It's a little bit frustrating to read a rehash of an argument that was cutting edge maybe back in the late 90s, especially one that is so poorly written, and framed as a battle between two intellectuals.
Chomsky's past his heyday. He has been seminal in his field, but he's no longer doing research which pushes at the boundaries of our understanding of language, how to model it, or what the fundamental nature of language understanding systems is. (as one might infer, I come from a non-chomskyian school of linguistics).
Given that we have actual data and research about large scale systems that do interesting things (including the massive artificial neural network that google built last month, see: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/google-x-neural-ne... ) reporting as substance free and obfuscating as this is, is a real frustration, when we could be talking about more interesting things, such as what a solid operational definition of meaning is, or how exactly heuristic/rule based systems actually differ from statistical mechanism, and whether or not all heuristic systems can (or should) be modeled with statistical systems.
The framing of this article is particularly galling because there are so many non-chomskian linguists out in the world who operate fruitfully in the statistical domain. Propping Chomsky up as somehow representative of all linguists is pretty specious and a bit irritating.
It's a rehash of http://norvig.com/chomsky.html and the talk by Chomsky that led to it (both recent and relevant). I can't wait to read the continuation of that article that Norvig promised in comments.
You know, the discussion of Chomsky made me realize something. I would bet that Chomsky's take on Norvig's approach (to put specific names on the ideas) is that Norvig is a resurrection of Skinner. Specifically, behaviorism as "study texts, make statistical correlations, but don't make up any grand theories."
Non-Chomskian linguists? I was under the impression that, post-Chomsky, linguistics was defined as Chomskian; everyone else had left the field for whatever related discipline most closely matched what they wanted to do.
I mean... there are core things at the basis of what everyone agrees on in linguistics (language is structured, learned, and there is a defined syllabary of sounds that humans make and use in language, etc), but Chomsky's grand unified theory of language, and his ideas about how those mechanics function are not universally agreed upon.
Even within syntax, which is really the sort of core of what Chomsky has been interested in, there are other formalisms to represent syntax which differ from Chomsky's theoretical framework. You can read more about Chomskian transformational grammar on wikipedia with links off to other sorts of formalisms as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar
Actually, that was one of the examples I had in mind. I was under the impression that the people interested in languages and sound had left linguistics in favor of phonetics, and as a result there was little interest in the interaction between the two.
My difficulty with the Chomskian method, as opposed to my ignorance about linguistics, is actually based on the "formalisms to represent syntax", since application of application of formalisms to natural language seems to be to be problematic. To quote the Wikipedia page you mentioned,
"Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g., starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealised version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis...."
At the time, my impression from more neurological reading was that the errors were rather more interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia).
Phonetics is most assuredly part of linguistics, unless you redefine linguistics just to mean "syntax" (No linguistics department i'm aware of makes such a distinction).
And yep, there's a whole sub-discipline of psycholinguistics which definitely learns from things like speech pathologies.
Elaborating on what knowtheory posted, in modern linguistics, "Chomskian" doesn't usually refer to "everything Chomsky said". For example, Chomsky was probably the foremost advocate of the overthrow of behaviourist theory in linguistics, and now no-one takes extreme behaviourism a la BF Skinner serious (as an explanation of linguistic behaviour), but this rejection is not currently labelled as "Chomskian". It's just linguistics.
So, not that I'm 100% clear on the details, but Chomskian refers to more specific claims. For example, some claims about what aspects of language knowledge are innate (Chomsky claims a great language engine with a relatively small number of tuning parameters). As another example, at least at one point, I think Chomsky was rejecting syntax rulesets with productions that were not binary? I think?
"Chomsky was probably the foremost advocate of the overthrow of behaviourist theory in linguistics, and now no-one takes extreme behaviourism a la BF Skinner serious (as an explanation of linguistic behaviour), but this rejection is not currently labelled as 'Chomskian'. It's just linguistics."
My impression was that Chomsky had effectively replaced extreme behaviorism with extreme "Chomskianism", which had then assumed the name of linguistics. Extreme behaviorism is pretty goofy, but less extreme versions have some good points.
Not sure how you got that impression, but a lot of stuff has happened in linguistics since Chomsky, some of it quite explicitly contrary to his arguments. None of my advanced linguistics classes dealt with Chomskian stuff.
Ok, I'm not anywhere close to a linguist. The only linguistics class I've ever taken was, strangely, an automata theory course.
But what I've read around linguistics lead me to believe that the field was mostly Chomskian theory with very little empirical evidence. But then, I've never been a real fan of Chomsky's work---sure, in that automata theory (and in other well-defined formal languages) it's great, but I don't see a good application to natural languages---and so I haven't actually tried to follow up on anything I've heard about it.
IOPOTW (In Other Parts Of The World) Chomsky may have a much lower relative influence on linguistics. For instance in France, you have Ferdinand de Saussure and André Martinet. I read a bit of the later, and it seem to me more solid on some grounds than Chomsky, because more humble (the first act of reason is to acknowledge its limits).
I'd bet in continental Europe the political Chomsky is deemed more interesting than the linguist.
West Coast Functionalism gave birth to various continuations that are still practiced fervently at various universities (including UCSB, as a specific example I can point to that I have personal experience with).
Chomsky's past his heyday. He has been seminal in his field, but he's no longer doing research which pushes at the boundaries of our understanding of language, how to model it, or what the fundamental nature of language understanding systems is. (as one might infer, I come from a non-chomskyian school of linguistics).
Given that we have actual data and research about large scale systems that do interesting things (including the massive artificial neural network that google built last month, see: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/google-x-neural-ne... ) reporting as substance free and obfuscating as this is, is a real frustration, when we could be talking about more interesting things, such as what a solid operational definition of meaning is, or how exactly heuristic/rule based systems actually differ from statistical mechanism, and whether or not all heuristic systems can (or should) be modeled with statistical systems.
The framing of this article is particularly galling because there are so many non-chomskian linguists out in the world who operate fruitfully in the statistical domain. Propping Chomsky up as somehow representative of all linguists is pretty specious and a bit irritating.