Collier, Peter (eds); David Horowitz;
The anti-Chomsky reader
Encounter Books, 2004, 260 pages
ISBN 189355497X, 9781893554979
topics: | linguistics | chomsky | cognitive
Chomsky’s work manifests a deep disregard and contempt for the truth [1], a
monumental disdain for standards of inquiry, a relentless strain of
self-promotion, remarkable descents into incoherence[2] and a penchant for
verbally abusing those who disagree with him [3].
[Footnotes:
1 An aspect of this is a frequent resort to what can only be called
play-acting at science, as in the remarks on page 8 of Chomsky’s 1981b
article:
"The telephone exchange, for example, has ‘heard’ much more English than
any of us, but lacking the principles of universal grammar (inter alia)
it develops no grammar of English as part of its internal structure."
This comment, intended to support Chomsky’s posit of an innate
faculty of language, is saved from utter falsehood only by the scare
quotes on "heard," which only weakly disguise the fact that the telephone
exchange, an inanimate object with no sense of hearing, has
heard no English at all. But the assumptions of the quotation cannot
support hypothesizing an innate faculty of language as against
claiming that language learning depends on general human intelligence—
telephone exchanges lacking the latter no less than any
putative faculty of language.
[AM: The true arrogance of the analogy is in imputing a telephone exchange,
and not, say, a chimpanzee, as the non-human object who doesn't have UG]
Similar play-acting in support of his innateness view is found on pages 50–51
of Chomsky’s slim 2000 volume, which claims, absurdly, that denial of the
innateness of language is equivalent to denial of any difference between his
granddaughter, a rock and a rabbit.
3 The last quality appears in Flint’s 1995 quotation from Steven Pinker
referring to him as "an out-and-out bully," and MacFarquhar’s 2003
description (pages 64–67) of Chomsky’s bullying of students in one of his
own classes (which she attended). Page 134 of Huck and Goldsmith’s 1995
volume describes a historically relevant instance of Chomsky’s bullying
of a then recent student and junior colleague. And de Beaugrande
observes: "The irrationality of Chomsky’s programme is most visibly
betrayed by the veritable thesaurus of belittlements he has bestowed upon
rival academics and scientists or their work," before listing several
dozen such belittlements.
James A. Donald, David Horowitz and many other critics of
Chomsky’s political writings have often accused him of intentional
deception in supporting his radical ideas, as in his attempt
to exonerate Pol Pot from charges of genocide in Cambodia and
his assertion that the United States collaborated with Nazis
against the Soviet Union during and after Word War II. This
syndrome infects his linguistics as well.
[Footnote citations:
Horowitz (2001): "It would be more accurate to say of the
Chomsky oeuvre...that everything he has written is a lie, including
the ‘ands’ and ‘thes.’"
Horowitz, David (2001). "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky, Part II:
Method and Madness," at FrontPageMagazine.com, October 10.
Delong (2002): "And then there are Chomsky’s casual lies."
Windschuttle (2003): "He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual
as the pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the
regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating falsehoods."]
... in his unpublished 1955 study The Logical Structure
of Linguistic Theory (finally published in 1975), he cites
"instances of actives with no corresponding passive.", e.g.,
this weighs three pounds / he got his punishment
Yet, in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, [published two years later], he
claimed that for every transitive sentence of the form [nominal1 verb
nominal2] (e.g.
The teacher praised Cathy
there exists a corresponding passive of the form [nominal2 is verb+en by
nominal1], e.g.
Cathy was praised by the teacher.
While this rule properly accounted for many cases, the claim was vastly too
general. no passives :
The kids want ice cream;
The movie starred Julia. [*Julia was starred by the movie]
[Though] he knew at least two years before the publication of Syntactic
Structures ... Chomsky produced an entirely unhedged and unqualified account
without reference to the earlier passage. That is, in a work introducing his
conception of transformational grammar to the general public, he knowingly
published a false assertion about English syntax...
[As an example of a rule in universal grammar, applicable to all languages,
Chomsky cited the A-over-A Principle, which states that a rule applies to a
category (e.g. NP), and if an NP has embedded in it another NP, then the rule
applies to the largest outer structure, not to the inner. ]
first stated in a famous lecture given by Chomsky to the 1962 International
Congress of Linguists:
(4) "What it asserts is that if the phrase X of category A is embedded
within a larger phrase ZXW which is also of category A, then no rule
applying to the category A applies to X (but only to ZXW)."
John Robert Ross, in Constraints on Variables in Syntax — a 1967 MIT
dissertation that Chomsky directed — devoted a chapter to arguing that the
A-over-A Principle was untenable even for English. Not only has this
demonstration never been refuted, but Chomsky himself (in Language and
Mind, pages 55–56) recognized that Ross had raised genuine difficulties for
his A-over-A Principle claims.
Ross showed that the principle was both too weak and too strong—too weak in
that there were relevant ill-formed cases it failed to block; too strong in
that it wrongly blocked perfectly grammatical cases.
