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I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell. But whenever I hear him speak outside his nich

• twoodfin 3y ago
  What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective sense there is such a thing as “faciness” that our brains recognize. In the same way, I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red—even accepting that it’s the structure of our optical and neural systems that are the basis for this fact.
  • dsego 3y ago
    Does that relate to Plato's world of ideas?
    • botanical57 3y ago
      To his doctrine of the Forms, yes I think it does. He seemed to think that when humans gain knowledge, they do not generate it, but rather discover it. For knowledge to be discovered, it must have already existed - in the abstract, non-material world of the Forms. Plato had an involved epistemological argument for why the human process of gaining incrementally less partial knowledge of a subject fundamentally must be a process of discovery - but I would fail to do it justice. Chomsky seems to imply that in a moral context, similarly, as humans learn abstract concepts and boundaries from sparse data, we are also carrying out a process of discovery. He seems to skip over the epistemological reasoning.
  • ajuc 3y ago
    The only definition is "most people recognize it" and there are people who disagree about it or don't recognize it at all. How does it differ from something that exists subjectively then? I'd say arguing that colors are like morality is pro-relativism stance.
  • roenxi 3y ago
    > I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red We don't. For starters there are colourblind people, for seconds there is no specific colour that can be called "red". There is a large and fuzzy category of red-ish colours like blood-red or rose-red. Even if there is some academic "these light wavelengths are the ones" definition of red that is arbitrary. Aliens might have drawn the lines elsewhere.
    • twoodfin 3y ago
      This is exactly Chomsky’s point. Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. To pick an example closer to the morality case: Hunger could equally be called a subjective phenomenon. Aliens may not experience anything like hunger. A rare genetic condition might produce a human who experiences escalating hunger as an escalating degree of pleasure. But as humans making our way through the real world, we are forced by physical and anatomical reality to see the causes and consequences of human hunger as objective truths.
      • roenxi 3y ago
        > ... Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. ... You didn't consider what I wrote - colourblind people get through life without considering the colour of traffic lights at all. They have to. They are colour blind. The colour of a traffic light as a practical matter is a subjective fact. In fact, the practical colour of a traffic light is more subjective than the philosophical take because at least philosophers can be convinced with a wavelength argument.
      • ajuc 3y ago
        Hunger is subjective. Starvation isn't.
        • chromoblob 3y ago
          Hunger is pretty objective if your body isn't malfunctioning (and it never is logically, "malfunctioning" body isn't yours). If your body works correctly, you are not free to choose whether to consider yourself hungry, and this is what I understand as objectivity.
  • ducharmdev 3y ago
    It's odd to me that you chose color as an example of something objective, since so much about perception is subjective. Even if we think about it in more quantitative terms, with red being defined as having a dominant wavelength approximately 625–740 nanometres, it's a bit of an arbitrary definition isn't it? If we observe a wavelength of 624, objectively we might say it's not red, but someone may still observe it as red considering how close it is to red. Or someone with protanopia won't see anything in those bounds as red either.
    • beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
      Color relies on ostensive definition. It's a public part of language whether someone is color-blind or not. When we say "that car is red" we are, in a sense, pointing to something and then using the concept and rules of color in our language. We might see something as a particular color through perception, but when we see "that --->" we are, in a sense, "seeing" in language (including body language, for instance. You could ask me which one is red and I could simply point). We, of course, might disagree, but color-blind people learn which traffic lights are red, green, or yellow, regardless of their perceptual faculties. Because the color is not just what you see, but what you say.
      • ajuc 3y ago
        I use f.lux - it changes the screen color temperature through the day to make it easier to sleep. If I sit late at night my desktop walpaper (which is a regular photo with a lot of blue sky) becomes basically all red if you look at rgb values. But I still perceive the sky in it as blue because other things are "more red" so it looks blue, and because I know sky is blue, and because I remember how it looked before and the change happened slowly. All of these scream "relativism" to me, in fact the mapping to common moral fallacies is surprisingly direct :) When law changes around you you might not recognize when it got evil. Obeying the law is good because it's the law. When everything around is evil - small evil seems good. As for language and law - these are arbitrary. "Yellow pages" can be any color, so can "blue screen of death". Green traffic lights are actually blue in some countries.
