological determinism. This as an oft-argued point, and one that has no consensus. However, as was made clear above, Marx himself was more concerned with the destruction of the constraints that capitalism places on mankind’s ability to make choices with their lives and the shaping of history.