When you consider how much Chomsky can see in language which nobody else can seem to find, you realize the degree to which Chomsky truly is the intellectual heir of Percival Lowell.
Some of those who follow the career of Noam Chomsky see him as an outsize figure, larger in scale than any of his contemporaries, a megastar in the American university galaxy.
To what academic figures of the past half-century might they compare him? To Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology, who won a Nobel Prize in both Chemistry and Peace, and who was a great scientist as well as a great humanitarian? Or perhaps to Albert Einstein, ensconced in Princeton University for a number of years, who won the Nobel for physics and who was also actively engaged in the great issues of the day?
Perhaps. One difference is that the works of Pauling and Einstein are considered to be vital, foundational and fully accepted by the scientific community.
With Chomsky…not so much. The hallmark of his work is transience and endless revision, with nothing in the field of theoretical linguistics that anyone can point to as a really lasting achievement. He certainly led a lot of people down the primrose path, fully expecting to one day arrive at some high moment of clarification. After fifty years, this moment has not yet arrived.
But I don’t think we have to look too far from home to find the most apt person to whom we might compare Chomsky. Exactly one century ago, in the summer of 1906, one of the most famous scientific figures in the world was working at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Chomsky’s long-time stomping grounds.
His name was Percival Lowell, and he was a professor of astronomy and the director of the Lowell Observatory at MIT. Professor Lowell was, according to the July 8, 1906 edition of The World Magazine, a “member of many scientific societies, and…recognized throughout the world as an expert on the solar system and especially Mars.”
And what exactly was Professor Lowell famous for? Dr. Lowell was the man who discovered that there were little people living on Mars who sustained themselves with the water which ran through the canals which they had constructed.
Dr. Lowell’s discovery confirmed the theories of the noted British science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who was thus quoted: “Professor Lowell told me many things that are simply amazing…Among these things, he states as a fact that the geometrical lines which are seen on the planet are canals constructed by persons of superhuman intellegence for the purpose of distributing water over the surface of the planet.”
According to the article in The World, “Professor Lowell, together with many other astronomers of world-wide reputation, believes that Mars is a very living world subject to an annual cycle of growth, activity and decay.”
Must have been a really exciting time to be alive.
Lowell, much like Chomsky, was most meticulous with his observations. Here’s an example of the detail of life on Mars which Lowell recorded: “…the landmarks of {a region of Mars} lay obliterated by a deluge; not directly, but indirectly. Probably the region was in various stages of vegetal fertility in consequence of a comparatively small body of water thus inundating it. The color of the dark areas was then and is now, to my eyes, a bluish green; quite unmistakably so.”
Amazing how much detail Lowell could see, and how many important conclusions he could draw from scant evidence. What a seer! And when you consider how much Chomsky can see in language which nobody else can seem to find – the universal grammar, the transformations, the parameters, the deep structure – then you must realize the degree to which Chomsky truly is the intellectual heir to the genius of Lowell.
And what of the Martians themselves? “With the disappearance of the water from the surface of the planet the Martians will die.”
Or was it as simple as that? Perhaps the real reason for the disappearance of the Martians was that the United States government had launched some sort of pre-NASA expedition to that planet for the purpose of expanding its empire and that, when the Martians resisted, they were starved and massacred by out-of-control U.S. troops. I see ‘book potential,’ Noam.
At any rate, the idea that there was water on Mars and that it sustained some form of life was a very real idea which was kept alive throughout most of the Twentieth Century. Although such Hollywood productions as The Three Stooges in Orbit spoofed the idea, the fact that it was spoofed at all meant that the general public had been taught to believe that life on Mars was likely. In fact, it was only in the 1970s that NASA’s Mars Orbiter missions succeeded in obtaining enough data to prove definitively that Lowell’s theories were unfounded.
And so for three quarters of a century the fanciful ideas of Professor Lowell held considerable sway over both popular and professional understanding of astronomy. None of it was true, but a lot of people wanted to believe it.
Lowell is now pretty well forgotten, his theories discarded. And what of Chomsky?
Who?
Research source: The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898 – 1911) Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano, Bulfinch Press, 2005.
Professor Lowell’s certitude about Martian life is similar to Al Gore’s prophesies about global warming. I suspect the similarity doesn’t end there.
