Deconstructing Chomsky
Those who regard Noam Chomsky as one of the world’s premier thinkers might be advised to reconsider. It is, of course, mainly his political writings that have earned him his current reputation for crusading fearlessness, uncompromising candor, and lacerating intelligence. That they consist largely of cant and drivel erected on a foundation of dishonesty escapes his acolytes’ attention completely, likely because he speaks to their prejudices and because they have not done their homework. And possibly because they are influenced by the New York Times, which beatifies Chomsky as “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” But then, that’s the Times, for which the provision of evidence was never a desideratum.“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence,” to quote Christopher Hitchens’ aphorism on the beatification of Mother Teresa, whom he regards as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” — epithets which would more aptly apply to Chomsky. I will, however, provide evidence for my dismissal of Chomsky as a world-class quack, as did Hitchens with Mother Teresa in his devil’s advocate volume on the saintly imposter.
As I’ve written before, Chomsky’s dishonesty is palpable. He rages furiously and sanctimoniously against the U.S. “war machine,” but as Peter Schweizer reveals in Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Chomsky wrote his world-famous Syntactic Structures on grants from the American military establishment. America is, for Chomsky, “the land of Pentagon contracts, lucrative real estate holdings, stock market wealth, and a tax-sheltered trust for his children.” Yet, despite his fierce denunciations, he squats there like an orb spider, his web sagging with the weight of juicy flies. He makes disingenuous millionaire Michael Moore look like a small-time piker.
As for his political ravings, the sheer nonsense of most of his claims is outstripped only by the abyssal gullibility of his auditors and readers, who do not realize that Chomsky is a contaminated witness. “It would be easy to demonstrate,” writes David Horowitz in an article titled “The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky,” “how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written, the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced,” expressing “a pathological hatred of his own country.” A recent book has accomplished precisely such a demonstration. Chomsky’s doctoring of sources, dubious or obscure references, misquotations, convenient abridgments, significant omissions and gross misinterpretations have been abundantly documented in The Anti-Chomsky Reader, a volume which should be consulted by those who are still impressed by Chomsky’s glowing nimbus and public prominence as a “libertarian socialist.”
Noted jurist and author Richard Posner concurs with the book’s findings. In his Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Posner writes that Chomsky’s tone and one-sidedness is “all too typical” of his oeuvre. “Chomsky’s use of sources is uncritical, and his methodology unsatisfactory — it consists simply of changing the subject.” Nor does Chomsky feel obliged to defend his assertions no matter how outrageous or tendentious since “[h]e never acknowledges error.” Chomsky appears to regard himself as a political sage, perhaps even a prophet, whose insights cannot be questioned and whose pronouncements are infallible. One recalls his confident prediction to an MIT audience in a lecture of October 18, 2001, scarcely a month after 9/11, that the U.S. was preparing a “silent genocide” against Afghanistan, planning “to murder three or four million people.” This should tell us all we need to know about his powers of divination.
According to Thomas Sowell in Intellectuals and Society, Chomsky is one of those public intellectuals who has ranged “beyond the confines of his specialty” and made “inflammatory comments on things for which he had no qualifications.” But the shabby scholarship alone, evident both in the pulpiteering style and the abject referencing, as well as the apodictic claptrap he purveys, should have set off alarm bells for responsible readers and prompted them to do a bit of supplementary research. If they had, they would have realized that Chomsky is so far off the wall he makes Humpty Dumpty look like a paragon of stability.
It would be no less instructive to leave the politics aside for the nonce and go back to his earlier technical writings in the field of psycholinguistics that established his reputation in the first place. As Posner says, “a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot.” But it goes deeper than that. If Chomsky’s reasoning is flawed or tenuous or unprovable in his scholarly work, which was considered seminal and yielded whole university disciplines, then it may well be, by extrapolation, that his reasoning is equally suspect in his other endeavors. It won’t do to read only books like Hopes and Prospects, Failed States, or Hegemony or Survival, the latter praised by the ruthless despot Hugo Chavez. I have in mind books like Syntactic Structures, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, and his somewhat later The Minimalist Program, which loyal Chomskyites should look into if they really wish to honor their master and justify their professions of regard. They should read the “scholarship,” not the propaganda, to determine if their hero merits his acclaim.
I must apologize in advance for a brief and regrettably superficial excursion into the technical realm of linguistics. I don’t have the space here to hack my way any great distance into it and I don’t want to try my reader’s patience any more than I have to. There may be some consolation to be found in that I avoid the really turgid, off-putting stuff that can drive even the most dedicated student into the nether regions of terminal despair. But some peripheral remarks are in order if we are serious in trying to figure out how Chomsky’s mind works. Chomsky, as we will see, is essentially an intellectual tyrant. He does not give clear and indisputable evidence when developing a thesis; he dictates. And he subsequently expects us to believe.
In short, he is a crackpot. I think crackpots are just shy of genius in that they lack a few essential components in their mental machinery. They think about things, they write immense and complicated tracts, they work hard, but it all goes round and round and never arrives. And usually for the reason you have stated, that there is little or no connection to observable reality.
“Deconstructing Chomsky”
Must we?
Seems like a lot of trouble, without much of a payoff.
I don’t know if the author wrote the title, but what he did was not deconstruction. As for Chomsky’s lies, he has affected hundreds of thousands of young persons, maybe millions. The stakes are very high, because he has gone after the founding principles of an advanced industrial and democratic society. I wrote about his misrepresentations here: http://clarespark.com/2009/08/19/noam-chomskys-misrepresentation-of-walter-lippmanns-chief-ideas-on-manufacturing-consent/. Chomsky’s followers are obliged to adopt the paranoid style, and diminish the very notion of competence in detecting frauds.
One of the most frightening things I’ve heard in years was the assertion that the single most read living writer in the country’s public libraries was Noam Chomsky.
It would be one thing if he were a crackpot with a fringe following but this factoid suggests that a whole generation of teachers and professors have convinced a whole generation of students that Chomsky is the ‘go to guy’ for any political issue in which they take an interest. It looks as if the educators, who once pointed students to general sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica are now sending them straight to one of the most radical lunatics on the face of the earth. That can’t be good….
