tpaine posted:

wait what the fuck is this thread even about?

former NYT columnist narm chosky's passing after the accidental destruction of his phylactery and resulting bombardment of his non-existent immune system by the millions of accumulated viruses and bacteria

acephalousuniverse posted:

none of the quotes used against chomsky in that article are particularly egregious, and it ends really suddenly without making any real point other than chomsky took teh war moneys and said a bunch of stuff that supports science and rationality and is overly skeptical of social sciences. a lot of the stuff chomsky is quoted as saying in the article are only scary if you harbor idealism in your bosom

it's entirely probable that chomsky was funded for the conspiratorial reasons outlined in the article but that doesn't say much about the linguistic theory in particular and it's a pretty bad article

This was addressed in part 1: Anti-marxist myth of our time
Chomskyian nativism is philosophical idealism. He even calls himself a Cartesian. His fairytale theory has cosmic rays hitting early humans, triggering mutations that allow them to finally express thoughts they supposedly carried around inside their heads the whole time (including a mental lexicon for things that didn't exist yet like airplanes!). In his own words he outlines the implications of his autistic theory of language:

“Actually you can use language even if you are the only person in the universe with language, and in fact it would even have adaptive advantage. If one person suddenly got the language faculty, that person would have great advantages; the person could think, could articulate to itself its thoughts, could plan, could sharpen, and develop thinking as we do in inner speech, which has a big effect on our lives. Inner speech is most of speech. Almost all the use of language is to oneself, and it can be useful for all kinds of purposes (it can also be harmful, as we all know): figure out what you are going to do, plan, clarify your thoughts, whatever. So if one organism just happens to gain a language capacity, it might have reproductive advantages, enormous ones. And if it hap­pened to proliferate in a further generation, they all would have it.”

swirlsofhistory posted:

acephalousuniverse posted:

none of the quotes used against chomsky in that article are particularly egregious, and it ends really suddenly without making any real point other than chomsky took teh war moneys and said a bunch of stuff that supports science and rationality and is overly skeptical of social sciences. a lot of the stuff chomsky is quoted as saying in the article are only scary if you harbor idealism in your bosom

it's entirely probable that chomsky was funded for the conspiratorial reasons outlined in the article but that doesn't say much about the linguistic theory in particular and it's a pretty bad article

This was addressed in part 1: Anti-marxist myth of our time
Chomskyian nativism is philosophical idealism. He even calls himself a Cartesian. His fairytale theory has cosmic rays hitting early humans, triggering mutations that allow them to finally express thoughts they supposedly carried around inside their heads the whole time (including a mental lexicon for things that didn't exist yet like airplanes!). In his own words he outlines the implications of his autistic theory of language:

“Actually you can use language even if you are the only person in the universe with language, and in fact it would even have adaptive advantage. If one person suddenly got the language faculty, that person would have great advantages; the person could think, could articulate to itself its thoughts, could plan, could sharpen, and develop thinking as we do in inner speech, which has a big effect on our lives. Inner speech is most of speech. Almost all the use of language is to oneself, and it can be useful for all kinds of purposes (it can also be harmful, as we all know): figure out what you are going to do, plan, clarify your thoughts, whatever. So if one organism just happens to gain a language capacity, it might have reproductive advantages, enormous ones. And if it hap­pened to proliferate in a further generation, they all would have it.”

The critique that needs to be mad then are the abstractions Chomsky makes fatal to the whole project or are they useful as polemics against what Chomsky sees as crude behaviorism in American academia?

The former applies to neoclassical economics, where the abstraction of the representative consumer is absolutely essential to the entire theoretical edifice of demand curves despite being not only contradicted by reality but internally incoherent as a theory (the ideal of general equilibrium is even more damning).

An example of the latter is perhaps Marxism itself, which either accepts the abstractions of Smith and Ricardo to critique them or makes it's own abstractions to come to a higher understanding of a specific phenomenon. The difference appears to be that Chomsky is only interested in the real world to support the abstraction while for Marx the abstraction only serves a function of better analyzing the real world. Despite the attempts to tie together Chomsky's politics with his linguistics, it appears he doesn't connect them at all and has complete compartmentalization of abstraction as a purely academic tool and the truth of everyday politics. Which is to me far more damaging than claiming he was somehow a tool of the government to destroy linguistics (I understand that's not what the author is saying but it could be extracted from the text) because he genuinely believes there is no science outside of physics and perhaps math and that science serves no function in human liberation or even understanding the world.

babyhueypnewton posted:

swirlsofhistory posted:

acephalousuniverse posted:

none of the quotes used against chomsky in that article are particularly egregious, and it ends really suddenly without making any real point other than chomsky took teh war moneys and said a bunch of stuff that supports science and rationality and is overly skeptical of social sciences. a lot of the stuff chomsky is quoted as saying in the article are only scary if you harbor idealism in your bosom

it's entirely probable that chomsky was funded for the conspiratorial reasons outlined in the article but that doesn't say much about the linguistic theory in particular and it's a pretty bad article

