Chomsky, Wolfe and me | Hacker News Reader

Chomsky, Wolfe and me

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78 pointsThevet33 comments

> Most recently, the disagreements in the field have pulled the American author Tom Wolfe into the fray, with a new book... This has changed the debate a bit, engaging many more people than ever before, but now it’s centred around Wolfe, Noam Chomsky – and me.

What a self-aggrandizing distortion. A non-specialist author writes a research-free book thumbing his nose at Chomsky (also, Darwin), gets some press coverage "engaging many more people than even before" -- except for, you know, linguists -- and now the "debate" is "centred" around this guy who was mentioned in the book.

Give me a break. Here's one of many takedowns of Wolfe, this one by Scientific American.[1] And here's a takedown of Everett, who basically is the only expert on the sole, inaccessible language he claims pokes holes in Universal Grammar, so may be fabricating results.[2]

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/tom-wolfe-...

[2] http://www.chronicle.com/article/angry-words/131260

Non paywalled article:

What’s universal grammar? Evidence rebuts Chomsky’s theory of language learning

http://www.salon.com/2016/09/10/what-will-universal-grammar-...

Your [2] summarizes the whole situation evenhandedly. Far from being a take down of Everett, it ultimately comes down slightly on his side of the controversy.

It literally ends with Everett's MIT collaborator surprising him by saying the data "falsified" his theory and another researcher noting that there was some embedding, contrary to Everett's theory.

This is a silly thing to argue about, but the article ends with a 5 paragraphs on how "Everett is far from the only current Chomsky challenger." And Everett has his own explanation of why his ideas still stand. It is a good article and people who are casually interested in the topic should read it.

I agree it's worth reading. But you're conflating Everett, whose theory does not hold up well to peer scrutiny, with everyone else who thinks there are problems with Generative Grammar, which is teased but not actually examined by the article.

Worth mentioning this refutation to Daniel Everett's argument by linguist at the University of Toronto published on Medium: https://medium.com/@dan.milway/dont-believe-the-rumours-univ...

>Which brings us to the mistaken view of the actual theory of UG that article such as the SA piece present. Daniel Everett, a field linguist and former evangelical missionary, gained prominence in 2005 when he claimed that Pirahã, a language spoken by a remote Amazonian tribe showed properties that categorically refuted the UG hypothesis. Central to UG theory, in Everett’s estimation, is embedding, the ability of a language to place, for example, a clause inside another clause (as in “I heard that Maura laughed”). Pirahã, it seemed, was unable to embed.

>On the surface, this does seem like a knockout punch to UG, but there’s just one problem with it: Everett is mistaken about what UG is.

The author of that article follows with "The source of [Everett's] confusion seems to be the term recursion, which is the central concept of modern Generative linguistics... Any expression larger than two words, then, requires recursion, regardless of whether there is embedding in that expression." This seems to make UG look like trivial feature of language - something like "we find it to be universally true that human languages use statements of more than one word"?

I'm not knocking generative linguistics, but I get the impression that this author has done it a disservice in his eagerness to put down Everett.

2005 was dark times. Iraq had become the first war of the 21st century, and had already descended into medieval decapitations.

There were intellectuals that stood as symbols against the abomination of it all. Chomsky was one such personality.

So polarizing were these times, that one had to question whether an academic criticism was based in legitimate intellect, or simply represented a contrived effort to discredit and ruin a politically relevant individual.

With Fox News on the prowl, Chomsky's co-authorship of the book, Manufacturing Consent, made him a valid target for character assassination, and simultaneously a defensible individual to those Fox News would so polarize.

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

Maybe this other scholar's criticisms are academically valid within the context of linguistics, but without considering the cultural relevance and stature Chomsky held during that period to those that despised the premise of Iraq, he had doomed himself to the cold shoulder of many. His writings, after all, would not be published in a vacuum.

This is the context under which the author of this article should come to understand his situation. It was bad timing. Tone deaf to debacles unfolding elsewhere.

Would it be OK to publish criticism of Chomsky's work in linguistics 3 years later when Chomsky shook hands with the leader of Hezbollah, which targets civilians and children in its offensive operations? Or would Chomsky's standing as an intellectual have gone up at that moment because Hezbollah targets the right kind of civilians and children? Which political views should shield a scientist from criticism in their own field? If you can tell, I'm sure many will rush to adopt those views, and great benefits to science will follow.

