/lit/ - Literature

>>15420873

Chomsky is a hack. He plagiarized that from Wittgenstein.

>>15420873
No one takes his ideas seriously anymore. They were popular decades ago, but developmental psychologist have proven it to be bunk.

Case studies like Genie, a girl who was abused and intellectually deprived at growth, showed long term deficiency in speaking ability. These sort of people never recover. She's 60 and still can't speak above a 7 year old level. These studies confirm what developmental psychologists have hypothesised, that there is a crucial imprinting period during childhood for linguistic ability.


It's not just that his theories have been disproved, but on hindsight they wasn't even any evidence for them in the first place. At best Chomsky only supplied anecdotal, off hand facts. Like Freud the whole field has been trying to distance themselves from him.

>>15420873
Chomsky is right about everything, read as much of him as you can.

>>15420873
>everything as we understand is some kind of language
Always thought this myself. Like all knowledge takes place through the medium of a language. Without language we wouldn't be able to think since language if the vehicle for thought and knowledge acquisition.

Breaking free from language, brings you into the unknown and freedom.

>>15420913
As far as I understood, human language is just like any other computational method of expressing anything. I dont see how this case disprove his ideas. If I cut off one persons leg when he were a child, of course he couldn't express himself with dance like most people.

>>15420949
Do people really believe that thought only exists through language? I agree that by putting thoughts into language we are able to develop and refine our conceptions very efficiently, but it’s almost always been my experience that my initial understanding of a concept precedes my ability to express it.

>>15420984
Your initial understanding requires a langauge of thought. Expressing it through communication is a different matter.

>>15420940
Thanks, anon.

>>15420976
Some anon posted about this Neo-platonic philosopher who said something like this:
>We attempt to look at the sun for the first time and we succeed because we are far away. But the closer we approach the less we see. And at last we see neither the sun nor other things, since we have completely become the light itself, instead of an enlightened eye.

>>15420996
Last quote was meant to >>15420949

>>15420873
This hyper linguistic framework seems dubious t.b.h. There are for instance aspects of mathematical thinking that are not linguistic (and making them into language is maybe 30% of all mathematical work). This much is known and can even be evidenced in primates and some birds (see the works of Dehaene).
Basically I'm not convinced.

>>15420873
>"WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE"
>is there anything we can do
>"VOTE DEMOCRAT"
>that doesn't really help...
>"I KNOW WE'RE ALL FUCKING DEAD"
>okay, well... i guess i'll do my laundry then and have a nice life

>>15420873
>that everything as we understand is some kind of language
What does that actually mean, what is a "language" in this sense? Does it mean the syntax? That there is a rigid pattern? Does it mean thoughts as a vocabulary?
>and we ourselves are programmed in a language that we couldn't ever understand.
What do you mean by 'programmed'? Is that conflating computer code with 'mental' languages and verbal-lexical languages?

>>15420976
His theory was that humans are innately imbued with core linguistic knowledge, a "universal grammar" which was the base of all language, and that all humans ever needed to learn their native language is learn language specific features. This contrasted with the developmental psychologists, whose theory says language is a skill entirely learnt. Chomsky's theory was based on some incredibly spurious evidence: he reasoned there was a universal grammar because children have a "poverty of stimulus" but are capable of generating an infinite combination of sentences. A poverty of stimulus meant that they saw and observed from their environment much less than they could speak of, which he claimed meant they already *knew* the universal grammar.

I won't even get into his attempts to stretch his theory into cognitive sciences, which was what you're referring to. But the original theory was proven a load of shit, developmental psychologists' theory were proven right in extreme case studies like Genie. She was deprived of virtually all linguistic stimulus and social communication, and throughout her life she never learnt to speak beyond a 7 year old level.

The keyword here is *learnt*. She never learnt to speak properly, which was a huge blow to Chomsky's universal grammar theory. As an adult her sentences were extremely short, and she mostly used them when asking for food or toys. At best, the modern Chomsky fanboy can only claim there is a critical development period for this "universal grammar", after which you'll never properly learn a language.

>>15421069
See I'll play devil's advocate but not him.
Considering Helen Keller etc as well as science probably having had or will have the ability to fix it, what if she had autism? Like how much of this is firmly proven in that regard? Abuse is terrible but there are autists who never speak.

>>15421093
It's possible, but unlikely she has autism just from a standpoint of the percent of people who have autism.

But the real problem with Chomsky's theory is that it's simply too unspecific and doesn't explain much. What is an innate grammar? Who are the people who don't have it? Is the ability to write but in jumbled sentences like certain mental deficients an innate grammar?

And because of its vagueness experimental evidence was never really demanded despite its incredible popularity. I mean, the guy didn't even try to say count the approximate number of things a child sees and the amount of things he can speak of. Or whether he can understand things he's never seen. Or any sort of data really.

>>15421157
That's fair, I think we can allow for genetic abnormalities in some sense to disprove his point (still playing devil's advocate), but language must be encoded in our dna in some sense I would think or we couldn't all speak at all. I also dk much about chomsky

Chomsky is a vapid, cavillling ass, his work in linguistics, politics, rhetoric is banal, unimportant, self inflated, the value of his work evaporates when his self made reputation is seen through. He believes nothing, his ideas are mere rhetorical adoptions, and his rhetoric only hurts the ideas it captures by wasting their time and rendering them trivial, toys for puerile psueds to play with.
I could explode him in a moment with witticisms, demolishing that phoney with facts and logic in an instant.
I crown him "Chumpsky-- King of the Intellectuals!", He means nothing to me.