Wolfe wrote this execrable book in which he denied evolution, among other very silly things. It was simply entirely wrong and built on a foundation of shoddy scholarship and vainglorious ignorance.
But I do have to credit him with one thing: he has inspired some of the most entertaining book reviews ever. I haven’t seen stuff like this since Twain’s review of Fenimore Cooper. Go enjoy EJ Spode’s review of The Kingdom of Speech.
That was a very entertaining examination, disassembly and conscientious composting of Wolfe’s book.
I must take it upon myself, however, to be terribly offended by a claim Spode makes about German, namely that it doesn’t have possessive recursion!
Actually German has at least two types of recursive possessive constructions. Casual googling of the literature suggests that he got the idea of “no possessive recursion” from generalising the claim that German only allows one human possessor in a “X’s X’s X” type construction. That rule seems questionable to me as a native speaker, and in any case there’s also a “the X of the X of the X” construction, which has no such restriction.
There, that’s today’s nit picked.
It looks like a worthless paean to creationism cynically published to score profits from that crowd. That plus the author’s overblown self-estimation of his scholarship, which is evident in most everything he’s written.
Those quotes from Tom Wolfe’s book were excruciating, not just in thought, but in writing. I thought he was supposed to be a good writer (if not thinker). But I’ve never read any of Wolfe’s stuff; does he always write that poorly?
The grotesquely racist characterization of the Pirahã culture and language in that book is a vivid illustration of why so many Indigenous people are cautious about outsiders publishing about them. Yeah, sure, bows and arrows and scrapers and baskets and huts aren’t artifacts, sure, if you want to portray a people as sub-human “pre-toolers.” Ugh.
I’ve long been of the view of, in some highly specialized, highly technical areas, I really don’t care until I need a subject matter expert. In the latter case, I consult one and listen.
If I want opinions on journalism, I might consult Tom Wolfe. Likely, I would.
I’d also get a countering opinion, as more information that has citations and further reading is good to have available and such would be in any report.
If I wanted highly specific information on linguistic processing, I think we can guess who I’d consult.
Just as if I had cancer, I’d consult an oncologist.
Or, for my hyperthyroidism, an endocrinologist.
Just as for information security, I am routinely consulted. I’m also routinely consulted in some highly technical areas of electronics, getting the *@&#! PC to work, server administration and some areas of things military, as I’m a subject matter expert in specific areas of those fields and can refer the requester on to specialists outside of my field of expertise in those areas.
Indeed, if I want information on Zebrafish, I’d likely consult with PZ (along with assorted other biology questions, he’d forward me to someone who has superior knowledge outside of his field of expertise).
Journalists today have forgotten how to seek out subject matter experts, seeking the sensational, as sensationalism sells a bit better, cold hard, occasionally unwanted facts don’t sell as well.
The problem is, in adopting that attitude today, journalism has fallen back into the style of yellow journalism in many ways (in certain media outlets, entirely back into yellow journalism).
Honestly, today, I’m uncertain if we’d ever have received a report on “The Pentagon Papers” or even a certain break-in at the Watergate Hotel.
But, I’m damned sure that we’d hear and read, “Remember the Maine!”.
I remember that I liked his The Right Stuff back in the day, but I don’t think I read anything else by Wolfe, except possibly an article or two reprinted in British publications, maybe. I think his writing style nailed The Right Stuff perfectly, and certainly made an impression on everyone else, but I don’t think it works for science, or even Science!
TMM:
QFMFT. The excerpts were incredibly painful to read. The Native-born business, and what on earth did he think he was doing with “Apache” (which, Tom? Western Apache, Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, Kiowa-Apache?) cosmology, besides bemoaning how terribly primitive it was?
NelC @ 6:
Oh, yeah. I read that too. I remember thinking at the time that it was painfully dry, pompous, and arrogant. I wanted it to end.
Zeppelin, thanks for your comment regarding recursion in German. You are quite correct that recursion with “X of the X of the…” comes freely. I guess we would call this prepositional phrase recursion. So what we are interested is the other kind, where there is recursion of the so-called Saxon (prenominal) Genitive.
In that case my understanding is that *some* speakers of German are ok with
“Mary’s mother’s house”
but are not ok with..
