Noam Chomsky Owns Sam Harris and Indicts Bill Clinton

Speaking of links, Daily Show’s video of Judith Miller takedown here:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/episodes/27m3xm/april-29–2015—judith-miller

Wow. I’m not even through the entire exchange and already I see Sam Harris playing the the black Knight in that old Monty Python sketch. (‘Tis but a scratch!”)

Noam Chomsky’s mind is like a razor and his reasoning behind every argument shows it. How can Harris not understand that he’s just been completely dismantled? I’d thought Harris was very intelligent. Next to Chomsky though, not so much.

I can’t imagine why anyone would think Sam Harris is intelligent. A cursory look at some of the arguments he has made makes it very clear that the man is a simple minded moron (and also a racist).

I didn’t notice harris being dismantled at all. it appeared Chomsky was profoundly irrational and dogmatic and unable to maintain a civil conversation. Chomsky’s age is really showing.

Neither one of them has a fucking clue what happened or didn’t in Sudan. There’s a huge amount of assertion and ostentatious marshalling, with varying degrees of deftness, of Internet insta-facts combined with rhetoric designed to show how smart and important the two of them are. It’s entirely of a piece with most of the irrelevant twaddle that people devote their time to rather than doing something more meaningful with it, including this discussion.

I think the most important takeaway from this exchange is the apparent certainty by Harris that he “won” the argument by appealing to proprieties of communication.

Comment Reading Tip #278: JPDave’s comments are much more enjoyable if you picture him sitting in his cigarette jacket on a high-backed, velvet chair, snifter of brandy on the round table with the ornate lamp beside him, and just putting the pipe back into his mouth and sounding like Gore Vidal. I’ve been using this method for a couple of weeks now and it really is entertaining.

Chomsky is far too gracious, in my view.

The exchange (and most criticism of Chomsky) is driven by this fundamental difference of moral perspective: Chomsky first holds himself as citizen accountable to an objective moral standard, before seeking monsters abroad, but still applying the same standard; Harris (and most Chomsky critics) start, and effectively end, with condemning the enemy, adapting the standard and the argument as needed to come out on top.

It’s hardly an accident that Harris uniformly finds American “intent” morally superior. As Chomsky points out, we all do it. That’s why motives cannot count. And that’s why Harris clings to them so desperately, concocting fantastical “thought experiments” rather than discussing obvious factual cases. Harris tries to win by controlling the description of the parties’ respective motives or intents. Our enemies would describe our motives differently than we do. And we should be able to see their motives as they do, at least hypothetically.

Chomsky is surely right to discount “intent” in favor of reasonable foreknowledge of consequences, for these are far more easily discussed objectively. It’s not even terribly clear that “intent” exists apart from an agent’s “endorsement” or “self-attribution” of what was intended. And this is known to change with the circumstances.

AArgg! “components” = “opponents”

Like him or hate him, Chomsky is one of the great geniuses of the 20th century.

Well, I’ve never been all that impressed with Noam Chomsky’s “seminal work” in linguistics and cognitive science—it’s difficult to say what, exactly, he’s been right about and, if anything, he set those fields back by about half a century.

Chomsky’s claim that children acquire a grammar without enough reinforcement or information (the “poverty of stimulus” argument) and therefore some underlying grammar “has to” be innate is rather like Michael Behe’s wildly wrong creationist argument that biological systems are irreducibly complex, and therefore “have to” have been intelligently designed; they assume something for which there might not be any evidence and then rule out any competing hypothesis. The assumption itself in Chomsky’s case is wrong besides—you can read linguist Geoff Pullum’s take about what is absent from experience as being crucial to learning, consistent with Bayes’ Theorem.

Chomsky is wrong on his claims about the “universals” of language and wrong on his recent claims about how language “couldn’t have” evolved.

In 1959, Chomsky wrote a critique of BF Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957) which is widely credited with causing the decline of behaviorism’s influence in linguistics and other fields and, while it might have done so, the actual critique—which is often cited but, it seems, not read—does not withstand scrutiny. (Here and here are analyses of that (in)famous critique.)

Just looking at the critique itself makes it unquestionably clear that Chomsky had no idea what Skinner was talking about. Skinner said as much about a later review of his work by Chomsky and saw no reason to respond.

In fact, as just one example of how badly argued his claims are, in that later review, Chomsky said the following:

Consider Skinner’s claim that “we sample and change verbal behavior, not opinions,” as, he says, behavioral analysis reveals (p. 95). Taken literally, this means that if, under a credible threat of torture, I force someone to say, repeatedly, that the earth stands still, then I have changed his opinion. Comment is unnecessary.

