SOURCE: A review of Knowledge of Language and Language and Problems of Knowledge, in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 56, No. 3, September, 1989, pp. 533-36.

In the following review, Stabler provides favorable assessment and summary of Chomsky's Knowledge of Language and Language and Problems of Knowledge.

Noam Chomsky has recently produced two more books about language for a general audience. (Earlier works of a similar character include Cartesian Linguistics (1966); Language and Mind (1968); Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (1971); Reflections on Language (1975); Language and Responsibility (1977); and Rules and Representations (1980).) They are both informal explorations of a wide range of issues relating to language and knowledge, refreshingly free of the academic parochialism that results from disciplinary inbreeding. Each covers new empirical ground, offering suggestions about how this material ought to be incorporated into the growing tradition of theoretical linguistics, and each offers some commentary on recent psychological and philosophical debates. Though the overarching perspectives...