Chomsky's ‘Galilean’ science of language (paywalled) | Hacker News Reader

Chomsky's ‘Galilean’ science of language (paywalled)

journals.cambridge.org

19 pointsehudla21 comments

I'm all for challenging academics, but that abstract was inflammatory and un-constructive. And this is coming from someone who was a little unconvinced by some of Chomsky's ideas. For instance, 'it'/'there' insertion in X-bar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Projection_Principle

gotta love the chomsky scorn that always crops up here. Jesus. I doubt very seriously if any of the commentators have even dipped a toe into his work in any approaching an honest investigatory way.

Read "The Linguistics Wars". It would give you a good idea of why there's such antipathy towards Chomsky.

I've read it. And "Ideology and Linguistic Theory. And met a handful of the principals involved. And read an inordinate amount of source material i.e. monographs, books, essays, etc from the early 20th to now in American Linguistics. My point is that the hate here seems to me principally to come from 1) Chomskys criticism of AI and Norvig's program in particular 2) His politics. Anti-capitalism isn't exactly going to be the most well recieved ideological view point at a forum dedicated to startups. Also, the meat of my point still stands, not many of the commenters at the time replied in any interesting way about his actually theory. Typical drive-by internet commenting, but whatever.

Worth your time to read the abstract. Most intense academic burn I can remember encountering. I didn't realize Chomsky's behavior in linguists had come to resemble his antics in politics and history.

All leadership converges to Torvalds.

What are his antics in politics? Can you point out specifically where he is off base?

Good introductions can be found in The Case for Peace by Alan Dershowitz and Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman; both excellent books that have sections devoted to detailing Chomsky's thuggish and cranky behavior.

One of my favorite anti-Chomsky quotes comes from the man himself. It represents a lot of what I find at fault with his approach:

I emphasized biological facts, and I didn't say anything about historical or social facts. And I am going to say nothing about these elements in language acquisition. The reason is that I think they are relatively unimportant. -- Chomsky, N. (1998), Language and Mind: Current Thoughts and Ancient Problems

Here's the intro to the paper, to give you the gist:

The Science of Language, published in the sixth decade of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic career, defends views that are visibly out of touch with recent research in formal linguistics, developmental child psychology, computational modeling of language acquisition, and language evolution. I argue that the poor quality of this volume is representative of the serious shortcomings of Chomsky’s recent scholarship, especially of his criticism of and contribution to debates about language evolution. Chomsky creates the impression that he is quoting titbits of a massive body of scientific work he has conducted or is intimately familiar with. Yet his speculations reveal a lack of even basic understanding of biology, and an unwillingness to engage seriously with the relevant literature. At the same time, he ridicules the work of virtually all other theorists, without spelling out the views he disagrees with. A critical analysis of the ‘Galilean method’ demonstrates that Chomsky uses appeal to authority to insulate his own proposals against falsification by empirical counter-evidence. This form of discourse bears no serious relation to the way science proceeds.

Full text: https://www.academia.edu/8739624/A_Galilean_science_of_langu...

What a great burn.

Chomsky's fall follows familiar pattern.

You are bright young nobody. You work diligently and produce great work. Then you become confident, famous and old. You don't have strength to work 10 hours per day working on your new magnum opus. People listen you for who you are and not for what you say and it's easy to become sloppy.

That looks like an interesting paper, but I think it's against etiquette to submit paywalled links, especially in this case.

You can RENT this paper for 24 hours for $6 USD? Are you kidding me? Scientific knowledge must be part of the commons. Locking up scientific papers behind paywalls is gross.

Anyhoo, I googled for the paper so you don't have to:

http://www.academia.edu/8739624/A_Galilean_science_of_langua...

re etiquette: that's not how I understand the FAQ.

"against etiquette to submit paywalled links"

NYT, etc, links are quite common here.

Thanks for the link, but they won't let me see the paper unless I share my identity with them.

On my browser you get the full paper just by scrolling down.

I tried again and you are right. The first time, it seemed to block my scrolling with a face-slam.

As far as that site is concerned, my name is Arse Biscuit.

Also, SciHub exists.

Chomsky's model is almost certainly wrong [see George Box]. It's been useful. In part because Chomsky writes well.

LOL! Journals are now resorting to clickbait tactics!

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