The Thoughts Of Parmenides And Plato In Formal Linguistics

Russell (1961: 163):

Most modern men take it for granted that empirical knowledge is dependent upon, or derived from, perception.  There is however in Plato and among many philosophers of certain other schools a very different doctrine, to the effect that there is nothing worthy to be called 'knowledge' to be derived from the senses, and that the only real knowledge has to do with concepts.  In this view, '2 + 2 = 4' is genuine knowledge, but such a statement as 'snow is white' is so full of ambiguity and uncertainty that it cannot find a place in the philosopher's corpus of truths.  This view is perhaps traceable to Parmenides, but in its explicit form the philosophic world owes it to Plato.

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The view that "there is nothing worthy to be called 'knowledge' to be derived from the senses, and that the only real knowledge has to do with concepts" underlies the approach of Chomskyan Formal Linguistics in modelling knowledge of language, rather than language, and in regarding instances of knowledge (intuitions about language), rather instances of language, as the data from which the theory is derived.

With regard to "most modern humans taking it for granted that empirical knowledge is dependent upon, or derived from, perception", modern Chomskyan Formal linguists, as Platonists, can claim that knowledge of language is not empirical knowledge. This is because, according to Plato's Theory of Ideas, the notion of 'empirical knowledge' is a nonsense, on the grounds that perception affords mere opinion instead of knowledge. Of course, this doesn't prevent Formal linguists from conducting experiments that will, in their view, "prove the theory correct".