Noam Chomsky: Fake Linguist

Right Wing News (blog of conservative John Hawkins) ^ | 2002 | Marc Miyake

[Tax Government]

I have degrees in both linguistics and CS. As you know, there is huge synergy and overlap between these two areas.

Chomsky has destroyed his credibility as a thinker by creating a cult around himself. Even if 'Guru' Chomsky has one or a hundred inventive ideas, I would never look to him for intellectual leadership.

My solution to the 'Chomsky problem': end tenure, and vastly scale back federal support of graduate education. (The states can support higher education on their own, if they choose.)

[Devil_Anse]

Time for an amateur to weigh in. All I know is, if you control the language, you can control the thought to a degree. What I am thinking of is when we study a language which is not our first, and we are told "there's no corresponding expression in that second language for the expression [fill in the blank] which you know from your first language.

And I guess if someone claims to have discovered that there is some universal element in all languages, that person is setting himself up as the only purveyor of this great understanding which HE has, and which he may now share with the rest of the world--IF he feels like it. It's a power-grab.

I think more credit goes to the geneticists, than to the linguists, concerning the now-accepted solution to the Gypsies' origins.

[chilepepper]

You're a Chomskyphobe ;-)

The truth is that I distrust mathematics, and the tendency of mathematicians and physicists to worship 'formulas' without really understanding what a formula is. Chomsky falls into this category, searching for a 'formula' which describes the 'universal grammar'. This search gets very deep and very basic in a hurry: Aristotle believed that ideas had an existence in a separate, timeless dimension, but IMHO ideas are an invention by human consciousness, wonderful and beautiful, but that is ALL that they are: an attempt to predict things based on what has come before.

Problem is that people get wrapped up in formulas and forget the real thing that the formula is trying to describe.

It seems to me that the 'universal grammar' is just the way the language centers of our brain represent reality, as things and actions. If you want to call this the universal grammar, so be it.

IMHO one of the most profound statements about people, symbols and reality was uttered by the much maligned Dr. Timothy "LSD" Leary, and it is an important concept to remember... here it is:

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRAIN.

[Tax Government]

Time for an amateur to weigh in. All I know is, if you control the language, you can control the thought to a degree.

This is true.

The government is involved in higher education *precisely* so it can give its own sympathizers a podium and control public discourse.

I frankly have nothing but contempt for aveage academics, not because of what they may do in their careers, but because they look to mammoth institutions (universities, governments) to sanction and approve them. Every academic in this country receives a degree that has at least tacit government support. The degree-holders passed through a government-supported selection process, and 'succeeded' in some respect. All of them are in hock to the 'system,' although they may protest to the contrary.

There is nothing as silly and contradictory as Chomsky, who holds tenure from a government-assisted institution, trashing government and claiming to speak for the political opposition. It's ludicrous. But Chomsky & Co. are too much part of the big system to notice the problem.

[Consort]

Chomsky: A man of independent memes.

[MinuteGal]

Can someone post a sample paragraph of Chomsk's "universal linguistics" so those of us who speak Freeperese can see what this discussion is all about?

Leni

[chilepepper]

I speak fluent Spanish, a fair bit of Japanese, German, French and Russian.

The human brain is the human brain. If you want to try to express human language in terms of a 'universal grammar', be my guest. I'll do it in PERL, or perhaps FORTRAN, or perhaps in mythological terms.

SO, which of these is 'CORRECT'??

[George W. Bush]

Chomsky's early work intuited that language was instrinsic to the human being, that there was an innate faculty. He stood against the Skinnerian behaviorists who said that human beings were essentially born as blank slates and that therefore science and government could do with them as they willed without moral objection. Chomsky repudiated Skinner and was an important voice in bringing down the Skinnerian establishment.

Whatever his other failings in analysis of foreign policy, Chomsky used linguistics to champion human dignity and human rights in the constitutional sense against the Skinnerians and Pavlovians who considered human beings to be little more than livestock. So, Chomsky's life has not been wasted entirely, even from a conservative standpoint.