Skinner says we “change verbal behavior, not opinions” and Chomsky says that, “taken literally, this means that” if I do x, “I have changed his opinion.” That’s the statement of a genius? It barely makes any sense. Aside from not making sense, what Chomsky is pointing out supports Skinner: according to Skinner, you’re changing a person’s verbal behavior—whether you call that verbal behavior a bona fide opinion or a coerced statement depends on the circumstances under which that behavior takes place. The example illustrates Skinner’s point and Chomsky doesn’t even realize it. Comment, as Chomsky would say, is unnecessary.

@Hairhead: IIRC, Chomsky identifies himself as a socialist, and did so from Day One.

Hence, the Imperial Spooks didn’t need to imprison or assassinate him, and so tip their hands. The usual Red-smearing campaign would neutralize his effectiveness sufficiently.

Otherwise, your grim scenario might indeed have materialized.

As polar the reaction to Chomsky can be (my favorite has reaction has to be Andrew Sullivan shrieking at damn near High C on Bill Maher), I generally agree with his view, and, even when I don’t, I invariably find all the facts are in evidence.

Chomsky did fine, but I do get a sense that he gave Harris more credit than he deserves. Harris is an anti Muslim bigot. Full stop. And that informs everything that he writes, and certainly any thing having to do with 9/11, Sudan, AQ, etc.

Harris simply has no response to the main point, and so he keeps on begging the question. Reckless killing (which is what the Sudan bombing amounted to, not merely “negligent” as Chomsky calls it) is, at law, and in common morality, usually considered to be as bad as intentional killing. If someone shoots a gun into the crowded bleachers at Yankee Stadium, without any intent that anyone be killed, or even hit with the bullet, but someone is hit and killed, that crime is just as bad, morally and legally, as shooting at and killing, intentionally, a particular person.

Of course, all wars involve killing. But wars themselves can be judged legally and morally. Legally, Clinton had no case. He had no evidence that he was acting in self defense and he had no UNSC resolution. Morally, he had no Just War Theory backing. And, in terms of the act itself (even assuming a legal and just war), there is a notion of avoiding civilian targets, minimizing “collateral damage,” and proportionality. But, again, given that there was no real evidence that the factory was producing chemical weapons, Clinton has no case here, either. So, he was akin to a reckless murderer, as Bin Laden was akin to an intentional murderer.

Was it “as bad” as 9/11? Well, Chomsky never does actually say that.

And Harris gives Chomsky another opening when he brings up My Lai. He claims that it was an aberrant situation, as well as an abhorrent one, and that the US reaction to it shows some sort of “moral development” on the part of the US, putting it above mere Muslims. But the truth is that plenty of Americans approved of the crime, that little or no punishment for it was ever meted out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre#Courts_Martial

and that the massacre was NOT particularly aberrant in terms of the conduct of US soldiers in Vietnam. Nor is it particularly aberrant in terms of the conduct of US soldiers in subsequent wars.

But Chomsky does not address My Lai, choosing to focus instead on the Iraq sanctions.

I also find that Chomsky tends to get bogged down a little too much in the “you said that I said that you said that I said” stuff. Harris’ main argument is ridiculous. The US bombing in Sudan are not even remotely comparable to simply NOT providing aid when you could, as he claims. And, of course, everyone CLAIMS that they are serving a greater good, including Hitler, the Japanese militarists, Bin Laden, etc, when they commit immoral actions. But the ends can never justify the means, and, beyond that, the notion of the greater good at play is almost always self centered, self valorizing, self serving, and unexamined. I think that pretty much covers it, and could have been said more succinctly than Chomsky said it.

But, again, Harris clearly “lost” the exchange, and did so quite badly and obviously.

I appreciate your response, Mandos.Just to clarify: I was saying that the form of Chomsky’s argument is similar to that of Behe. (It’s the argument that psychologist Andrew D.Wilson makes regarding Hegelian arguments in cognitive science.)

I have a lot more respect for Geoff Pullum than I do for Noam Chomsky when it comes to, well, anything, but I am perhaps not well-versed enough in linguistics to see why Pullum might be wrong. I can see a psychologist/linguist divide here—which seems to be a large part of the problem—but, of course, Pullum is a linguist so that divide doesn’t suffice to explain their differences. But I agree—here might not be the place to relitigate the Linguistic Warz.

My larger point, though, was with Ian saying Chomsky is a “genius.” As just one example of why I have a problem with that:

Chomsky makes the statement

If [you] believe that there is a difference between my granddaughter, a rabbit and a rock [in learning English], then [you] believe that language is innate. So people who are proposing that there is something debatable about the assumption that language is innate are just confused.

But absolutely no one proposes that. So either Chomsky doesn’t understand what other people are, in fact, proposing or he is, unfairly, setting up some sort of exceedingly weak straw man argument. Neither is the sign of a genius—to me, anyway. (A genius would frame the issue precisely to illuminate it, not attempt to score cheap rhetorical points with straw man arguments, and would know which one was more effective.)

