Mmmm... Well, I actually agree with Chomsky's analysis of behaviourism, at least with regard to linguistics. The "poverty of stimulus" agrument is one of the good things I am willing to give Chomsky credit for. There aren't many people left who don't agree, in princile, with the inateness hypothesis of language. I'm not very happy with the kinds of universals Chomsky thinks exist, or the mechanisms he is trying to ascribe to language, but human brains are clearly intended to learn langauge.
> He has the unique distinction of having stymied progress not just in his own
> field, but several others, including Psychology and Artificial Intelligence.
That's a little excessive. Look, I'm a linguist (currently in exile writing code since linguistics never has paid well, but none the less) and in linguistics I'm from a pretty anti-Chomskyan sect. But I've been studying a lot of AI of late (taking advantage of my company's tuition deal with Stanford) and as far as I can tell, most AI folk don't pay more than a hint of attention to Chomsky anymore. I blame Chomsky in part for the poor state of research in natural language processing, and perhaps for some ignorance about language acquisition. I blame a slew of other people too, only some of whom are Chomskyans.
For the most part, the damage has been restricted to linguistics. Education theory never really relied on generative grammar anyway (what it does rely on often isn't any better though.) NLP probably never could have gotten very far without better computers. Neurobiology never paid too much attention to Chomsky either.
AI actually has made a great deal of progress. Many of the underlying tenets of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI in the literature) don't hold much water anymore, but we've learned a lot anyway. Psychology's problems are their own. Blaming Chomsky for that just isn't true.
I have problems with Chomsky's linguistics, and his writing style in linguistics makes me somewhat prejudiced against reading his politics. Lots of people have problems with Chomsky's linguistics these days, and some people always have. There are whole other schools of thought outside of Chomskyanism, and at long last, thanks in part to the AI people, they are getting some attention.
Geoffrey Sampson writes books about how generative grammar is the road to surfdom. I just think generative grammar is a dead end.
Scott Martens
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