... despite never claiming to have refuted Ross’s conclusions, he
has nonetheless refused to give up the principle, and since 1972
has simply avoided mentioning Ross’s critique. Instead, in work
after work, he has until recently either cited the A-over-A Principle
as a serious, persisting element of his universal grammar, or
referred to it in neutral terms without a hint that grounds for its
abandonment were already available to him in 1967.
[the A-over-A Principle]
is found in his works of 1971, pages 29–30; 1977, page 85;
1980, page 4; 1981a, page 212; 1982, page 62; 1986a, page 71;
1986b, page 17; 2002, pages 129–30; and in the 1977 article by
Chomsky and Lasnik, pages 429, 446. There are also similar statements
by Chomsky in Mehta’s 1971 partial interview article, page
54; in Shenker’s 1971 article, page 107; and in Haley and Lunsford’s
1994 interview-based monograph, page 135.
The worst aspect of this subterfuge is his touting of a failed principle as a
genuine discovery to nonlinguist audiences... in an interview in the New
Yorker, Chomsky claimed (without invoking the term "A-over-A Principle"):
Well, we transformationalists would say that the question ‘What did John
keep the car in?’ is governed by a universal condition— undoubtedly a
principle of universal grammar—that asserts that a noun phrase, here ‘the
garage,’ that is part of a larger noun phrase, here ‘the car in the
garage,’ cannot be extracted and moved.
[Given the background of John Ross' work], the "undoubtedly" reveals a
typical, profound and massively arrogant contempt for the truth. p.213
[Footnote: contrast Feynman:]
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but
something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman
when you’re talking as a scientist... I’m talking about a specific, extra
type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show
how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a
scientist. [Cargo cult science]
An especially reprehensible feature of Chomsky’s linguistics is a
tendency to reject proposals made by other linguists, often in the
strongest terms, but then to adopt later those very proposals
without attribution or credit.
One instance involves Chomsky’s belated recognition that there was actually
nothing like what he called deep structure (later usually abbreviated
"D-structure"), which, starting in 1965,* played a central role in his
linguistics,
"The status of deep structure is discussed again in the third essay,
where further evidence is presented leading again to the conclusion
that a level of deep structure (in the sense of the standard theory
and EST) must be postulated."
- Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972, p. 5)
"We have also considered the levels of representation determined by
the interaction of their principles: D-structure, S-structure, LF and
PF (phonetic form or ‘surface structure’)."
- Knowledge of Language (1986, p. 155):
This role of deep structure in Chomsky’s views persisted until the
development of his "minimalist" program in the early 1990s, when he
concluded: "Suppose that D-Structure is eliminable along these lines."
Now, there is nothing wrong with changing one’s views and renouncing a
concept, even a concept that has been central to one’s thought for three
decades. ...
In the case at hand, however, the fact is that other linguists had advocated
the rejection of deep structure in the late 1960s; abandonment of this
concept was a defining feature of the Generative Semantics movement.
The origin of the proposal to eliminate deep structure is well
described in the literature. The idea first surfaced in a 1967 letter
drafted by John Ross (published as the 1976 Lakoff and Ross article).
Chomsky was ferociously opposed to the Generative
Semantics movement, and in particular he strongly defended the
reality of deep structure—as in the two statements quoted earlier
and in other assertions, like the following from 1972:‡
"Summarizing, I believe that these considerations again provide strong
evidence in support of the (extended) standard theory, with its
assumption that deep structures exist as a welldefined level with the
properties expressed by base rules."
Given such statements, Chomsky had an obligation to cite
those who had (beyond doubt) advocated this theoretical pruning
decades before he did, once he formally decided to eliminate
the concept of deep structure from his theory. But he ignored
this obligation. So University of California professor Geoffrey K.
Pullum has written:
"Taking this view means abandoning the cherished level of deep
structure (known as ‘d-structure’ in the last two decades).... But the
names of linguists like Postal, Ross and McCawley, who in the late
1960s tried to argue for the elimination of deep structure, are
completely absent from Chomsky’s bibliography. There is no belated nod
in the direction of the literature he resolutely resisted for 25 years
(from 1967 to 1992... but whose central thesis he now adopts."
- [Pullum 1996 review, p. 138]
[FN: see also the remarks in Johnson and Lappin’s 1998 study of
Chomsky’s recent ideas, p. 14n14].
The American Historical Association "Statement on Plagiarism
and Related Misuses of the Work of Other Authors" says:
The misuse of the writings of another author, even when one does not
borrow the exact wording, can be as unfair, as unethical, and as
unprofessional as plagiarism. Such misuse includes the limited borrowing,
without attribution, of another historian’s distinctive and significant
research findings, hypotheses, theories, rhetorical strategies, or
interpretations, or an extended borrowing even with attribution.
But Chomsky has been able in this and other cases to appropriate others’
work with no cost to his image in the discipline of linguistics.
