There's actually room here to mention Michel Foucault as a hidden partner in the discussion in two ways: * The political debates between Foucault and Chomsky i

There's actually room here to mention Michel Foucault as a hidden partner in the discussion in two ways: * The political debates between Foucault and Chomsky in the seventies: Chomsky wholeheartedly believes in the application of justice to injust actions, Foucault was interested in how an act becomes just or unjust. * The revolution in historical method effected by Foucault lies eliding the descriptive apparatus with which we usually explain the transmission and transformation of ideas (author, book, oeuvre, influence, tradition, consciousness); or, imagine if we did history as if consciousness and its attendant concepts were disqualified as descriptors. The key to comprehending Foucault here is to suspend the following ideas: * There exist a particular set of universals regulating historical description of a domain of knowledge * "Consciousness", whatever that is, is a constitutive principle for that historical description * The particular set of universals and consciousness exist inextricably, the latter buttressing the concepts of the former Basically you can sketch a considerable amount of human history without reference to any human subject. You can accomplish a lot just by looking at what was said. What's more, you'll discover a completely set of rules and regularities when you do. So I have a speculative interest in what discoveries for linguistics might be discovered with Google's method.