Noam Chomsky: Fake Linguist

Many conservatives regard Chomsky as a linguist who falters out of his field. Unfortunately, they are giving Chomsky too much credit. Chomsky's linguistics are as warped as his politics.

As someone with a PhD in linguistics, I think I am qualified to judge his professional credentials.

Prior to Chomsky, linguists engaged in a lot of data collection to understand the diversity of human language. I'm vehemently anti-PC, but in this case, I think the word 'diversity' is justified. There's a lot out there, and someone's got to catalog it.

However, Chomsky rejected this approach. He wanted to look into something 'deeper' (academese for 'pretentious and nonexistent'). So he invented something called 'universal grammar' which is somehow programmed into us at birth. Now it is obvious to anyone who's studied a foreign language that there is no such thing as 'universal grammar': there are a lot of differences between any two languages' structures. How does Chomsky account for these differences? He claims that we formulate 'deep structures' in our heads using 'universal grammar'. Then we use 'transformations' to change these (invisible, nonexistent) 'deep structures' into 'surface structures' (which are what we actually say and write). There are innumerable problems with this. For starters:

1. Where did this 'universal grammar' come from, and how did it end up becoming part of our biology? Not many Chomskyans are interested in evolutionary biology. 'Universal grammar' simply IS. (I myself suspect that there may be a universal grammar sans scare quotes, but I doubt that it has much in common with Chomskyan 'universal grammar'.)

2. How can we see this 'universal grammar' and 'deep structures' if they are hidden behind 'transformations'?

4. How can any child learn the 'transformations' (which are extremely complex and often counterintuitive, even to university graduate students in linguistics)?

Since no one can see 'universal grammar', 'deep structures', or 'transformations', one can imagine ANYTHING and create a maze of rules to convert ghost forms into what is actually being said and written. The Chomskyan approach to grammar is oddly English-like, even though many languages are UNlike English. This has absurd but dangerous consquences:

1. As a friend of mine pointed out, Chomsky, the enemy of "AmeriKKKa", is actually an ethnocentric advocate of imposing an English-like structure on all of the languages of the world.

Imagine if some professor said that there was a 'universal religion' programmed into us at birth. What if this person were, say, Buddhist? How would he explain the diversity of faiths around the world? He would say that all deities are 'transformations' of the 'underlying Buddha', all religious codes (e.g., the Ten Commandments, Sharia) are 'transformations' of the 'underlying dharma (Buddhist law)', etc. But, you then ask, how could a Muslim knowing nothing of Buddhism be an 'underlying Buddhist'? The professor would answer: 'Underlying religion' just IS.

2. This (let's be frank) *junk science* is very convenient for lazy academics who do not want to do real research but want to appear 'profound'. Chomskyans compete to create 'deep structures' that are the furthest from reality and the most complex 'transformations' possible. Never mind that neither of these non-entities can be depicted or tested except in a circular manner: "This transformation Z exists because it is needed to change deep structure X to surface structure Y. Deep structure X exists because if you take surface structure Y and undo transformation Z, you can see X underneath." I know of NO hard science (e.g., neurological) evidence for any of this. But the jargon sure looks impressive. This site parodies Chomskyan obscurantist writing by generating unreadable prose worthy of the master himself:

3. The combination of junk science and junk politics has made Chomsky an attractive - and unstoppable - juggernaut in the academic world. Academics - mostly left-wing to begin with - agree with his politics and assume his linguistics are as 'good'. Linguists who reject the Chomskyan paradigm such as myself are often either marginalized or shut out of the profession entirely. And not a few of Chomsky's linguistic opponents agree with his politics, I'd bet. I am the only linguist I know of who rejects both.

The late Nicholas Poppe, a Soviet emigre who was a master of Oriental linguistics, had this to say about Chomskyan linguistics in the US (_Reminiscences_, p. 207):

"Unfortunately, _true_ academic freedom, freedom to adhere to a scholarly theory of one's own choice, is often lacking in American universities, and scholars who do not comply with currently fashionable theories have little chance at a university. This makes an American university somewhat like a Soviet university: in the Soviet Union it is Marxism, in the United States it is, say, a currently obligatory method in linguistics."

Poppe does not specify what the "current obligatory method" of lingustics was. It was, and is Chomskyanism. Edublogger Joanne Jacobs was forced to learn it - and she hated it:

"Structural linguistics was required for a degree in English at Stanford. I put it off till my last semester; finally I had to take the class. It consisted of uncritical worship of Noam Chomsky. I kept disrupting class by asking questions: Why do we believe this is true? Just because Chomsky says so? How do we know he's right? Why is this class required?"

