I have a degree in linguistics. We were taught Chomsky’s theories of linguistics, but also taught that they were not true. (I don’t want to say what university it was since this was 25 years ago and for all I know that linguistics department no longer teaches against Chomsky). The end result is I don’t take anything Chomsky says seriously. So, it is difficult for me to engage with Chomsky’s ideas.
I'm rather confused by this statement. I've read a number of Chomsky pieces and have listened to him speak a number of times. To say his theories were all "not true" seems, to an extent, almost impossible.
Care to expand on how his theories can be taught in such a binary way?
GP may be referring to the idea that language is innate like an organ in the body/brain. The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe is a great read exploring Chomsky and other thinkers in this realm. It would have been great to see what he thought of LLMs too.
Generally what people are talking about are his universal grammar or generative syntax theories/approaches, which are foundational to how you approach many topics. Because you build your academic career based on specialization they are hotly contested (for the material reasons of jobs, funding, tenure, etc.).
This leads to people who agree hiring each other and departments ‘circling the wagon’ on these issues. You’ll see this referred to as east vs west coast, but it’s not actually that clearly geographically delineated.
So anyways, these are open questions that people do seriously discuss and study, but the politics of academia make it difficult and unfortunately this often trickles down to students.
This reminds me of the debates over F.R. Leavis, and the impact it had on modern english teaching worldwide. There are a small dying cohort of english professors who are refugees from internecine warfare.
Same thing happened in Astronomy. Students of Fred Hoyle can't work in some institutions. &c &c.
I don't have a degree in linguistics, but I took a few classes about 15 years ago, and Chomsky's works were basically treated as gospel. Although my university's linguistics faculty included several of his former graduate students, so maybe there's a bias factor. In any case, it reminds me of an SMBC comic about how math and science advance over time [1]
Linguistics has been largely subsumed by CS (LLM, speech synthesis, translation). It's not an empirical science or social science and most of its theories are not falsifiable.
But generally speaking Chomsky's ideas, and in particular, the Universal Grammar are no longer in vogue.
Linguistics is a heterogenous field, an while some parts aren't empirical, others absolutely are. I can attest to that from the journal articles I read in undergrad. They had experimental data and statistical analyses.