“Mary’s dog’s house”
Point being that the recursion only works with human agents. I guess the question is, do you like this:
Marias Hunds Haus.
There is a long discussion of German possession in footnote 13 of the Nevins et. al. paper, and they surveyed 10 German speakers and found that 7 out of 10 didn’t even like “Mary’s mother’s house”. It sounds like you side with the 3. Or maybe you are even more liberal with recursion than they are.
It is a good illustration though, of how subtle these facts are. It is hard enough to dial in the facts for German, when we have german linguistic informants at arms length. It shows how dangerous it is to rely on the report of one guy who went to one place that we have no access to, and came back with a very strong claim about recursion in a language for which he was not a native speaker.
What I found most interesting about Tom Wolfe’s latest “writing” is that his greatest obviously ability is one of projection – projecting his own massive faults onto others that he cannot even hope to match in intellectual achievement. This is apparently his last gasp at “fame” and he is way too senile to see his own tragedy of errors. Fortunately for the rest of the world, his monumental errors have been recorded by his own hand in his self-immolation book.
Zetopan @ 10:
There’s no need to speculate about senility here. Plain ol’ white privilege fits the bill, helped by a more than healthy dose of class snobbery.
Just because a person is in a certain age group does not make senility a reality.
Well, my jaw dropped at Wolfe claim “I could hardly believe that no licensed savant had ever pointed it out before. There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.”
Forget Chomsky, but so far as I know this has been an widely accepted tenet since time immemorial. I remember an interminably awful Disney Science education film from the 50s that pounded this home that humans are the only animals with jaws because by human exceptionalism they are the only animals that can think and talk(!!!) Spode actually disappointed me in pointing out it was an oft stated comment of Chomsky– I feel it’s a incredibly banal statement and, although true, is overly filtered and simplified and slightly odiferous with human exceptionalism.
It astonishes me that “there is this tribe-“isms still flourish in this day and age. You’d think the reek of hopeful comfirmation bias would give serious scholars just the slightest bit more pause.
Anyway… this review as a freakin’ *DELIGHT* to read (it absolutely made my day), and yes, … every bit as entertaining as Twain’s review of Cooper, which really should be better known.
Brilliant. Just brilliant. And true. (I kind of thought Wolfe was respectable.)
And it was fun to know he claimed Einstein discovered the speed of light.
#3: He used to be a much better writer, but either old age has sapped that from him or he’s just too famous to allow an editor to touch his copy. A truly dreadful essay of his was published in a recent issue of Harper’s (I’ve only just learned it’s actually an excerpt from the book) which is thickly spattered with ellipses, larded through with apophasis of a very specific and tedious sort (“breeds of Na — er — indigenous peoples”), and overall a sneering, smirking mass of words unworthy of the memory of Wolfe’s better days and of Harper’s Magazine. I’m shocked that they published it.
Doesn’t astonish me one bit. Not that it gets repeated in the popular press. That the 2005 Paraha paper got published at all was a travesty, and IIRC was immediately seen skeptically.
This last sentence in this paragraph nails it, I think.
@ejspode:
Ah, I assumed that “possessive recursion” would cover any sort of, well, recursive possessive construction, whether prepositional or Genitive or otherwise. Thank you for the clarification.
And in fairness I can also think of two sources of interference with my judgement of the acceptability of the Saxon Genitive with different possessors:
Firstly I code-switch a lot between German and English during the day. And secondly my native dialect of German has yet another Genitive construction (using the Dative and the possessive pronoun — “der Maria ihr(em) Hund sein/das Haus”, “dem Mark seinem Vetter der/sein Gastroenterologe”) . I suspect getting useful data about possessive constructions out of Germans also requires paying close attention to the dialect and regiolect situation.
“Marias Hunds Haus” sounds slightly wonky, but I think I wouldn’t stick out to me in everyday speech. “Marks Vetters Gastroenterologe” sounds fine. I hadn’t noticed that human/nonhuman difference before, I’ll definitely be paying more attention to it in the future!
Now that I think about it , different speakers of my dialect also give up on recursion in that particular construction at different points:
[der Maria ihrem Vetter seinem Vater sein Haus],
[der Maria ihrem Vetter] [dem Vater sein Haus]
[der Maria ihrem Vetter seinem Vater] [das Haus], and
[der Maria ihrem Vetter] [dem Vater] [das Haus]
all sound reasonably idiomatic to me. Interesting!