Chomsky is also the enfant terrible of linguistics, the towering quirky charismatic intellect about which the entire field has revolved. Both his successes and his failures have been instructive for his colleagues. I think his linguistic work drives them nuts and awes them by turns. Perhaps this has to do with the nature of linguistics work, which is not really a hard science and probably never will be.

[George W. Bush]

Chomshy's linguistics is like Bible Code or the game of casting out nines. It can never be wrong because it is circular. Anything can be fixed by just one more transformation. Problem is, it sheds absolutely no light on the physical implementation of the mind. It predicts nothing, adds nothing to our understanding.

True enough. But surgery failed pretty badly in the Civil War era. And yet, look what it has become.

Linguistics isn't a hard science yet. Maybe it never will be. It is mostly collecting information. But someday, it may lead to some real science. Give it another fifty years. It does occasionally produce some useful information even now. I suspect as our ability to analyze brain function increases, linguistics will provide more valuable contribuitions to research in related sciences.

Look at how often it takes decades or more than a century for a particular bit of mathematics to become useful. Basic research yields all sorts of benefits though I'd doubt that linguistics is more promising than space research or materials research.

[RWG]

Chomsky may have contributed to the analysis of computer languages...are you saying he works for microsoft?

[x]

Where did this 'universal grammar' come from, and how did it end up becoming part of our biology?

I have to wonder about this. Have evolutionary biologists figured out how certain chemicals rather than others came to be used in seeing, feeling and thinking? Maybe the author demands too much for the current state of science to provide.

His real quarrel may be with Kant. How did, if Kant is right, certain categories come to determine our understanding of the world? It may not be a question that can be answered by evolutionary biologists.

[WOSG]

I suspect many Freepers are into computer science, and Chomsky may have contributed to the analysis of computer languages. I have long suspected that this is the underlying reason for the failure of AI.
---

Yes, a CS freeper here ... Chomsky did have some contributions that we learn of when taking theoretical computer science, ie, the Chomsky grammar, in between the finita automata and the turing machine. What you say may well be true, there were certain flawed assumptions in AI about how easy it would be to characterize human understanding. many of us learned list way back when and learned how to convert input into a comupter 'parrot' that could carry on conversations, "Eliza like". Impressive, but it turned out to be more of a parlor trick than deep AI ... those approaches have come up short.

It may indeed be a generalization of the failure of Chomsky's grammer to account for deeper human "ontologies", ie, knowledge structures. AI over-reached and came up short. You could argue that CHomsky and some of the AI pioneers must be *wrong* because if they were *right*, we'd have been able to program language/knowledge-bases much better by now.

Assuming a grammar/structure does or doesnt represnt how human think - without studying neurology - is not science, it's conjecture. It strikes me that Chomsky is guilty of the same junk science that Freud passed down. Interesting that another poster made a similar point.
In both cases, their general and superficial ideas are subjectible to neuroscience review/checking, and will be superceded by it over time.

Only "constipated" academic tunnel vision will keep bad ideas alive well past their point of usefulness.
This does not make his contribution non-useful, but it does mean its application and meaning are more limited,
and should be challenged if we want to move 'forward' scientifically.

Finally, Chomsky is a 19th century style Communist. he is not above telling total and known lies to get his views spread. how and why he has any respect when his anti-human political views are worse than a vehement racists is beyond me. His extremism calls into question the rest of his work, IMHO.

[DrNo]

The human brain is the human brain. If you want to try to express human language in terms of a 'universal grammar', be my guest. I'll do it in PERL, or perhaps FORTRAN, or perhaps in mythological terms.

FORTRAN?!

You must be as old as me!

[Lx]

I read, "He is like Lenin and Lysenko rolled into one."

as, "He is like Lenin and Lewinsky rolled into one."

LOL. Need more coffee.

[ez]

What a tragic and uncreative and boring and meaningless and hopeless existence if that's what you believe!

Please pray for me.

[ez]

Except that Chomsky predicts that these kinds of rules are embedded in the mind and do not need to be explicitly learned.

Couldn't "embedded in the mind" be another way to say "inherent in the physical structure of the brain?"

[MinuteGal]

Professorial "publish or perish".......Chomsky does both at the same time.

Thanks,

Leni