For a rebuttal by a programmer, see "Chomsky can't be bothered to learn C" http://byfat.xxx/chomsky
Peer review relies on peers being able to predictably understand the terminology in a clear manner without ambiguity. You get this in traditional Western philosophy, even as people define new terminology, that adorn axioms and logical rules to buttress its meaning. But if you invent an entirely new terminology that most people don't understand, which is hard for any two people to come away with the same meaning, I'd argue you have not put forward a theory, you've put forward ideas dressed up in technical jargon giving the aura of precision.
This isn't a C programmer refusing to learn Haskell. This is a C programmer refusing to learn Brainfuck or INTERCAL.
Right, and refusing a Brainfuck's assumptions does not deny it turing complete status, or render it unable to produce ELFs.
For some, it illuminates the nature of an abstract turing machine. For others it appears to be nothing but sound and fury.
I'm not saying Foucault's wrong, I'm saying that there are other philosophers who have put forward similar ideas in a much more straightforward fashion without the Brainfuck.
Many philosophers aren't concerned with providing readers with ideas in the system of efficient exchange of language and labor hours. For many in critical theory the project is the opposite: to show how the systems of exchange and efficiency dominate our meaning-making.
The post-structuralists, on the other hand, are trolls. They claim grandiose results that fail Chomsky's simple personal test, and similar personal tests of many others, myself included, who have a demonstrated capacity to understand ideas across many fields, including in my case epistemology with a knowing subject, which comes close to some important post-structuralist or post-modernist ideas regarding subjectivity.
But the "critical theoretic" political program is so important to post-modernist program they they deliberatly distort their accounts and ideas for the sake of goals that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, and results in the whole body of their work being incoherent nonsense with a few gems embedded in it. There are well-meaning people who see the gems and argue passionately that the rest of the mass simply must be meaningful and important, and there are people who correctly observe the incoherence of the mass and miss the gems.
These two groups then spend a great deal of time fighting with each other, while those of us who have picked up the gems and moved on are ignored by all.
Continental philosophy and postmodern thought fall reasonably within the domain of Chomsky's interests. If a man of his knowledge and reputation cannot parse the arguments being made then really what is the utility of those arguments.
It would be one thing if Chomsky was rejecting the arguments being made. Instead he is basically saying there is no argument.