> people
> took his word for thing, scientifically, just because he said them. they
> weren't formulated. they were one offs written in footnotes. didn't matter.
> Chomsky said ti? then it was true.
>
> that's fucking scary.
Why do you think they call it "scholasticism"?
But it doesn't ring quite true for me in this case. I haven't read the book you mention, so I'm not sure which "people" are supposed to have had this slavish Talmudic attitude toward Chomsky. I was in the linguistics racket myself, at what was probably the apogee of Chomsky's arc, and while everybody I knew took the guy very seriously -- as well they should have -- none of 'em treated the stuff as Holy Writ. In fact they were much more interested in picking holes in it than wielding proof- texts at each other.
Academics have a funny contradictory predicament. On the one hand, it's dangerous to stray too far from received wisdom. On the other, you've got to come up with a fresh angle. It's a little like being a screenwriter.
Linguistics, though, in the 50 years since _Syntactic Structures_ was published, has skittered around so much there hasn't been a lot of opportunity for received wisdom to consolidate itself. However, I've been out of the field for a while. Perhaps sclerosis has set in since I stopped paying attention.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org