Talk:Noam Chomsky

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Contents


[edit] Featured article status

Who would like to collaborate to achieve featured article status for this article? CyberAnth 22:24, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WARNING SIGN

Someone needs to remove the warning signs. They are rude and a bad joke. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.245.115.67 (talk) 02:47, 4 January 2007 (UTC).

[edit] TWIT

A mention came up that this article is slanted a it..... someone wanna take it with a fine tooth comb -- Tawker 18:55, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This article reads like a press release

How about some critism? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 72.236.189.72 (talk • contribs) 18:40, 3 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Vandalism to Noam Chomsky article

This is rather curious. Someone who isn't logged in accused me of vandalizing the Noam Chomsky article. I check my edit, and it shows exactly what i did-- added the IWW category to the article, because Noam Chomsky is a member of that organization. It doesn't show any other changes.

But i look at the next edit, where the vandalism was apparently undone. That shows vandalism that *appears* to come from the previous edit (my edit.)

Is there a way that someone is able to edit, and hide what they've done?

I don't know who posted to my talk page without signing, but if you have any more information, please weigh in on this. Richard Myers 16:25, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi Richard Myers -- I looked at it and sure enough it looks like you did the category & the random edit. I doubt that someone spoofed your address -- more likely, wikipedia was having a database sync hiccup of some sort. However, if this happens again on this article or to you, you should certainly let an admin know at the [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard. --lquilter 21:12, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
I have this article on my watchlist and yes I noticed that vandalism has been up a little lately, but this article has always been prone to vandalism and the recent vandalism hasn't reached levels where the article needs to be protected. If vandalism starts getting out of hand then I'll protect the article myself.--Jersey Devil 00:08, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I added to your talk page because it looked like you had vandalized. You did not. I apologize. I do not choose to login for anything I do on wikipedia, and that will not change. I saw a lot of vandalism, and someone was named in the history after a few reverts I did that day and decided to tell them to stop. Little did I know, it must have been a database hiccup. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.105.30.44 (talk) 15:06, 15 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Political views, connections to linguistics

My first edit. I'm surprised that there isn't much discussion on this page. I removed the following remark: "Chomsky has made connections between his linguistics research and more political topics. An example is a 1971 debate with French philosopher Michel Foucault on the question of human nature, where Chomsky used the idea of innate linguistic capacity to criticize the idea that all human values and knowledge are entirely conditioned by societal conditions."

Firstly, the characterization of that element of the debate is incorrect. In the Foucault debate, he used the idea that we have an innate capacity for sympathy (not language), to criticize the idea that human values, our sense of right and wrong, etc. are entirely conditioned by society. Secondly, this has nothing to do with politics. I left the subsequent sentence which gives a quote of Chomsky from 1969 describing the "tenuous" connection, although I don't think it's right to leave this in. There are a few instances where he has described a very tenuous or abstract connection, but there are hundreds of articles and interviews where he says that there is "absolutely no connection", or that the connection "is approximately zero". I'll let others decide if it should be removed. MJM72 06:20, 16 February 2007 (UTC).

I'm not entirely sure on the specific debate but I know that Chomsky frequently disavows any connections between politics and linguistics in various interviews he does. So I would tend to agree with you.--Jersey Devil 06:43, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
The new wording is problematic: the phrase "regularly admits" seems to imply that he is "admitting" something that he's accused of. How about replacing that with "frequently states"? Cgingold 16:07, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Good call Cgingold. MJM72 01:41, 23 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] faurisson misstatement replaced

Earlier, there was a long debate over the main article's grossly one sided treatment of the Faurisson affair which misrepresented the actual beliefs of Chomsky's critics. Someone has apparently both cleaned up/deleted that discussion from the discussion page and also reintroduced the same type of one sided exposition into the 'criticisms' section. It's a bit absurd that we can't even present criticisms of Chomsky in the section devoted to that topic, and instead show Chomsky trying to rebut arguments that aren't even allowed to be made. The article on the Faurisson affair gives a good overview of the topic, but the summary in the main article is horribly misleading.--Ryan Wise 07:30, 22 February 2007 (UTC)--150.135.1.43 07:28, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What languages does he speak?