• ch4s3 3y ago
  Yeah I have to say he's always seemed like he made up his mind about the world by the 60s and hasn't really adjusted since. His Ukraine takes are right in line with his awful takes on the Cambodian genocide, which he still claims didn't happen.
  • imjonse 3y ago
    which he *never* claimed didn't happen. You are another of those quickly educated on PragerU and similar Youtube channels but who never go to original sources?
    • ch4s3 3y ago
      No he definitely made the claim. He was quoted saying “tales of holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda.” He went on to say that refugees were making up the stories to please the west. It’s in the 1977 article on his own website. Chomsky apologists never seem to be able to admit that he carried water for the worst regimes of the 20th century. To be clear there are nearly 24,000 confirmed mass graves accounting for nearly 1.3 million dead. Fully 60% of the examined remains showed clear signs of execution with the most common method being a pickaxe. Chomsky said the refugees made it up. He’s never taken that claim back.
      • imjonse 3y ago
        Due to little info coming out of Cambodia at the time, from what I read, Chomsky said he underestimated the immensity of the genocide, not that he denied it. Later he acknowledged it, you make it sound he's some sort of Holocaust denier. Funnily Chomsky gets a lot more flack for incorrectly assessing the gravity of the Khmer Rouge killings in the late 70s while the US foreign policy which was intstumental in keeping Pol Pot in power at certain points where it was convenient geostrategically are considered par for the course.
        • ch4s3 3y ago
          This is bullshit. He unequivocally said that the refugees were lying for the benefit of the US. Chomsky is always quick to shout that anything short of the literal Holocaust isn’t genocide and doubly so if a leftist regime is doing it. He was then and always has since minimized crimes against humanity in one direction.
• elondaits 3y ago
  Chomsky is one of the most internationally-known intellectuals. Most people in my country (Argentina) know him for that, rather than his work in linguistics. ... So I think it's very unfair to say he's speaking "outside of his niche" here.
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    I guess one could phrase it like this - his work in linguistics was important and somewhat falsifiable. The rest, not so much.
    • mcv 3y ago
      Is anything in philosophy or politics falsifiable? If politics is not his field, then whose field is it? Are only polsci majors allowed to discuss politics?
      • ajuc 3y ago
        "Peace for our time" by Chamberline and Germany's dependence on Russia are as falsified as you can be in politics. Chomsky would probably support both :)
        • mcv 3y ago
          Fair point, and definitely a valid refutation of his position on Russia-Ukraine. My point should have been that everybody is entitled to their opinion on politics and philosophy, but you do have to take facts into account when available. They're not always available, and it's not always obvious how relevant they are to a new situation, but you obvious shouldn't ignore facts completely, and that does happen way too often. In every corner of the political spectrum.
    • psychoslave 3y ago
      Is Karl Popper's theory on falsifiability as a scientific criterion itself falsifiable?
  • 3y ago
• eddythompson80 3y ago
  He’s also a genocide denier.
  • dgb23 3y ago
    That's not true.
    • eddythompson80 3y ago
      He is pretty open about it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial
      • ch4s3 3y ago
        I don’t know why people still defend Chomsky’s horrible positions on this stuff. Moreover his claim that Leninism is distinct from Stalinism was absolutely disproven when the soviet archives were briefly opened and scholars could read Lenin’s letters and memos, but Chomsky holds to the claim.
        • eddythompson80 3y ago
          My main problem with Chomsky is that he's intellectually dishonest. He picks his positions, then redefines words and picks facts or parts of facts that support his position and ignores others. He twists narratives dismisses anything that contradicts with his position as conspiracy. I used to like Chomsky when I was initially introduces to him because I agreed with a lot of his leftist ideologies. But being so intellectually dishonest in supporting them makes him no better than an Alex Jones of the intellectual left.
          • ch4s3 3y ago
            > My main problem with Chomsky is that he's intellectually dishonest He also routinely cites "the archives," and every single time I've checked the source he's referencing his grossly misstating things (if I'm feeling generous). > an Alex Jones of the intellectual left This gave me a good chuckle.
