Thanks, people! This is the first ever thread I started, and I’d say it really generated a good discussion. I learned quite a few things. Let me synthetise what has been said to see if I understand correctly. Chomsky’s work on formal language theory is not controversial at all, and it is still a very important part of this theory. His work on the evolution of language, on the other hand, while still considered important, has been replaced by newer and better work. For this reason, linguists nowadaws tend to follow those newer theories and get farther from Chomsky’s conclusions. The backlash against him is mostly fueled by the fact that he is sort of a jerk (that, I wasn’t aware of, he looks like such a nice old man) and by the fact that his (rather controversial) political opinions keep him in the spotlight.
Monty - You are correct, Excalibre was the one who said that he considered Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics to be rather minor. Your professor said that he didn’t like them, which I interpreted to mean that he didn’t think they would last long, but I guess that’s not what he meant.
don’t ask - I read the beginning of the article you’ve linked, and the author’s main problem with Chomsky appears to be his politics. It seems to me that he’s trying to discredit Chomsky’s politics by “proving” that his academic work isn’t worth anything. I might read more later, but it already raised a red flag for me. I share sjc’s skepticism. And given that the general consensus of this discussion seems to be that Chomsky’s work still has significance, even though it has been superseded by better research, I can only wonder how you got the idea that no one took him seriously anymore.
Steve Wright - Well, I assume the “Chomsky is God” thing was more of a joke than anything else, sort of an indication that he is still seen as an important figure in the field and that much research started with him. The colleague in question is an undergrad, she’s learning stuff that has been done in the past, not current research. Of course, in science, we must not consider other people’s research to be unquestionably true.
Just in case anyone’s not familiar with it, formal language theory isn’t a scientific theory but a mathematical one instead. What Chomsky provided is a scheme for classifying formal languages that just happens to correspond very nicely to a different classification scheme (read about it here).
Nobody in the other thread said that Chomsky is a crank. Even calling him a pseudo-scientist is a little too strong. It’s not easy explaining what his problem is. There’s a reason that I recommended the books The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris or Ideology and Linguistic Theory by Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith in that thread. I know that people would like to have any issue explained in a neat little thread that can be read in fifteen minutes, but I think that this is one of those cases where that’s not possible. What I’m going to say in this post is only the sketchiest outline of an explanation of Chomsky’s lack of argumentation skills.
Chomsky is like a poster to the SDMB who you know, at some level, is very smart and well read. His posts are superficially coherent and not overtly snide and yet any thread the guy enters will end up as a trainwreck. Chomsky had no idea of how to present an ordinary falsifiable theory. Any idea he presented will be defended from attacks from other people to the death. He would ignore contradictory evidence and misunderstand objections as much as necessary. He would take advantage of vagueness in his original presentation of his ideas to claim that his proposals already take care of any objections. He would actually claim that some objections were irrelevant because they don’t fall within the field of linguistics. He would later propose a new theory which was essentially throwing away all his previous ideas but would pretend that this was a minor revision to his old theories. He would never admit that someone else’s objections to his theories influenced him.
The Harris and the Huck and Goldsmith books that I am recommending are about the debate between Generative Semantics and Generative Syntax in the 1960’s and 1970’s. I was around at the time of this debate (although just as a grad student who eventually gave up linguistics), and these books seem to me to give an accurate picture of what was going on back then. None of this debate had anything to do with his politics, incidentally. None of it had anything to do with his ideas about the innateness of grammar. And, finally, none of it has anything to do with the fact that he introduced some very useful ideas into linguistics. The fact that someone introduces an important idea into a field at one point doesn’t give them a free pass to screw up all future debates in the field with their bad arguments.
I think that’s an excellent analogy. If Chomsky was a doper, he would hang around GD for a year, be repeatedly warned to tone it down, finally get banned on relatively a flimsy pretext and then spawn a 30 page pit thread with dopers evenly divided about whether he should be banned or not.
Wendell Wagner, your comment is interesting. I know you said that the issue is hard to explain in just a few lines, but it does give me some idea of what is usually the problem people have with Chomsky. Something has been mentioned a few times in this thread: the fact that when objections to his theories appear, he tends to modify the theories, incorporating the ideas of other people and sometimes leaving little of what the original theory was, while keeping the same name and hinting that this was his idea all along. I can see how this alone could alienate people. But still, it appears that he remains rather well-considered in the field, which was what I was wondering about.
Just FYI, if we’re having a discussion about whether or not a guy is a crank, then we should probably avoid making citations to people who are widely considered to be cranks themselves.
Keith Windschuttle is a blowhard whose last name should have been changed at birth to “Windbag.” He is NOT a linguist, and his attack on Noam Chomsky arises out of a desire to take a jab at Chomsky’s politics, rather than from any real insights that Windschuttle has about Chomsky’s linguistics. He’s a complete cheap-shot artist, and a poor historian to boot.
I’m not having a go at you here, sjc. If you don’t live in Australia, there’s probably no reason for you even to know who Keith Windschuttle is. Luckily, his academic-cum-shock-jock ranting have not yet gained much currency outside his native land.
Interestingly enough, for those who do seek to make connections between Chomsky’s politics and his linguistics, Chomsky himself has always denied that there is much of a link at all. If you watch the great documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, you’ll see an interview in which Chomsky says that he would like to be able to find connections between his linguistic work and his political beliefs, but he hasn’t really been able to do so. He says that he see a few tenuous connections here and there, but nothing really substantial.