Status Updates From Decoding Chomsky: Science a...

This book has gone from disagreeable to just downright ignorant. Chomsky is apparently bad because he separates his linguistic views from his view on social science and politics. Yeah what an arsehole, how dare he try to have a scientific take on linguistics without shoehorning his anarchism into it. This author is foolish

Not too sure what the author’s gripe is. He seems to want to attack Chomsky because he’s dubious about his linguistic theory, and dislikes Chomsky’s military funding from MIT. But I just don’t get the point of all of this, although I have enjoyed reading it strangely

"We don't like what this person says so we're going to take his word and define it in a way that makes it incompatible with his usage, then we're going to mock him for using the word wrongly." This seems to be Chomsky's MO whenever anybody comes up with arguments discomforting to Chomsky.

The most flawed assumption is the one that language is distinctly human. How can such a claim possibly be justified based on anything but our own ignorance? And especially with Chomsky's idea that language is internal rather than external, I truly can't believe there's justification for pretending we know what the internal mental life of any animal is. Speciesism is the basis of linguistics, no wonder it fails so!

The problem seems to me to be a misplaced scientism. The only questions of interest are those that meet a very strict definition of science. I agree that science should be strictly defined in such a constricting way, but I deny that the questions which fall thereunder are the only ones of interest! To ignore half the problem is a recipe for disaster.