Right Wing Nation

Okay, I’m really going to stick my neck on the chopping block here. I’m going to tell you exactly how I feel about Noam Chomsky — not as a political gadfly, but an academic. I have no respect for Chomsky. For those of you who don’t know, Chomsky has even more status in his field than Einstein does in physics. Chomsky is God. Nobody ever questions Chomsky. Never.

Except me. I entered the PhD program because I questioned Chomsky.

The great myth preposterous myth laughably preposterous myth Laughably Preposterous Myth Laughably Preposterous Myth is that Chomsky single-handedly took an intellectually dead field and revitalized it, made it intellectually relevant once again.

Pardon me while I laugh until my side hurts.

The best thing Chomsky ever wrote as an academic was his review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. It was the best thing he wrote because Skinner was full of horse manure, and because Chomsky did not, in his review, propose any of his mentalist nonsense.

I will concede that Chomsky sparked a whole generation of creativity, though delusion would be more apt. But it was snake oil. Every bit of it. What Chomsky did was spark a whole generation of “research” done by people who had done way too much bad acid.

I will also concede that Chomsky’s first movement, Transformational Grammar, allowed one (intuitively) to relate what were obviously related linguistic strings, such as “Did I put my keys on the table?” and “I put my keys on the table,” which previously could not be done. Fine so far.

The problem lay in the way his theory related those two strings. You see, we had a “deep structure” and a “surface structure” and we have these rules or mechanisms that move words from place to place when they go from deep to surface. Uhm, sorry, but that’s utter quackery.

How do you test for the presence of this “deep structure” in language? Where, exactly, is it, since “surface structure” is what comes out of your mouth? Where are these “rules,” and what form do they take? Where do they live in the brain? What can and cannot be a “rule” in this theory?

But wait, because as the years went on, Chomsky’s theory got even sillier and less testable. We went from having these two structures to three, “D-structure,” “S-structure,” and “Phonological form,” where the last, “Phonological form” is what is actually said. Why? Well, so Chomsky could incorporate yet another set of untestable, unprovable “rules,” this time phonological rules, into his theory.

And we had hundreds of “rules” mystically transforming sentence into sentence, more “rules” proposed in every paper that came out, with little justification, and again, all untestable. Worse, every paper came out with more “rules” and many were ad hoc, justified only because the existing “rules” could not handle this particular sentence, so hey, let’s make up another “rule”!

To give the Chomsky fan club credit, they did realize this was a problem. Unfortunately, the solution was even more ridiculous. Suddenly, we had one rule, Move-α, which translates as “move anything anywhere, like, it’s cool, man, and after you move that α, pass the joint.” This obviously presents a problem, since you can’t just move anything anywhere, so instead of hundreds of “rules,” we suddenly had hundreds of constraints on that one “rule.”

This immediately created a problem, particularly for certain kinds of sentences. So we had to have “phonologically null categories,” that is, “words” you never hear, speak or see — but they’re there because Noam says so (actually, because his theory would fall apart if they didn’t exist). So in “D-structure,” perhaps a third of the “words” are “phonologically null” and yes, we move them from place to place as we go to “S-structure” and “Phonological form,” you know, to satisfy all those “constraints”.

The one time I know of that Chomsky was asked about the existence of these “phonologically null” items and he replied, he said, more or less, that we know they exist the same way physicists know particles exist, we can see the result of their presence. And that was when I lost what little respect I had at the time for Noam Chomsky. Physicists can detect particles based upon their results because they know how particles behave; inventing “phonologically null” items and inventing their “behavior”, then turning around and claiming that you know they exist because you can see the results of their behavior is pure academic fraud.

And that’s what Chomsky is, and always has been. An academic fraud.

No, he is worse than a fraud. He’s a cult leader. There has been for years an Inner Circle of Chomsky and His Cheelas, and frequently, if you read the literature, you will see references such as, “personal communication from Brother Will,” or “unpublished paper, Brother Will, MIT” offered as the sole support for an argument. Unless you are part of the Inner Circle of Chomsky and His Cheelas, you will never see those unpublished papers. The Cult is closed, and so is their research.

I had to take a seminar once in the “Empty Category Principle.” Now, if you haven’t fallen to it yet, the “Empty Category Principle” is one of those “constraints” on that single “rule,” (you know, that “move anything anywhere you want and it’s cool” rule) and get ready for this one, the “Empty Category Principle” constrains how these invisible, unheard, unseen items can and cannot be moved about.

Yes, okay, I’ll wait till you’re through laughing.

Done? Good. Okay, here’s why Chomsky is worse than an academic fraud. The class was about sixteen, very earnest, PhD students, nearly all of them Chomsky Cheelas, and the instructor was a High Priestess of the Religion of Chomsky. She would put a perfectly lovely sentence on the board and say, “This sentence violates the Empty Category Principle,” and the students would gasp and say, “Oh no! Then it can’t be a sentence!” yet it was. A beautiful sentence. Nothing wrong with it at all. Yet, here were glassy-eyed Cheelas, all aghast because the Cult of Chomsky overrode their common sense. Nobody (well okay, nobody but me and one other student) pointed out the obvious: It’s a perfectly good sentence, so maybe the “principle” is the problem. Sure, some suggested that we tweak the “principle,” but nobody (well okay, I did, and one other person, much to the consternation of the rest of the class) suggested that perhaps all this mentalism and all these untestable, unprovable “invisible categories” and “constraints” on moving them about was utter nonsense.

Stop and think about that for a minute. In twenty-plus years, nobody stopped and said, “Wait. We can’t see the word, we can’t hear it, we don’t say it, so maybe it’s not there.” Not once. That’s not rational. That’s just nuts. And trust me, I got all kinds of attacks because I did stop and say that in classes. Nobody could answer my questions — you know, like how do we test for the presence of this, and if we can’t, how can we say it exists — but I sure did get lots of crap thrown at me.

That’s not science. That’s not academics. That’s a cult.

The practitioners of the Religion of Chomsky go way beyond drinking the grape kool-aid at Jonestown. They’re certifiably irrational. And they have the nerve to toss around all these untestable, unprovable theories, and justify them by evoking the phrase “psychological reality,” which is no reality at all.

But the Cult of Chomsky went from merely delusional to utterly insane when it migrated to language acquisition. Suddenly, we had to have these (again) invisible, untestable, mysterious mental organs (the so-called “language acquisition device”) Again, where was this “mental organ” in the brain? What form did it take? How do we test for its existence? All inconvenient questions, and all brushed aside, with “psychological reality,” or “the theory requires it.” Then, that “mental organ” transformed into a tripartite form, because it had to do three jobs, and of course, all three were as untestable as the original.

One thing I will say for current research. At least a few connectionists have entered the field, and are saying (with little result), and demonstrating (with little result) that no, you do not need some untestable “mental organ” to explain language acquisition. At least, “Chomsky says so!” does not carry quite the weight it once did, though it can still silence critics.

Chomsky and mentalism is, I suppose, one step above postmodernism, in that it at least pretends to be science. Or maybe the dishonesty puts it a step below postmodernism. It’s hard to decide. Either way, the dissent has begun, and Chomsky and the mentalists can’t be dethroned and decapitated soon enough.