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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.
by 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 agoYes, 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 agoI 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.