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Noam is on the short list of the most intellectually impactful human beings of the period since Descartes: Newton, Darwin, Smith, maybe Ricardo, Marx, maybe Fre

Noam is on the short list of the most intellectually impactful human beings of the period since Descartes: Newton, Darwin, Smith, maybe Ricardo, Marx, maybe Frege or Russell, Einstein, Turing, Keynes, Chomsky, and a scant few more. His politics may motivate people to disregard him, but mostly he's just come to the devastating conclusion (for solid reasons) that people working on language outside the Chomskyan tradition are not doing science; semantics, linguistic anthropology, and some areas of psychology are just wind. People who do such work will not understand his criticism because their academic standing depends on their not understanding it. There is thus a supply of motivated PhDs ready to dismiss and de-emphasize his contributions. Some of the same applies to philosophers who work on language.

skybrian 9y ago
Although oddly, Chomsky seems more important for computer languages than natural languages? The most successful machine translation systems don't use Chomsky's grammars. But their compiler's parser probably does. More: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
- jeffmcmahan 9y ago
  As the article you linked says of Chomsky's view (correctly), "Statistical language models have had engineering success, but that is irrelevant to science." Chomsky wants to know how your brain does things, and not how best to make a computer do something to approximate that. He reiterated to me and a few others in 2009, during a seminar, that right from the start he always said that the only way to do machine translation is brute force statistics -- but back in the 50s he took the funding for translation research, and then just did whatever he wanted with it.
Froyoh 9y ago
And Knuth!
- jeffmcmahan 9y ago
  Haha, yes, perhaps. "I found the mathematical approach to grammar immediately appealing---so much so, in fact, that I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961." - Knuth
DFHippie 9y ago
Within linguistics there's plenty of politics associated with Chomsky but it's mostly politics within the field, it has nothing to do with politics writ large. He is cited more than any other linguist I expect. I haven't paid attention in about 15 years now, but back in the day there were plenty of linguists who liked his politics plenty but were sore that lines of inquiry they found fruitful -- reasoning about how linguistic form relates to function in particular -- had been banished from the influential journals and conferences by Chomsky and his acolytes. Semantics is plenty formal, by the way. Lambda calculus and other formalisms get lots of print.
- jeffmcmahan 9y ago
  Yes, as I said above, politics (re American policy) may have some role, but mostly, he has argued forcefully against a whole range of approaches to studying language. And many people (most prominently those in the Barbara Partee/Montague tradition) don't like that. Oh, and at last look he was not just the most cited linguist. He was the most cited living human being. (And FWIW, I came to linguistics from philosophy via formal semantics; I once held negative opinions of Chomsky myself. It took time to see that he was right.)
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  - DFHippie 9y ago
    I wouldn't say that I ever came to the view that his anti-functionalist views were right. In other fields of science, biology, for example, it's taken as given that one can and should reason from function to form and vice versa. I got my PhD and left to program computers, in large part because I'd soured on the politics within the field. I was interested in semantics myself.

skybrian 9y ago

Although oddly, Chomsky seems more important for computer languages than natural languages? The most successful machine translation systems don't use Chomsky's grammars. But their compiler's parser probably does. More: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

jeffmcmahan 9y ago
As the article you linked says of Chomsky's view (correctly), "Statistical language models have had engineering success, but that is irrelevant to science." Chomsky wants to know how your brain does things, and not how best to make a computer do something to approximate that. He reiterated to me and a few others in 2009, during a seminar, that right from the start he always said that the only way to do machine translation is brute force statistics -- but back in the 50s he took the funding for translation research, and then just did whatever he wanted with it.

Froyoh 9y ago

And Knuth!

jeffmcmahan 9y ago
Haha, yes, perhaps. "I found the mathematical approach to grammar immediately appealing---so much so, in fact, that I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961." - Knuth

DFHippie 9y ago

Within linguistics there's plenty of politics associated with Chomsky but it's mostly politics within the field, it has nothing to do with politics writ large. He is cited more than any other linguist I expect. I haven't paid attention in about 15 years now, but back in the day there were plenty of linguists who liked his politics plenty but were sore that lines of inquiry they found fruitful -- reasoning about how linguistic form relates to function in particular -- had been banished from the influential journals and conferences by Chomsky and his acolytes. Semantics is plenty formal, by the way. Lambda calculus and other formalisms get lots of print.

jeffmcmahan 9y ago
Yes, as I said above, politics (re American policy) may have some role, but mostly, he has argued forcefully against a whole range of approaches to studying language. And many people (most prominently those in the Barbara Partee/Montague tradition) don't like that. Oh, and at last look he was not just the most cited linguist. He was the most cited living human being. (And FWIW, I came to linguistics from philosophy via formal semantics; I once held negative opinions of Chomsky myself. It took time to see that he was right.)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- DFHippie 9y ago
  I wouldn't say that I ever came to the view that his anti-functionalist views were right. In other fields of science, biology, for example, it's taken as given that one can and should reason from function to form and vice versa. I got my PhD and left to program computers, in large part because I'd soured on the politics within the field. I was interested in semantics myself.