It all very much depends on whether or not you can use the failure of the Ottoman Empire as a tool in understanding events on the ground.

If the base-layer ... situation for Hezbollah is in essence, an anarchy, then you go down one branch. If it's that ... reasonably good States exist, but these folks are just unreasonable people[1], then you go another.

[1] many of these folks are cast in the mold of Sayyid Qutb, who I can never seem to make "reasonable" in my own mind....

Chomsky's political writings ( at least the ones with which I am familiar ) use an expression of surprise at the venality of state actors as the main ... thing.

Evidence that Hezbollah targets civilians and children?

Here you go (there's tons more but it's not my job to answer questions like "Evidence that Hitler was a Nazi?" in detail):

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

My favorite section is "Treatment in prison":

During his imprisonment, Kuntar married Kifah Kayyal (born in 1963), an Israeli Arab woman who is an activist on behalf of militant prisoners. They later divorced. While they were married, she received a monthly stipend from the Israeli government, an entitlement due to her status as a wife of a prisoner.[25] Kayyal is an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin from Acre, now residing in Ramallah, who was then serving a life sentence for her activities in the Palestine Liberation Front.[30] Kuntar was allowed conjugal visits with his wife while in prison.[31] They had no children. In addition, while in prison Kuntar participated in a program under which Palestinian security prisoners took online courses from University in Israel, and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Social and Political Science.[32]

That was a really interesting read. Thank you.

That being said. Hitler is to the Nazi's as attacking children is to Hezbollah isn't really equivalent. I get it. You are pro-Israeli. There's no need for that BS.

I meant that it's equivalent in that it's common knowledge; I could and maybe should have used "evidence that ducks quack" as my analogy. If it's not common knowledge where you live, I apologize for assuming that you were demanding evidence of an obvious fact, though the ones who should really apologize is the media in your part of the world that cared to tell you about Hezbollah but did not bother to tell you what they do.

This aspect is acknowledged in the article. I.e. that criticism of Chomsky's linguistic theories are seen as an attack on this political views.

But that's hardly a justification for attacking Everett who has never expressed an opinion on Chomsky's politics. Surely these aspects of Chomsky's work are completely independent?

For example, I can appreciate Watson's work on DNA but abhor his racism. Similarly I can question Chomsky's linguistic theories while agreeing with (aspects of) his politics.

Also, I must say that I find the ad-hominem nature of the attacks on Everett to be quite ugly.

The author seems to make a very valid point. In social sciences, validation by peers and reputation seems to be at least as important as factual correctness.

Chomsky's 'theories' do sound vague and pompous. It is never nice to see counterexamples to your conjectures, but he should deal with like a grown-up. I do understand that this is very hard when you are praised the way he was and is.

>Chomsky's 'theories' do sound vague and pompous.

Have you read any of Chomsky's work on syntax?

From the OP:

> But Chomsky is no Einstein. And linguistics is not physics. Unlike Einstein, for example, Chomsky has been forced to retract at one time or another just about every major proposal he has made up to his current research, which he calls ‘Minimalism’. Concepts that helped make him famous, such as ‘deep structure’ and ‘surface structure’, were thrown out years ago. And unlike physics, there is no significant mathematics or clear way to disprove Chomsky’s broader claims – part of the reason for the current controversy.

> Over time, universal grammar has been reduced from a rich set of supposedly innate principles to whatever it is about human biology that makes human language possible (by which definition, as I have said numerous times, the physical brain itself is all there is to ‘universal grammar’). And once he got down to the narrow faculty of language, supposedly the one thing that makes human language possible and unavailable to other creatures, Chomsky claimed it was nothing more nor less than recursion – the ability to put one thing inside another of the same type. Then Pirahã came along.

Ignoring Everett's own work and the Pirahã, is this in fact true?

No, not really. It's true that Chomsky has modified his ideas in response to new evidence/arguments. Exactly the same thing happens in physics and any other scientific discipline.

