[lbo-talk] Ethics of choosing an audience/ was Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Sun Dec 10 14:00:00 PST 2006


On 12/10/06, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> For instance, earlier in the thread, bitch mentioned someone who
> considered Chomsky an elite academic who is difficult to read. You
> don't agree. Why should your assessment of Chomsky carry more weight?

Shouldn't you cite evidence for his "incomprehensibility"? (Rather than rely on a flamewarrior's family anecdote?)

Amazon reviewers praise his _Understanding Power_ for clarity, despite his views ranging from anarchism to Zapatistas: <http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Power-Indispensable-Chomsky-Noam/dp/1565847032>

I don't recall anyone in this discussion citing a specific paragraph which was intellectually incomprehensible. (As opposed to just boringness.) Please try.


> If we did a survey of adults in the U. S., had them read some Chomsky,
> and the majority claimed that he was an obscure intellectual elitist,
> would you denounce his work?

Well, do you know any such surveys? I've heard of informal ones where he's voted highly. Even other academics in the social sciences cite him heavily, regardless of his criticisms regarding the social sciences: <http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/mc/mc-supp-017.html>


> Let's face it, only a small
> number of people in our society need to understand how op-amps work or
> how cpus are manufactured or how to design a safe bridge. In an
> industrial society, it's impossible for all specialized forms of
> knowledge to be understood by everyone.

Maybe, but those hardware guys are usually happy to explain how it works, in simple terms. Children can go to Radio Shack and build electronic devices. Schools have contests where they build bridges from straws. Managers at hardware firms demand easy explanations.

Here's a refreshing anecdote from the physicist I mentioned earlier:

"Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Laureate in physics, was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin one-half particles obey Fermi Dirac statistics. Rising to the challenge, he said, 'I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.' But a few days later he told the faculty member, 'You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.'"

Tayssir



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list