This was addressed in part 1: Anti-marxist myth of our time
Chomskyian nativism is philosophical idealism. He even calls himself a Cartesian. His fairytale theory has cosmic rays hitting early humans, triggering mutations that allow them to finally express thoughts they supposedly carried around inside their heads the whole time (including a mental lexicon for things that didn't exist yet like airplanes!). In his own words he outlines the implications of his autistic theory of language:

“Actually you can use language even if you are the only person in the universe with language, and in fact it would even have adaptive advantage. If one person suddenly got the language faculty, that person would have great advantages; the person could think, could articulate to itself its thoughts, could plan, could sharpen, and develop thinking as we do in inner speech, which has a big effect on our lives. Inner speech is most of speech. Almost all the use of language is to oneself, and it can be useful for all kinds of purposes (it can also be harmful, as we all know): figure out what you are going to do, plan, clarify your thoughts, whatever. So if one organism just happens to gain a language capacity, it might have reproductive advantages, enormous ones. And if it hap­pened to proliferate in a further generation, they all would have it.”

The critique that needs to be mad then are the abstractions Chomsky makes fatal to the whole project or are they useful as polemics against what Chomsky sees as crude behaviorism in American academia?

The former applies to neoclassical economics, where the abstraction of the representative consumer is absolutely essential to the entire theoretical edifice of demand curves despite being not only contradicted by reality but internally incoherent as a theory (the ideal of general equilibrium is even more damning).

An example of the latter is perhaps Marxism itself, which either accepts the abstractions of Smith and Ricardo to critique them or makes it's own abstractions to come to a higher understanding of a specific phenomenon. The difference appears to be that Chomsky is only interested in the real world to support the abstraction while for Marx the abstraction only serves a function of better analyzing the real world. Despite the attempts to tie together Chomsky's politics with his linguistics, it appears he doesn't connect them at all and has complete compartmentalization of abstraction as a purely academic tool and the truth of everyday politics. Which is to me far more damaging than claiming he was somehow a tool of the government to destroy linguistics (I understand that's not what the author is saying but it could be extracted from the text) because he genuinely believes there is no science outside of physics and perhaps math and that science serves no function in human liberation or even understanding the world.

Whether Chomsky sees a connection or not (he does -- see his article on Cartesian Linguistics), the undeniable truth is that his linguistic nativism is ammunition for methodological individualism.

Jean Jacques Lecercle:

If there is a single structure of language which is inscribed in our genetic
inheritance; and if all social or cultural differences are, from standpoint of
language, irrelevant, a second conclusion follows: each member of the human
species is identical as regards the faculty of language, because language is
inscribed in his or her brain. Language must therefore be studied in the
individual: we are no longer dealing with a system that is external to individual
speakers and independent of them (the central position of the linguistic
tradition, from Saussure to structuralism), but with a set of individuals endowed
with the same capacities; and language, at least as conceived by the science
of language, has nothing to do with social existence. In other words, the
logical consequence of Chomskyan naturalism is methodological individualism,
which is characteristic of liberal thinking in economics and politics.
(p. 21 my bold)

link (PDF): http://openrevolution.net/fileshare/Political%20Writing/jean-jacques-lecercle-a-marxist-philosophy-of-language.pdf

swirlsofhistory posted:

capacities; and language, at least as conceived by the science
of language, has nothing to do with social existence.

The Science of Syntax, which is a linguistic field.

acephalousuniverse posted:

petrol's post on this page isn't distinguishable from that other person's lazy critique of the elementary principles of philosophy text in that thread

im sorry i didnt realise i needed to share detailed insights acquired over years of study and research in linguistics in order to support what was clearly meant to be a cheap swipe at an already clownish figure

nonetheless, and still without providing citations, i will point out that chomsky's achievements are notable only if you subscribe to the great man theory because literally none of the content of his work is supported by the decades of research in syntax that has occurred since he last published anything relevant. also syntax is incredibly boring shit for nerds

chickeon posted:

wait are you a linguist Petrol or did I read somethin wrong

I majored in linguistics in a past life. I specialised in semantics

EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

Prior to Chomskys antisctructuraliem syntax was treated like morphology or crude descriptive linguistics where ppl just catalogued utterances, which was probably a dead end way of going about it. I don't think its antidialectical or great man history to say that his research creates a sea change in the field of syntax, a particularly dry and dumb field of linguistics as you pointed out. it does sound like great man history to say that because of him the CIA and Google use technology with recursive grammars to do whatever nefarious shit

Yeah that's fair. I hate chomsky a lot so i overstated my position, but not by much