Chomsky is just one figure in a soon to be long line of exposed charlatan pseudo intellectuals prevalant among the left. Filled with emotional wrought ideas of feeling instead of fact, their childish reaction to normal earthly cycles of heating and cooling, devastation and growth, death and birth are why their influence will never grow beyond the artificial reach of political power.
But, Haliburton!
Ignore the facts, attack the man, that’s the conservative way isn’t it? Gee you guys must be really desperate.
Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar revolutionized the study of linguistics and much besides. Like Einstein, or Carl Jung, or many other great scientific talents of the 20th century, Chomsky’s work in cognitive linguistics has been widely accepted in the scientific community and forms the basis of a whole new direction in his field.
In other words, just like Einstein in physics, the study of linguistics would be very different today had Noam Chomsky not been around. Just like popular music wouldn’t be the same without the Beatles, or South Africa would be a different place today had Nelson Mandela not steered it away from being a blood bath and towards reconciliation. All of these people changed the world for the better in ways it would be hard for any rational person to truly dispute.
Chomsky became the respected intellect he is today via strong, verifiable science and rigorous academic discipline, and you guys hate him for it. You ‘intellectual’ conservatives. It really is a conservative fantasy that Chomsky just disappear into the ether, isn’t it? The more political nails he hits on the head the more you cowardly right-wingers just want him to go away. In fact why don’t you all just try holding your breath until Noam Chomsky becomes irrelevant?
It is because you can’t attack his facts you feel compelled to attack the man, his record and his irrevocable achievements.
Tell me, what have any of you done lately, except vote for a moron?
Max, name one lasting fact the weed league troll chomsky has presented the world?
Dean, why not address the actual arguments presented by Chomsky? For example you could try refuting manufacturing consent or perhaps Chomsky’s argument about America’s ‘imperial ambitions.’ Or maybe asking a conservative to do this is too tall an order? I see this a lot. It’s easier for conservatives to beat up a straw than the real man (in this case Chomsky). Max is refering to the adhominem fallacy committed by the author of the original author.
Max, while I think John’s column is terribly funny, search Dissecting Chomsky on this site. It is a more turgid attempt to dissect Chomsky’s views in detail. Unfortunately, it probably won’t do much good. I have found Chomsky fans resistant to any crticical critique, no matter how nuanced or detailed.
Chump-sky is the worlds most verbose “educated” huckster the looney university system has ever produced. His achievements are far and wide, take for example the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power.
Chomsky has stated that he continues to reside in the United States because he believes it remains the greatest country in the world
“evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America’s advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired.’
I guess like most leftists they like the free speech part, only with the guarantees of free speech can they spout their mouths, free speech is of course only free speech when it agrees with their ideology, all other speech is hate speech and should be censured.
This is the only real achievement Mr. Chimp-sky has done
Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who according to some researchers learned 125 signs in ASL, was named after Noam Chomsky.
Now if only the followers of Chompsky could learn as well as Nim.
Thanks, Shadroui. Yes, if any others go to my blog The Anti-Chomskyan Redoubt and if you go to my “Articles Published on FrontPageMag” you will see a number of articles attacking Chomsky’s linguistics theories. Thanks.
Gee,Chomsky can see in language which nobody else can; and voila!, that makes him an expert in foreign relations, too! Amazing. Simply amazing.
What is real scary is that Madam Hillary is a big follower. Or was until it was discovered by others.
“name one lasting fact the weed league troll chomsky has presented the world?”
OK.
Chomsky’s work on languages has greatly influenced the study of computer science. The Chomsky Normal Form is based on the Chomsky Heirarchy and “many proofs in the field of languages and computability make use of the Chomsky normal form”. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_normal_form ]
Languages, or a set of accepting/rejecting rules operating on a set of defined symbols (…which is exactly how computers operate, and why this is so important to computer science), that can be written in this form are context-free and are provably computable by a universal turing machine.
And Turing Machines “are extremely basic symbol-manipulating devices which — despite their simplicity — can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer that could possibly be constructed.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine]
So if we can pose a decision problem as a Chomsky Normal form language, we prove that the problem is computable by modern computers. Very. Very. Important.
Thanks, Jon, for your comments on the Chomsky normal form. Unfortunately, what you may be leaving out is that these computer-based approaches to the analysis of language never worked out in showing how languages work. Thus, Chomsky never actually accomplished what he set out to do as he wrongly assumed that languages work in the programmatical way that computers do. They don’t.
– John Williamson