ABSTRACT
I The Preface of Knowledge of Language (KL) draws together in a spirited way the two rather disparate areas of Chomsky’s work. He presents his contribution to linguistics as an attempt to solve in this domain what he calls Plato’s problem: “… to explain how we know so much, given that the evidence available to us is so sparse.” In contrast, his political writings can be taken to be a discussion of “Orwell’s problem”: “why we know and understand so little, even though the evidence available to us is so rich.”
