Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Chomsky “Bernie Would’ve Won"" video.
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+Jeff W The truism is that there must be an innate, more or less discrete cognitive structure associated with acquiring human language, otherwise other creatures raised in human environments would acquire language like we do.
That assumption is motivated by what he called the "poverty of stimulus," which doesn't have to do with the number of words that children hear (there aren't more than 500,000 words in English, so the 42 million is either an exaggeration or a result of duplication) but with the fact that they don't hear many of the utterances they produce. I don't have any stake in whether or not it's true, but that's my understanding of it based on reading some of his technical and non-technical books five or six years ago. (I think he's undoubtedly wrong about the evolutionary development of the language faculty across the animal kingdom.)
As I said, the newer theories like the usage-based acquisition championed by Tomasello maybe have some interesting insights, like observing how other faculties contribute to language learning.
One problem with UG is that it relies too much on ideal speakers and listeners. (Although, there is a reason that physicists don't do particle experiments under a tree in the quad.) But in many ways Cognitive linguistics and UBA seem like a step backwards. Instead of pointing to an LAD, they postulate a system of general learning that somehow (it isn't explained as far as I'm aware) we humans have but other animals don't. One thing UBA relies on is the ability to categorize. But of course a great deal of categorization comes from and perhaps is impossible without language, so I'm not sure how that's any help. I also come across the word "generalize" a lot in newer theories, but of course a theory should explain how children generalize from one sentence to another. So, maybe a step backwards, though sometimes that's what needed.
But all of that is beyond irrelevant in a discussion of Chomsky's political statements. It strikes me as just a way to get a jab in.
Finally, the Slovenian jester. Can we take a moment to appreciate the irony in criticizing Chomsky for a potentially false scientific idea and then in the next breath citing the ramblings of someone like Slavoj Zizek, a Lacanian by way of movie reviews and softcore Leninist for the masses? Okay, let's get into that pitiful excuse of a retort.
The title is taken from his opening salvo (not quite opening: he genuflects a little, like a fighter bowing to an opponent): "I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever!" I want to draw attention to the phrase, "in his descriptions in his whatever." I realize that this is an off-the-cuff remark by a non-native speaker, but is that the level of specificity* we want, "in his whatever"? It doesn't get any better.
Next sentence: "I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge." Note the strong word, "defended." He continues, "And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that. And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know. But I totally reject this line of reasoning."
That's pretty damning. Chomsky "defended" the Khmer Rouge. He thought they were "the nicest guys in the universe" and had to be "compelled to admit" otherwise. Again, it's an extemporaneous remark, no one expects Zizek to have quotes memorized, but how does that stack up against what Chomsky and Hermann wrote? Well, in the immortal words of Chomsky, if you actually read what they fucking wrote, they said nothing of the sort.
It's worth drawing this out, because Zizek likes to portray himself as a free-wheeling maverick intellectual, a master manipulator of ideology. And here he is repeating the same third-rate muck the right wing has been flicking their tongues over for the past half century.
It explicitly was not Chomsky's aim to establish the facts of mass murder and genocide in either East Timor or Cambodia, but to demonstrate the selectivity of the Western media in singling out a noble victim, the Cambodians under Pol Pot (whom it later turned out, the US had a large part in allowing to ascend to power), but ignoring the victims of a US client state, the Timorese, who were being killed in vastly greater proportion.
The point was not to say that the Khmer Rouge were "nice guys," but that the media of in powerful countries routinely ignore the victims of their and their allies' atrocities. Maybe a 12 year old can understand that, because Zizek apparently can't. It's sort of like today when one criticizes US foreign policy in the Middle East and gets branded a terrorist sympathizer who relishes when ISIS beheads people. It's easy to see how disingenuous that line of pseudo-reasoning is. One can criticize a superpower and how it turns a blind eye to its atrocities (we have no problem doing this to other nations) without cheerleading the actions of some other malefactor.
Here's Zizek again: "For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there."
It's hard to know where to begin with this mess. Zizek started out by criticizing Chomsky for being empirically wrong—and now he's arguing that you don't have to empirical at all. You just have to listen to the discourse. That's real evidence. I suppose one could also listen to people in America rail against White Genocide to know that something is wrong. After all, you don't need any evidence of such a thing; merely that people talk about it. The other disingenuous thing is that he pretends like Chomsky (and Hermann) were only concerned with hard evidence, photographs and so forth. Which is not true. They were reviewing the journalistic literature, which was largely based on eyewitness testimony, government and third party estimates, etc. In other words, a range of data, including more subjective and more objective measures.
Equally egregious is that Zizek takes Chomsky to task for not critiquing ideology...but that's what Chomsky and Hermann were doing in their comparison of coverage of the Khmer Rouge and East Timor atrocities, addressing how ideology informs and shapes what gets covered, just without the Lacanian windowdressing.
I wish I could go on, but I really don't see the point. Zizek is all over the place.
EDIT: I have to add one more thing. Zizek mentions Stalinism and how you don't need photographic evidence to prove that the gulag existed. Maybe it's a lapse of memory on his part, but the gulag existed long before Stalin or Stalinism. In fact, by some measures Stalin didn't oversee the worst years of the gulag (Anne Applebaum writes about this; I can't locate the book presently). For decades, the Marxist-Leninist, Mao Thought left ignored the gulag despite an equally damnable "public discourse" and plenty of first-hand accounts of "something terrifyingly pathological," if not...photographs. So much for Zizek's rigor. If I were you, I wouldn't take anything he says seriously without first researching it.
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Here's Chomsky's reply: https://libcom.org/library/fantasies-noam-chomsky
While not the text usually cited (from The Political Economy of Human Rights) this is a close approximation, available online: https://chomsky.info/19770625/
You can also find Bernard Hermann responding to similar accusations in the NYT.
*We all have little things that trigger our BS alarms. One of mine, rightly or wrongly, is when people use words like "precisely" all the time without being precise. That's Zizek.
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+Jeff W Zizek is sputtering buffoon and his objections in that video amount to little more than gross misreadings of the kind one is used to hearing from the right. He likes to say things that sound radical and iconoclastic, but if you break them down, there's not much there.
As for Chomsky's linguistic theories, the language acquisition device is not really a theory; Chomsky himself actually hasn't written about or researched it in detail but relies on the work of others, particularly researchers studying child acquisition; it's merely an assumption—what he regards as a truism—that undergirds his rationalist approach to linguistic theory.
Linguistics is such a young science, it's to be expected that its founder would be wrong about many, if not most, things. At the very least Chomsky set the field in a more scientific direction. I'm not a linguist, but the newer theories, like usage-based, don't strike me as being much better.
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