Perhaps the intention was to point to the controversies surrounding the origin (perhaps the wrong word) in *a* human being. Is there a language organ from which language springs forth, or is language acquired as a faculty using general computing mechanisms (or other method if CTM sounds bad to you). In that case, Chomsky's position has to be the defensive one, given the eery similarity of "poverty of input" type arguments to those who doubt evolution.
> And although he's never been interested in doing field
> work himself, I'm not aware that he's ever "laughed at"
> such work "as a waste of time."
I cannot imagine Chomsky laughing at things, he seems all too sensible and knowledgeable for that. But of note (though not corroborative): here is something from a fellow named Daniel Everett at the XVII International Congress of Linguists:
> Thus, for the first half of the Twentieth Century, the normal
> conception of the
> linguist's 'job' was to study little- or un-studied languages in the
> field and to produce
> coherent bodies of data on the interaction of culture, lexicon,
> texts, and grammar.
>
> But by the 60s this had changed radically, with fieldresearch given
> more or less the intellectual status of butterfly collecting. The
> 'withering of fieldwork' began innocuously enough, in the
> restlessness of a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania
> with his MA research:
>
>> "Harris suggested that I undertake a systematic structural grammar
>> of some
>> language. I chose Hebrew, which I knew fairly well. For a time, I
>> worked with an
>> informant and applied methods of structural linguistics as I was
>> then coming to
>> understand them. The results, however, seemed to me rather dull and
>> unsatisfying.
>> Having no very clear idea as to how to proceed further, I abandoned
>> these efforts
>> and did what seemed natural; namely, I tried to construct a system
>> of rules for
>> generating the phonetic forms of sentences, that is, what is now
>> called a
>> generative grammar." (Chomsky 1975,25).
>
> Chomsky's intellectual frustration with (an extremely easy version
> of) standard
> fieldwork led indirectly to some of the most important developments
> in the 2000 + year
> history of the study of language, so I am hardly complaining about
> the direction
> Chomsky decided to take. Nevertheless, the very intellectual vigor
> and power of
> Chomsky's subsequent work sufficed, in my view, to pull most
> linguistics students and
> departments away from the traditional emphasis on fieldresearch to
> theoretical work on,
> for the most part, the linguist's native language. Though there is
> nothing inherently anti-
> fieldwork in Chomsky's research programme, his attitude, as
> expressed in the passage
> just cited, and his rejection of the intellectual priorities of
> Boasian linguistics led to an
> abandonment of fieldwork in the US and a nearly five-decade neglect
> of the study of
> indigenous languages and fieldwork throughout the linguistics world,
> as his influence
> soon became massive and international.
--ravi