I find it interesting that the article makes no mention of his linguistic work. The Chomsky Hierarchy has had a massive impact on the world of software development, for example. If you’ve ever written a regular expression, you’ve used his work.
Haven’t most of Chomsky’s linguistic theories been discredited at this point? Nothing against the man, science moves on, that’s just how it works. It certainly says nothing about his political activism.
I honestly don’t know. I do know that people regularly reference the Chomsky Hierarchy (or works based off of it) when writing FSAs or parsers, since the class of grammar dictates what you can use. A FSA can’t be used to completely parse a context-free grammar (or anything above it). The thing about parsing HTML with regex is an example of that, and is what first keyed me in to the different types of grammars.
I don’t know much about it, but it could be that his theories have good applications in computer science even if they don’t with human language. Science is also like that.
There’s a summary here. I know nothing about the field, and I know his theories were controversial, but just glancing over them right now quickly, they look pretty sensible to me. Also, even if they weren’t totally right from a modern perspective and needed some refinement, it looks like what they replaced at the time was pure nonsense (e.g. Skinner’s total batshit early-days-of-psychology theories about how language worked).
I suspect that a certain amount of criticism of his linguistic theories is from people who had sour grapes about his political theories. It’s hard to remember today how unanimous was the rabid disagreement with Chomsky’s political views all the way up until the rise of the internet made “the US isn’t always the good guys” an acceptable view outside of the fringes. Up until the mid-90s, the motherfucker was more or less Judas Iscariot.
I find it very interesting that he didn’t start out in political science, but had a background in cognitive and mathematical realms where you can either be right or wrong based on how well your theory matches the reality, and if you’re wrong you have to fix your theory and try again. And then also that when he started analyzing political topics, he showed an uncommon-for-the-field ability to analyze statements and theories to see if they were true (which made him some kind of wild and radical outlier compared to how more or less every single other professional at the time liked to look at the world).
Wasn’t one of his first works showing how American media coverage, especially the New York Times, make key changes in articles about Israel? He found internationally distributed articles and showed that US media always changed articles about Israel to paint them in a better light. It was really great work.
I find it interesting that the article makes no mention of his linguistic work. The Chomsky Hierarchy has had a massive impact on the world of software development, for example. If you’ve ever written a regular expression, you’ve used his work.
Haven’t most of Chomsky’s linguistic theories been discredited at this point? Nothing against the man, science moves on, that’s just how it works. It certainly says nothing about his political activism.
I honestly don’t know. I do know that people regularly reference the Chomsky Hierarchy (or works based off of it) when writing FSAs or parsers, since the class of grammar dictates what you can use. A FSA can’t be used to completely parse a context-free grammar (or anything above it). The thing about parsing HTML with regex is an example of that, and is what first keyed me in to the different types of grammars.
I don’t know much about it, but it could be that his theories have good applications in computer science even if they don’t with human language. Science is also like that.
There’s a summary here. I know nothing about the field, and I know his theories were controversial, but just glancing over them right now quickly, they look pretty sensible to me. Also, even if they weren’t totally right from a modern perspective and needed some refinement, it looks like what they replaced at the time was pure nonsense (e.g. Skinner’s total batshit early-days-of-psychology theories about how language worked).
I suspect that a certain amount of criticism of his linguistic theories is from people who had sour grapes about his political theories. It’s hard to remember today how unanimous was the rabid disagreement with Chomsky’s political views all the way up until the rise of the internet made “the US isn’t always the good guys” an acceptable view outside of the fringes. Up until the mid-90s, the motherfucker was more or less Judas Iscariot.
Chomsky’s work undeniably transformed (cognitive) linguistics, but a large portion of Chomskyan linguistics is heavily debated/controversial.
His universal grammar, although debated, at least contributed a lot to Sapir-Whorf linguistics generally being recognized as wrong, which is nice.
His theories aren’t discredited. Many people have misconstrued them however. I wrote about this in a reply to someone else.
I find it very interesting that he didn’t start out in political science, but had a background in cognitive and mathematical realms where you can either be right or wrong based on how well your theory matches the reality, and if you’re wrong you have to fix your theory and try again. And then also that when he started analyzing political topics, he showed an uncommon-for-the-field ability to analyze statements and theories to see if they were true (which made him some kind of wild and radical outlier compared to how more or less every single other professional at the time liked to look at the world).
Wasn’t one of his first works showing how American media coverage, especially the New York Times, make key changes in articles about Israel? He found internationally distributed articles and showed that US media always changed articles about Israel to paint them in a better light. It was really great work.