It seems like a strange ommission, but I can't find in this article what languages Noam fluently speaks. Gronky 14:26, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

English only. He mentiones it in talks sometimes.--ChainSuck-Jimmy 14:34, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I seriously doubt he's ever said he speaks only English- he was translating Hebrew texts by age 7: http://www.pabook.libraries.psu.edu/LitMap/bios/Chomsky__Noam.html

Furthermore his debate with Foucalt seems to indicate that he speaks French as no translator could be heard. If I had to guess I'd say he speaks a few other languages as well. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.208.46.221 (talk • contribs).

When you take a look at the video of this debate you will recognize that Chomsky spoke in English while Foucault spoke in French. In case Chomsky would speak French there would be no point to that. I do not know about Chomskys Hebrew, but I remember him saying in an interview that he would like to be able to speak foreign languages but did'nt manage to get into this.--ChainSuck-Jimmy 13:23, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Keep in mind that his standards for what constitutes fluency or 'competence' in a given language tends to be more stringent than that of most folks BernardL 03:28, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
If he can speak Hebrew or French or whatever language, then there will surely be a record of him conversing, writing, debating, or otherwise using that language somewhere. And his level can be obvious from the complexity of his use, or can be judged by the comments of a third-party. His standards are not the issue here. Gronky 16:11, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
In the first chapter of "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" (1965), he quotes French text without providing any translation. At the very least he can read it. Quite probably he can also understand it passively, just not speak it well enough to do so in a in public debate . Emile 16:20, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
It doesn't prove he can read it, it just proves that he expects his readers not to be thrown by seeing it. Anyway, basic French is not difficult for English speakers. The languages are so similar that you can even get by in French speaking countries by speaking English with a French accent. Gronky 16:11, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
Help, I just fell off my chair! LOL
"The languages are so similar that you can even get by in French speaking countries by speaking English with a French accent."
Thanks for the laugh! (really)
You, um, do realize, I hope, that just possibly the reason for this is that an awful lot of people in those countries have learned basic English. Cgingold 13:57, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
An awful lot have, and others haven't. A quarter of words in English are of French origin (that figure, IIRC, excludes medical and scientific terms). Take a look at fr.wikipedia.org, in the opening welcome sentence, even if you've never heard of French before, you'll understand "project" "encyclopedia" "distributable" and you might cop that "librement" has something to do with liberty. Then in the sentence that follows, you'll understand "articles" "French" "million" and you'll probably recognise "languages", and from the word "plus" you might take the right meaning, or if not, a meaning not too far wrong. The rest of the page is also full of examples of French that a monolingual anglophone can understand. You must have a special chair that ejects its occupant whenever the occupant encounters something they don't know much about - be careful on Wikipedia! :-p Gronky 15:58, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] jewish

if he is athiest, why is he listed as a jewish scientist —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.142.83.66 (talk) 13:40, 6 March 2007 (UTC).

Because being "Jewish" means that one is a Jew, which is an ethnic term in this context rather than a religious one. Many Jews, like Chomsky, do not practice Judaism but they are still Jews. Merenta 21:31, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Need to cite source

First quote in the Opinion on criticism of science culture does not have a source. The quote does not come from the Activism, Anarchism, and Power interview. --Fseth7 05:38, 22 March 2007 (UTC)—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Fseth7 (talk • contribs) 05:36, 22 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Unbalanced bit

Virtually the whole section entitled "generative grammar" consists of unsourced criticism, parts of which are masked as objective, supposedly uncontroversial statements. While many of them do sound "truthy" to me (I'm not particularly interested in the field), it is unclear where the "objective" part is supposed to end and where the overt criticism is supposed to start, as they form a single line of reasoning. It's obvious that Chomsky's own quote disputes the accuracy of the preceding generalizations (and was indeed written as an objection to them, as apparent from the wiki page cited as a source for the quote). Finally, a section entitled "Generative grammar" should begin with a neutral and clear explanation of the basics of generative grammar, and criticism and "advertisement" of competing trends should come afterwards. --91.148.159.4 14:19, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

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