Yes, Chomsky is a fraud and a mess and a self-hating Jew
But this was a very awkwardly written piece.
Some clever observations got tangled-up and crushed, it needed to be cleaner.
Yes, you are right…
But like Chomskys painfully convoluted reasoning, any disection of it is bound to be a messy, difficult and unpleasant affair.
The artice attempted to flesh the criticism with examples of concrete verifiable proof, not an easy task when dealing with a pathological liar like Chomski (and his defenders)
Rather like arguing with a muslim…
When you finally get the conversation to checkmate,
they’ll simply eat the queen, and shout “allah akbar”.
Chomski is nothing but a despicable turd, living off the fat of the very land he despises. Its quite an old formula among psudo-intellectuals…
As anyone who DOESNT bite the hand that feeds them can be dismissed as a slave indebted to their Master, and any articulated hatred for America can be perpetually trotted out as proof of your superior intellectual “independece, honesty and clarity”.
And the sham goes on.
How is Noam Chomski any different than Sean Penn?
At least “Mr. Specoli” made me laugh once,
when he was portraying his real-self.
Agreed. The author’s comparison between C.’s politics and linguistic scholarship, meant to show a “common root” in totalitarian thinking, is dubious, to say the least. For one, there are many examples of political cranks/imposters with perfect scientific credentials.
For another, axiomatic thinking is common in math, logic, metaphysics–all operating sometimes under postulates that are assumed to need no evidence–perfect fodder for criticism/fallsifiability, all of which have gone on for millenia.
I gather the author knows the following axioms:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Obviously, there’s a huge difference between logical/scientific axioms and religious/philosophical ones. Yet a criticism of C.’s axiomatic thinking in linguistics doesn’t get us anywhere. You have to start with Plato and Cratylos.
True. Didn’t Albert Einstein write an article in Life Magazine advocating socialism?
Chomsky, in Linguistics, plays the chicken-egg game for all its worth. It all comes down to “is it the meaning or the words”. As a reductionist who like to play God, Chomsky sets up his linguistic theory as a perpetual input-output machine and dictates that the input and output are equivalent.
This sets up for the Big Lie like “good is evil”, and as master of his Rube-Goldberg dominion, Chomsky defends it as an intellectual exercise to prove how unassailable he is.
Not only does Chomsky’s work like falsifiability but so does much sociological ‘theory’ and all cultural ‘theory’. They are circular abstract systems and not true theory. Needless to say those who propound it are also leftists but few of them are nutter leftists like Chomsky. They may be unhappy with USA, UK, Israel but they do not hate them or invent mad accusations about them. They may be biased but Chomsky is not only a meshugeneh but a verbissener. He is not clinically insane but merely ‘normal deranged paranoid’.
I loved this piece, David. Not only because I learned something and had fun doing so, which is always thrilling…but because it described the disease of leftism in a new and powerful way.
Post-modern Leftism has its roots elsewhere, most notably in the many followers of Marx and Mao. It has left behind a trail of blood, lies and distortion. It cannot stand on its own merit, so it must “own” the “truth”…by whatever means of deceit it can muster. Most importantly, it must not only be free of investigation and interrogation…it must own the questioner’s fealty. Being so full of hypocrisies and fake, false and planted “memories”….it not only lives on revisionism, it must constantly be writing daily…new revisions.
In other words, to live a life as a leftist, one must abandon truth and conscience.
There are some basic rules:
1)A seminal premise of post-modern leftism is to hate America and Israel.
2)Because you must hate America and Israel, you must gloss over any and all acts of their enemies, especially any act taken against them.
3)You must find financial success under the free market or capitalist system to be antithetical to every fiber of your being.
4)If you achieve financial success as a leftist, you must make loud, obnoxious, grandiose gestures of “system loathing” and dedicate yourself to the destruction, tearing down…overthrow, of that very system. Becoming a Godfather to the mindless lemmings and useful idiots grants you absolution. Planting false memories and revisionist history into the written record allows you to march along the Bridge Over Truffled Waters without missing a step or being called a hypocrite.
False memories are to be seared seared into your brain, your very treasons are held up as proof positive of your greatness. You can get away with creating a completely false history (Howard Zinn), stock manipulation, media manipulation and breaking an entire country (George Soros), manslaughter (Ted Kennedy), Logan Act violations (Jimmy Carter)…even murder.
To accomplish institutionalized leftism you need a compliant, weak and corrupt media. It cannot and does not work without propaganda replacing ethical journalism. In fact, the cornerstone of post-modern leftism is the removal of integrity and honor from the Fourth Estate and turning them into the Fifth Column.
Chomsky, Zinn, Moore, all have the same modus operandi. Paint a landscape full of lies, distortions, half-truths, false memories…and present them as “proof” of a slander. One can create a cottage industry out of whole cloth and then watch as the slobbering lapdog media covers your tracks AND elevates you to Godfatherdom status. Of course, Hollywood has always been a bastion of leftist agitprop, useful in sealing shut the minds of the useful idiots.
Two problems have arisen most recently in our traipse through this journey of ours, David. In propping up enemies of America and Israel, one could swat away the annoyance of the various buzzing gnats and flies of Euro-socialism, the sniping from the sideline of various hippie dreamers and the acid flashback goofs from Woodstock Nation…while they were permanently out of any real power.
But, they seized power. And, while this current administration and the leader of the freak world at the top of it have been criticized by the far, far, far left for not driving a stake through the heart of America and Israel fast enough, hard enough, deep enough…we have suffered the tearing down of our system in so many ways, it will take us decades to repair the damage.
Worse, in looking for enemies of America and Israel to climb into bed with…the leftists have stumbled upon a snarling cur that they have adopted as a pet…and one they cannot control. There is no leash strong enough to contain radical Islam. The apology tour and “like us, we hippies are your friends” act is a shot of adrenaline for the bloodthirsty. In their rush to tear down America and Israel, the Woodstock wimps are no match for the Arab Winter they have unleashed.
Destroying capitalism is not the end game for radical Islam.
As with Chomsky’s “intelligence for imbeciles”, leftism has played a rigged game with phony rules…and still lost. Because those who had a mandate to protect us by investigating and interrogating left their posts, gave up their honor, spit upon their integrity…abandoned their posts and put us in imminent peril.