Here is what David Palmer wrote in 2006 regarding Chomsky’s “On Chomsky’s Appraisal of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior: A Half Century of Misunderstanding”:

Although Chomsky’s willingness to discuss his review of Verbal Behavior with behavior analysts is a sign of openness and confidence, the Virués-Ortega (2006) interview did not flatter him. His refusal to acknowledge errors of fact, or shrillness of tone, was narrow and defensive. Moreover, he confirmed that he does not understand the distinction between experimental analysis and interpretation, that the extrapolation of laboratory principles to domains in which experimental analysis is not yet possible is standard practice and contributes greatly to our understanding of the world. Finally, Chomsky revealed a naive understanding of the rationale for the behavioral approach, its goals, and its relation to empirical work. His imagined opponent was an extreme environmentalist cleaving to stimulus– response dogma, immune to evidence. Painting an absurd caricature of one’s opponent is an effective debating move, but the strategy pays a penalty when it is discovered.

None of that rings of “genius.” Chomsky’s 1959 review, even given its (unfortunate) influence, is flat-out wrong in places and obtuse in others—it is, in a word, ludicrous. (I didn’t need Palmer to tell me that—it’s clear from the review on its face.) Just that statement (about torture and opinions) in his later review in 1971 that I quote above shows, yet again, how absurd his reasoning is—he’s clueless as to what he is critiquing. That, to me, is no indication of a genius.

Yeah I’m not going to go into great detail into the wars here. There is a faction of “disillusioned” “ex-Chomskyan” linguists who basically think that Chomsky promised them something he didn’t, and are annoyed that they didn’t get what they thought they ought to get out of linguistics. I put Pullum, Postal, etc into that category. Then there is a faction of cognitive modelers who have deep methodological differences with Chomsky and think that advances in computer technology (e.g. big data) allow the testing of hypotheses that Chomsky deems implausible as models of acquisition — and they have made a lot of headway, particularly institutionally, but I don’t find their arguments overcome what Chomsky has accomplished, to say the least.

Harris is often (and here as well) mischaracterized as anti-Muslim. Agree or disagree with Harris, he is rabidly anti-Islam, but has no particular view of people who happen to be Muslims based on birth. What he takes issue with is people’s adherence to Islam and their resulting behaviors. The difference is not hard to understand. Also, Harris didn’t get mopped because he didn’t want to debate, but rather to start an interesting discussion. In this regard, Chomsky lost badly because he quickly and unkindly turned what could have been an interesting discussion into a fruitless string of emails in which he never really addressed an important question.

I find Harris’ “imagine if” scenarios ludicrous. Witness: Hedges and Harris.

Harris is a bigot. And he lived awfully well as a probably Mossad sponsored graduate student.

Shorter Harris: “T’ain’t like it was genocide. After all they’s only camel jockeys.”

Ian:

I actually think Chomsky was unfair to Skinner.
…
The fact that some psychologists think that Chomsky got it wrong is all very nice, but a great great number of linguists do not. Chomsky may not understand psychology that well, but I see no indication that those who criticize generative grammar from the psychology side understand linguistics all that well.
…
Perfection and always being fair are not the hallmarks of genius.

I feel like that’s a very fair response to my diatribe. True, but I’d say that making dopey critiques and thinking they’re game-enders (“Comment is unnecessary”) aren’t exactly hallmarks of genius, either. Obviously we differ.

Thinking about it, my objections boil down to: (1) In criticizing psychology (and BF Skinner, in particular), Chomsky was, as I said, clueless. He didn’t understand what Skinner was talking about (and Skinner said exactly that). In my book, a genius doesn’t pontificate—and smugly at that—about what he doesn’t understand, except to give some cogent account about what he doesn’t understand about it. (2) In terms of his own field, linguistics, Chomsky might be right about some underlying “Universal Grammar” (I think he isn’t but that’s neither here nor there) but his arguments—such as his argument appealing to species specificity (“rocks and rabbits”)—don’t make a lot of sense. (And one of the reasons Chomsky makes these arguments is that he doesn’t understand psychology—which leads to a sort of “poverty of the imagination” argument: “I can’t imagine how x would occur so therefore it must be ‘universal grammar’.”) A lot of this isn’t about psychology or linguistics per se—it’s more about how someone reasons. The fact that Chomsky is unfair just makes it worse but, even if he were exceedingly magnanimous, his reasoning is still bad. (I haven’t read Plato but I’d like to think his arguments were brilliant for their time. Chomsky’s aren’t. But again, we just differ on our assessments of Chomsky.)

