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Don't count me among those who think he's a great linguist. I have been ranting against his linguistics for thirty years -- not, however, with the brilliance of this article. I am deeply appreciative of the author.

I suspect many Freepers are into computer science, and Chomsky may have contributed to the analysis of computer languages. I have long suspected that this is the underlying reason for the failure of AI.

Chomsky did make some very important contributions to CS with his theories on grammars, but as I like to point out, John Backus was working on virtually the same thing at virtually the same time, to the point where it's not at all unreasonable to say that he independently discovered much of what Chomsky did.

I'm not sure that the failures of AI are really traceable to Chomsky, though - I think it's more that the problem has turned out to be much deeper and harder than anyone originally thought it would be. Really, nobody, IMO, has adequately framed the "problem" of artificial intelligence, let alone "solved" it.

Chomsky may have contributed to the analysis of computer languages...are you saying he works for microsoft?

I suspect many Freepers are into computer science, and Chomsky may have contributed to the analysis of computer languages. I have long suspected that this is the underlying reason for the failure of AI.
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Yes, a CS freeper here ... Chomsky did have some contributions that we learn of when taking theoretical computer science, ie, the Chomsky grammar, in between the finita automata and the turing machine. What you say may well be true, there were certain flawed assumptions in AI about how easy it would be to characterize human understanding. many of us learned list way back when and learned how to convert input into a comupter 'parrot' that could carry on conversations, "Eliza like". Impressive, but it turned out to be more of a parlor trick than deep AI ... those approaches have come up short.

It may indeed be a generalization of the failure of Chomsky's grammer to account for deeper human "ontologies", ie, knowledge structures. AI over-reached and came up short. You could argue that CHomsky and some of the AI pioneers must be *wrong* because if they were *right*, we'd have been able to program language/knowledge-bases much better by now.

Assuming a grammar/structure does or doesnt represnt how human think - without studying neurology - is not science, it's conjecture. It strikes me that Chomsky is guilty of the same junk science that Freud passed down. Interesting that another poster made a similar point.
In both cases, their general and superficial ideas are subjectible to neuroscience review/checking, and will be superceded by it over time.

Only "constipated" academic tunnel vision will keep bad ideas alive well past their point of usefulness.
This does not make his contribution non-useful, but it does mean its application and meaning are more limited,
and should be challenged if we want to move 'forward' scientifically.

Finally, Chomsky is a 19th century style Communist. he is not above telling total and known lies to get his views spread. how and why he has any respect when his anti-human political views are worse than a vehement racists is beyond me. His extremism calls into question the rest of his work, IMHO.

This article points out the profound problesm associated with the Government funding of science. Once a particular theory has been adopted it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: advocates of new theories cannot get grant funding for research because advocates of the dominant theory run the peer review committees.

This problem is not confined to linguistics. It is particularly accute in Biology where evolutionary bilogical theories are given the status of revealed truth and "heretics" from the accepted theory are drummed out of the profession.

Academicians are particular attracted to "gnostic" theories; that is to say theories that claim to embody a "hidden" knowledge that only the cognoscenti can absorb. Chomsky's theory smacks of academic gnosticism since it seems immune from experimental proof or disproof. Freudianism, Marxism, and Structuralism are examples of the same intellectual tendency.

The abolishment of tenure should become an important conservative political goal. Some healthy competition among the professoriat would quickly begin to clean the trendy Maxrsist anti-americanism that dominates the Humanities departments in most Universities.

Unfortunately, I am taking a college course - COMM 380 - and one of the texts quotes Chomsky extensively.