So hellbent were they to overthrow free market enterprise, they put the world in jeopardy. No, it didn’t end today. That prediction was too early.
But, in a world where Chomsky is hailed as a genius, where treason wears a champion’s ring, where truth is a trifling thing…it couldn’t have ended today. It was already long gone.
Dear cf
Clean this up a bit–an excellent commentary written at white heat–and submit it as an article.
David
Excellent. I like your analysis of Leftists tactics of owning the truth. But eventually, like when an Obama comes along, the truth will out.
I agree David’s dissection of the GNOME was interesting to read- particularly the idea that he is not only a fraud in his politics, but in the field that gave him fame enough to matter.
I also love ctf’s post- and still LOL’ing at “Bridge over Truffled Waters”
“But, in a world where Chomsky is hailed as a genius, where treason wears a champion’s ring, where truth is a trifling thing…it couldn’t have ended today. It was already long gone.”
Priceless imagery, cfb!
“…honor…integrity…” — complete with the list of virutes in the Boy Scout oath — have indeed already gone. And free market enterprise has indeed been overthrown.
Solway notes “a pathological hatred of his own country”, the hallmark of anyone with the ‘liberal gene’, but Chomsky’s called a “libertarian socialist” which, being myself an Objectivist qua Libertarian, insults many. Better to have used the proper word: nihilist.
Too many people worship sophistication, even though they don’t understand what the sophistication is about. It is the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Chomsky’s work has not withstood a rigorous analysis well. However, it doesn’t matter because he has his sycophant groupies. I have seen similar behavior in other arenas. The ideas sound plausible until they’re tried.
That’s when the Emperor’s nudity becomes apparent –but not without a great deal of embarrassment and rage by many people.
“…it doesn’t matter because he has his sycophant groupies” Absolutely! I have encountered many of them. They act as his “enforcers” . To them, if you dismiss Chomsky , they take it as a personal attack.
In my personal dealings with people who like to think (and want everyone else to think) they are “intellectuals”, there are three people you must never ever say anything negative about or suffer ridicule or banishment.
Carl Sagan
Harlan Ellison
and Noam Chomsky
Chomsky’s father was William Chomsky, the noted Hebrew scholar. Chomsky detests, absolutely detests, Israel. I don’t have a background in psychology but you know, that does present some interesting questions.
Over thirty years ago in “The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War,” Robert James Maddox tore Chomsky apart, showing that in many areas he simply lied or fabricated evidence–one example I remember offhand was citing the correct date of a Truman speech but then simply making up a text which was directly contradictory to the actual speech.
Yet no effect, none, Chomsky goes on being adored by the left.
The Left believe what they want to believe, namely anything that justifies their plans to run things. Truth has nothing to do with any of this.
Sounds very Freudian to me. Either that or his dad made him do stuff like face reality.
I’m quite certain that the Progressive Left is not interested in the truth — indeed, they deny that it exists.
Interestingly, descriptions of psychobabble sound exactly like the thing one is describing.
The attacks against Mother Teresa have more to do with a hatred of Christianity than a desire to expose corruption.
Saints don’t have to be perfect. See Peter, Paul, Augustine etc.
Mike Jagger gets it better than you
Does anyone know if Chomsky speaks a language other than English? I’d guess Hebrew since his father was a Hebrew scholar, but I’m not sure. I’ve always suspected his linguistics work was a bunch of bull … stuff you can bluff your way through in academia.
Chomsky is a narrow minded self righteous pompus ass.
I just remembered being completely “dazzled into submission by indomitable complexity” back in university. Those trees – or a primitive version of them – made sense, but the more complex follow-up repeatedly left me with a pretty stupid look on my face. Always thought that’s just dumb me, but apparently not^^ A nice analysis of Noam, imo.
‘What a tangled web we weave…’
One of the basic flaws in the human psyche causes some individuals to accept
as unquestionable truth whatever ideas spring from their own minds, and spend
their lives defending their fancies against the rebuttal of reality;
The Rapture scheduled for today has been postponed because…
I never understood much of his work, except those tree diagrams; in an adjusted “primitive”-version… and now all of a sudden I don’t feel bad about it any longer^^
To the tune of “Ba, ba, black sheep,” with apologies to black sheep
Noam Chomsky, have you any bull?
Yes, sir. Yes, your texts are full;
Hate for Americans, then for the Jews,
Back to hate Americans, as you choose.
No lie, Chomsky, sage is all your rage,
Reading it on every page.
Noam Chomsky loves most Leftie thugs,
Thinking Americans are mostly slugs.
Hate for the Western world, freedom too;
His love for all the tyrannies gives the clue.
No sly Chomsky, his words confuse themselves.
His books gather dust upon the shelves.
chomsky loves the sound of his own voice and wallows in the egotism of complicating simplicty
no wonder he appeals to the leftist snobs
I disagree with your analysis. You have made the error of merging Chomsky’s analysis of language structure with his political and social views; the two have no relation to each other.
First, Chomsky’s work is not psycholinguistics but cognitive linguistics. It is not focused on words but on the deep structure or grammatical structure of whole sentences. Not words – which depend for their meaning on their function within the grammatical relations.
All languages have grammar, or, hierarchical systems-of-relating sounds/words to each other such that meaning can be generated. So, we can say ‘All mimsy were the borogroves and the mome raths outgrabe’…and despite the words being without meaning, we can get a meaningful sense …because of the grammatical order.
Equally, his focus on grammar has nothing to do with people like Saussure, whose focus is strictly and only on words; it has nothing to do with any focus on words, on sociolinguistics, on psycholinguistics. It’s strictly about the grammatical relations…that enable sounds/words…to generate meaning. period.
And it has, again, nothing to do with his political and social views. To criticize his political and social views, a justifiable criticism in my view, and to somehow link that with his language views is itself unscientific!
So, we can say ‘All mimsy were the borogroves and the mome raths outgrabe’…and despite the words being without meaning, we can get a meaningful sense …because of the grammatical order.
Would you please let us have your “meaningful sense” of “all mimsy. . . “, etc.
