si-maro wrote:Hope this helps and look forward to your criticisms.

Simmo

clocker bob wrote:

si-maro wrote:I tired to bring in an argument more based on his liguistics, or at least paying more attention to them, but none of you care. I'm gonna go some place (probably a left liberal corner somewhere) and cry. :c

It's not that I don't care, it's that I don't understand a word of what Chomsky is talking about regarding linguistics, and I freely admit that. It may as well be Chinese to me.

The world is ending. It has been for a long time. Discussing how and why that will occur is a field you can really sink your teeth into. Linguistics is like a Latin mass compared to that, fringe voodoo that only excessively smart people spend their time on.

Andrew L. wrote:There have been some pretty fucked up languages, and I have trouble believing there aren't epistemological consequences to coming into self-consciousness in a language like Hittite, which codified past-tense as forward or ahead of the present and future tense as behind: in Hittite, what already happens is ahead of you, and what will happen is behind you. But in spatial terms back and front were the same as they are for us. They conceptualized temporality from the perspective of standing backwards on an escalator. And 3000 years ago! Thats seems like a different "head-space" to me.

Cranius wrote:

Andrew L. wrote:There have been some pretty fucked up languages, and I have trouble believing there aren't epistemological consequences to coming into self-consciousness in a language like Hittite, which codified past-tense as forward or ahead of the present and future tense as behind: in Hittite, what already happens is ahead of you, and what will happen is behind you. But in spatial terms back and front were the same as they are for us. They conceptualized temporality from the perspective of standing backwards on an escalator. And 3000 years ago! Thats seems like a different "head-space" to me.

I don't know if this temporal perspective is that fucked-up; it makes a lot of sense to me. The future is unknown and we have our back to it, whereas we have clear perspective of the past, i.e. it's in our line of sight. It's just a philosophical reversal of our linguistic perception of time; both are linear. Actually, the more I think about it the more sensible it seems.

Salut crazy backward Hitittes!

si-maro wrote:I'm very much with you clocker bob, and steve's got a good point regarding the leftist's lose-lose situation when criticising capitalist society. But anyhows, that's just my two cents; what I find more interesting about Chomsky than any other modern intellectual I've come accross is that his politics are a logical result of his linguistic theory. He really is a polemecist of the highest order, with a very, very comprehensive model of human reason and nature which informs his political assertions in a direct and lucid fashion. That in itself I have a lot of respect for. As a philosophy major I very rarely came accross thinkers who were so thorough and coherent.

says that the meanings of words are not socially negotiated but wired into the brain in advance as features of the human genome.

Why is Chomsky a genius? Just about every theoretical linguist I know says that Chomsky is a genius. Even those who disagree with him seem to agree on this point. The entire modern discipline of theoretical linguistics stems very largely from Chomsky’s pioneering work. I don’t really understand the details, but my problem is that I am not a theoretical linguist. I don’t necessarily feel qualified to judge. If a bunch of nuclear physicists were to tell me that someone in their field was a genius, I would just have to take their word for it.

As for overthrowing him, the problem is this. Chomsky occupies a very peculiar institutional position in the United States and in western society more generally. Both in science and in the arts, he is the most frequently cited intellectual. The anarchist/libertarian left look up to him with enormous respect. Chomsky tells them that his linguistic science is of no special interest to activists. He explains that science and politics are completely different, mutually autonomous kinds of activity. No form of political action can be justified by science, just as no scientific theory can be justified by politics. His personal practice reflects this: his political writings contain no science, just as his scientific writings contain no politics. Or so it seems. Of course, no single figure can be held responsible for legitimizing the chasm between the scientific community and the community of political activists. But if we had to pick on a single figure, it would have to be Noam Chomsky.

The problem is that Chomsky’s separation of science and politics is a myth. His own science - his linguistics - is political through and through. Chomsky defines language as not social. He defines it as an object inside the individual head. He says it doesn’t have any special communicative function - mostly, we use language just for privately thinking to ourselves. He says that the meanings of words are not socially negotiated but wired into the brain in advance as features of the human genome. In my view, to say all this is pure nonsense - stark, raving nonsense. But it is not politically neutral nonsense. To argue for such far-fetched positions is is to adopt an ideological stance - that of the liberal bourgeoisie. Chomsky is the most virulent imaginable opponent of social science in general and of Marxism in particular. Since the late 1950s, bourgeois hostility towards Marxism in western intellectual life has found its most extreme and articulate champion in Noam Chomsky.

