Re: What was Noam Chomsky's contribution to *LINGUISTICS*?

ekkilu@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


> >Thus p.126: "If London is reduced to dust, it - that
> > is, London - can be rebuilt elsewhere and be the same city,
> > London." Never mind that Londoners might beg to differ there,
> > Chomsky continues: "If my house is reduced to dust, it (my house)
> > can be rebuilt elsewhere, but it won't be the same house." So when
> > London is destroyed and rebuilt in Antarctica, it is the same
> > London but its houses are not the same houses?</quote>

> I guess his analogy was not good. But Jacques you certain won't miss
> the forest for the trees, right?

And the iceberg for its tip? Not really. Here is another excerpt
from that review:

[quote]
Immediately after destroying and rebuilding London and his house,
Chomsky adds: "If the motor of my car is reduced to dust, it
cannot be rebuilt, though if only partially damaged, it can be"
and comments on this: "Pronouns involve dependency of reference,
but not necessarily to the same thing; and both referential
dependence and the narrower notion of sameness involve roles in a
highly intricate space of human interests and concerns. Judgments
can be rather delicate, involving factors that have barely been
explored." Readers furrowing their brows to figure out what that
could possibly mean, are likely to overlook that "rebuilt" has
just been used in two different meanings: to do up or restore, and
to build from scratch. More "legerdemot". The trick would not work
in French, though, because French has two separate words
(_refaire_ and _reconstruire_) which force its speakers to
distinguish the intended meaning.[/quote]

It is all trickery and hocus pocus.

Here is another case:

[quote]
p.128: "Suppose [a] cup is filled from a tap connected to
a reservoir in which tea has been dumped (say, as a new kind of
purifier). What is in [this] cup, is water, not tea, even
if a chemist could not distinguish it [from the contents of
a cup of tea made in the usual manner]."

That is what I call a linguistic illusion
--magician's "legerdemain" or rather, if the word existed,
"legerdemot". How is the reader tricked into confusing water with
tea? Very simply--through Chomsky's use of a non-standard
definition of water: "H2O give or take certain impurities". Stop
and think for a moment. Certainly, that definition covers water,
but it also covers ice, clouds, steam, rain, and, with increasing
amounts of impurities, beer, wine, and even you, readers, who are
70% H2O and the rest "impurities". Since the definition is inept,
the subsequent discussion has as little to do with the reality of
language as the deferents and epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy
have to do with the reality of the solar system. Look up "water"
in any dictionary, and Chomsky's conundrum vanishes: "a colourless
liquid essential for animal and plant life and which constitutes,
in its impure form, rain, oceans, etc."[/quote]

I was very careful reviewing that book. I even went to the
trouble of scanning and OCR-ing it in its entirely, so that
I could cross-examine it.

Oh, one last stupidity:

[quote]p.190 we
are told that "most of the universe's water exists in the glassy
state (in comets)" and then we are invited to a thought experiment
on a Twin-Earth, "where they happen to make their glasses from
tails of Earthly comets. Suppose Earthly Oscar arrives on
Twin-Earth and asks for water, pointing to G [a glass filled from
a tap]. Is he right if he is referring to the glass and wrong if
he is referring to its contents?" But on Twin-Earth where glasses
are made of ice, water poured into one will either melt it, or
freeze. So Earthly Oscar is asking for water, pointing either at a
puddle or at a block of ice. The attempted distinction between
glass and contents is just another meaningless conundrum.

Again, think about how you were tricked into seeing a meaningful
question in this. Instead of being told that glasses on Twin-Earth
are made of ice, you are told that most of the water in the
universe occurs in comets in "the glassy state" (note how the word
"ice" is avoided), and that Twin-Earth glasses are made "from
tails of Earthly comets". ("Earthly comet" is a contradiction in
terms; and it is the core of comets that contains ice, not the
tail, which is fine dust, practically insubstantial.) Your
attention has been diverted by this comet story long enough for
you to forget that water poured into ice turns into ice or melts
the ice--and to miss how a jabberwock has been pulled out of a
linguistic hat.[/quote]
.

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