It’s the structural relations of words to each other that enable one to come up with meaning, so ‘mimsy’ is obviously a descriptive adjective; ‘borogroves’ is obviously a noun..and so on. Therefore, since our language operates in this structural relation manner, the imagination comes up with images, just as we do with other fictional beings such as unicorns, the various creatures and actions in the realm of Harry Potter etc.
Your ‘mimsy’ image, your borogroves might have different images than mine, but, I suggest the relational role those images play (adjective, noun) is the same.
“All mimsy were the borogroves . . .” certainly does have a meaning. It is from Jabberwocky, and Humpty Dumpty explains it to Alice.
ETAB,
‘All mimsy were the borogroves and the mome raths outgrabe’”
‘mimsy’ is obviously a descriptive adjective”
Could it not also be a plural noun?
Replacing the variables with:
“All women were the targets, and the Mohamadans ran outside?
Could it not also be a verb?
Replacing the variables with:
All decelerations were the opposite, and the launch was canceled.
Rules cannot define the meanings of words.
If a pair of cavemen understood the meaning of just these three words:
“kill”, “food” and “cold” they would have no problem understanding what the other meant when seeing a deer and saying EITHER;
Food….kill
or
Kill….food
But the combinations “kill…cold” and “cold…food” would probably be confusing. Staring at a snuffed out campfire, or tugging on the fur of some carrion left by a lion, while saying “cold…cold”" would make sense. Re-start that fire, wear that fur, I’m freaking cold.
Without words having agreed upon meanings, its difficult to have any “grammar” or “rules” build better sentences and ideas.
The Spanish “Going to the house of John” vs the English “going to John’s house”
Once you understand the possessive meaning of “John’s” you can understand that all this crap is his: John’s house, John’s Car, Johns porn collection and…
John’s huge bonfire of all the Noam Chomsky books ever published.
It seems Chomsky, like all unnecessary Leftists, has made a living out of re-inventing the wheel, with square edges and flat planes, and is thought of as genius for daring to do so.
That the wagon simply wont GO doesnt enter their minds.
Recognizing and rewarding the brilliance of such abstract thought is the career goal among all such “non-pullers”
There is no doubt that Chomsky has a prodigious memory and many have equated this with intellect. In fact, Chomsky is the master of stripping away the context of events and presenting one-sided “dialogues” that nicely plug in to every buzz word and overarching theme within the ideology of political correctness.
Chomsky may have decided long ago that there is simply no money to be had in presenting a dry and dispassionate view of world politics. Americans are notoriously attracted to views that reflect their own rather than actually learning about a given situation and if, for example, Chomsky spoke about the Israel military incursion into Gaza in 2009 and actually mentioned the hundreds of rockets flying into Israel from Gaza that preceded the invasion, Chomsky’s fans would be disappointed as would be Norm Finkelstein’s fans.
Polemic’s sell as long as they are not enacted too often in the same locale by way of debate and one can only imagine the damage to our country in our colleges as one-sided “debates” are taught by politically correct teachers whose thought processes emanate from the same intellectual space as hate groups in that such thinking cannot exist without a foe to be defended against and identified by color and ethnicity in it’s millions of otherwise faceless people. We have the equivalent of “good” Nazis teaching our children.
The beauty of Chomsky’s tactics is that he presents himself, not as having a one-sided view point, but as the ultimate purveyor of “true” context and this is when Chomsky uses his impressive memory and readings as a flail but the kind of flail a stage magician might use. This supposed exposition of the “truth” has great traction among the young who view their own culture as endemically immoral and racist and so their world is one big basket of Trails of Tears, Tuskeegee Experiments and latent Jim Crow that “prove” how wretched America actually is. What is obvious never is and what isn’t is where the secret of life really lies – just ask Chomsky. The problem is that portraying America as only having done bad things denies history and reality but that thought process is a fun place to slum if you have a Che Guevarra t-shirt.
Other than that debate is only as fascinating as an actual view of it.
Great, to the point. In the spirit of our Constitution, all ideas, voices have a time, space and opportunity to express themselves…in whatever shape,way or form. It’s necessary to allow differing view points to surface; Saul Alinsky comes to mind. Chomsky, Alinsky, Piaget, Jung et al have view points worthy of examining and discussing in a coffee shop (Starbucks is an idea), bar (over a beer or two), during a game of eight ball…nothing really serious. Nothing worthwhile to “gird ones loins” about. Just HooHah! Comes in one side, goes out with the wind…lost forever. Look!!! Marx, Hegel tried and failed. Mussolini tried (fascism) abject failure. Mao tried, too, now has “state capitalism?.” Finally they all failed and returned to market capitalism…never fails! Look at Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina all trying to implement these tried and failed theories (sure, with contemporary author’s babblings about “social justice”).
Brazil’s redistributive policies…how’s that working out? Folks, our Founding Fathers had it right, everything else is just HooHah!!!!Bullpucky.Stay the course.
That Chomsky’s linguistic theories are wrong is not really a problem. At the time he proposed them, careful observation of human language (and especially syntax) was very rare, so it wouldn’t be correct to say the deep structure was impossible out of the box. Indeed, one can make a reasonable argument that Chomsky’s writings launched a revolution in the analysis and understanding of human language – people were attempting to validate his theories and thus set out to see if the facts fit. The audacity of his hypothesis contributed to this revolution in experimental linguistics. This is a significant contribution and should not be devalued, independent of its source.
However, that is where the problem begins: the facts did not fit. And so, as the author describes, Chomsky proceeded to add appendages to his theory to conform to reality, and more an more appendages were added as more facts arose. At some point, an honest scientist would at admit to at least the possibility that he didn’t have things quite right at the foundation, and would seek a reset. Chomsky did not. The most charitable interpretation of his subsequent scientific career is that he moved on to other things.
It is now clear that this behavior was revealing of a fundamental character flaw – the complete inability to let reality intrude on his desires for how things ought to be. The particular nature of those desires – and how those arose – is not the subject of this post. Suffice it to say that Chomsky, like most fundamental thinkers, was heavily influenced by the atrocious state of philosophical thought at the time (and for centuries prior).
