Chomsky

[Mills, Carl (MILLSCR)]

 Actually, many of us who went to LSA in the late 1970s and '80s discovered
that the "genuine criticism" our papers received, most of it from
Chomskyans, was so ill-informed and narrow minded that we stopped going.  So
I don't blame Chomsky for not going.

On the other hand, it is not surprising that Chomsky is addressing the MLA.
Anyone who reads stuff from the sciences, e.g. biology, chemiostry,
anthropology (the scientific, i.e. physical or biological, parts of it) is
apt to discern that linguistics since the Chomskyan revolution (pick
whichever one of them you want) has becoming less scientific and more
humanistic over the years.  Personally, I think that pre-Chomskyan
structuralism was a sort of natural history, but what we see mostly today is
on a par with literary theory (sic).  Incidentally, my own work on how the
sciences and a few other disciplines display their results indicates that
there are a number of disciplines between the sciences and the humanities
(psychology, sociology) that are not unlike linguistics in being unable or
unwilling to decide whether they are sciences or humanities.

Carl


-----Original Message-----
From: A R

You know, Funknetters, I don't know that I'd call myself either
a formalist or a functionalist.  But one of the most damning things
I know about Chomsky is that he *never* goes to LSA, the one place where
he
might face genuine criticism.  A friend of mine, a formalist,
used to argue that he simply never went to academic conferences.

This year, I discover that this is clearly untrue.  Chomsky is going
to talk at the MLA, to those who do literature.   It's only his own that
he
refuses to talk to at conferences.


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