Michael Dummett

SIR: It always feels churlish to disagree with one who professes himself an ally: but, whether or not the effect of my review of Noam Chomsky’s Rules and Representations was, as Professor Harris maintains (Letters, 1 October), to demonstrate his view of the knowledge of a language to be ‘either vacuous or incoherent’, that was not my intention.According to certain of Chomsky’s critics, his...

SIR: In the LRB of 1 October, you published a letter from Mr Gerald Lynn of Liverpool, quoting and endorsing an article from the National Front journal Spearhead. The article stated that the underlying cause of urban riots in Britain and the United States is the constitutional inferiority of ‘the negro’, since this causes him to fail in a racially mixed society and this failure generates resentment...

SIR: No doubt it was careless of me to rely on the result of a spot check to conclude that there were no changes in the translation other than those recorded in the glossary; it was certainly careless to have overlooked the Prefatory Note: but it ill-becomes Professor Geach (Letters, 4 December) to make abusive remarks about carelessness when the first edition contained frequent omissions of phrases...

SIR: Sir William Empson considers it improbable that ‘the tarot pack was used merely for games’ (Letters, 18 September). I think that the clue to his opinion lies in his use of the word ‘merely’. Intellectuals, scholars and other serious-minded people are prone to consider playing games a trivial occupation on which no one would expend any genuine effort; for some reason that entirely escapes...