Noam Chomsky set the field of linguistics and cognitive science back 50 years by proposing that there was a module in the brain specifically devoted to language, and that all grammar is innately stored in the human brain at birth. His theories were widely accepted by the linguistics community because of his constant evangelism, but he had no evidence whatsoever beyond “humans are special.” His theories have been time and again proven wrong by evolutionary biologists.
Even in modern times, he continued to push false pseudoscientific theories in artificial intelligence, a field where he had no experience. He claimed that AIs and animals can never become conscious because they can’t have the special magical consciousness module that humans have, again with no evidence. Similar arguments were used by phrenologists to justify the abuse of Blacks during the slave era, and are still used today to justify the abuse of animals on factory farms.
I’m sure he’s done some good in the world, but I don’t think his contributions to linguistics were one of them.
Chomsky is considered one of the founders of cognitive science. He was the only person who was able to argue away Skinner’s conceptualization of language. Were it not for him, behaviorism may still have been dominant.
Sure, his review of Skinner’s work was very popular, and it did change the field. But replacing one wrong theory with another wrong theory without evidence is not an improvement, and he continued to push his incorrect theory even after clear evidence to the contrary.
He turned psychology into a popularity contest and it continues to have negative repercussions on the field. It’s “pop science”
Edit: My bad, Freud turned psychology into a popularity contest. Chomsky merely exacerbated it, or at best did nothing to fix it when he had a shot at the reins.
Steve sounds like your typical Redditor posting about a famous person who has made monumental strides in academia. I’m guessing Steve also has ready-to-paste arguments for anyone who says that Stephen Hawking was intelligent.
Absolutely not. Your description of his theory is wrong. His argument is that humans innately possess universal grammar. That is not at all the same as “innately storing all grammar at birth.” It was obvious to him and anyone else at the time (and long before) that a kid born in America doesn’t spontaneously start speaking Swahili without first learning it. So what is universal grammar then? It’s the innate capacity for grammar itself.
Secondly, Chomsky did in fact present evidence for his theory. His most compelling evidence is summarized by the Poverty of the Stimulus argument. That is to say, human children begin to speak and understand their first language extremely rapidly given very few examples, mostly from listening to and interacting with their parents. More recently, given our experiences attempting to build AI in the form of Large Language Models, we’ve witnessed just how incredibly tiny the “training set” for human babies really is, compared to the sheer enormity of the text they feed into something like ChatGPT (a significant portion of all the text ever written in English).
This observation is what originally refuted Skinnerian behaviourist theories of language development. Skinner essentially tried to say that humans learn language by positive and negative reinforcement, the way we train a dog to do tricks. But that idea is obviously false to anyone who witnesses a child rapidly begin speaking. Language is compositional and infinitely productive, so to be able to acquire it so quickly implies that the brain is preconfigured or structured in a way that innately understands these features. That is Chomsky’s theory.
This is shocking to hear. I’m also extremely spooked that no experts have even attempted to dispute these claims. Was he really just some pseudo-academic celebrity? Is he merely the OG Jordan Peterson?
Haha, don’t worry, he was definitely not some kind of Jordan Peterson. JP intentionally abuses his popularity to spread hatred.
I don’t think Chomsky was as intentional about it. He just had opinions and happened to talk about them in a reassuring, intellectual tone. It’s more of a systemic issue, in that other people spread his ideas without thinking scientifically about them. I think it’s not healthy for the field that people idolize him so much. It makes it harder for linguistics to move toward the scientific method.
I think there is also something structural about academia, at least culturally, that supports the kind of monolithic views of how things work, even when they’ve never been shown to be demonstrated by the evidence. Linguistics is far from the only field where I’ve seen this scenario play out.
I mean, while I disagree with his thoughts on animal consciousness, which have been disproven in clinical settings (mirror-test), AI will obviously, at least not anytime soon, be conscious. We’re not even sure how consciousness works, although we are sure that we are not sure consciousness works. Without that knowledge, I posit AI will never become conscious.
Yup.
Noam Chomsky set the field of linguistics and cognitive science back 50 years by proposing that there was a module in the brain specifically devoted to language, and that all grammar is innately stored in the human brain at birth. His theories were widely accepted by the linguistics community because of his constant evangelism, but he had no evidence whatsoever beyond “humans are special.” His theories have been time and again proven wrong by evolutionary biologists.