The New Criterion, Volume 23 September 2004 from http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/A-disgraceful-career-1111 John Williamson points out that fifty years after the announcement of the "Chomskyan revolution" in linguistics, immense progress has been made in almost every field of science. "We have been to the moon several times," he writes. "Our way of life depends upon the computer chip." The work of Einstein, to whom some of Chomsky’s fans compare him, has been confirmed many times and can explain many physical phenomena. But in linguistics, Williamson shows, the results are comparatively trivial. All that Chomskyan grammar can explain is language which is transparent and easily labelled: “first-order” sentences such as The keeper fed the bananas to the monkey. Grammatical formulations of the “second order of difficulty,” such as For there to be a snowstorm would be nice, still remain a mystery. Moreover, Chomsky has not established a grand new paradigm for his field, and then spent the rest of his life building upon its foundations and encouraging other researchers to do the same, as would have happened had his project been genuinely important. Instead, his work has resembled a pattern all too familiar in the humanities and social sciences of one overblown speculation following another. Williamson writes: The history of Chomskyan theory is a study in cycles. He announces a new and exciting idea, which adherents to the faith then use and begin to make all kinds of headway. But this progress is invariably followed by complications, then by contradictions, then by a flurry of patchwork fixes, then by a slow unravelling, and finally by stagnation. Eventually the master announces a new approach and the cycle starts anew. Over Chomsky’s career, these cycles have gone from "transformational grammar and deep structure," to "universal grammar," then to "principles and parameters." The most recent approach, launched in 1995, is called "minimalism." And what has all this accomplished? Chomskyan theory has not even developed a rational means of explaining why the sentence John was decided to leave early is ungrammatical. If this had been real science, the project would have lost its funding years ago for lack of results. Robert E. Levine and Paul M. Postal, in an essay appropriately entitled “A Corrupted Linguistics,” are equally critical of Chomsky’s puffed-up promises. They write: Much of the lavish praise heaped on his work is, we believe, driven by uncritical acceptance (often by nonlinguists) of claims and promises made during the early years of his academic activity; the claims have by now largely proved to be wrong or without real content, and the promises have gone unfulfilled. Commentators who are not linguists often discern a fundamental contrast between Chomsky’s academic work on linguistics and his non-academic writings about politics. They take the former to be brilliant, revolutionary, and widely accepted, but recognize the latter as radical and controversial. After a dissertation by one of his own doctoral students, John Ross, had shown that one of Chomsky’s purported "universal principles" of grammar was not actually universal, Chomsky refused to give up the principle and simply avoided mentioning Ross’s critique. "The worst aspect of this subterfuge," Levine and Postal write, "is his touting of a failed principle as a genuine discovery to nonlinguist audiences unprepared to recognize the dishonesty involved." He cited it in an interview with one credulous reporter and repeated the claim in a much more prominent interview in The New Yorker last year. Levine and Postal record that Chomsky has sometimes rejected proposals made by other linguists, often in the strongest terms, but then later adopted those very proposals himself, without attribution or credit. This occurred with the concept of “deep structure,” which is one of the ideas by which Chomsky is best known to lay audiences. In the 1970s, other linguists showed that “deep structure” was untenable. Chomsky at first defended his idea and ferociously opposed his detractors. He eventually gave away the concept himself in the early 1990s. But in abandoning it, he made no open announcement that he had done so, nor acknowledged the critique whose alternative thesis he adopted. Collier, Horowitz, and their six other authors have produced a book that has long been needed. It provides a penetrating coverage of the disgraceful career of a disgraceful but very influential man, who has so far avoided a criticism as thoroughgoing as this. Steven Morris, Thomas Nichols, and Eli Lehrer provide powerful critical analyses of Chomsky’s writings about Vietnam, Cambodia, the Cold War, and the news media. Two essays by Paul Bogdanor and Werner Cohn examine Chomsky’s compulsive hatred for the state of Israel and his support for neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. Anyone who likes seeing such a celebrated leftist being skewered by his own words and arguments will enjoy much of this book hugely, but its overall effect is actually very sobering. What is it about Western intellectual culture, and American academic culture in particular, that has led so many potentially talented people to turn into such blind and hate-filled critics? There is no answer in this book, but it sure makes you wonder. [AM: How did Chomsky manage to "manufacture consent" on his point of view, given the personal nature of his
Introduction vii Peter Collier
ONE Whitewashing Dictatorship in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia 1 Stephen J. Morris TWO Chomsky and the Cold War 35 Thomas M. Nichols THREE Chomsky and the Media: A Kept Press and a Manipulated People 67 Eli Lehrer
FOUR Chomsky’s War against Israel 87 Paul Bogdanor FIVE Chomsky and Holocaust Denial 117 Werner Cohn
SIX Chomsky and 9/11 161 David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh SEVEN Noam Chomsky’s Anti-American Obsession 181 David Horowitz
EIGHT A Corrupted Linguistics 203 Robert D. Levine and Paul M. Postal NINE Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me 233 John Williamson