Mandos:

Chomsky is hypothesizing that the human linguistic capacity is enabled by a small change that reflects itself in a new way of integrating existing, more complex capacities of the human brain.

Yes, I agree—I don’t have a problem with that. But none of that entails the “structure” or “internal nature” in terms of grammar (as opposed to physiology) that Chomsky says it does. I don’t have a problem with Chomsky looking—good luck to him—but I do have a problem with him insisting, in the face of valid arguments to the contrary (which might or might not be correct), that that must be the case. Neither side meets its burden of proof.

I remember when bitch slap certain people was jejune.

First, the information of that incident came from the most vile people on earth the Sudanese government and its operatives, and most likely they were the same who gave the false information to the CIA in the first place. It most likely there was no gas production, but I am sure that the production of medicine was highly inflated. I am sure that plant would have been closed within a year hadn’t been for the bombing. If Clinton had rounded them (Sudanese government) and bombed them all he would have saved the lives of million. I would have forgiven him anything including Rowanda. It’s really sad that those 2 men wasting their time debating that and ignoring the genocide that going on there since that government took office

(My take – I hesitate to weigh in, as I don’t think I’m necessarily as informed as others here. Apologies for my loose use of language – I’m not a linguist)

They are fundamentally talking past each other, although I suspect Chomsky knew this. I’m surprised he engaged in the first place. Frankly, the whole thing reminds me of the sort of dynamic you used to see on the nascent blogosphere in the early 2000’s. On one side you’d have some long-form blogger (with whom I sympathized!) detailing in excruciating detail a butcher’s bill of wrongs, with footnotes and references and links. And the countries’ response was, ‘But 911!’

For Chomsky, words have precise meaning. Without that, it all descends into meaningless hand-waving. Chomsky wants to debate (nominally verifiable) facts, and apply a uniform standard. In this case the argument then can be reduced to ‘Stupid or evil’. Harris wants to add intent into the mix. There’s no ‘hard’ way to adjudicate this, at which point it just becomes an exercise in berating the other side for not having your opinion. Harris can’t concede that intent is unreliable on three grounds: it is unverifiable; it is relative to subjective standards; it is universally invoked (thus normalizing it in a logical sense and letting it fall out of the ‘equation’). In this sort of case it mostly makes sense to say, “Your opinion differs from mine and you are entitled to it”…

Chomsky did come on pretty aggressively, but I think it’s a bit of a response to a young-buck coming along and effectively demanding Chomsky account for himself. There’s probably a bit of arrogance involved, but it’s presumptuous to challenge someone with Chomsky’s lengthy body of work without having read it in more depth.

I continue to be increasingly unimpressed and even disturbed by Sam Harris. As an atheist I was glad to see his first book, but he has subsequently shown himself to be an apologist for abhorrent policies. I am stunned at how fundamentally he didn’t seem to understand Chomsky. To gripe about legalistic parsing is laughable – what did he expect from Noam Chomsky?! If you are going to challenge someone, and that’s what this was, however polite, then courtesy would compel him to try to respond to Chomsky in detail, which Harris refused to do. Harris’ intent seemed to be to call-out Chomsky AND set the terms of the debate. Were I Chomsky I might be a bit cranky as well.

Harris even states, explicitly, although apparently unknowingly, the nature of the disconnect. It wasn’t that Chomsky didn’t address these issues, it’s that Harris didn’t like the answer. That answer condemns Harris’ worldview, and Harris. In response to Harris’ plaintive “I just want to understand what you mean”, Chomsky get’s increasingly detailed, and then Harris gripes about the parsing… Harris is being willfully obtuse, most likely to protect himself.

When you have this sort of rhetorical disconnect, it’s almost meaningless to engage. I’m an atheist and my brother is a devout Christian. Both our worldviews are internally consistent, but his involves faith and mine does not. That element creates an impassable barrier to discussing religion. I want ‘proofs’ that don’t rely on faith. He can’t honestly discuss his beliefs without faith coming into play. As such, there’s nothing to discuss…

(As a final note, hopefully related to the discussion of how brain-structure affects language, I will offer up an interesting although much less technical book: Proust and the Squid. The author is a researcher who has spent her life studying the neurological causes of dyslexia. There is no single cause, and the causes differ depending on the language of the culture in question, although externally it presents similarly. For instance (loosely paraphrasing based on recollection from a few years ago – but the gist is correct), for reading to occur one of the neurological components that must be in place is the ability to recognize symbols in less than about 600 ms. If your brain takes more than 700 ms, then you’re just not going to learn to read. In English, because of the way the language is structured, there are about 4 0r 5 different neurological components that have to all come together seamlessly for reading to occur. The author notes that in German and Chinese (two of the other languages she cites), the neurological components for dyslexia differ from those for English.)