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You may recall that Noam Chomsky won the public poll sponsored by Foreign Policy and the UK's Prospect Magazine to determine the top "public intellectual" from an initial list of 100 nominees. In a stinging deconstruction of Chomsky's credentials and anti-Western political ideology (originally published in Prospect), writer Oliver Kamm denounces the pick:

In his book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Richard Posner noted that "a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot." Judging by caustic remarks elsewhere in the book, he was thinking of Noam Chomsky. He was not wrong.

Chomsky remains the most influential figure in theoretical linguistics, known to the public for his ideas that language is a cognitive system and the realisation of an innate faculty. While those ideas enjoy a wide currency, many linguists reject them. His theories have come under criticism from those, such as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who were once close to him. Paul Postal, one of Chomsky's earliest colleagues, stresses the tendency for the grandiloquence of Chomsky's claims to increase as he addresses non-specialist audiences. Frederick Newmeyer, a supporter of Chomsky's ideas until the mid-1990s, notes: "One is left with the feeling that Chomsky's ever-increasingly triumphalistic rhetoric is inversely proportional to the actual empirical results that he can point to."

Prospect readers who voted for Chomsky will know his prominence in linguistics, but are more likely to have read his numerous popular critiques of western foreign policy. The connection, if any, between Chomsky's linguistics and his politics is a matter of debate, but one obvious link is that in both fields he deploys dubious arguments leavened with extravagant rhetoric—which is what makes the notion of Chomsky as pre-eminent public intellectual untimely as well as unwarranted.

Read the rest.

UPDATE: Also be sure and read these previous condemnations of Chomsky's intellectual credibility and political posturing.

(Via Allah)

Dorkafork adds: and one more analysis of a Chomsky whopper, from Kamm.

Posted by Bill at October 23, 2005 02:17 PM | TrackBack (1)

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