The claim that FLN is nothing more than recursion is from one rather speculative paper Chomsky co-authored in 2002. If you look at his actual theoretical proposals, or more importantly, those of everyone else working in generative syntax, there's lots more to it than just "recursion".

The perception that UG is just about recursion does not come only from Chomsky's critics. This article, which is a criticism of Everett by a linguist, makes a big deal of recursion and seems to be implying that UG takes a form that is practically un-falsifiable (it may just be a poor defense of the concept.) https://medium.com/@dan.milway/dont-believe-the-rumours-univ...

That's a blog post by a PhD student. I'm talking about ~50 years of literature with concrete theoretical proposals that involve much more than just the general concept of recursion. Check one of Chomsky's recent syntax papers and see if you find that recursion is the only component of the theory.

Also, the blog post does not say that UG is just about recursion. It just says that it's a central concept within generative linguistics, which is true.

So much vitriol - this is the sort of argument that could probably be represented in a relatively simple argument graph that highlights which contentions are in dispute, and which rebuttals are unaddressed. Instead it sounds like a lot of energy is being invested in irrelevant strawmen, probably on both sides.

> John spoke. Mary thinks. John is wrong. John believes. The moon is green cheese.

Seems forth-like, requiring a stack to be understood.

If a language requires recursion to process it, is that language "recursive" despite not possessing explicit recursive syntax?

No this in not forth-like (i.e. referring to the programming language Forth, see also reverse polish notation [1-2]), as in Forth operands precede operations:

"the moon green cheese is john believes john wrong is mary thinks."

Note that this almost exactly corresponds to japanese grammar (which really feels very forth-like)

tsukisama ha midori no chi-zu da to john ga shinjite, machigatte to mary ga omotte to john ga itta.

An interesting resulting property of japanese grammar is that attributive phrases are grammatically equivalent to recursive sentences. I.e. "aoi sora" meaning "blue sky" is gramatically the same as "the sky, which is blue". (as "aoi" = "blue" is a fully valid single-word sentence in japanese grammar)

What you refer to is Lisp-like grammar. But in Lisp you have parentheses that help with making the grouping explicit. Maybe Lisp without parentheses is more difficult to understand than reverse polish notation because the "stack" needed to parse the sentence needs to be build by reading the sentence in reverse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

The story of the failure of elites in all circles and their intransigence or out right opposition to the TRUTH has been the overarching story of my lifetime.

It makes me cautious, though. The monetization of acrimony actively seeks ways to tell that story over and over again. If the author's paper is good science, its idea's will persist.

Not every scrappy upstart will overturn the empire and not every Goliath is evil.

[Nose rubbing intensifies]

Chomsky's claim is that humans, unlike other animals, have the capacity to use recursion not that all humans use that structure. So the Piraha objection is irrelevant unless you can demonstrate the Pirahas cannot understand recursive language.

He addresses this specific criticism at length in the article, it's worth reading the whole thing.

It's not clear what Everett is claiming in his rebuttal. He says Pirahas have no genetic impediment from learning recursive language (Portugese); which supports rather than undermines Chomsky's hypothesis.

Then he points out that Pirahas that learn Piraha first before learning Portugese don't use recursive Portugese. What is that observation supposed to suggest when taken together with the previous observation? That you lose the ability to use recursive language when you first learn a linear one? Or simply that you tend to transliterate when you learn a second language?

My understanding is that Everett claims that Chomsky claims that not only do humans have the capacity to use recursion but that it is an essential feature of all our languages and for us to have languages (whether this is an accurate representation of Chomsky's views, I do not know; Pinker has stated that Chomsky is hard to pin down.) Everett further states that only Piraha children who have learned a recursive language as their first language are able to speak it recursively; adults, it seems, may learn another vocabulary, but will not use it recursively. Therefore, according to Everett, we have a human population (those who have not learned another language in childhood) with a functioning language, who display no capacity for recursion, even when exposed to it.

This seems to me to leave a sliver of hope for what is alleged to be Chomsky's theory, but I would prefer to see more data than more argument over the current data.

It is not an accurate representation of Chomsky's views. GP is correct.

Chomsky was simply ahead of the curve wrt achieving truth through repetition, slipperiness, and ad-hominem attacks on the credentials of your critics.

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