[ultimate_robber_baron]

We all know that Noam Chomsky is an anti-American who, politically, doesn't know what he's talking about. However, many conservatives concede that he's a great linguist. In reality, he's a lousy linguist too.

[genefromjersey]

A girl I know said he was a cunning linguist...

[js1138]

Don't count me among those who think he's a great linguist. I have been ranting against his linguistics for thirty years -- not, however, with the brilliance of this article. I am deeply appreciative of the author.

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.

[MEG33]

'Noamuhammed'! He is a vile anti American .Keep your children close.He is the voice of leftist academia.Scary

[js1138]

Is Chomsky a double fraud in both science and politics? I honestly don't know. I have never met him and don't want to - the urge to verbally attack him is too strong. Maybe he really believes what he says in one or both fields. But in any case, Chomsky is a troublemaker on two fronts. He is like Lenin and Lysenko rolled into one.

Now I have posted this an number of times of FR.

[js1138]

This thread will die unless those interested in science threads are pinged. Thanks for posting anyway.

[angkor]

I studied structural linguistics (Chomsky) and other aspects of structuralism in college. Personally, I thought it was very interesting, though I'd certainly agree that structuralism is not "provable," in precisely the way Miyake describes above.

However that doesn't mean that it's not thought provoking or even useful as a way of thinking about the world, in the same manner as philosophy or cultural anthropology.

Yet in the end there is zero relationship between Chomskian linguistics, and the superficial and demented trash he brings to the world of politics.

It's kind of humorous that Miyake is really proposing there's a "deep structure" in the mind of Chomsky. What it is we do not know.

[tictoc]

Emperor's clothes bump

[Mamzelle]

However distasteful you find the fact, Chomsky was and is a brilliant linguist. He is crazed with hating America, is breathtakingly hypocritical in enjoying America's freedoms, is pernicious and brutal in using his position to intimidate students. But, I'm afraid, he's still a brilliant linguist. It's like the other fact--Barbra Streisand was wonderful in "Hello Dolly."

[Toskrin]

Chomsky's fame is a bit like Freud's fame, I think. Freud was the first to popularize the notion that the psyche could be studied in a scientific manner, like any other organ in the body. His theories about psychological development were completely wrong, and have mostly been discarded, but they stuck around for more than half a century because the constipated academic minds were unwilling to challenge the "master's" theories.

[RichardW]

Great post!

[AndyJackson]

This is an ignorant hit piece by a third rater who has let his politics warp his professional judgment. The questions that he poses that follow from Chomsky's work are excellent and urgent questions. This author could do himself and the world a favor by picking one and devoting his professional life to answering it.

[Malsua]

How old is Noam Chomsky anyway?

Isn't he about due to die of old age? This way we could raise a glass, toast his life and bury him and his idiotic anti-American stance.

[IronJack]

I've never read much of Chomsky's linguistic theories. I just assumed that they were as muddled as his politics. It took an expert in the field to validate my suspicions. Thank you.

[chilepepper]

Chomsky's *REAL* game with linguistics isn't to 'discover' an existing universal grammar, rather IMHO is to IMPOSE one.

As Goebbels knew so well, and as Orwell exposed so completely, the totalitarian system requires a "new" totalitarian man, one who is unable to even frame in his own mind a disenting thought.

The Soviets were adept at this, and it shows with the careful grooming of words by the Left(example? how about the neat trick of replacing the word NAZI everywhere with the word FASCIST. Why? Obvious! NAZI stands for National Socialist - by replacing with FASCIST you hide the evidence that Hitler was a rabid SOCIALIST, and in NO WAY a capitalist. If Hitler and Stalin were both SOCIALISTS, gives the movement a bit of bad odor, sort of like everything French, n'est ce pas?).

The EXACT SAME PRINCIPAL is at work with Politically Correct speech. The goal of PC is to make it impossible to even say something that goes against the PC agenda, since the words and concepts themselves no longer even exist. A scary example of the totalitarian attack on freedom of thought...

Kudos for posting this article. It provides a succinct and powerful counter to Chomsky, and was great food for (free) thought...

[facedown]

bump

[ez]

He claims that we formulate 'deep structures' in our heads using 'universal grammar'. Then we use 'transformations' to change these (invisible, nonexistent) 'deep structures' into 'surface structures' (which are what we actually say and write).

Chomsky is a moron. Surface structures are thoughts, Deep structures are electromagnetic brain waves, and universal grammar is nothing more than the common way in which our synapses interconnect.

Yes, Noam, we all use the same brain cells to generate the same electrical activity which, with repetition, becomes thoughts that are formed differently by people speaking different languages.

Major drug use involved here, I suspect...

[Rocky]

"Unfortunately, true academic freedom, freedom to adhere to a scholarly theory of one's own choice, is often lacking in American universities, and scholars who do not comply with currently fashionable theories have little chance at a university. This makes an American university somewhat like a Soviet university: in the Soviet Union it is Marxism, in the United States it is, say, a currently obligatory method in linguistics."

Many other subjects could be substituted for "linguistics" in the above paragraph, and it would still be true.

[Theo]

The author wrote:"Imagine if some professor said that there was a 'universal religion' programmed into us at birth...."

The truth is that many of us believe that a Creator in fact **did** create us, and that that Creator put in us a sense that He exists.

Once again, the author *may* have something valid to say, but it's obscured by poor logic, an anti-godly perspective, an appeal to his expertise as a "Ph.D., a subtle arrogance....

[FairWitness]

How does Chomsky account for these differences? He claims that we formulate 'deep structures' in our heads using 'universal grammar'. Then we use 'transformations' to change these (invisible, nonexistent) 'deep structures' into 'surface structures' (which are what we actually say and write).

I'm not a linguist and I don't even play one on the internet. My only thought on the matter is that the author's description of the complexity and convolutedness of Chomsky's linguistics made me think of how the movement of planet's could be satifactorily explained by Ptolomy's complicated system of circular orbits with "epicycles". Now we describe them much more simply as elipses. If Chomsky's explanations are too complicated (which I do not have the background to judge), perhaps it is because they are circles where they should be elipses.

[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.)