Even in modern times, he continued to push false pseudoscientific theories in artificial intelligence, a field where he had no experience. He claimed that AIs and animals can never become conscious because they can’t have the special magical consciousness module that humans have, again with no evidence. Similar arguments were used by phrenologists to justify the abuse of Blacks during the slave era, and are still used today to justify the abuse of animals on factory farms.
I’m sure he’s done some good in the world, but I don’t think his contributions to linguistics were one of them.
Chomsky is considered one of the founders of cognitive science. He was the only person who was able to argue away Skinner’s conceptualization of language. Were it not for him, behaviorism may still have been dominant.
Sure, his review of Skinner’s work was very popular, and it did change the field. But replacing one wrong theory with another wrong theory without evidence is not an improvement, and he continued to push his incorrect theory even after clear evidence to the contrary.
He turned psychology into a popularity contest and it continues to have negative repercussions on the field. It’s “pop science”
Edit: My bad, Freud turned psychology into a popularity contest. Chomsky merely exacerbated it, or at best did nothing to fix it when he had a shot at the reins.
I urge anyone downvoting these comments to refute Steve. Downvoting without honest criticism is just petty
Steve sounds like your typical Redditor posting about a famous person who has made monumental strides in academia. I’m guessing Steve also has ready-to-paste arguments for anyone who says that Stephen Hawking was intelligent.
Absolutely not. Your description of his theory is wrong. His argument is that humans innately possess universal grammar. That is not at all the same as “innately storing all grammar at birth.” It was obvious to him and anyone else at the time (and long before) that a kid born in America doesn’t spontaneously start speaking Swahili without first learning it. So what is universal grammar then? It’s the innate capacity for grammar itself.
Secondly, Chomsky did in fact present evidence for his theory. His most compelling evidence is summarized by the Poverty of the Stimulus argument. That is to say, human children begin to speak and understand their first language extremely rapidly given very few examples, mostly from listening to and interacting with their parents. More recently, given our experiences attempting to build AI in the form of Large Language Models, we’ve witnessed just how incredibly tiny the “training set” for human babies really is, compared to the sheer enormity of the text they feed into something like ChatGPT (a significant portion of all the text ever written in English).
This observation is what originally refuted Skinnerian behaviourist theories of language development. Skinner essentially tried to say that humans learn language by positive and negative reinforcement, the way we train a dog to do tricks. But that idea is obviously false to anyone who witnesses a child rapidly begin speaking. Language is compositional and infinitely productive, so to be able to acquire it so quickly implies that the brain is preconfigured or structured in a way that innately understands these features. That is Chomsky’s theory.
This is shocking to hear. I’m also extremely spooked that no experts have even attempted to dispute these claims. Was he really just some pseudo-academic celebrity? Is he merely the OG Jordan Peterson?
Haha, don’t worry, he was definitely not some kind of Jordan Peterson. JP intentionally abuses his popularity to spread hatred.
I don’t think Chomsky was as intentional about it. He just had opinions and happened to talk about them in a reassuring, intellectual tone. It’s more of a systemic issue, in that other people spread his ideas without thinking scientifically about them. I think it’s not healthy for the field that people idolize him so much. It makes it harder for linguistics to move toward the scientific method.
Hope this helps clarify.
I think there is also something structural about academia, at least culturally, that supports the kind of monolithic views of how things work, even when they’ve never been shown to be demonstrated by the evidence. Linguistics is far from the only field where I’ve seen this scenario play out.
I mean, while I disagree with his thoughts on animal consciousness, which have been disproven in clinical settings (mirror-test), AI will obviously, at least not anytime soon, be conscious. We’re not even sure how consciousness works, although we are sure that we are not sure consciousness works. Without that knowledge, I posit AI will never become conscious.
Your position is:
We don’t know what it is, but AI certainly won’t have it?
Does not seem rigorous.
Lol. Lmao even.
Imagine thinking so rigidly. Plenty of things were known of before it was known how exactly they work. My position is:
We know something is causing this, but our understanding of it is currently infantile.
QED