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Chomsky is interested in power, not semantics. The question "Who invented email?" has a variety of possible meanings, and if you clarify what you mean, the ans
by dkarl 14y ago
Chomsky is interested in power, not semantics. The question "Who invented email?" has a variety of possible meanings, and if you clarify what you mean, the answer follows from the facts. But people don't care what the question means; they care about the prestige attached to the answer. This is more true of Chomsky than of the average person because of his obsession with power. He knows it is an attention-getting question, and he wants to answer it in favor of a powerless underdog who was robbed of his just deserts by well-connected "insiders," because he wants people to see that story everywhere. Therefore Chomsky runs with a particular interpretation of the question and disingenuously says, "The facts are indisputable," when he knows that the facts are the least issue in the dispute.
Chomsky is as much a rhetorician and an entertainer as anyone on the right, though his intelligence and love of underdogs make him a lot more likable than someone like Rush Limbaugh.
- yummyfajitas 14y agoThis is a very interesting (and plausible) theory about Chomsky's motivations. But again - it's irrelevant to us. We know who invented which software package and what functionality each one had. The rest is a debate over variable names.
- dkarl 14y agoIt's irrelevant to answering the question as we understand it, but it's relevant when we end up talking to people who don't have our perspective. I think most people's first assumption is that email is a simple, unitary concept that must have had a single inventor.
- calibraxis 14y agoSome of the comments here are very strange. Chomsky worked in MIT's electronics lab, because MIT didn't have a linguistics department before he came along, and the government was throwing all sorts of money around to build the high tech industry. I imagine it was rather chaotic and exciting. So Chomsky probably knows what he's talking about. This is about his work life, not his participation in political life.
- sashahart 14y agoChomsky isn't going to get a lot of power from anything at this point, he hit his stride politically some time ago. If you have read Chomsky's work from early academic stuff up through today, one unifying characteristic is that he is very good at polemics and very apt to it. That style is so much a part of him that it is completely unsurprising that he would use it even on something apparently strange like the invention of email. It's just a long term character trait.