CHOMSKY VS. MOZESON

Someone wrote: "Transformational grammar is hard-wired."

I responded: I'm glad you wrote this.

Disagreeing with deconstructionist and postmodern criticisms of science, Chomsky writes:

"I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed."

I interpret this to mean that Chomsky is admitting that he did not succeed in applying scientific method to linguistics and that he is not particularly apt in math or physics. It was his intention to apply scientific method to linguistics, but he failed. I assume he wished to do so in order to lend a greater air of respectability to his theories.

Rather than torture physics, math and linguistics to say what they do not (by appropriating and misapplying a term such as 'transformational' for instance) he should have developed a method of the study of language that is appropriate to language. Language does not admit of analysis by scientific method.

By his own account, though he applied himself assiduously to thestudy of Hebrew, he never plumbed the depths of Hebrew either (see: http://tinyurl.com/7m3tf)

Add to this the fact that Chomsky has revised his theory of language radically a number of times. By the mid-1990s the "deep structure" and "surface structure" elements of his theory of language that made him famous in the 1960s have been supplanted by his "minimalism". If I'm going to be perfectly frank, and I am, "my eyes glaze over" when I read Chomsky's pseudo-scientific "gibberish", "and I do not know how to proceed".

It's OK that Chomsky failed in applying scientific method to the study of language, because that was an exercise in futility. It is not OK that he refuses to recognize the validity of the work of someone who has succeeded in applying the correct method. The correctness of Isaac Mozeson's conclusions and method are, in sharp contradistinction to Chomsky's put-on, eminently clear.

It is no wonder that Mozeson poses the threat to Chomsky that he does.

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel