Intelligence is chemical.
Chomsky believes that language is arbitrarily rather than
functionally structured -- that is, it is the way it is because of
some peculiar and essentially random accident of evolution, and not
because it is shaped by its communicative function.
He reduces linguistics to the study of 'grammar' and under his
definition, 'grammar' means very little -- it is the study of certain
questions which can hardly even be asked, much less answered, without
adopting a vast amount of his assumptions about language. I'd say
that 95% or more of the things that you would think are questions of
linguistics, are not questions that Chomsky thinks linguists should be
interested in. What he ends up studying is essentially an
angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin question.
His theories change radically every five to ten years, but he never
publishes more than the sketchiest indication of what his theories
currently are. The changes generally insulate his theories further
and further from any possibility of empirical disconfirmation. While
he has always talked loudly about making strong empirical claims, the
nature of the theories are such that these claims generally turn out
to be either truisms or impossible to disconfirm.
Example: a while back Chomskians were claiming that there was a single
'head-first' parameter which determined whether modifiers in a phrase
come before or after a head. (This means things like whether
adjectives and adverbs follow or precede their nouns or verbs, and
whether direct objects precede or follow the verb.) English is
supposed to be head-first, which means that verbs come before direct
objects, and adjectival phrases come after nouns (e.g. "the king of
the hill") and so on.
and yet... And yet... Adjectives come BEFORE nouns! An
adjective-noun combination is head-last!
When I was big into Chomsky I read handbooks on his linguistics
searching for the reason for this. I found it mentioned nowhere.
Finally I asked some people on the internet what the deal was.
It turns out that there's a weaselly way out of the claim: there are
two kinds of modifiers, "specifiers" on one side, and "complements" on
the other. In English, adjectives are specifiers, not complements,
which is why they are on the wrong side of the head.
Of course, if any given modifier can be either a specifier or a
complement, that reduces the "strong empirical claim" about head-first
vs. head-last languages to absolute vacuity.
This realization was my first disillusionment with Chomsky. Reading
better lingusits, like George Lakoff and especially Ronald Langacker,
thoroughly disillusioned me.
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Irrefutable Mathematics.
With schoolyear stipends at an end and rent yet to be paid, I've taken
the plunge into the world of office temping. I signed up with Friends & Company,
the place that found Nate that joke of a job with Bell Atlantic a few
summers ago. I like jokes.
The job they found for me, however, is not quite so great. It's partly my
fault. When you interview at Friends & Company, they sit you down at
a computer and let you test yourself on all kinds of common office applications--I
chose MS Word and WordPerfect. The lady asked if I wanted to do Excel,
too, and said why not. I used it once last summer and once this past year
to make a mandolin fingerboard chart.
Of the three tests, I did poorest on MS Word, which I use every single day at
home and in my classroom. I did much better on WordPerfect -- I tested
on 7.something and hadn't used WP since 5.1 at school. And I did RIDICULOUSLY
well on Excel. This has been the story of my life, by the way. When
I was in third grade, my parents thought I was too bright for the grade I was in,
so they brought in a psychologist and put me through all manner of intelligence
tests. I did very well and found myself in all sorts of extra math and science
programs, which I liked and was reasonably good at, but I really wanted to play with
words (my mother has my actual journal entries from that time where I explain
this). Even after I dropped all of that hard science stuff and turned to literary
things, though, my GRE scores were only mediocre in verbal and quite good in analytical.
Here's the deal. A lab called Smithkline is being sued for price gouging,
and Peterson Consulting Worldwide is preparing an enormous database of what the
lab charged for all of their services for 1989. My job is to take numbers
from all sorts of insurance invoices, interpret where the money is going, and put
the figures into the database. Story problems eight hours a day.
Here are the people I work with. Marcos and Kierre are my bosses -- both
in their early thirties. Marcos seems to think that I think he is pretty
cool -- or at least that I SHOULD think he's cool. He always encourages me
to ask him questions, but if it's something I can't figure out by myself, he usually
has to defer to Kierre. Kierre (pronounced like Pierre) is usually somewhere
around Marcos, but he's always working harder. I think Kierre is
cool. There are three others like me. Len is an older man from
the south. He speaks with an extreme drawl, and he is usually saying
something condescending about Kierre or Marcos. Frampton will be a
college freshman in the fall. He does not like to talk to me, and he
listens to technopop really loud on his discman. Len and Frampton
share one table; I share mine with Angelena. Angelena is a Chinese girl
who types like the wind and can wear bright colors like oranges and yellows
without looking flamboyant or ostentatious.
Here are the bad things about the job. It pays poorly, and it is
long-term (Friends and Company have had a four-person team there since January
and we're only up to 1993 in the records). Here are the good things about
the job. I can choose my own hours (within reason) as long as they total 40
a week. I'm there when the place opens at 8, I skip lunch or eat a bagel
at my computer, and I'm the first one out of the building at 4. The dress
code is not as formal as many of the places I could have ended up. They've
got us in a sort of "back 40" section with unfinished walls, lots of
cardboard boxes full of files, and folding tables. And we can listen to
walkmans all day.
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