Re: OFF-TOPIC: Non linguistics books by Chomsky

Thomas wrote:

<<The problem is that to my knowledge he has never explicitly acknowledged
any errors of his thought, either in linguistics or otherwise.  Most
bizarrely to those who do not subscribe to his views, the current
recension of Minimalism is considered to be in most fundamental respects
the same as his work in the mid-60s, even though he has jettisoned the
most salient aspect of _Syntactic Structures_ or _Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax_:  deep (or D-) structure.  Chomsky actually still cites SS and
Aspects today as if they were still relevant to the MP.>>

Somewhat related to this, shortly after 9/11 (a couple months, if I remember
right), Noam Chomsky was invited to Berkeley to give a "linguistics" talk.
What this meant was that the university didn't want to openly sponsor a talk
that was anti-Bush, so they invited Chomsky to give a talk on linguistics, 
and if
there were any political science professors who wanted to invite him to talk 
in
their classes about "something else" while he happened to be in town, well, 
that
was up to them, and was in no way officially sponsored by the university.   I
didn't attend any of these political talks, but I did go to his official 
linguistics talk,
just for the heck of it.   One of the most memorable things he said was 
something
like the following: "The past 35 years of research have taught us nothing.   
Thus, I
feel like I have to restate my original [thesis]."   I forget which word he 
kept using,
but he kept on saying that second sentence throughout the talk--the former 
was
just particularly glaring.   And what he meant by that is exactly what Thomas 
was
talking about.   One of my professor here thinks this is an example of how whe
n
academics age, they find themselves going back to their old work which they 
pro-
duced in their heyday and saying things like, "Gee, wasn't that good?"   Of 
course,
that certainly doesn't hold for all academics, and it's just a secondhand 
opinion, but
it appears to be a pattern with a noting.

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
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