She asks precisely the right questions. Chomsky is not a scientist. He is a prophet who demands that people believe him. I call him 'Noamuhammad'. Since his claims cannot be proved, they have to be taken on faith.

And too many place their faith in him. Jacobs took her course in the mid-70s. Little has changed in a quarter of a century. Chomskyanism has been the dominant paradigm in linguistics for nearly forty years, and its major competitors share some of its weaknesses. Even if Chomsky's own version of nonsense dies out, others will continue to pump out 'junk science' that contributes little or nothing to language learning, language teaching, or intercultural understanding. And peer review has done nothing to stop the cult of Noamuhammad. Like James Hudnall said:

"Science in this day and age has become one big pimp act for government grants ... 'Peer review' is just another word for log rolling. It's as useful as what David Duke thinks of Mein Kampf."

And linguists like me are paying the price in another way. I have been looking for a professorship in linguistics for four years with very little success - a semester here and a year there amidst countless rejections. I don't attack Chomsky in my cover letters, interviews, etc. but I don't pretend to worship him either. Exile from academia is my reward.

Is Chomsky a double fraud in both science and politics? I honestly don't know. I have never met him and don't want to - the urge to verbally attack him is too strong. Maybe he really believes what he says in one or both fields. But in any case, Chomsky is a troublemaker on two fronts. He is like Lenin and Lysenko rolled into one.

Found this here:

The minimal condition the language condition must meet is what we can call the ‘interface condition’. The information it presents must be accessible to the external system. The question is: Is that also a maximal condition? That is, is the language faculty optimally constructed to satisfy that minimal condition? When you pursue this question, you’re pursuing the minimalist programme.
A few years ago it seemed hopelessly crazy, but now there’s already been enough work to indicate to a rather surprising extent that it may be correct that the language faculty is an optimal solution to the minimal conditions. It’s as if an engineer inserted a language faculty into a brain that didn’t have one and did it in an optimal way so that it would be accessible to the other systems.

And here:

Chomsky and Fodor's overt appeals to unlearnability should set off alarm bells for anyone who believes that human cognitive capabilities arose through evolution. If knowledge of sentence structure cannot develop in human beings, how could supposedly innate knowledge of Universal Grammar have come about through evolution? Chomsky openly doubts that it could have:
"It is sometimes argued that though knowledge might in principle be innate, it must nonetheless be grounded in experience through evolutionary history… there is no reason to require...that evolutionary adaptation play some special role. There is no reason to demand and little reason to suppose that genetically-determined properties result from specific selection—consider the case of the capacity to deal with properties of the number system...If there is, as I believe, good reason to construct [a theory of knowledge and belief] in terms of mentally represented cognitive structures...then it becomes a question of fact, not doctrine, to determine the character and origin of these structures. It is an open question what if any role experience or phylogenetic development may play." (Chomsky, 1980, pp. 99-100)

Chomsky was and is a brilliant linguist

Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin were brilliant politicians. That doesn't mean they are worthy of respect. Nor does it mean that there political philosophies were correct.

The transformational grammar started by Chomsky is an exercise in mental gymnastics. His postulate, the univeral grammar, is totally unprovable.

Let me give you an example. Let's suppose we say that the deep structure of the number 25 is 4. So how do we start with 4 and get to 25? By applying the rules of our grammar, the transformation, to 4. So what is the transformation rule? You coud add 21 to 4. Or you could multiply by 7 and subtract 3. Or could just add 1 to it until you get to 25. Or you could add 100 and keep subtracting 1 until you get to 25.

Any of these "transformations" to 4 will yield 25. But does that prove that the deep structure of 25 is 4? And which rule is the correct one?

The entire edifice of Chomskian linguistics is built on nothing more substantial than his personal whim and the entire field of American linguistics has been duped.

On his website at http://www.amritas.com , Marc Miyake posted a follow-up about this:

"I want to make a couple of points clear to my first-time visitors:

"1. I am not a crank amateur. I have a PhD in linguistics and have taught linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and the University of Oregon. I am currently a visiting assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, where I teach introductory linguistics, morphology and syntax, and semantics. In the past I have also taught phonology, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and several specialized courses on the history and structure of East and Southeast Asian languages. I have presented at international linguistics conferences since 1995 and have been invited to be a member of a elite panel of Japanese language historians which will meet in Copenhagen this August. I have a book on the history of Japanese coming out from Routledge late this summer.