• irrational 3y ago
  I have a bachelors in Linguistics. We were taught what Chomsky believes, but our professor also made it clear that many linguists, including himself, didn’t believe it was right or true. Though, this was 30 years ago. I haven’t kept up with the field to know what professors of linguistics think today.
  • 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    The concept of an innate, universal language that Chomsky came up with is almost certainly true, now whether that universal language contains information regarding what we call ethics, that is an open question
    • beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
      > The concept of an innate, universal language that Chomsky came up with is almost certainly true It's important to clarify that Chomsky's argument about universal grammar, in that there is an innate universal base human language, is not remotely certainly true. The existence of a human capacity or ability for language is true, but that's not a really amazing finding. People have been talking about that for hundreds of years. There's very little actual evidential basis in neuroscience or brain research for Chomsky's claim. It also frequently falls into private language fallacies, which is a logical blackhole he can't really climb out of.
  • olalonde 3y ago
    His editorial on ChatGPT definitely read like "sour grapes"[0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
    • mcv 3y ago
      ChatGPT does feel a bit like a refutation of his life's work. Because whether or not ChatGPT can think, it certainly has a good command of language without starting out with an inborn sense of grammar. It learns grammar by copying. Just like kids do, I suspect.
• maeln 3y ago
  > But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes). Chomsky was always like this. He is an unapologetic hypocrite, constantly criticizing the U.S and "the west" while defending "socialist" country for the exact thing, and often even worse, than he was criticizing the U.S for. Even going as far as denying the existence of genocide during the Yugoslavia civil-war. Manufacturing Consent was a very good book, but for me it won't change the fact that Chomsky is a genocide-denier tankie.
  • imjonse 3y ago
    Can you cite him exactly on any of your points or are you paraphrasing what you have heard second hand?
    • maeln 3y ago
      You could just go to his wikipedia article. Anyway, he tried to downplay the genocide and the violence committed by the Khmer Rouge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom... He, in the same fashion, downplayed the bosnian genocide: https://www.dw.com/en/dissident-intellectual-noam-chomsky-at-90/a-46629642 https://www.dw.com/en/dissident-intellectual-noam-chomsky-at... https://books.google.fr/books?id=7Bl9KT9NME0C&pg=PA142&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.fr/books?id=7Bl9KT9NME0C&pg=PA142&redir... And said that the Russian was acting "with restrain and moderation" in Ukraine: https://archive.is/EJp7e https://archive.is/EJp7e That is how he operate. Whenever there is a conflict involving the U.S, even remotely, he is systematically downplaying the opponent violence and insisting that everyone focus on the U.S and ally violence. This way he can always look like the reasonable man, while basically defending massacre and dictator. How can he do this when criticizing (rightfully so), the U.S for the Vietnam War or the Contra, and not see the hypocrisy, is beside me.
      • 6stringronin 3y ago
        He tried to make sense of numbers, as a point that it serves the US geopolitical goals at the time to have a distraction from their own atrocities. "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered." Calling it downplaying genocide is a nice strawman. In any developing situation the media wants to jump yo a conclusion, that's his point overall. He wasn't denying or downplaying just stating, if its happening how can we know to what degree when we have unreliable sources?
• anewhnaccount2 3y ago
  Since people keep saying he's a genocide denier, I'll drop this link here https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol14/iss1/8/ https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol14/iss1/8/ which explains that it's more a matter of semantics. He hasn't denied mass murders have taken place. He would probably also object to using either "terrorist" or "freedom fighter" since using these words emotively serves to obscure what's really going on.
  • ajuc 3y ago
    He argued against stopping it. I don't care how he calls it.
• cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  Two for one here: calling him stupid and a straw man.
• chromoblob 3y ago
  Well, at least it reduces the problem to the criterium of "health". At least you can individually decide it and use it to accept or reject relativism, treating it as a subjective belief itself :) Hence, why debate relativism at all?
• js8 3y ago
  The problem with ethics is that if you take almost any two different moral rules, there are always moral dilemmas where it is, for a large minority, unacceptable that we apply one rule over the other. So the moral rules of society as a whole form a logically inconsistent system, which appears to be only consistent within certain boundaries. Since it is inconsistent system, every moral position can be logically invalidated. Therefore, the sensible positions, compromises, are also the least rationally defensible. Now, Chomsky has a humanitarian angle, according to which no harm to other people is justifiable to make the world better. This means he rejects notion of justified war (which is anonymous killing of humans). And from this comes his position on Ukraine.
• cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Chomsky is a mixed bag, on multiple fronts. He's very strident, and especially many his recent takes on geopolitical issues are unable to understand the new polarities at work in the world. He's been an important critic of American foreign policy, but it has blinded him (and his followers) to the absolutely more terrible nature of e.g. Russian hegemony. (I actually think this turn began for him around the conflict in Serbia.) But I find him a useful and important antidote to the dominance of total relativism postmodernism/poststructuralism on the "left" and respect him for doubling down on the important of reason, rationality, and an empirical method. These days, especially in American academia, most people preposterously labelled (by conservative opponents) as "cultural Marxists" or "Marxists" generally are anything but. Marx and many other people in that vein in the 20th century were committed materialists -- attempting to ground their analysis in rather cold hard economic analysis -- you can debate whether they were right or not or using the right tools, etc but this was their philosophical position, what they were trying to do. The bulk of today's apparently-left wing intellectuals are effectively idealists (in the epistemological sense, not the moral sense). They fundamentally believe in the primacy of ideas over the material world, but they've done a slight of and instead of referring to it as Forms ala Plato, or Idea as in Hegel, etc. it's now the "Narrative" etc. I think it is having a destructive effect, and has in large part discredited this line of though about the people it's supposed to be liberating. It's a middle class movement for middle class academics, and has little to offer the working class. Chomsky is a refreshing antidote to this. I can't speak to his linguistic analysis, though. He's also very very old at this point.
  • reducesuffering 3y ago
    > Marx > cold hard economic analysis Haven’t heard something like that in awhile. Maybe you missed how much of his writing was more about how a Hegelian spirit force overtaking the world was inevitable, disproved by the Soviet Union.
• asah 3y ago
  +1 - I got off the Chomsky bandwagon decades ago. Language is a loose encoding of thought, nothing more or less. Want proof? Spend some time with ChatGPT4.
  • stavros 3y ago
    I don't entirely agreed, as there have been cases where my thought has changed because I learned a new word for something. I started to see that thing everywhere, where before I wouldn't notice it as much, just because I learned the word for it.
    • asah 3y ago
      interesting point - but was it the word? or the concept?
      • stavros 3y ago
        Are the two different? What is a concept without a word?
        • asah 3y ago
          multiple words! :-) I'm arguing that it's an obvious optimization to assign short tokens to commonly used concepts. I'm arguing that many people had the thought before society agreed on a given token for that thought.
• hef19898 3y ago
  Chomsky is yet another person, who gained public "fame" for expertise in his initial field. And who then went on to believe that his newly gained recognition, and expertise in one field, qualifies him to reach out into other fields with public comments. And since the internet and society works the way they do, people assign him authority in those fields as well since he's famous. Hence, he became more popular science than hard science. At which point it is almost fair to just ignore him.
  • boppinz 3y ago
    I'm sorry but that discredits his wide history as a modern intellectual. He did philosophy and linguistics from the start. Like it's fine to not agree with him, but he often offers a great introduction to topics like war and labor organizing for folks. His pop science is at least based on real science and his own reasoning. And who would you suggest instead? If you say anyone before the 1960s but filtered through the likes of Jordan Peterson or Steven Pinker I'm going to have a hernia. THEY are pop science crap.
    • hef19898 3y ago
      Personally, I have a peoblem with all those "intelectuals". Most of the time they were never top of the crop in their field to begin with, and then switched over to general intellectualism using top notch rethoric skills. Peterson is living, or already fell off, the extreme end of this spectrum. People like Chomsky occupy places on the same spectrum so. And spare me philosophers.