And, these same philosophical principles have merged in Chomsky with his methodological idealism (i.e. the notion that “beautiful” theories need not conform to reality), and his dishonest and self-delusional psychology to produce the abominations of his political/social views, and his ignorance of the horror which would ensue were they implemented. Is there any doubt that Chomsky himself would have been one of the first victims of the Khmer Rouge he so lauded? It is only his delusions which can protect him from the recognition of such realities.
I think you’ve hit on it–it’s not the authoritarian streak in his early linguistic work that mirrors his present love of fascism (though called by another name), but his endless struggle against reality. I never finished reading his linguistics book–which of the three it was I can’t remember anymore–but as I read it it caused its own cognitive dissonance in me. I can think in two languages, and it simply didn’t fit. I have no idea how I learned how to think in Spanish but I can do it, possibly because I didn’t learn more than a small percentage from books. My method was use the few words I knew and ask everybody the names of things and how do you say… After about six months I was so fluent that people stopped believing I was from the USA. When I try to wrap my brain around the underlying universal grammar it just won’t stretch that far. There are so many untranslatable words, and ways of approaching both grammar and meaning that don’t match up with English at all. English is so contextual, meaning changes so dramatically in the same word depending on where, when and how it is used. That simply isn’t true in Spanish. I’m terrible at translating from Spanish to English, because when I’m thinking in Spanish the difference in sentence structure and meaning clobbers me. Takes a paragraph of English to finally get the sense of a Spanish sentence. A one word example: igualmente. It literally means ‘equally.’ However if somebody says, ‘you’re an excellent fellow,’ you can’t just say ‘equally’ in English. That word when used by itself means ‘I return your compliment warmly.’ Yet it can also be used just to mean ‘equally’ in a sentence. It’s an example in Spanish where the context changes the meaning, yet it still doesn’t conform to English structure or meaning.
No doubt it’s likely that my inability to digest Chomsky’s linguistic theories in light of my own experience is just a sign that my mind isn’t as sharp as I’d like it to be. Nonetheless, it kept me from reading anything else he’s written, other than a few essays. It seemed to me that the real point of his thesis was ‘if you scratch a dad-blasted furriner in the middle of the night, he’ll wake up speaking English till he remember he’s supposed to speak foreign.’
I agree with you. An interesting analysis of chomsky can be found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1333660/pdf/jeabehav00145-0085.pdf
Who cares what this moronic fool Chomsky thinks?
You get my vote.
Pseudo-intellectuals, who begin their pseudo-thoughts with nihilism and end up in folly, should no longer be taken into consideration when we talk about culture or politics.
They are the demons that have caused more than one century of massacres.
Imagine history without these fanatic demons, an history without the marxists, the nazis, the islamists…
I attended a lecture by Chomsky in the 70′s at Glasgow University on the “Mathematical structure of the English Language”. The great man’s credibility was blown apart about half way through the lecture when he declared that the one ironic feature of the English language that amused him was that two negatives made a positive and that there was not a single example of two positives making a negative.
Voice from the back of the hall “Aye, right”!
Or the use common in the US: Yeah, right.”
“Yeah, sure,” also.
Does this also mean, in that context, the following?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah!”
or, (pace William Cosby, PhED)
“Riiight…” ?
How is this different than sarcasm or damning with faint praise?
When one reads about the endemic evil of Western civilization from men like Chomsky and then reads an essay like Thomas Sowell’s “The Real History of Racism”, one sees all the proportion, context and balance Chomsky couldn’t find with the help of a guide dog.
James,
Excellent observation…
And with such economy of words,
You nailed it.
Similarly, what is called a “finite-state grammar,” to quote Steven Pinker in his explication of Chomsky in The Language Instinct, “is just one damn word after another, but with a phrase-structure grammar the connectedness of words in the tree reflects the relatedness of ideas in mentalese.” Really? A formulation of this nature is actually a dictum, and though a hierarchical tree diagram may seem convincing, the map is not the territory. It may not be that way in reality.
No, it’s actually kind of obvious that this is the case. If language were structured as a Markov chain (simply concatenating words), then sentences would be incomprehensible because the process would “forget” what was already in the sentence as more words were added. If you have a hierarchical structure, then your verb can say “hey, I still need an indirect object” if it calls for one, even if another phrase has intervened.
Or maybe it’s the “relatedness of the ideas” bit you object to? I don’t know why Pinker didn’t say “relatedness of the words” (i.e., the verb is more connected to its direct object than to some adverb somewhere else in the sentence, and they’re more likely to move together or whatever).
But if that is what you object to, then I find it hilarious that you then say “well, WHORF is right about this!” Whorf is notable for claiming that the Hopi language has no concept of time, which turns out not to be true. He’s also notable for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the kind of thoughts people have are significantly influenced by their native language) – again, read Pinker for an explanation of why that’s wrong. But not enough non-linguists know that it’s wrong – it’s one of the Left’s arguments for the use of PC language, a la Newspeak (never mind that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is more about the structure of the language than vocabulary; that seems to be what people have latched onto for some reason with the “if we can control their vocabulary, we can control their THOUGHTS”).
Many thanks for your comment. You are exactly right. It’s the relations, the grammatical relations, that determine meaning – and that’s what Chomsky’s structural grammar deals with…Meaning is not derived from a serial accumulation of words but from deep grammatical relations. This focus on the grammatical relations as the key to producing meaning..means that for humans, language can be creative, you can develop new meanings, multiple meanings, etc. Animals cannot do this with their communication systems.
And yes, Whorf-Sapir, and the other sociolinguists (eg, Basil Bernstein) with their relativism, their view that cognition is confined to the words in your vocabulary…have indeed been shown to be wrong.
The reference to Cartesian linguistics (#26 Pathena) is valid, for Chomsky was referring to the notion of language development and cognition of the Cartesian era, which was an era focusing on how the mind operates and develops knowledge in relation to the external reality. Chomsky’s focus on cognition, as a specifically human capability based in logical grammatical relations, fits into this analysis.
See “On the Non-Existence of Cartesian Linguistics” by W. Keith Percival.
The danger of deconstructing language this way is that you can also shed contextual information that would otherwise have been processed. This shows when you analyze Chomsky’s political views.
In many ways, Chomsky is the polar opposite of Marshall McLuhan. Intuitively we know that both of these extremes are nonsense. Both of these ideas are devoid of any common sense.
