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Plato's Problem, Orwell's Problem, and Life in the Spotlight In the mid-to-late 1970s, Chomsky's Reflections on Language and Essays on Form and Interpretation appeared, as did Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (although it had been written between 1955 and 1956). Studies that Chomsky had been working on for years entered the public domain. He was also lecturing widely: he delivered the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario; the Huizinga Memorial Lectures at Leiden; the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University; and the Kant Lectures at Stanford University. He was named Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1974. But it was Reflections on Language that sparked the greatest amount of discussion within the field, partly because of John Searle's review article "The Rules of the Language Game," which appeared in the 10 September 1976 edition of the Times Literary Supplement. In Searle's opinion, Reflections confirmed that Chomsky was retreating from his previous positions, in particular the idea that a sentence's meaning is determined by its syntactical deep structure. Searle argued that Chomsky was now seeking to determine meaning through an altered notion of surface structure. Chomsky merely remarked that the review proved Searle had lost interest after Aspects came out. Reflections ­ comprised in part of the Whidden Lectures ­ addresses the first of three problems that Chomsky has explored in a number of contexts. He has called it "Plato's problem," and Bertrand Russell, in his later works, poses it like this: "[H]ow comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are able to know as much as they do know?. . . (qtd. in Chomsky, Language in a Psychological Setting 3 ­ 4). The second problem, more often addressed in the course of political rather than linguistic discussions, is what Chomsky (in Knowledge of Language) has called "Orwell's problem" : How is it that human beings know so little given the amount of information to which they have access? The third problem, which was examined in the previous chapter, is what Chomsky refers to as "Descartes's problem" : How can we account for the many "mysteries for humans, or even determine what lies beyond epistemic bounds? The first problem is taken up in Reflections on Language as a means of gaining insight into universal grammar. Searle differs with Chomsky not over the problem itself, but over Chomsky's approach to it, particularly what Searle calls Chomsky's "thesis of the autonomy of syntax. But, Chomsky writes, "It's a logical impossibility for Searle, or anyone, to differ with my `thesis of the "autonomy of syntax," because I've never held any such thesis. There is a very large `debate' about it, with many people attacking the thesis (but without telling us what it is) and no one defending it, surely not me, because I have no idea what it is (31 Mar. 1995). According to Searle, Chomsky's argument in support of this "thesis is that "the rules of syntax of natural languages, that is the rules of sentence construction, can be stated using only syntactical notions: the rules, for him, make no reference to meaning or function or any other non-syntactical notions: all the rules of syntax of all natural languages are in this sense formal." Searle counters this argument that he attributes to Chomsky by stating: "if, as seems probable, language evolved in human prehistory to serve certain needs of communication, it is likely both that there will be some rules that make reference to the communicative functions of language and to the meanings of syntactical elements, and that many of the purely syntactical rules of language will have a deeper explanation in terms of the functions that the syntactical forms serve...." This review, which contains fundamental misreadings of Chomsky's work, prompted further discussion, which, in Chomsky's view, concerned nothing more than "what might be shown if such proposals [about the role of functions] could be formulated" (31 Mar. 1995). At least part of the fallout from the review took the form of letters to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The issue of "the unargued assumptions about the nature of language" (Searle, letter), and the question of how meaning and function are related to the rules for the distribution of syntactical features of sentences, continued to fuel linguists and other language theoreticians for years. In the mid-1970s, Chomsky was approaching the age of fifty. His children were teenagers, and Carol was teaching half-time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The children, all excellent students, undoubtedly benefitted from the rich conversation and the intense cultural environment of their home. But they also lived in the shadow of the Chomsky name. Family life was also somewhat difficult, at times, because the spotlight, frequently shining on Noam, also sought out his wife and children. Carol and Noam held fast to their decision to allow their children the freedom to choose their own career paths and to shield them from the controversies surrounding Noam's political work. And so very little information concerning the Chomsky family has been circulated over the years, and even colleagues of the Chomskys were routinely kept at an arm's length from their domestic life. But whatever trepidation he might have felt about the dangers that he faced as an individual and the difficulties that his family might encounter as a result of the intensifying spotlight, Chomsky did not relinquish his beliefs or soften his stance. In his political work of the mid-to-late 1970s, he maintained his focus on issues that he had talked about since the late 1950s: the Middle East, the Spanish Civil War, the background to World War II, the framework of American global planning, global order, Indochina, and so on. But he was also becoming more and more absorbed by Orwell's problem, paying special attention to the question of why, after almost a century of destruction and invasion that had been heavily reported as a result of the new technologies (television images of the Vietnam War were beamed into living rooms across America), and after events that should have shaken American confidence in their institutions (the social unrest of the 1960s, the war, the oil crisis), the population did not rise up. Nevertheless, "the movements of the 1960s really expanded in the 1970s, and even more in the 1980s. They also became much more deeply rooted in the mainstream society" (13 Feb. 1996). At this point, in the early 1970s, Chomsky began to collaborate with Edward S. Herman, who shared his interests and who had also published books on the Vietnam War in 1966 and 1971. This marked the beginning of a new phase in Chomsky's work, one in which he would complement his previous political analysis with closer scrutiny of the institutions that manufacture consent.