      • boppinz 3y ago
        Laymen need people who can synthesize the works of academics/researchers. If someone like Chomsky wasn't talking about "faciness" and the ethics of ChatGPT, would anyone really bring that up? In an academic setting or otherwise. This again also discredits his work as an academic for coining and bringing to light topics like CFGs. Or in another similar vein: Bill Nye helps to distill scientific concepts for children (and adults too). There is something to be said for him helping to engage some students more in science, AND for whatever interpretation and analysis of Creationism vs. Evolution he did at that debate with Ken Ham, for the lay people. To a degree, it doesn't matter if he got every one of his points 100% logically sound, it can be a springboard that hopefully gives theists some food for thought on why Evolution is the best we empirically have and that the Bible isn't a primary source for citing. So I again ask who you would rather speak to me about these topics, or am I supposed to just dig through thousands of scholarly articles and hope the ones I discuss and cite have the "correct" opinion and rhetorical skils?
• chomskyole 3y ago
  > What Chomsky is saying is that if you include only the people who are "healthy" according to some subjective criteria and take a crossection of their moralities - the result isn't an empty set. Well duh. Where do you get that statement from? I don't think he says that at all. He says that the idea of morality is bound, i.e. it isn't infinite. I think that is easy to agree. He also says that you can argue morals. So he doesn't argue for a cross section of morals at all, quite the opposite: he hints, in this short video, that you can analyse sets of morals for their consistency. He uses the example of labour under slavery vs labour under a wage contract and how these different arrangements lead to different attitudes to labour. Implied is the idea that Chomsky is against slavery, but considers certain arguments slaveholders made valid. Are you sure you aren't, accidentally, putting up a straw-man?
• boppinz 3y ago
  1 - His Ukraine stance is simply that we have had a Cold War paradox in our American minds since the 50s, Russia is both too strong a foe to ignore and a paper tiger working off of shoddy USSR tanks and being beat by some farmers with lock-on missiles. This article helps clarify his points, he absolutely calls Russia's invasion barbaric, but he has always vehemently stated the West's bloodlust and policing has never helped our case as peacemakers: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/noam-chomsky-interview-russia-ukraine-war https://jacobin.com/2022/06/noam-chomsky-interview-russia-uk... 2 - Sometimes philosophy is about stating the obvious "well duh". Because if you can't establish solid axioms, then how can you try to prove a higher-level thesis? And if the linguistic stuff is over your head, I'm not sure the philosophy stuff will be easy for you to grasp either. Unless you have a major/minor in dialectics I don't know about.
  • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    The problem with the Ukraine stuff is that it falls easily into the same crap position as Varoufakis and others on the left which is basically a) some kind of "realism" about what Ukraine should do [basically surrender] and b) gives credence to much of the crap that Lavrov has put out on the public stage about this war being somehow about American imperialism. Well, duh, everything is about imperialism, but what's missing from Chomsky's analysis is that: Russian imperialism is far far far worse. I am not so much distressed by Chomsky's position on this issue as that of many of his followers/fans who seem to lack nuance entirely Lefteast had some good articles on this topic and the crappy role many western "left wing" intellectuals have been playing. I will try to dig them up.
    • johndhi 3y ago
      Why is Russia's imperialism far far far worse? What about the us invasion of Iraq is "better" than the Russia invasion of Ukraine?
      • snowpid 3y ago
        1.) Iraq was never annexed by USA. 2.) American govertment never claimed there is no Iraqi culture. 3.) There was no large kidnapping of Iraqi kids. 4.) There are no mass rapes made by the American military. 5.) Iraqis were never forced to forget Arab and learn only English. 6.) Hussein used poison gas on Kurdish people and used Zyklon B filled rockets (yes, same gas like in Ausschwitz) to attack Israel. Hussein occupied Kuwait and attacked Saudi - Arabia. There is no remotely similar thing the Ukraine goverment did in the past.
• tomjen3 3y ago
  I agree with you. I wish he was a banned subject on hn.
  • boppinz 3y ago
    nah, I think a lot of armchair philosopher techies on here could use some alternate opinions and dialectics. The primary reason for bringing him up (or any philosopher on this forum, really) is the nexus of ethics and AI. Although we haven't particularly let ethics stop us from a lot of high-tech atrocities throughout the past century, in the military field or otherwise (I'm thinking private equity and rampant credit use).
    • tomjen3 3y ago
      I don't disagree that we could use other useful perspectives. I strongly emphatize he doesn't bring them.