October 17, 2004

Chomsky is right!

Well, this only came about because he was talking about something having to do with Linguistics, not Foreign Policy for which he has zero training or authority. Linguistics he knows and knows well. From Michael J. Totten comes this link: Harry's Place bq. Chomsky is totally, utterly right. Words you thought you'd never read at Harry's Place? Me too. Not words I usually write. Yet Chomsky hits the nail on the head when it comes to Derrida and post-modernism. And here is the quote from Chomsky talking about post-modernism and the work of Jacques Derrida who passed away recently: bq. "I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed." Don't forget to visit Michael's link -- some of the comments on his board are fun to read, the nut-jobs and moonbats are well represented and they get rightly skewered by Michaels other readers... Posted by DaveH at October 17, 2004 2:54 PM