"2. I am not attacking Chomsky merely because of his politics, which have been attacked to death. I wrote the article mainly to dissuade non-Leftists from saying things like "His politics are wrong, but he is a brilliant linguist" (often presumably without ever having examined his theories for themselves). I am really sick of that caveat which I see from time to time in conservative and libertarian critiques of Chomsky.

"A Right-winger or libertarian espousing the same linguistic views would be equally wrong. If Noamuhammad became a Dubya cultist overnight, that still wouldn't change my stance on his theories. Moreover, many of the best arguments I have ever heard against Chomsky come from Leftist friends and colleagues who agree to varying degrees with Chomsky's politics. Although Eugene, Oregon (whose campus David Horowitz called a "disgrace") is hardly Rush Limbaugh-land, none of the linguists I knew there were Chomskyans. Besides, I loathed Chomskyan linguistics long before I ever heard of his political views (which added to my dislike of the man but were not the source of it). And I don't even think he's the worst Leftist alive. He hasn't killed anyone. He is not Stalin or even Pol Pot. Most importantly, rejecting scientific theories because of their advocates' political opinions is wrong. To cite a non-linguistic example, whether punctuated equilibrium is right or wrong has nothing to do with whether Stephen Jay Gould's Marxism was right or wrong.

"However, I should note that some think that Chomsky's politics and linguistics are really two sides of the same coin. I can't read Chomsky's mind, so I don't claim to know, but I did find Cinderella Bloggerfeller's theory intriguing:

" 'From what I've read, I think Chomsky's basic problem is the same whether it's his linguistics or his politics. He creates an a priori theory then he tries to makes the facts fit it

" 'Chomsky's politics and linguistics are similar too in that they are both extremely Anglocentric or "Americanocentric". From what I've read on your blog, Marc, Chomsky's language theory is almost exclusively based on English and ignores languages that are totally different. His political theories boil down to the statement: "The USA is responsible for all the evil in the world today." I can see the appeal of this "one solution fits all" approach. It certainly cuts down on the need for research. Now we need never investigate all those difficult foreign grammars and the complicated histories and politics of other nations. This might be an attractive attitude to those in search of a guru, but it doesn't impress me.'

"Or me. I would add that language is culture is history is politics. (Hence the political-historical-cultural-linguistic slant of this blog.) Chomskyans have not only relegated language into a mystical pseudoscience of invisible 'underlying' forms, but have also robbed language of its context. What is language without its past, without the society that used it, cultivated it, or in some cases, abandoned it? Give me the wealth of Sanskrit philology any day over sterile speculations about phantom pronouns.

"I agree with Cinderella Bloggerfeller's point about the Anglocentric appeal of Chomskyanism. Many Leftists are monoculturalists in multiculti clothing who think they appreciate other cultures but in fact impose their ignorant fantasies onto others (hence the myth of a pure Third World of noble savages contaminated by AmeriKKKa, etc.). Chomskyan linguistics is a junk science version of this, imposing English-like characteristics onto other languages in the name of 'human' language. Many pro-Chomskyans are either native English speakers or people who have mastered English as a second language. Chomskyanism feels 'right' to them since English is native to them and/or a language they value highly. (Anyone who says to me, "It works for English!" will get this answer back from me: "Oh yeah? It doesn't work for ...!") And such people are often wholly unaware of the diversity of human language (which is suppressed in Chomskyan classes that focus on English and, if you're lucky, a handful of European languages with a token non-European language like Japanese - this results in a highly imbalanced picture).

"But even the Chomskyan analysis of English is suspect. How do children learn invisible words and constructions that no one ever pronounces or writes - that never existed until Chomsky and his followers invented them? These invisible entities only 'exist' if you believe they exist.

"An emphasis on belief over empiricism makes Chomskyanism a religion rather than a science. Although I severely doubt this, future hard scientific investigations into the brain may prove Chomsky correct. But until then (= almost certainly never), Chomskyans come off as highly pretentious, thinking they know for a fact what cannot be known for a fact (yet). Their beliefs have become rigid dogmas that few linguistics students can afford to question. The emperor is nude, but if enough people respect him anyway, others who have never seen the emperor for themselves will assume that he is deserving of respect."

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