Furthermore, there is a commonly heard standard for theories which favors socalled elegance. Well, "elegance" is just a complicated word for "simplicity". Also, the epistemological standard of Occam's Razor is exactly that the simpler theory is to be favored over the more complicated one.
To me the most important issue in this thread is that especially for social theory, it is imperative that it be understood and assimilated by masses of people, whether it is simple or complicated. Social theory is worthless or bad if it is not united with practice by large numbers of people. Social theory must grip masses and become a material force, not remain the possession of a small group of scholars and thinkers, even if it originates with the latter. If the complexity of the concepts forces it to remain esoteric ,it makes a social theory a failure, so it must be broken down somehow.
Marx, Engels and Lenin spent a lot of time popularizing Marxism, as in _Value, Price and Profit_, for example. To some extent, the theory needed to justify socialist revolution is not that complicated at all: There's all this wealth being produced,plenty for all , and yet some people are in poverty. Just shift some of the excess-surplus wealth of the rich over to the poor, and we'll be happier. Simple. However, society has the ancient superstition of the authority of predominantly mental laborers, "geniuses", etc. ( priests with esoteric knowledge as the original social theorists-theologists, and the like). Marx did all that theory and science work , reading and writing, in part, to establish himself as an authority equal to the establishment intellectual authorities ( who had evolved from priests to scientists, authorities on the word of God to authorities on the Laws of Nature). Then Marx could say to workers in a _Value, Price and Profit_ , "I am an authority in economics, and I say when wages go up, prices do not have to go up , too, if we lower profits. Go and make revolution based on my intellectual authority and your common sense of decency. " ( Michael Perelman, Max, Doug, et al., note bene :>) )
The big difference between a theory of physics and a social theory in relation to lots of people understanding it is that with revolutionary social theory, there are enormous and concentrated efforts by the powers that be to DIS-suade most people from "understanding" the social theory. So, it is not as much complexity , as human adversaries who are the barrier to popularization.
To me the test of literary theory is its practice. Are the literary theorists, post modernists, etc. able to get their ideas to grip masses and change the world ? That's the test of their theory. I am openminded to their claims to make improvements and corrections of Marxist social theory. However, I haven't seen the proof of their claims in terms of revolutionary social movements that literary theory and post-modernism have given rise to. Maybe in the future.
That's the test for Chomsky's generative grammar too, because linguistics is a social science. What has generative grammar done to change the world ? Ironically, for this thread, one might think that revolutionary grammatical theory would somehow make it easier for masses to understand the language of revolutionary social theory !
Charles
From: "C. G. Estabrook"
from the examples he gives, I think what Chomsky means by a simple idea is first of all that it's not a theory. I think he would consider his fundamental insights about language (e.g., so-called innateness) simple ideas, although his work has clearly been an attempt to fashion some theories about language.
He has claimed that for almost all the subjects his MIT colleagues work on, he can find someone who can give him a straightforward and simple account of what they think. That that cannot be done for what some literary scholars have been calling theory for a generation is for him an indication that there is something profoundly wrong with it. And that seems plausible to me. --CGE