@woozy
Chomsky’s point was bigger and more substantive than “only humans have speech.” Chomsky revolutionized linguistics by making syntax central. If you conceive of language as being mostly about vocabulary, you can only deny it to animals by claiming either 1) their verbalizations have no specific meaning, or 2) they have too few “words.”
Chomsky said, no, syntax is what makes language “language,” and that seems to be uniquely human.
Since then, though, syntax has been discovered in other species. I don’t know if Chomsky still believes there’s a solid dividing line there.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1598/1984
(^I found the above via a Google search; I haven’t read it yet.)
@Zeppelin, thanks for the very interesting judgments. What is your native dialect, if I may ask?
Frankfurt Hessian! Though like most of my generation I’m something of a passive speaker, and use a Hessian-tinted Standard German in everyday life. So my judgements on such finer points may not be the same as a full native speaker’s.
Chomsky is long overdue for a serious debunking in the popular press, but unfortunately it seems that Tom Wolfe is not serious (no surprise there).
For the serious case against Chomsky, go here.
BTW, Chomsky is no linguist. At best, he’s a philosopher of language, but he doesn’t do the serious work of actually analyzing language at any level.
re #21. I am always concerned when we say things like “X is overdue for a serious debunking.” Why does the goal have to be a debunking when we can instead point out errors and offer better theories, or, what the hell, maybe even make HELPFUL contributions if there is a problem with the theory. But no. It’s time for a debunking. The felt need for debunkings is what leads us to catastrophes like the Everett research and all the people lined up to cheer for it.
You link to the SA article for the “serious case against Chomsky” but right smack in the middle of it is this:
“As before, when linguists actually went looking at the variation in languages across the world, they found counterexamples to the claim that this type of recursion was an essential property of language. Some languages—the Amazonian Pirahã, for instance—seem to get by without Chomskyan recursion.”
So the Everett falsehoods and confusions (no, recursion is not “an essential property of language”) became serious when they were uncritically repeated in SA?
There are other problems with that article, including the claim that “children’s natural ability to intuit what others think, combined with powerful learning mechanisms in the developing brain, diminishes the need for a universal grammar.”
The problem here is that “natural ability to intuit what others think” sounds like magical mind reading. I would have thought that the scientific task was to understand what mechanisms underly that “natural ability” and as I understand it UG is supposed to be part of that process. I also recoil at the notion of “powerful learning mechanisms”. To each his own, but I rather prefer the idea of simple parameter setting. But maybe my time-to-debunk clock is running slow.
The SA paper also seems to perpetuate the myth that Chomsky is the only person working on this research program, when there are thousands and certainly hundreds working on acquisition — some in the cognitive science center at MIT. If the SA article was serious it wouldn’t be taking shots at Chomsky, who doesn’t do acquisition research, but at Ken Wexler and his students or someone else who has worked on parameter setting models of language acquisition. The SA article claims that there is no evidence that acquisition is biological, but this suggests a lack of interest in the literature. I know of at least one Wexler student who showed a correlation between testosterone levels in males and the acquisition of certain hierarchical linguistic structures. Point being that it looks like the acquired structures are synched with biological maturation.
All of this having been said I think the research reported in the SA article is interesting. I just think the authors were so busy falling over themselves trying to debunk a particular person they lost site of how their work fits into the broader research project.
in the above I should have said Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences and not cognitive science center at MIT
@Maroon:
It’s a real shame, too, because I think Chomsky’s underlying idea is very sensible. Language is clearly part of our evolutionary history, so we would expect some specialised brain functions relating to it, and we would expect those (along with the rest of our inherited mental makeup) to bias what kinds of patterns children pick up on, what kinds of grammars they form, which should in turn limit the range of human language diversity. Which fits what we see “in the wild”. And I understand the appeal of moving linguistics away from the stigma of “stamp collecting” and turning it into a respectable (i.e. maths-y) science.
It’s just that attempts at establishing the specifics of any of this are desperately premature given our limited knowledge of the world’s languages and the human brain and mind. We have no way of translating the actual fuzzy squishy distributed neural processes going on into human-readable “rules” right now, and I don’t see why we should expect them to be tidy enough to allow that even in principle.