However, for academic reasons, I think it is good to cite these people as an example of interpretive extremes. Chomsky should continue to spew his nonsense. Studying his work will serve as an example of where someone can go wrong by stripping context from their world view.
I disagree with Gork. Chomsky’s analysis of deep grammatical cognitive structures that enable linguistic communication and the generation of meaning is not ‘nonsense’ but, in my view, accurate and insightful.
McLuhan, on the other hand, was in my view – a charlatan and sophist. His relativism, his superficial analysis of communication..well..it’s emotional hogwash.
The point is, Chomsky’s cognitive linguistics analysis has great merit; he was a pioneer in the linguistic field which had been focused for years solely on referential semantics – the relation of a word to an object – and totally ignored the generative properties of grammar. Chomsky changed all that.
BUT – this quite remarkable linguistic analysis doesn’t mean that his political and societal opinions have any validity! Equally, to reject his political and societal views does not mean that one should automatically reject his linguistic views as does the author of this article.
First, no-one is more ignorant than experts who have stepped outside their field of expertise. On this point we agree.
However, people often engage in patterns of speech that “feel right” despite having grammatical connotations that oppose the very view they’re trying to voice. Chomsky’s analysis places too much emphasis on this grammar to the point where he can easily misinterpret what someone means.
The goal here is to communicate, not to analyze the communication itself. We need to be careful with how we apply these analytic methods.
“First, no-one is more ignorant than experts who have stepped outside their field of expertise. On this point we agree.”
I have carefully examined this sentence and declare it 100% irony-free.
Noam Chomsky is a would-be tyrant, which is why he supports tyranny everywhere and opposes democracy and the rule of law. He was a tyrant in his academic field, having his acolytes destroy those who disagreed with him. Nils Yngve at MIT had a group supported by grants from the Navy to work out machine-translation. He gave Chomsky a job which led to his later career at MIT. When, after twenty years, Yngve applied to become a faculty member at MIT, Chomsky led the attack to prevent this – some gratitude. Incidentally, Chomsky never got a Ph.D., and I do not think that he knew many languages apart from English and Hebrew.
Chomsky wrote a book, CARTESIAN LINGUISTICS, to prove that he was the successor to Descartes. Only Descartes did not have a theory of linguistics.
A truly fascinating list of comments on an anti-capitalist demagog posing as a “scientist”, employing non-scientific methodology for the capitalistic achievement of personal wealth.
Will some linguist do a paper on the corruption of the word “science” in today’s academic world. Because the principles of scientific investigation are applied to studies of a subject does not render the conclusions “science”. The “Social Science” which pervades academia is a ridiculous term: an oxymoron. “The explanation is nothing but a description” of a postulation that is unprovable by the basic standards of true science.
Naom Chomsky is simply a brilliant scholar and charlatan, deliberately dealing in obfuscation and falsification, knowing that didactic bravado and bluster will gain him academic stature and financial reward. If he had, instead, applied his talents to the commercial world he could have become a second Ponzi. His “studies” have about as much value as the reading of chicken guts. His political rantings have as much merit as Che Guevera’s.
I remember reading – and abandoning mid-way – an interview with Chomsky. His major technique in responding to questions seemed to be attacking/redefining how and why the questions were being asked, and bending them to his whim of the moment. It reminded me irresistibly of Humpty Dumpty’s dictum : ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” But on an even grander scale, as he was claiming the same right to his interviewer’s words. Count me an unsophisticated boob if you have to, but I’m deeply and incurably suspicious of anyone who not only thinks he owns the debate, but the whole concept and rules of debating itself.
(BTW, Noam? 2 negatives = positive? Slapped onto English by 18th century Latin-lovin’ grammarians’ decree, not an essential feature of the language. Plenty of examples of double negatives = intensified negative before then. STILL done and understood in colloquial. No meaningful intrinsic philosophical paradox, just the results of snotty intellectuals trying to dictate the rules – like you, ass.)
“I’m deeply and incurably suspicious of anyone who not only thinks he owns the debate, but the whole concept and rules of debating itself.”
In fact, you have neatly described the entire debate philosophy of the Left in that concise sentence.
Wait a sec, are you referring to Matt’s post? I think that’s a famous joke and/or urban legend, and he just inserted Chomsky’s name to be funny.
If I’m completely missing the point and there’s something in the article about this that I missed, or if Chomsky does indeed discuss this issue somewhere, then I’m sorry.
Anyway, two negatives do make a positive in my dialect. If that phenomenon doesn’t exist in your dialect, then that’s quite interesting. But surely Chomsky is nothing if not a descriptivist (like any linguist who makes a scientific study of language), so of course he would accept the existence of dialects like mine as well as dialects like yours. There’s no “right” or “wrong” one to have as your native dialect. “Double negative = positive” dialects are real varieties of English, which have real speakers; they’re not just a construct invented by elitist snobs.
Compare this with the “rule” against ending a sentence with a preposition: as far as I know, nobody actually speaks like this, and it was basically invented by prescriptivist “grammarians” who didn’t get the memo that English and Latin were different languages with different syntax.
Having a standard written language that can be used by speakers of multiple dialects is another issue altogether.
“Anyway, two negatives do make a positive in my dialect.”
I ain’t got no argument with that. I ain’t got no money neither, that’s for sure.
Chomsky=socialist propaganda.
Our problem is the lack of critical thinking skills that would afford readers the ability to discern that Chomsky’s writings are not supported by evidence and express his own personal anti-American bias, and push an anti-American agenda. His hypocrisy would be plain to see for any reasonable person capable of analyzing the written word, but sadly, we discourage that in our modern, government-run schools. Far too many parents turn their kids over to it without a thought as to what they are learning.
The first I heard of Noam Chomsky was early in the Clinton regime when Hillary espoused Chomsky’s “the politics of meaning”. W, I asked myself, TF?
I had the feeling that Chomsky was academic snake oil salesman. He picked his niche, wrote some words about it and spent the next few decades selling it as superb intellectualism, defending his thoughts as Humpty Dumpty did.
To blue collar guys like me, the Chomsky’s of the world will be the first casualties when the utopia they try to sell collapses on their collective heads.
