Re: OFF-TOPIC: Non linguistics books by Chomsky

From:    John Cowan <cowan@...>
> Chris Bates scripsit:
> > I wasn't aware Chomsky had written any books about politics
> > but the book itself is very interesting, and very convincing...
>
> Chomsky was a leftist long before he was a linguist, and has been
> more or less continuously denouncing American foreign policy since
> the Vietnam War.
Indeed; in one of Chomsky's biographies, it is noted that Chomsky
claims to have come to some of his seminal political conclusions at
the age of something like nine, which strikes many of his political
detractors as entirely implausible, or if true, it means the opinion
preceded rational reasons for holding that opinion.  At any rate,
either possibility is a good window on the darker, more Messianic side
of Chomsky.

> (Which in Vietnam is called the American War, not
> illogically.)  You can easily find American yahoos who will denounce
> Chomskyan linguistics, and indeed linguistics generally, as a criminal
> enterprise on the strength of Chomsky's political opinions.
In my experience, the vast majority of people who have any
opinion about Chomsky's views on linguistics whatsoever are
people highly trained in linguistic methodologies, if not
actually professional linguists themselves.  Most of the rest
of the (educated) world either ignores or is ignorant of his
views on linguistics. Indeed, it is not clear to me that
Chomsky would be at all famous outside linguistics were he not
so well-known for his nonlinguistic opinions.

> I agree with most of what he says (as opposed to what he is *said*
> to have said),
One problem is that much of what he said has been second-hand. For
example, John Goldsmith was a student of Chomsky's, and I am a student
of John Goldsmith's, so to the extent that Goldsmith mentions Chomsky
around the departmental lounge and in social gatherings and classes,
I have heard a number of unpublished anecdotes and opinions concerning
him.  (One concerning Chomsky's unwillingness to credit Zellig Harris
with basic conceptualizations of generative grammar comes to mind.)

Another problem is that Chomsky hedges himself so tightly that it is
often difficult to pin down what he's actually saying. Jackendoff notes
this in his recent book _Foundations of Language_, where Chomsky appears
to say one thing in a kind of tentative, suggestive manner on one page,
and then a few pages later makes the same claim quite categorically.

Another problem is that much of what he says is dogma, where theory
informs fact rather than vice versa, such as when he suggests that the
communes in the Spanish Civil War were leading to the kind of anarcho-
syndicalist paradise he envisions for the future of humanity.  That
claim in particular cannot be falsified (no counterfactual reality
can), so it takes a great deal of detailed understanding of the events
about which he makes claims to have an opinion about his claim one
way or another.

> but I find his prose style almost impenetrable.
I think pretty much everyone will agree with you on this point,
except perhaps for the hagiographers, like Robert Barsky.  This is
actually not just a problem of style;  like Kant, it gives him an
aura of infallibility because most people are simply unwilling to
follow through to check his logic and facts.

> > book gives a very coherent and well thought out argument against it
> > which I find myself agreeing with completely. Has anyone else read it?
>
> Not that one in particular.  It usually makes sense to read just the
> latest Chomsky book, as it tends to recapitulate (with corrections)
> the earlier books.
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.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

Reply