One might call him the Jordan Peterson of the left, if one wanted to piss off everyone.
idk shit about his politics, but for linguistics, I am not a big fan. Universal Grammar is wrong, and the dogma surrounding it is even worse.
I just love how he and Skinner had it out. Skinner wrote “Verbal Behavior”, Chomsky responded, and Skinner’s takeaway was “well, he didn’t read this at all.” And declared himself the winner. Meanwhile Chomsky was expecting a rebuttal, never got one, and declared himself the winner.
I’m at the next level: I don’t know who it is.
I also need to figure out if it’s the next level up or down…
Don’t know about his linguistic work. As much as I can gather, even if not 100% correct he was hugely influential in linguistics. This is a how (good) science usually works. Someone postulates a theory which tries to explain a thing, and is then proven and/or disproven. If well done it stays important even if disproven.
However his politics? It’s a barely coherent mess with only one basic postulate - “America bad”. Anything that US does is automatically bad. Anything that any enemy of US does is automatically good. Turns out to be correct sometimes but there is no true moral and philosophical underpinning to it. He build his political career on the “even a broken clock is right twice a day” principle.
I can only speak for his linguistic works, but it’s odd how much clearer and more straightforward his earlier works are than his later ones. Syntactic structures and Aspects of a Theory of Syntax are easy enough that I’d even recommend them to Introduction to Syntax students, but starting with Lectures on Government and Binding things get increasingly obtuse to the point that I’d always recommend reading “translations” of his later works rather than the works themselves.
Edit for full transparency, since this comment is getting upvoted while Chomsky is getting blasted in the comments here: Don’t get me wrong, all of Chomsky’s linguistic work is incredibly brilliant. He single-handedly brought about a complete paradigm shift in the field of linguistics. G&B with all of the bells and whistles added by other researchers in the 80s and 90s is still the closest we’ve come to an actual explanatory theory of syntax, and X-bar theory is probably the single most elegant, ingenious innovation in the history of linguistics.
And that’s just syntax. I haven’t even mentioned how he and Morris Halle revolutionized phonology a few years later with The Sound Pattern of English, or how he also revolutionized grammar theory with the idea of context-free and context-dependent grammars the year before publishing Syntactic Structures, and all of this somehow still understates the enormous import of Chomsky’s linguistic work.
If anyone has any questions about Chomsky’s linguistic work, feel free to ask, and I’ll respond as best I can.
I pretty much only know his politics and works like the Manufacturing Consent documentary and book
Hehe Cunning Linguist
