ANT100Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Noam Chomsky, Moral Relativism, Cultural Relativism
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Topic: universal and particular structures in language and culture. Case study: mother love and infant death in alto do cruzeiro, brazil. Cultural relativism: assumptions and behaviours mean different things in different cultures. Recognize that historical, social, and economic conditions strongly affect our behaviour and that of others. It teaches us to understand the other"s behaviour and thoughts, in context. What is good or evil depends on the culture. Believing that these exist is the opposite of moral relativism. It is not necessarily the opposite of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism allows for moral universals and moral particulars. Noam chomsky: there is an innate, universal language acquisition device. he redefined how linguists saw. Every baby has the ability to learn every language but after a certain point of maturity we cannot learn languages without an accent. All humans are programmed to learn a language fluently, but they lose this capacity after a certain age.
