Tram Town
Saturday, September 04, 2004
| Category: Chomsky The Uncle at ABCWatch pointed me at a Keith Windschuttle review of The Anti-Chomsky Reader by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. I have not read the book but I do have it on my "to acquire" list. I had always imagined that Chomsky's academic record was unchallengeably sound. It appears that I may have been wrong to make such assumptions... The most devastating articles in the Anti-Chomsky Reader are not those that expose the ideological prejudices, factual misrepresentations, and distorted logic of his political writings but the two at the end of the book that tear up his reputation as one of the towering intellects of our time. Two essays about linguistics reveal Chomsky’s output in that field to be not the work of a rare, great mind but the product of a very familiar kind of academic hack. His reputation turns out not to have been earned by any significant contribution to human understanding but to be the product of a combination of self-promotion, abuse of detractors, and the fudging of his findings.Hmm... gotta get that book! |
