I’m at the next level: I don’t know who it is.
I also need to figure out if it’s the next level up or down…
One might call him the Jordan Peterson of the left, if one wanted to piss off everyone.
Don’t know about his linguistic work. As much as I can gather, even if not 100% correct he was hugely influential in linguistics. This is a how (good) science usually works. Someone postulates a theory which tries to explain a thing, and is then proven and/or disproven. If well done it stays important even if disproven.
However his politics? It’s a barely coherent mess with only one basic postulate - “America bad”. Anything that US does is automatically bad. Anything that any enemy of US does is automatically good. Turns out to be correct sometimes but there is no true moral and philosophical underpinning to it. He build his political career on the “even a broken clock is right twice a day” principle.
idk shit about his politics, but for linguistics, I am not a big fan. Universal Grammar is wrong, and the dogma surrounding it is even worse.
Yeah like everyone wonders a little bit whether there is an intrinsic grammar to human biology but saying there are feature/s that every language shares is a strange and reductionist claim.
I just love how he and Skinner had it out. Skinner wrote “Verbal Behavior”, Chomsky responded, and Skinner’s takeaway was “well, he didn’t read this at all.” And declared himself the winner. Meanwhile Chomsky was expecting a rebuttal, never got one, and declared himself the winner.
I can only speak for his linguistic works, but it’s odd how much clearer and more straightforward his earlier works are than his later ones. Syntactic structures and Aspects of a Theory of Syntax are easy enough that I’d even recommend them to Introduction to Syntax students, but starting with Lectures on Government and Binding things get increasingly obtuse to the point that I’d always recommend reading “translations” of his later works rather than the works themselves.
