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> It's very unlikely that Everett's key claims about Pirahã are true Everett achieved something unequivocally difficult--after twenty years of failed attempts

> It's very unlikely that Everett's key claims about Pirahã are true Everett achieved something unequivocally difficult--after twenty years of failed attempts by other missionaries, he was the first Westerner to learn Pirahã, living among the people and conversing with them in their language. In my view, that gives him significantly greater credibility than academics with no practical exposure to the language (and I assume you're aware of his response to the paper you linked). I understand that to Chomsky's followers, Everett's achievement is meaningless, in the same way that LLMs saturating almost every prior benchmark in NLP is meaningless. But what achievements outside the "self-referential parlor game" are meaningful then? You must need something to ground yourself in outside reality, right? > Then when we finally get to see the concrete alternative proposal, it turns out to be nothing more than a promissory note. I'm certainly not claiming that statistical modeling has already achieved any significant insight into how physical structures in the brain map to an ability to generate language, and I don't think anyone else is either. We're just speculating that it might in future. That seems a lot less grandiose to me than anything Chomsky has promised. In the present, that statistical modeling has delivered some pretty significant, strictly falsifiable, different but related achievements. Again, what does Chomsky's side have? > I don't see how we can discuss this question without getting into specifics, so let me try to push things in that direction. Here is a famous syntax paper by Chomsky: https://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/On_WH-Movement.pdf https://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/On_WH-Movement.pdf And when I asked that before, you linked a sixty-page paper, with no further indication ("various things"?) of what you want to talk about. If you're trying to argue that Chomsky's theories are anything but a tarpit for a certain kind of intellectual curiosity, then I don't think that's helping.

foldr 9mo ago
Believe Everett if you want to, but it doesn’t make much difference to anything. Not every language has to exploit the option of recursive clausal embedding. The implications for generative linguistics are pretty minor. Yes, Everett responded to the paper I linked, and then there were further papers in the chain of responses (e.g. http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodrigues_2_Evidence_and_Argumentation_Reply_to_Everett.pdf http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodri...). > And when I asked that before, you linked a sixty-page paper, with no further indication ("various things"?) of what you want to talk about. I was suggesting that we talk about the central claim of the paper (i.e. that the answer to question (50) is ‘yes’). I don’t see how it’s reasonable to ask for something smaller than a paper if you want evidence that Chomsky’s research program has achieved some insight. That’s the space required to argue for a particular viewpoint rather than just state it. In other words, if I concisely summarize Chomsky’s findings you’ll just dismiss them as bogus, and if I link to a paper arguing for a particular result, you’ll say it’s too long to read. So, essentially, you have decided not to engage with Chomsky’s work. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but it does mean that you cannot make informed criticisms of it.
- tripletao 9mo ago
  > So, essentially, you have decided not to engage with Chomsky’s work. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but it does mean that you cannot make informed criticisms of it. Any criticism that I'd make of homeopathy would be uninformed by the standards of a homeopath--I don't know which poison to use, or how many times to strike the bottle while I'm diluting it, or whatever else they think is important. But to their credit they're often willing to put their ideas to the external test (like with an RCT), and I know that evidence in aggregate shows no benefit. I'm therefore comfortable criticizing homeopathy despite my unfamiliarity with its internals. I don't claim any qualifications to criticize the internals of Chomsky's linguistics, but I do feel qualified to observe the whole thing appears to be externally useless. It seems to reject the idea of falsifiable predictions entirely, and if one does get made and then falsified then "the implications for generative linguistics are pretty minor". After dominating academic linguistics for fifty years, it has never accomplished anything considered difficult outside the newly-created field. So why is this a place where society should expend more of its finite resources? Hardy wrote his "Mathematician's Apology" to answer the corresponding question for his more ancient field, explicitly acknowledging the uselessness of many subfields but still defending them. He did that with a certain unease though, and his promises of uselessness also turned out to be mistaken--he repeatedly took number theory as his example, not knowing that in thirty years it would underly modern cryptography. Chomsky's linguists seem to me like the opposite of that, shouting down anyone who questions them (he called Everett a "charlatan") while proudly delivering nothing to the society funding their work. So why would I want to join them?
  - foldr 9mo ago
    >but I do feel qualified to observe the whole thing [Chomskyian linguistics] appears to be externally useless Sure, Chomsky's work doesn't have practical applications. Most scientific work doesn't. It's just that, for obvious reasons, you tend to hear more about the work that does. You mention number theory. Number theory had existed for a lot longer than Chomskyan linguistics has now when Hardy chose it as an example of a field with no practical applications. > seems to reject the idea of falsifiable predictions entirely, As a former syntactician who's constructed lots of theories that turned out to be false, I can't really relate to this one. If you look through the generative linguistics literature you can find innumerable instances of promising ideas rejected on empirical grounds. Chomsky himself has revised or rejected his earlier work many times. A concrete example would be the theory of parasitic gaps presented in Concepts and Consequences (quickly falsified by the observation that parasitic gap dependencies are subject to island constraints). The irony here is that generative syntax is actually a field with a brutal peer review culture and extremely high standards of publication. Actual syntax papers are full of detailed empirical argumentation. Here is one relatively short and accessible example chosen at random: http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTL03/04.pdf http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTL03/04.pdf >After dominating academic linguistics for fifty years, it has never accomplished anything considered difficult outside the newly-created field What does this even mean? Has geology accomplished something considered difficult outside of geology? I don't really understand what standard you are trying to apply here.

