At the Rockridge Institute’s site George Lakoff posted his reply to Steven Pinker’s critique of Lakoff’s new book Whose Freedom.

Lakoff and Pinker, both students of Chomsky, have split deeply over the question of whether the brain determines our abilities to talk, to think, to be.

Lakoff’s critique claims that Pinker (and Chomsky) are stuck in a medieval Cartesian account of the human mind, and that it’s finally time to move more into the human actuality.

To go even further and more critically, I hope it’s finally a time when actually observing humans can begin to be done, and to be heard in this conversation. Children (and their m/others) are much more complicated in interaction, in facial expressions, than these forms of thought have led us to note. Time to begin to observe again!