People keep mentioning Universal Grammar as if it were the heart of Chomsky’s linguistic theories, as if he were the one who invented the idea, and as if it were the first thing that brought Chomsky prominence. None of those assertions is true. Read the Wikipedia entry on Universal Grammar that’s linked to in Superhal’s post above. Universal Grammar is only one aspect of Chomsky’s linguistic theories.
Now that I could agree with. In all fields, we must have a rigor and logic that stands up to any scrutiny.
Imho, the problem with UG is that defense is replacing evidence.
Exactly. If all that Chomsky’s theories have in their favor are good arguments then I figure they’re useless. Let’s see the results of some scientific testing. That’s what seperates philosophy from science.
As a former student of linguistics I can’t stand Chomsky. I think Universal Grammar is bullshit, plain and simple. Don’t like transformational grammar either. I don’t see how that has any basis in reality. However, I don’t think that other theories (that I know of) in that area are much better. He’s an idea guy, and that’s cool, but every time he finds out he’s wrong or changes his mind, he just says, no no I really meant this not that. But a lot of the time no one else has really come up with anything better. Of course, once again I didn’t get that deep into linguistics, so I could be wrong about that.
I don’t know much about his political stuff, but I imagine I wouldn’t agree with him there either if he acts anything like how he does with linguistics.
Little Nemo, I think that you and I mean entirely different things by “good arguments.” You apparently mean something like “interesting supporting statements completely out of the context of actually proving a theory.” I mean the entire body of proof of a scientific theory. That is, I mean all the experimental evidence and all the theoretical calculations necessary to show that a theory is correct. I was making a distinction in my post between coming up with an interesting idea that perhaps someone in the future may prove and actually coming up with the proof oneself with experimental evidence and theoretical calculations.
If you look at UG as just another way of saying that all languages have the same objective characteristics, like person, number, and temporal aspects, whether as root inflections or as syntagmatic constructions, then it’s hard to argue against that. It also becomes so self-evident as to be trivial, but the enquiry as to how it originated is certainly not trivial.
I’m curious – what evidence do we have prior to the earliest written records?
Ahhh…it all comes down to linguistics. 
He who controls the language controls the world.
Of COURSE a linguist is going to nit-pick and say, “No, I meant THIS, not THAT” 
Sort of like the Republicans chartacterizing the expiration of tax cuts for the top 3% (which would merely raise their rates by a few percentage points and to a still lower level than at just about any other time in U.S. history) as “raising taxes”. :dubious:
Just to work in both the political and the linguistic elements. 
Some cave drawings seem to be telling stories, using the concept of numbers, relative size, and perhaps signature of the artist. I don’t know if that counts.
What predictions have been based on Chomsky’s work and have they been tested and had results that match the predictions?
Little Nemo, that’s my point. The experimental work on proving Chomsky’s theories has been sparse, and Chomsky himself did none of it. The point that I was making was that Chomsky came up with a number of useful concepts for how language works. He then decided that proving these ideas was for lesser beings to worry about, since great thinkers like him were far above such trivialities.
What I was saying was that in evaluating the work of any prominent theorist, one has to ask two questions: First, did their new ideas inspire later workers in the field to come up with interesting, useful work? Second, did they do any of the hard work on coming up with the experimantal evidence to support their theories? My personal opinion is that Chomsky may have had some interesting ideas, but he contributed nothing to the experimental work on them.
Spectre of Pithecanthropus, the idea of Chomsky about universal grammar is that there are a small, fixed number of grammatical rules. His claim is that by using the grammatical systems that he came up with (transformational grammar and the numerous later fixes he proposed), one can characterize all possible grammars of human languages. He claims that there are lots of grammars that one can theoretically create but which no human language would ever use. My personal opinion is that Chomsky’s proposals were always too vague and too often changing to be usefully tested. Furthermore, in the cases where they were tested, they often were shown to be wrong.
The (now widely expanded) Chomsky-Schutzenberger hierarchy is still widely used in theoretical CS for describing formal languages.