His point still stands though. In most fields, no matter how complex, it is possible to generalize and explain things at a fairly superficial level, in terms a layman would understand.

-"In physics, a particle can have different properties at once!"

-"Some people think that the language you speak defines what you can think! There's even languages without numbers, and those people have trouble counting!"

-"There are political philosophies that say everybody should share in everything equally, and others where only the people who work the hardest should get the most stuff!"

-"If you eat more calories than you spend, you'll get fat!"

-"If too many people try to use the same wireless signal at once, it'll get jammed up and won't work right."

And this type of thing seems to hold true for most disciplines. It's possible to get similar layman explanations for just about anything except for, as he's pointing out certain brands of philosophy.

Since we know that a person cannot learn a complex topic at its most complex, they must take simpler stepping stones in a subject till they can achieve comprehension at a high level this implies a couple possibilities:

1) People in this field have worked up through these stepping stones, and by building on various axioms and following certain lines of reasoning, it's possible to achieve a level of comprehension that is based on reducible and explainable models of thinking.

2) There are no stepping stones and it's complex word gibberish without particular meaning. To get "in" to the field, you must master the phrases, secret handshakes and passcodes, to learn the common language of the field, so that you can appear for all purposes as one of the group. It'd be similar to learning a particular dialect of street slang and customs so that you can fit in to a particular neighborhood and not be identified as an immediate outsider. Of course even in that case, words, phrases, actions, customs are all reducible and explainable in simple, general, layman terms ("you wear big clothes and stand and walk like this to thwart the ability of an observer, say the police, in determining if you are carrying a weapon", "you say 'jigga-g' when talking about the leader of the gang", "you spray tags as markings to indicate territory to other gangs").

If 1 is true, then Chomsky should be able to find somebody, anybody, who could do a passable job at explaining this topic in general layman terms such as is possible in every other field. Perhaps he's not really trying very hard, or perhaps the people who inhabit this discipline are particularly intransigent to formulating an articulation of their field for layman without using the domain vocabulary specific to it?

There's a growing consensus external to the field, however, that 2 is true. It would actually be rather simple for the practitioners of this field to counter this sentiment, simply provide a layman's explanation of the topic. But since that seems to be something that nobody can do, and statements like "And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult." do nothing to assuage this.

The original article of course, highlights one of a number of embarrassing public episodes where a complete outsider strings together a pastiche of phrases into a paper or a presentation or some such, and it passes the muster of the group as being legitimate and meaningful to that group even though it is, by way of purpose, complete gibberish. Again, this further supports the notion that 2 is correct, that the field is composed mostly of nonsense and claims of "no it's not" without supporting evidence or a rough, layman's exposition does nothing to counter that.