Conversely, it is a myth to say that Chomsky’s political activism is unconnected with his science. The connection is intimate. Today’s most imaginative and effective political activists are constantly engaged with the findings of environmental scientists, earth scientists, economists, anthropologists, historians and others. Could we even imagine today’s environmentalist movement without the brilliant environmental science which lies behind it? Against this background, it is positively uncanny to find how little science appears in Chomsky’s writings as a political critic. We find no economic analyses, no sociological analyses, no application of theories or findings from any part of the social sciences or humanities. All we find are quotes from newspapers or reports of various kinds, telling a journalistic story. I personally tend to find Chomsky’s stories accurate - more accurate than most. I admire his political integrity and courage. But I am suspicious about Chomsky’s overall role. My view is that the ruling class are perfectly happy to have Chomsky writing this kind of thing. It doesn’t frighten them in the least because it doesn’t threaten them - Chomsky goes out of his way to construct and represent himself as a lone voice. In particular, when wearing his activist hat, he ostentatiously removes his scientific one. What would upset the ruling class would be the reverse strategy. What would upset them would be for the world community of scientists to become active while the activists became scientific. Our two communities might then hope to converge on a shared language of self-emancipation and revolutionary change. Chomsky has devoted his life to obstructing any such development. This is why I think he should be overthrown.

si-maro wrote:I will assert this: I'm no academic linguist badass, but everything I've read from Chomsky and everyone else's analysis of Chomsky suggests that the above quote from Andrew Knight is complete horseshit.

Al Cohen: I have to say that Chomsky's project has been to change the field of linguistics from a soft to a hard science.

Chris Knight: Yes, as everyone knows, this has always been Chomsky’s stated project. By ‘hard science’, Chomsky means ‘natural science’. By contrast, any kind of social science is deemed ‘soft’. This is my point. It is precisely his acceptance of this institutional/disciplinary divide that compels Chomsky to be so ruthless in defining language as a natural object. The slightest concession on this score would lead to the implication that linguistics could be scientific while also being ‘soft’. Chomsky wants linguistics to be completely ‘hard’. This compels him to redefine language as completely ‘natural’, with the logical corollary (logical in Chomsky’s mind) that it is neither ‘social’ nor ‘cultural’. Once this novel definition has been established, it can be ruled legitimate to exclude all social science
perspectives. This is precisely what Chomsky does.

Al Cohen: Knight is completely wrong to say that Chomsky's project has been to say that 'the meanings of words are not socially negotiated but wired into the brain.' Chomsky never makes claims about the lexical semantics of a language, but rather of its syntax and grammar.

Chris Knight: I am afraid this comment is not well informed. Chomsky makes no such distinction between syntax/grammar on the one hand, semantics on the other. Instead he conflates the two. I agree that this is very strange. But although it is strange, it is nevertheless true.

Rather than argue in a vacuum about whether it is or isn’t true, I think it
best to accept Chomsky’s own word on such matters. Recourse to Chomsky is a valid procedure because our dispute just now is over what Chomsky does or doesn’t say. So here, just for the record, is Chomsky himself:

‘In my view, most of what’s called semantics is syntax. I just call it
syntax; other people call the same thing semantics. Syntactic Structures, in my view, is pure syntax, but the questions dealt with there are what other people call semantics. I was interested in the question, “Why does ‘John is easy to please’ have a different meaning from ‘John is eager to please’?” I wanted to find a theory of language structure that would explain that fact. Most people call that semantics; I call it syntax because I think it has to do with mental representations. Take a point we discussed earlier: the word house, the concept “house,” and the use of the word house in real situations to refer to things. There are two relations there, and I don’t think you can turn them into one as is commonly done. The common idea is that there’s one relation, the relation of reference, and I don’t believe that. I think there’s a relation that holds between the word house and a very rich concept that doesn’t only hold of house but of all sorts of other things. That relation most people would call semantics. I call it syntax because it has to do with mental representations and the structure of mental representations.’1