David, a lot of the ways that Chomsky has affected linguistics are unproductive . The whole notion that only humans had real “language” and thus, ipso facto, any apparent use of language by nonhumans — signing apes, gray parrots, or dogs that identify words — can’t “really” represent language use stalled “xenolinguistics” for 50 years.
But your analysis of Chomsky’s grammars is simply wrong, the result of at least a couple of severe category errors.
The biggest one, and what appears to be the root cause of the others, is trying to apply Popperian falsifiability and “scientific method” — what Peirce called “adduction” — to test Chomskian grammars. The category error here is that Chomsky’s theory of symbol systems, what’s known as “formal language theory” is not an experimental science at all. It’s mathematics. Chomsky proposes an axiomatic basis for languages as symbol systems, and derives from some basic rules (which came from previous researchers, like Russell, Whitehead, Gödel, Frege, Cantor, and many others) the Chomsky hierarchy of grammars. This hierarchy turns out to be intimately related — technically, mutually reducible –to the other models fo symbol manipulation, which we also call computation.
One of the consequences of this is that Chomsky’s grammars are exhaustive: there is nothing that is recognizably a language that won’t fall into some Chomsky grammar class. (Now, strictly, this depends on the Church-Turing thesis in its broader form, that what can be reasoned can be reasoned by an effective computation. I take this as axiomatic; it’s a legitimate philosophical position, perhaps, to not make that assumption, but if you take that course I’ll promptly challenge you to display a counter-example.) It can no more be falsified than you can falsify the proposition that there exists no integer x such that 4 < x < 5. As with other forms of mathematics, the question isn’t whether it’s falsifiable — hell, Euclidean geometry is obviously falsifiable — but whether it’s useful.
There’s no doubt Chomsky’s formal symbol systems and hierarchy of grammar classes is useful: it’s central to most of mathematical logic, and nearly all of computer science: the HTML we’re using for PJM is described by a Chomsky grammar.
You then make a second category error by trying to then claim there’s a flaw in Chomsky’s grammars because they don’t explain how we then apply “meaning” to those strings. Again, the mathematics there is well-developed; it’s the results that aren’t very satisfying. A language has “meaning” because of a mapping to some other system, called a model, and we certainly can apply that sort of mapping to interpret natural languages.
We run into the problem that we don’t, in some essential sense, know what we mean by “meaning”. Searle’s “Chinese room” demonstrates that — it constructs an example of a symbol system that exhibits all the characteristics we’d see as “understanding meaning” in a natural language, but asserts that because it’s merely a symbol system, it’s not “real understanding”. The problem is that when we look at the brain, we don’t see any signs of anything other than a physical system behaving as a computational system, performing effective computations. So if Searle’s Chinese room can’t “understand”, apparently neither can we.
Here’s the category error is to assert some special sense of “understanding” when we don’t understand “understanding” to start with.
Although he started in linguistics, his real contributions are now really considered part of mathematical logic and computer science. The real point here, which you are on a good path to demonstrating, is that merely because Chomsky has presented effective and useful mathematics that describe languages, doesn’t mean he’s particularly qualified to then have his political opinions taken more seriously.
As a logician and computer scientist myself, I’d be more inclined to believe the opposite.
The point about animals was one of the first things I thought of also. But then there is sarcasm and irony, where the ‘meaning’ is almost completely dependent on context, and indeed, not everyone gets the joke. I’m sure that isn’t an original observation. Perhaps language is best regarded as signaling, which raises the question of what grammar is used when neurons interact in the myriad ways that they do. Perhaps that example would be better considered as a dynamical system. And does dynamics then reduce to grammar? I know that sometimes it can treated as such.
I certainly reject any other than a superficial comparison of animal communication systems with the human language. The fact that animals have a ‘signifying method’ is simply unrelated to the grammatical structure of human languages that enables symbolic and generative communication. [I maintain that animals are unable to develop symbolic signification and most certainly, don't have grammatical infrastructures].
I think, with reference to Peirce, that you mean ‘abduction’ not ‘adduction’. It’s not really the scientific method as we understand that method as based on observation and experiment. Abduction is the process of hypothesis generation, of coming up with a new theory…that can then be tested within the objective scientific method.
Your outline of Chomsky’s structural analysis of cognitive processes within lanuage describes its importance very well. And yes, this analysis was and remains, a productive and important contribution to cognition – but- as you point out, this does not justify or support any validity within Chomsky’s political and societal opinions.
Dear Charlie
I don’t have the requisite expertise to respond adequately to your observations, so I’ve been asking around among my math and cyber friends, who do not seem to agree with your statement that Chomsky’s “contributions are now really considered part of mathematical logic and computer science.” A few profess to be somewhat baffled by this remark and one said that whatever Chomsky’s contribution to these fields may have been, “they were certainly trivial.” I also asked my son, a scientist and professor at a major Western Canadian university, what his take on the issue is, and I post an abridged verson of his reply below:
“It took me a while to understand what Charlie was saying. But now it’s clearer – it seems he claims that Chomsky’s theories are logically at the level of things like number theory.
Myself, I cannot say whether Charlie is right or wrong. I merely use math and some computer programming using math languages as “tools of the trade”. It’s hard for me to say whether Chomsky has made valuable contributions there. I have never heard of it.
The question I instinctively wanted to respond with was something to the effect that if Chomsky’s “theories” are at the logical level of pure mathematics, why do whole groups of linguists reject them? Did he create a logically valid construct and then use it wrongly, or do these other linguists simply not understand? Frankly, the little I’ve read of Chomsky did not make me want to spend time to try to untangle his writings. Nice that such conversations can be had at PJM though.
As for Popperian falsifiability. In physics theories have to be testable and make predictions that can be verified, otherwise they’re basically worthless. In math, it’s different. Mathematicians seem to be concerned more with proofs that can be deduced logically and do not require observational evidence. Computer programming is not observational either, as he says, it’s built from a set of logical rules. It could be that he’s saying Chomsky built a set of if/then statements (for example) that encompasses all language and meaning, and that they’re logically consistent and therefore can’t be falsified. I don’t know if that’s true or not but if it’s that cut-and-dry, I wonder how is it that so many linguists fail to be convinced. After all, he was writing about language, not about math or computer programming.”