foldr 9mo ago

Believe Everett if you want to, but it doesn’t make much difference to anything. Not every language has to exploit the option of recursive clausal embedding. The implications for generative linguistics are pretty minor. Yes, Everett responded to the paper I linked, and then there were further papers in the chain of responses (e.g. http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodrigues_2_Evidence_and_Argumentation_Reply_to_Everett.pdf http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodri...). > And when I asked that before, you linked a sixty-page paper, with no further indication ("various things"?) of what you want to talk about. I was suggesting that we talk about the central claim of the paper (i.e. that the answer to question (50) is ‘yes’). I don’t see how it’s reasonable to ask for something smaller than a paper if you want evidence that Chomsky’s research program has achieved some insight. That’s the space required to argue for a particular viewpoint rather than just state it. In other words, if I concisely summarize Chomsky’s findings you’ll just dismiss them as bogus, and if I link to a paper arguing for a particular result, you’ll say it’s too long to read. So, essentially, you have decided not to engage with Chomsky’s work. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but it does mean that you cannot make informed criticisms of it.

tripletao 9mo ago
> So, essentially, you have decided not to engage with Chomsky’s work. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but it does mean that you cannot make informed criticisms of it. Any criticism that I'd make of homeopathy would be uninformed by the standards of a homeopath--I don't know which poison to use, or how many times to strike the bottle while I'm diluting it, or whatever else they think is important. But to their credit they're often willing to put their ideas to the external test (like with an RCT), and I know that evidence in aggregate shows no benefit. I'm therefore comfortable criticizing homeopathy despite my unfamiliarity with its internals. I don't claim any qualifications to criticize the internals of Chomsky's linguistics, but I do feel qualified to observe the whole thing appears to be externally useless. It seems to reject the idea of falsifiable predictions entirely, and if one does get made and then falsified then "the implications for generative linguistics are pretty minor". After dominating academic linguistics for fifty years, it has never accomplished anything considered difficult outside the newly-created field. So why is this a place where society should expend more of its finite resources? Hardy wrote his "Mathematician's Apology" to answer the corresponding question for his more ancient field, explicitly acknowledging the uselessness of many subfields but still defending them. He did that with a certain unease though, and his promises of uselessness also turned out to be mistaken--he repeatedly took number theory as his example, not knowing that in thirty years it would underly modern cryptography. Chomsky's linguists seem to me like the opposite of that, shouting down anyone who questions them (he called Everett a "charlatan") while proudly delivering nothing to the society funding their work. So why would I want to join them?
- foldr 9mo ago
  >but I do feel qualified to observe the whole thing [Chomskyian linguistics] appears to be externally useless Sure, Chomsky's work doesn't have practical applications. Most scientific work doesn't. It's just that, for obvious reasons, you tend to hear more about the work that does. You mention number theory. Number theory had existed for a lot longer than Chomskyan linguistics has now when Hardy chose it as an example of a field with no practical applications. > seems to reject the idea of falsifiable predictions entirely, As a former syntactician who's constructed lots of theories that turned out to be false, I can't really relate to this one. If you look through the generative linguistics literature you can find innumerable instances of promising ideas rejected on empirical grounds. Chomsky himself has revised or rejected his earlier work many times. A concrete example would be the theory of parasitic gaps presented in Concepts and Consequences (quickly falsified by the observation that parasitic gap dependencies are subject to island constraints). The irony here is that generative syntax is actually a field with a brutal peer review culture and extremely high standards of publication. Actual syntax papers are full of detailed empirical argumentation. Here is one relatively short and accessible example chosen at random: http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTL03/04.pdf http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTL03/04.pdf >After dominating academic linguistics for fifty years, it has never accomplished anything considered difficult outside the newly-created field What does this even mean? Has geology accomplished something considered difficult outside of geology? I don't really understand what standard you are trying to apply here.