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psychology, sociobiology, prior to empirical testing, tries to infer the existence of
certain behavioral tendencies and/or mental faculties by appealing to their usefulness
in helping the organism adapt to some ecological niche in the ancestral environment.
No such reasoning is appealed to in this paper.
(2) Chomsky is concerned to understand the unconscious or “tacit” knowledge which
underlies our ability to use language. The question is what unconscious inferences the
child would have to make. Likewise, the representations underlying syntactic and
moral competences are not conscious.
(3) This is not to say that all languages use movement to form questions. Turkish and
Japanese do not. It is to say that movement, when used, is sensitive to parts of speech.
(4) This universal applies only to basic word order. It is not a counterexample that Dutch
and German, although head-first, have head-last verb phrases in subordinate clauses.
(5) For some speculations outside the framework of Fiske’s relational models theory as to
how a P&P approach might apply to moral competence, see (Dwyer, 1999; 2004;
Harman, 2000).
References
BEAUCHAMP, TOM L. 1982. Philosophical Ethics: An Introduction to
Moral Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.