Thank you Charles. I knew that Chomsky was important to Comp Sci, but I don’t have the chops to say why.
David Solway: Just tell your friends that Chomsky invented, or perhaps first described, the pushdown stack which is a central feature of many compilers and other computer software architectures to this day.
Of course that was in his youth a very long time ago, and since then he has been a nothing more than a tenured communist agitator.
The effect of Chomsky’s celebrity on the field of linguistics was nothing less than a total disaster. Before Chomsky, a linguist had to go the forests to sit in reed huts with toothless tribal elders who could still remember the old tongue and its stories so as to describe them before they were swept away forever; or the shantytowns and favelas of the third world to research the birth of pidgins and creoles. It was dirty, dangerous, and uncomfortable.
Followers of Chomsky’s new dogma could stay in their offices on campus, play campus politics, screw undergraduates who needed a good grade, and no one in the world outside their coterie had any idea of what they were talking about.
David – I enjoyed your article and Charlie Martin’s rejoinder regarding your analysis of Chomsky linguistic “theories.” I have nothing to add because I know nothing about the field of linguistics. I thought, though, that the description of Chomsky as a “libertarian socialist” was a very amusing oxymoron, and your description of him, as seriously “meshuggah” had me in stitches. Yasher ko’ach.
Way back in the 1980s I took a course in transformational grammar, which is based on Chomsky’s work. After the first day, I realized what a crock of crap it was. I renamed it “transcendental grammar,” because you had to be high or having an out-of-body experience to make any sense of it.
If it hadn’t been required for my degree, I’d have dropped it.
Chomsky isn’t that hard. Simply drop the names (like USA, Russia, France) and follow the money, power, military machines, and paths of destruction. Watch how systems of power function in the world without labeling one “your side” or “their side”. He is equally critical of all systems of power, but spends more time on the one he is responsible for criticizing: his own.
Chomsky’s linguistical acumen aside, he is self-described as a “libertarian-socialist”. More correctly, he is an anarcho-communist. Chomsky advocates a confederation of groups, fully cooperative with each other (somehow ignoring human nature) without the over-riding restraint of a governmental body. The “base” will be the ruling body. A variation is syndicalism (trade unions) which will rule the country.
Chomasky may be a top drawer linguistics expert, but that’s ALL he is. He is a died-in-the-wool left winger, a dissident social activist, espousing a utopia that cannot possibly exist today. Chomasky can call it “libertarian-socialism”, but I call it a pipe dream.
Chomsky suffers from the same fantasies that afflict many famous people. They assume that since they are near the top of their field, they must also be experts in every other field. Case in point was Einstein’s short article in Life Magazine in the late 1940s (I think) in which he advocated socialism for the USA.
More on Chomsky’s politics: He recently visited Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to support their attacks on Israel. However, Hezbollah not only wants to destroy Israel but all Jews. So Chomsky is also genocidal.
David. You may be interested to learn that 2 separate studies into the evolution of language have come out against Chomsky’s theory. As the British blog Harry’s Place puts it, Chomsky is now wrong about everything.
Simplicity and intellectuals are mutually excluded in any conversation, discourse, or other intellectual pursuit. However, when one takes away the practiced language of an intellectual and asks him or her to explain their thoughts and theories in a lineal, straight thread manner, they are incapable. Their minds do not work nor are they capable of direct truth. They must cloak every unproven theory in a rambling and unconnected discourse or in the case of C, a diatribe against his own country.
Chomsky must use his deceptive language in order to justify his hypocrisy and willingness to “bite the hand that feeds him.” It is a basic requirement in Industrial Engineering to use the minimum number of words that create the least amount of confusion when presenting a new system, idea, process, or other endeavor so the end user can clearly and plainly understand what the actual point or purpose is of the new system.
Intellectuals find the practice of practical language an anathema to their very existence since it would force them to speak the “plain truth” and their elitist mentality will not allow them to “let the vast unwashed and uneducated” in the club. When the average “Joe or Jane” must constantly refer to the dictionary in order to understand the point the writer is trying to convey. When an author or writer make a sentence difficult to diagram and understand, it is not done out of any actual intent to improve or enhance humanity, it is to put on display their own linguistic agility and their extensive knowledge of obscure words that would never be used by most people possessing average or slightly above average intelligence.
I find there is a stronger than or above average connection between the Chomsky and Obama syntax they use when trying to convey a point. They are both successful liars and cheats who are conscious of the deception they practice with the use of cleverly cloaked words usually meant for obscure references. Their most ardent supporters will put on a mask of pretense and believe they actually understand the garbled theories these people put forth.
After reading Obama’s first book, it was a revelation into the soul of the man and the soul of Obama is not one who holds this country in high esteem nor does he have a connection that would be conducive to developing a deep love of country, America. He is truly a man without a country, same as Chomsky, of their own choosing. All you need do is read the words they use.
I find that a whole lot of garden variety Leftists (by which I mean under-educated, which is most of them) quote Chomsky constantly without even realizing it.
Despite being Leftists themselves (of the thinking, non-totalitarian variety), both Paul Berman and Francis Wheen have dished out withering takedowns of him. Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism is the best analysis out there of Islamism and its apologists.
On a more personal note, I got a bemused laugh from Chomky’s recent tirade about America naming its weapons after Indian tribes. The first laugh was the fact that he referred to the “Tomahawk” cruise missile within a list of Native American people. Pretty sloppy for a so-called “linguist”. The second laugh was from his absurdly uneducated opinion of American Indians. I’ve lived much of my life near reservations (including working and living on one for a few years). Indians take enormous pride in their military service, and Veteran’s Day is a huge holiday, with festivities lasting four or five days. They are also disproportionally represented in our elite combat units.
Of course, an old Marxist like Chomsky would just say that was false consciousness. However, I would advise him not to say it to their faces.
Dodgers Koufax Yankees, 2-1
Every time I see the great posts under the username “cfbleachers”, for some reason I am reminded of that great magnum opus (remember?) “Under the Bleachers” by Seymour Butts. Why is that?
#16 Anonymous Most excellent!
How about doing another for us to the tune “Clementine” (Oh my darling) Noam Chomsky?
You’re very good!
Isn’t a “mimsy” nothing but a musing whimsy?
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