Refuting (again) Chris Knight in his (2020) The Unknown Chomsky: When the Pentagon Used Chomsky’s Linguistics for Weapons Research, Critique, 48:4, 661-676.

Refuting (again) Chris Knight in his (2020) The Unknown Chomsky: When the Pentagon Used Chomsky’s Linguistics for Weapons Research, Critique, 48:4, 661-676.

 

Wolfgang B. Sperlich

 

 

It looks like Chris Knight is trying hard in making a career out of critiquing, or rather denigrating and defaming Noam Chomsky, rehashing his rather absurd claims first published in his (2016) Decoding Chomsky, which I reviewed on my blog and on various on-line sites. Chomsky himself refuted his claims in Allott et.al (2019) point by point, noting in the end that:

 

What is striking is the unfailing regularity with which Knight’s vulgar exercises of defamation crash to the ground on a moment’s inquiry, typically into the sources he provides. I can only assume that Knight provided these extensive sources in a show of scholarship, assuming that few would actually look into them.

 

Knight, like a shark, cannot let go of his prey, even if he wanted to by way of reason. As such he has to follow his reactionary instincts and do it again in his new article (2020) The Unknown Chomsky: When the Pentagon Used Chomsky’s Linguistics for Weapons Research.  His beef with Chomsky is summarized by himself, in his abstract:

 

Noam Chomsky’s early linguistic research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was funded by the Pentagon. While acknowledging this funding, Chomsky has always denied that it had any effect on either his linguistics or his political activism. Here, I provide evidence that Chomsky’s linguistic theories were initially developed in a context of significant military interest and involvement. I go on to argue that Chomsky’s anti-militarist conscience then prompted him to throw himself into passionate resistance against the Vietnam War – while making sure that his models of language were so abstract and unrealistic that military applications were unlikely ever to be found. The result was an impoverished linguistics that ignores the political implications of our understanding of language and its origins.

 

Yet again, let’s first look at his claim that Chomsky’s academic work ‘was an impoverished linguistics that ignores the political implications of our understanding of language and its origins’. Harking back to the 1995 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris, another anti-Chomsky hatchet man, there have been many attempts to discredit Chomsky’s widely adopted school of linguistics, mainly based on the denial that language exists as a syntactic construct situated in the brains of homo sapiens, as an evolutionary mutation some 80,000 years or so ago, allowing a recursive operation called MERGE. What is claimed instead (often by non-linguists like Knight), is that language slowly evolved as part of the cognitive apparatus, what with communication being the main driver.  As such, Knight again comes up with this biblical (Chris calls it ‘political’ since he a self-avowed left-wing activist) story of our paradisical-communist evolution:

 

            I am endlessly struck by the vast amount of scientific research being conducted these days about  

            the evolution of life on earth and the deep history of Homo sapiens. For something like ninety 

            percent of our existence as a species, we humans were hunter-gatherers, living without property or

            the state. Our bodies and minds were shaped not by class society but by an egalitarian, even a 

            communistic, social order. It was under these social conditions that we developed the most 

            exquisitely social of our genetic capacities - our ability to use language creatively in order to share

            our thoughts and dreams.

 

He then shoots himself in the foot by noting:

 

At a time when humanity faces deadly threats from nationalism, militarism and environmental catastrophe, we urgently need to find some way out of this mess. To do this, it would be more than just helpful to understand where humanity comes from and what our potential as a species really is.

 

So, Chris, what happened when the 90% of our existence changed to the 10%, now characterized as the above horror story? Surely if good old socialist language shaped us for eons, how come it turned into fake news, corporate bullshit and fascist militarism? Sure enough, Knight again assumes that 

 

… language must have something to do with history, politics and culture, and that children acquire their first language at least in part by learning from those around them.

 

So, again, was this not also true of our existence as hunter-gatherers? 

 

I think it becomes plain to see that language use (or sometimes called ‘performance’ or ‘parole’ by Saussure) has been at the crux of this matter since year dot. How does Chris Knight know that amongst the hunter-gatherers there were no little Hitlers whose seductive oratory led to periods of political insanity? Let’s just stick to recorded history and maintain that there were also periods of socialist and syndicalist anarchist (à la Chomsky) movements that had it all figured out, namely what Knight calls ‘our potential as a species’. 

