Talk:Noam Chomsky/Archive 6

message: Thank you for presenting a well-balanced, warts-and-all portrayal of this "controversial" American figure.  Most of the left-leaning pages on Wikipedia are full of self-congratulatory and uncritical assertions -- yours isn't.  Thank you for presenting a balanced and encyclopedic entry.  Morton devonshire 20:13, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Thank You

message: I believe this is an important point. I changed it earlier, but someone reverted it.
Does anyone have an objection in inserting the "swing state" fact? cihan 6 July 2005 23:56 (UTC)
:I doubt it.  I think the additions were good.  I went ahead and re-added them.  I don't think they were reverted intentionally, but to correct the preceding vandalism. Unended July 7, 2005 00:05 (UTC)
::In this case I was aware of the vandalisms but did in fact object to the edit.  That his support was limited and qualified does not mean that it is only "perceived" by others--he made a statement to the effect and that is verifiable, and I would rather that his reasoning be stated for his own part than to be attributed by others.  I do recall the instance but not the point on swing states.  Do you have a good reference at hand?  --TJive July 7, 2005 06:36 (UTC)
:::It makes sense to say "limited support", not "perceived support" or "support".  — Chameleon 7 July 2005 07:49 (UTC)
:::Sorry, TJive, I thought the revert was inadvertent.  I don't really like "support" at all, although if it is used maybe "tactical support" is best, since Chomsky's "support" for Kerry was limited to his belief that Kerry would be slightly less harmful to Americans than Bush.  Is there not a better word for his position than "support"? Unended July 7, 2005 13:09 (UTC)
:I don't know about this one. I believe that including Chomsky's political stances in an article about him is perfectly reasonable. The question is, are specifics like this really central to the character? It seems natural that, were Chomsky to take a 'lesser of two evils' approach, he would endorse Kerry with reserves. However I feel this sort of thing is implied enough by a description of Chomsky's political leanings. Edward Grefenstette 11:19, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chomsky only encouraged voting for Kerry in swing states

message: npov tags need *clear* discussion indicating why; otherwise they will proliferate in every controversial article.
Benwing 23:22, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  that npov again 

message: "Since his visit to Cuba in 2003, Chomsky has failed miserably to denounce the repression against peacefull opponents of Castro's regime and the application of the death penalty agianst 3 negros as did Jose Saramago, the Portuguese intelectual, member of the Portuguese Communist Party. Some much for Chomsky's anarchist credentials."
Can anyone substantiate a word of this?  --TJive 21:46, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
:all I can say is ATTACK OF THE IPs J. Parker Stone 05:59, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Cuba section

message: Any characterization of Chomky´s work in Linguistics in terms of just 'influencing the field' as was proposed in a recent reversal is  wrong and essentially misguided.
Let us start with  his doctoral dissertation. It was so atypical of the work done by the linguistic establishement that it found no publisher, and it was only by intervention of R. Jakobson-- another outsider and one of the founding fathers of XX century formal linguistics--that a short version was eventually published in Holland in a rather obscure series ,Janua Linguarum.
Secondly, it was necessary an almost book-lenghth review of Syntactic Structures by Bob Lees to begin to give a glimpse of the inportance and revolutionary character of his work to the outside world, meaning the structuralist-descriptivist establishment, who largely ignored it .
In fact it was the change in attitude that was simmering in some areas outside mainstream  psychology, like cybernetics, information theory, and early artificial intelligence that was to frutify in what we now call the cogintive revolution -- bombastic or not -- that made  Chomsky´s own ideas about language acceptable . He himself contributed to this  by a celebrated  review of Skinner´s work that revealed the limitations of any behaviorist approach to mental phenomena.
This is all plain today and was assimilated into mainstream academia.
It  was at the time a complete break from the established methodology and goals of linguistic research. In fact it was so new that no linguist educated in the structuralist tradition ever came to appreciate the novelty of Chomky´s work. 
That´s when we -- bombastically or not -- talk of scientific revolutuion. Or you might prefer to use kuhnian vocabulary of 'paradigm shift', or Bachelard 'epistemological break'. In fact only a new generation of young scholars was able to appprecite the scope of the ideas originally developed by C.,  and to pursue his basic insights into a rich mesh of new contributions.
Wiki-correctness must not be a pretext to accept a  mellow and uncharacteristic representation of what is work of originality and depth that radically changed a whole field of research and became a 'de facto' approach against which all competeting or dissenting opinion continually have  to measure up.
~~pete
: I agree. Chomsky almost single-handedly set up an entirely new approach to linguistics which spread all the way across American academia (although there have always been competing approaches of course). And the Chomsykan revolution in linguistics was a vital element of the broader cognitive revolution.
:The fact that Chomskyan linguistics departments were set up in many major universities is a fairly objective way of showing that Chomsky really did revolutionize the subject. Or at the very least, you could say that he colonized it with his students.
:However, I do understand why people might want softer language. One compromise would be to weasel word it: "...ideas which many regarded as revolutionary" or some such. I think this would be one case where that's justified, since even most anti-Chomskyan linguists would agree. My personal opinion is that the level of controversy here is about the same as it is in "Einstein revolutionized physics" or something like that. You don't even have to agree with anything Einstein ever said to agree with a statement such as that. Cadr 23:43, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Would it help to find some linguistics reference works (dictionaries etc), text books etc that can be cited as testifying to the importance of Chomsky's work?  For example, Newmeyer, FJ, "Was there a Chomskyan Revolution?" Language, Vol 62, p1-18.  The use of the word "revolution" is of sociological interest, however: --Dannyno 09:37, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  ==   N.C.  == 

message: I've set up a sandbox for a "Criticisms of Noam Chomsky" article.  To start with, I've just copied the text and external links from the main article.  If nobody objects, I'd like to add the article to Wikipedia and delete the corresponding sections from the main article. Russil Wvong 18:01, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've created the Criticisms of Noam Chomsky article, and linked it from the main article. Russil Wvong 23:39, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sandbox for "Criticisms of Noam Chomsky" 

message: There isn't a single link to any external sources which are critical of Chomsky. Could it be that Chomsky supporters fear any scrutiny of the professor?
DrZin 05:06, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deletion of Dissenting Link; Manufacturing consent?