Fantastic breakdown of how Chomsky's formalism collapsed under scrutiny. The Peters-Ritchie proof showing the theory was Turing-complete is brutal, basically revealing it explained everyting and nothing at the same time. What's interesting is how this parallels his political work, stripping away messy historical context to build grand unified theories. The Piraha counterexample is particularly damning since recursion was supposed to be the last remaining universal. It's kinda wild how someone can dominate a field for decades while the empirical foundation keeps eroding beneaththem.
Exactly. The one field where he could have been useful decided to abandon formal grammars as too cumbersome and moved to statistical approxations, which most modern nlp and llm algos.are based on
Not my field, but it seems that Chomsky did create a series of frameworks that provided a new and useful way of looking at linguistics?
Oversimplified and wrong, perhaps, but logical and well-organized, amenable to falsification and useful for others? Very roughly akin to Einstein's work, that wrongly didn't acknowledge quantum effects but whose relativity work provided a coherent base for others to work from?
Sadly no. jHe is constantly goal post shifting... so he is unfalsfiable. also burden is lm him to prove the existence of UG or merge "genes.". The burden is not on others to prove the lack of it
Fantastic breakdown of how Chomsky's formalism collapsed under scrutiny. The Peters-Ritchie proof showing the theory was Turing-complete is brutal, basically revealing it explained everyting and nothing at the same time. What's interesting is how this parallels his political work, stripping away messy historical context to build grand unified theories. The Piraha counterexample is particularly damning since recursion was supposed to be the last remaining universal. It's kinda wild how someone can dominate a field for decades while the empirical foundation keeps eroding beneaththem.
And my Theory is linguistics of secondary importance.. his primary function is that of an acceptable dissident
Exactly. The one field where he could have been useful decided to abandon formal grammars as too cumbersome and moved to statistical approxations, which most modern nlp and llm algos.are based on
Thank You Esha
Not my field, but it seems that Chomsky did create a series of frameworks that provided a new and useful way of looking at linguistics?
Oversimplified and wrong, perhaps, but logical and well-organized, amenable to falsification and useful for others? Very roughly akin to Einstein's work, that wrongly didn't acknowledge quantum effects but whose relativity work provided a coherent base for others to work from?
Sadly no. jHe is constantly goal post shifting... so he is unfalsfiable. also burden is lm him to prove the existence of UG or merge "genes.". The burden is not on others to prove the lack of it