 

So, how come Chris Knight keeps celebrating Chomsky as a political activist to his liking and yet refutes him as a shonky scientist who sold his soul to the Pentagon? 

 

Why can’t he believe Chomsky who says that all he wanted to do with his linguistics is to find out what language is, rather than study its many uses. There is no getting away from the fact that the fascist and the socialist share the same brain, the same genes, the same language, the same syntax, the same grammar, the same biological make-up and the same speech organs - but what sets them apart is what they say and how they say it. Chomsky’s neutral claim that language as such can generate an infinite set of sentences, good and bad, seems to me the true ‘potential’, namely by overcoming the bad use by being able to generate novel thoughts, and yes, show up reactionary bad language content for what it is. 

 

Let us reaffirm that Chomsky conducting his studies at MIT is a mere random event in academic history, as he had no devious plans whatsoever to get there in the first place. Academic careers, like so many other professional careers are often determined by the proverbial luck to be at the right place and time and who you know and who recommends you. Chomsky was recommended  for MIT by no other than Roman Jacobson (of Harvard and later of MIT). So was Jacobson a militarist in disguise?  How did Chris Knight end up at UCL where they have academics for military radar (2016)? Should he feel guilty by association, since he accuses Chomsky of such a crime? Just about every university in the world has some association with the military. Should Einstein have refused the invitation to join the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin which at the time was also a hotbed of German militarism? 

 

These conundrums then lead to Knight’s most laughable assertion, namely that Chomsky did feel guilty and therefore devised an incomprehensible linguistics that could not be used by the Pentagon even though they paid him for it. Here again Knight shoots himself in the foot, seriously:

 

Chomsky felt most comfortable with models of language so utterly other-worldly and abstract that no one could possibly make use of them for anything at all, let alone for killing people.

 

So, Chomsky’s linguistics is a truly pacifist theory, however incomprehensible, especially for those who like killing people. Clearly then, if somewhat cynically, linguists who see language as a functional tool for communication, and nothing else, are aiding and abetting killing people because one can say things like “lieber tot als rot” (attributed to Goebbels). 

 

Sure, the Pentagon was funding MIT research into command and control applications to enable thick generals to issue English kill commands to computers. As Knight cites Chomsky in this instance, noting that Chomsky thought this was a bad joke and that he wanted nothing to do with it, why not believe it? In fact if one wants to go down this road, Chomsky’s contribution to computer science is the so-called Chomsky hierarchy, which is derived from his ‘incomprehensible’ theory of formal grammars. It did nothing for machine translation, by the way. In fact, machine translation has now become an industry by way of statistical matching algorithms which are as primitive as Skinner’s Pavlovian language assertions in his (1957) Verbal Behaviour (which Chomsky famously debunked; see also my blog on Mercer et al.). Why then assume that Chomsky did everything in his power to come up with a crazy theory of language to assuage his guilt for not having resigned his MIT position at that point in the 1960s? Who is not guilty of somehow contributing to the mess we are in now? I drive an old car contributing to pollution. Being a professor at UCL is a bullshit job (cf. David Graeber, 2019) as much as it is at MIT. Give me a chair at UCL or MIT, and I’ll take a seat (I’ll promise not to bite the hand that feeds me). Knight admires Chomsky as a political activist, and Chomsky says he feels guilty for not having done more. What has Chris Knight done? Clearly not as much as Chomsky, so he should feel guiltier than Chomsky! Chris the Knight should get off his high horse, do the honourable thing and apologize to Chomsky. 

 

Finally though, let’s give Chris (who is not a linguist) a lesson in linguistics, since he tries again to ridicule Noam by misquoting him “that he then makes the even stranger claim that the concepts we put together in sentences - for example ‘book’ or ‘carburettor’ - are natural items which existed in the human brain thousands of years before real books or carburettors had been invented.” Hahaha, Noam, how stupid can you get! So let’s have a look at the real quote which Chris, to his credit, provides in the footnotes:

 

Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, op. cit., p. 64. In 2000, Chomsky said ‘there is overwhelming reason to believe that concepts like, say, climb, chase, run, tree and book and so on are fundamentally fixed’. In 2010, when again discussing the innate nature of such concepts, he wrote: Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburetor and bureaucrat. ... However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.