As for whether Chomsky says that ‘the meanings of words are not socially
negotiated but wired into the brain’, I am again perplexed. Can anyone
familiar with Chomsky’s writings possibly doubt this? Chomsky himself makes his position abundantly clear. The lexical concept ‘house’, he explains, is wired into the brain. Here is Chomsky in his own words:

'There’s a fixed and quite rich structure of understanding associated with the concept “house” and that’s going to be cross-linguistic and it’s going to
arise independently of any evidence because it’s just part of our nature.' 2

Of course, Chomsky is not stupid. He knows perfectly well that there are
different kinds of houses – mud huts, country mansions, men’s houses, public houses etc. etc. – and that for this and other reasons people in different cultural situations will be using the word ‘house’ (in whatever language) in different ways, for different literal and/or metaphorical purposes and so on. But he is not interested in all this. For him, such matters concern linguistic usage, not the nature of language as such. As we have just seen, Chomsky treats semantics as syntax. Lexical concepts can be used in various ways, he says, but in themselves they are fixed features of the human Language Faculty, in this respect no different from syntactic features. His fundamental point is that variations in semantic usage are superficial. Beneath all such variation, he asserts, the lexical concept ‘house’ – a component of the human language faculty – is universal and hard-wired. It is a pre-installed internal feature of the ‘semantic component’ of the distinctively human ‘language organ’.

Al Cohen: No responsible linguist can state that lexical semantics can
represent universal truths about onotological objects.

Chris Knight: I did not say that. I am well aware that for Chomsky, the whole of language including ‘the semantic component’ is ‘internal’ to the Language Faculty rather than ‘external’ in the sense of accurately mirroring the environment.

Having said that, Chomsky’s position is very strange. Why should the lexical concept ‘house’ be part of the human genome? Are we sure that palaeolithic hunter-gatherers had houses? In the recent ethnographic record, most Aboriginal Australians didn’t really have houses. Very often, they slept in the open around a camp-fire. But even assuming our paleolithic ancestors did have houses, it still doesn’t solve the wider problem of where lexical concepts can have come from.

It seems extremely unlikely that the lexical concept ‘carburetor’ could have become installed during the evolutionary emergence of Homo sapiens. So what about this concept? Is it an exception? Do we adjudicate that certain concepts (such as ‘house’) are part of the genome while others (such as ‘carburettor’) are just socially or culturally determined? As a scientific theory, that would look a bit messy and inconsistent.

In a sense to his credit, Chomsky opts for consistency. To this end, he
decides that even in the case of ‘bureaucrat’ and ‘carburettor’, the concepts are hard-wired. Our stone age ancestors already had these concepts, even though as yet they didn’t need to use them.

Yes, I agree, this is strange. I fully appreciate that few supporters of
Chomsky are likely to believe me unless I quote Chomsky himself. So let me quote Chomsky himself.

After defending his idea in a general way, Chomsky elaborates:

‘Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburettor and bureaucrat, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it. The same is often true of technical terms of science and mathematics, and it surely appears to be the in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburettor and
bureaucrat, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus
if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the
evidence on the basis of which we know it. The same is often true of
technical terms of science and mathematics, and it surely appears to be the case for the terms of ordinary discourse. However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.’3

‘Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the
concept of a bicycle – he just never had occasion to use them!’, comments Dan Dennett, adding that he and his colleagues find it hard not to burst out
laughing at this point.4

So there we have it. Chomsky views word meanings – the concepts to which words are attached – as mental representations drawn from an ‘innate stock’ of such representations provided by ‘nature’. The child who acquires a particular language, according to Chomsky, doesn’t have to learn the concept. The task is simply to rummage through its innate stock of concepts and then discover the relevant label.

This is what I said in the first place. I very much thank Al Cohen for giving
me this opportunity to explain. I hopeI have made myself clear.

References.

1. Gary A Olson and Lester Faigley, 1991. Politics and composition: a
conversation with Noam Chomsky. In Journal of Advanced Composition 11.1, pp.
1-36.
2. The same.
3. N. Chomsky (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 64-66.
4. D. Dennett (1991) Consciousness Explained (London, Penguin), pp.
192n-193n.

Champion Rabbit wrote: He genuinely doesn't appear to believe that Israel is responsible for it's own actions.

Israel is merely an innocent glove-puppet of the US to Chomsky.