[Recall that John Mikhail may have been victim of less than generous acknowledgment by Marc Hauser. I happen to be sitting in (on my sabbatical colleague) Aaron Zimmerman's seminar on Mikhail's Elements of Moral Cognition. Part of Mikhail's argument turns on an interpretation of section 9 of Rawls' TJ, which according Mikhail deliberately deploys an analogy between moral grammar and Chomsky-style linguistic grammar. What follows is stimulated by chapter 3 of Mihkail's book.]
In the context of explaining a distinction between competence and performance, Chomsky claims that "Linguistic theory is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance" (Chomsky 1965:3ff). Without being in the least critical of Chomsky's idealizing assumptions, it is worth nothing that this is self-consciously positing a counter-factual. No human could ever find herself being the ideal speaker-listener. Of course, Chomsky's approach here is remarkably similar to the perfect information (etc) assumptions that characterize homo economicus in once-standard economic theory. [I leave it to the historian of linguistics to figure out how much Chomsky was inspired by his colleague Paul Samuelson!] Let's grant for the sake of argument that for the sake of some goals in science these models are appropriate.
By contrast, here is Rawls on "considered judgments," which "are simply those rendered under conditions favorable to the exercise of the sense of, and therefore in circumstances where the more common excuses and explanations for making a mistake do not obtain. The person making the judgment is presumed, then, to have the ability, the opportunity, and the desire to reach a correct decision (or at least, not the desire not to)." (Rawls 1971, 47-8) Not unlike the economist and the linguist, Rawls creates idealizing conditions that "favorable for deliberation and judgment in general." (I grant to Mikhail that Rawls is also drawing a competence/performance distinction.) But in Rawls ordinary human beings are very much capable of instantiating or having considered judgments. (I think Zimmerman disagrees with my reading of Rawls.) This is no trivial matter. For it means that moral judgment need not be farmed out entirely to the moral-theoretical expert. By contrast, evaluations of linguistic competence or economic rationality are entirely in the hands of the expert. And given the significant normative impact of these concepts, it is by no means obvious that we ought to farm this out to them even for the sake of the advancement of science. Or to put the point I am driving at in philosophic jargon: the human-normative sciences are ripe for some standpoint theory. In economics a good place to start is this book.
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