            

So what does this really mean? Chris, as any school boy who attended a good old British grammar school, should know, in the English canonical SV(O) sentence, the subject (S) is always in the nominative case. Having done a bit of Latin and Greek, he would also know that the word ‘nominative’ is derived from Greek via Latin, meaning something like the ‘naming case’. Now we all know that ‘naming’ – putting a name or label on anything animate or inanimate – is a fundamental concept fixed in our brains. Words (the lexicon) do not drop out of the sky but are essentially generated by syntax, based on the well-known categories of noun and verb that exist in all natural languages. As such we explain in simple terms ‘nouns’ as ‘naming words’ and ‘verbs’ as ‘action words’. Chomsky simply asserts that we have an innate stock of concepts like nouns and verbs in our brain, and the child learning her language will discover the synchronic labels as they exist in today’s language. So when acquiring a word like ‘book’ we can easily find the underlying fundamental concept that existed before the book was invented, namely the etymology of book tells us that this can be traced back to an Indo-Germanic label or name attached to a particular tree (beech) which was used to scratch in runes. In other words (excuse the pun) all words in our lexicon can be traced back to fundamental concepts, so whenever something new crops up, like the carburettor, we have the innate language capacity to ‘name’ this new thing by slotting it into a pre-existing category that ultimately links up with an innate concept that Chomsky describes above. It doesn’t require a genius to find a proto-concept for ‘carburettor’ either, namely via Latin and further back to designate/name/label something fundamental as ‘charcoal’ (our hunter-gatherers would agree). BTW, there was a popular school of thought called generative semantics, developed by former Chomskyan scholars around George Lakoff (1970) but in competition with generative syntax, whereby a famous lexical item ‘kill’ was said to derive from ‘cause to die’. There have been many attempts to find lexical or semantic primitives that somehow underly the lexicon (cf. Wierzbicka, 1996), hence Knight’s attempt to ridicule Chomsky on this account falls very flat.

 

So, Knight’s lamentable misrepresentation of Chomsky’s claims about the lexicon is then followed up by the even more startling assertion that ‘many linguists now agree that almost none of Chomsky’s detailed claims about the nature of language has survived the test of time’ citing a few authors, some of whom, surprise, surprise, are not linguists (like Knight). It would be easy to list ‘many linguists’ who actually subscribe to Chomsky’s minimalist bio-linguistics program but let’s just focus on one of them, namely Koji Fujita who advanced the theory of the lexicon as derived via syntax, as I have briefly indicated above (see also my various blog entries on this subject, e.g. 2010). The educate himself, Knight should leaf through a fairly contemporary (2016) ‘book’ titled Advances in Biolinguistics The Human Language Faculty and Its Biological Basis, edited by Koji Fujita and Cedric A. Boeckx, and count how many genuine linguists tow the Chomsky line. BTW, Chomsky has never behaved like an academic guru who surrounds himself with adoring disciples but has always advanced his scientific program in fair and equal collaboration with many others, giving rise to many interesting research directions in biolinguistics, not all of which necessarily align with all the technical details that arise from the Minimalist Program, which is very much alive and well today.

 

 

Allott, N., Knight, C. and Smith, N. (eds) 2019. The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years. London: UCL Press.

 

Graeber, David. 2019. Bullshit Jobs. (see also my review of the book http://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.com/2018/09/an-orange-review-of-bullshit-jobs-by.html

 

Military Radar (2016). https://www.asdevents.com/event.asp?id=15356

 

Sperlich, Wolfgang (2010). A review of First Special Issue of Biolinguistics https://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.com/2010/08/review-of-first-special-issue-of.html

 

Sperlich, Wolfgang (2016). A review of Decoding Chomsky by Chris Knight.  http://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-review-of-decoding-chomsky-2016-by.html

 

Sperlich, Wolfgang (2017). Computational Linguistics à la R. Mercer: gross and crude. http://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.com/2017/03/computational-linguistics-la-r-mercer.html

 

Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press.