Chomsky's fame is predicated on his work in linguistics. There, his prose in impenetrable. So supposed his work in linguistics is as flawed as his political views? David Solvay does a devastating analysis of this academic work.
Put succinctly, Chomskyan psycholinguistics is not a science, but an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that mobilizes enormous resources to get very little done. Nevertheless, many of us are seduced by an intricately latticed diction and dazzled into submission by indomitable complexity.
Supposed Chomsky is simply an academic fraud - akin to man-made global warming. That would explain ...
... the mind that is at work postulating a theory of generative grammar is the same mind that is busy expounding an ideological program of anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Israeli doctrine, that excuses the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan and is sympathetic to totalitarian North Korea, that supports Latin American and Islamic autocrats, that can defend a mass murderer like Pol Pot, a Holocaust denier like Robert Faurisson, and a terrorist like Hassan Nasrallah, and that can argue that George Bush’s “crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.” And it can do so because it is not bound by the rules of testability.
The next time anyone tells you that Chomsky is a brilliant academic, ask him to explain his work. 999 out of 1000 won't understand anything of what he wrote. They are all under the spell of the fallacy "appeal to authority."
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