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Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

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Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#11

Post by philsnow »

> Chomsky

Heyyy it's actually about Chomsky qua linguist instead of qua political whatever!

> It would be premature to conclude that universal grammar has been proven not to exist.

> But universal grammar has lost some credibility. Suppose the whole notion is eventually abandoned. What will be left?

> Second, psycholinguistics is going to be big business.

> In short, Chomskyanism may be on the wane,

Welp. This is some Fox News "I'm just saying" bullshit right here.

edit:

> Third, opportunities to discover more about language are continuing to open out before us.

Language attrition (and the dearth of linguists willing / able to work in the field to produce ethnographies of dying languages) are _decreasing_ our opportunities to learn about human language.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#12

Post by PavlovsCat »

johlindenbaum wrote: post #3

(I don’t hear good things about it from political scientists.) Immediately closes tab. I assume the rest of this is garbage innuendos, too?

I don't know enough about linguistics to have an opinion on that, it just seems too short and lacking sources and explanations for the layman, but to be fair, that's really just getting the "politics out of the way". I'm very sensitive to people trying to have a go at other people they can't face directly, and I was absolutely primed to be upset about that here, but I didn't get the impression at all. Maybe I'm wrong, but fwiw and all that.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#13

Post by jplasmeier »

Today I learned about Betteridge's Law [0], which seems apt here. It states that when a news headline asks a question, the answer is always "no." When it applies to a paper, I'm disinclined to take the paper seriously...

[0] -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#14

Post by PavlovsCat »

ommunist wrote: post #4

Looks like some very important people ordered Chomsky's discreditation campaign, because that guy had enough balls to reveal something about them to general public in his book "How the World Works".

I had that knee-jerk reaction too, but reading the thing I didn't get the impression it's some kind of stabby thing. But generally: yeah, I just know when Chomsky dies (heavens forbid), so many people will pull so many antics to sweep him under the rug. But another way to look at it is like a flare, that makes it easier to separate wheat and chaff in these murky times, so I ain't bothered. His life and mind will always be an inspiring example to those who care to really look, nothing can undo that. Kinda like people can forget and belittle but not touch Bill Hicks.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#15

Post by ktRolster »

koverstreet wrote: post #7

Off topic, but as long as we have a Chomsky discussion - where would be a good place to start reading about his theories on the evolution of language? More on topic, the dude is a giant, and the linked pdf not worth the electrons it's printed on.

This paper is a good place to start lol. The paper begins with a summary of Chomsky's major contributions, and is fairly readable.

The answer is no, Chomsky will probably never be blown out of the water. His hypothesis is evolving, though.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#16

Post by cletus »

jplasmeier wrote: post #13

Today I learned about Betteridge's Law [0], which seems apt here. It states that when a news headline asks a question, the answer is always "no." When it applies to a paper, I'm disinclined to take the paper seriously... [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

This gets posted on EVERY submission ending in a question mark. It was old 2 years ago. Now it's just plain trite, pointless, tiresome and distracting.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#17

Post by twblalock »

This is like asking "Has Einstein been blown out of the water?" in the context of physics.

The answer is that such a thing would be impossible, because even though his theories and models are imperfect (as all theories and models are), they were so influential that they fundamentally changed his field.

Chomsky had a similar effect on linguistics, and even if much of his work ends up being rejected, his influence will have changed the field of linguistics forever. The theories that supersede Chomsky's will be developed within the paradigm he created.

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#18

Post by arde »

tzmudzin wrote: post #2

If you want to prove a scientist wrong, present evidence to the contrary rather than personal innuendos and hypotheses / observations without proof.

The Scientific American article [1] cited as first reference in the paper is quite interesting.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-ch...

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#19

Post by atdt »

The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age.

We also know that a stroke can seriously impair a person's ability to use language, even as their memory and powers of abstract reasoning are otherwise in tact.

The only way to make sense of that that I know of is to suppose that language engages some sort of specialized structures within the brain.

If such structures exist and are implicated in the acquisition of language by children across different cultures, then language must not be infinitely plastic. There must be certain structural properties that languages share that allow them to be acquired in such a regular, programmatic fashion.

Is this conclusion unwarranted, unreasonable, false, or dubious? Are there other ways of making sense of these phenomena?

Re: Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

#20

Post by weerd »

johlindenbaum wrote: post #3

(I don’t hear good things about it from political scientists.) Immediately closes tab. I assume the rest of this is garbage innuendos, too?

He just couldn't help himself. Just had to throw that in, even after acknowledging he is not familiar with it.

It's an appropriately weak start to a bland document.

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