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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

To the cynic, Chomskyism is exactly what Thomas Kuhn warned you about "normal science".

That is, you can apply for grants and write papers in the transformational grammar paradigm endlessly. You can pose and answer questions that make sense within in the system.

Chomskyism was disappointing in two respects: (1) was that it was an inadequate basis for machine understanding of text, (2) was that structuralists were hoping everything in culture could be understood in terms of "... having the structure of language" but syntactic structures weren't all adequate for that task.

(1) and (2) both pointed to Chomskyism being hermetic and not something really useful or inspiring to other fields and maybe just a little less "true".

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Actually, there have been a number of rounds of paradigm shift (or attempted paradigm shift) in linguistics over the past 70 years. The unique thing about linguistics is that they've been compressed into the lifetime of the same central figure.

Also, I'll mention that there is a lot of empirical knowledge about natural language syntax in generative grammar, even if the details aren't quite right about their theoretical underpinnings. And a lot of them were "low-hanging fruit" waiting for someone to point out how to find them and characterize them. That Chomsky did that is the best argument for his intellectual value - permitting all that "normal science" to happen.

Science doesn't guarantee technological applications, whether or not that science is correct.

Finally, just saying: use of a word like "Chomskyism" makes you sound like one of those creationists who call evolution "Darwinism".

So we can't use the word "creationism" without validating their use of "Darwinism"?

This is wholly fallacious ... you may disagree with what you interpret as the implications of attaching "ism" to Chomsky, but in no way does that equate it to attaching "ism" to Darwin -- each of these attachments and their validity are independent.

BTW, even what you see as pejorative in such an attachment is a cultural interpretation ... e.g., it is far more common among British evolutionary biologists than American to view "Darwinism" neutrally -- Dawkins for one uses the term and describes himself as a Darwinist. See, e.g., https://www.edge.org/conversation/richard_dawkins-chapter-3-...

The irony is that while (1) is currently dying a terrible death, (2) is on its peak influence of culture and politics

Officially structuralism had a crisis around the release of Syntactic Structures and the morphed into post-structuralism which has been through relentless post[n]-modernization and is whatever it is now.

> You can pose and answer questions that make sense within in the system.

Yes this is one of my critiques of the academic system (I have finished a PhD and will hopefully never work at a university ever again). Many papers in the introduction start with explaining how the study builds on plenty of previous research, but that alone doesn’t prove that something is a good direction to investigate. If academics were completely honest, many papers would write “We researched topic X because we got funding for it. But since we actually don’t care about X, we just wrote a proposal about our favorite niche topic that only one of the co-authors cares about, namely topic Y, and wrote it such that it sounds like X. Next we show that Y is actually very cool in the hope to convince others that it is cool plus to convince others of the conclusion that our most senior professor already found during the PhD which was 30 years ago. Apart from the professor, we don’t believe in the main argument of the paper but since he got the grant we’ll just go with it in the hope to one day be able to push our own ideas forward”.

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