Which makes the results of generative grammar today kind of…useless. We can’t tell whether they match any underlying structure or are just an alternative way of describing the output. We can’t separate language-specific learning mechanisms, from general learning mechanisms. We can’t tease out the effects of culture: it’s possible for an adult to consciously learn and use rules that violate even basic linguistic universals, and we know people will do much stranger things than talk in unintuitive ways, under the right cultural circumstances.
And unlike traditional grammars they’re of little use in language teaching and learning, which severely limits their interdisciplinary value. I feel we have a lot more stamp collecting to do.
That all said, I agree with ejspode that the authors of that article get a bit too excitable in their own icon-smashing. This seems largely because they see “Chomskyan” linguistics as being utterly dominant and other directions of research being unfairly marginalised. Which may be true in the Anglo-Saxon world for all I know, but generative grammar and such have barely been a footnote in my linguistic education here in Germany. In fact I’ve had to defend them against complete dismissal by educators and other students on occasion.
@22, ejpode: Thanks for this, and even more for the extended essay. The “felt need for debunking” is clearly a hindrance not just to popularizing but to science itself. Likewise, of course, the felt need to file patents. I suspect that Chomsky would be genuinely interested in evidence that challenged his approach, and also that your smart-ass version (Can they learn Portuguese?) has the ring of truth. Darwin is for the millennia, he’s locked in; Chomsky has a narrower but certainly extended future (what, he dabbled in politics too?); Wolfe, however, will soon be forgotten.
woozy:
It’s not so different from Aristotle’s conception of a human being as a distinctly “rational animal.” His “reason having” characterization of people had to do with more general psychological features than only those employing language, but it presumably play a big part in how that manifests in human behavior (to the extent that Aristotle was remotely accurate, I mean).
It’s not clear what Wolfe is saying here, although maybe some context would clarify things…. People didn’t notice (or never pointed out) that non-human animals don’t speak? They didn’t make that distinction? That is indeed hard to believe. Why exactly would he believe it? Or is it that everybody was busy not saying something special and unique that only Wolfe has said, about what kind of distinction it is or how it can be explained or understood?
What a Maroon:
Are you suggesting that would disqualify him from doing serious work (if it were true, though analyzing a language at any level is very low standard) or from doing that particular type of serious work? Is the latter the kind of work he would need to do? Why “at best” — the latter is supposed to be obviously better?
Philosophers very often come up with research programs and theoretical structures and so forth. The fact that in the process some don’t personally do a particular type of scientific work doesn’t particularly matter. We also have scientists, like theoretical physicists for example, who specialize or focus on doing similar work instead of other types of scientific work. That doesn’t undermine the validity or legitimacy of what they’re doing, and there is no hierarchy according to which they’re doing lesser work.
@What a Maroon
Uh, dude, he’s been a lingist for sixty years. He started a revolution in the field. He’s been called “the father of modern linguistics.”
Whatever the ultimate fate of his most famous theory, the man’s a linguist.
@Maroon (#21):
The “serious” case against Chomsky that you mentioned is actually an ill-informed and badly-argued rehash of a supposed controversy that is almost 20 years old. In no way, shape or form that SA article comes close to a serious criticism of Chomsky’s research program, much less a “debunking” of it.
It perhaps outlines a different take on how acquisition of language happens, but given how little progress has been made in that framework for the last 20 years, you would be hard pressed to argue that it presents a prima facie *better* alternative to the framework that generative grammarians have been working on.
For those interested, Jeff Lidz, one of the leading language acquisition researchers nowadays working on the generative tradition, had a three part blog post about the SA piece linked by @Maroon (#21):
http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-generative-death-march-part-1.html
http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-generative-death-march-part-2.html
http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-generative-death-march-part-3-whose.html
@ejspode (#22): Thanks for the fantastic review of Wolfe’s book! I’ve been directing people to it all the time since I read it yesterday…
To me, even the fact that Chomsky attempted a universal theory of language smells a lot like a 1950s theory of AI.
That is, there was a time when researchers were confident that simulating a mind was just a matter of creating a big enough logical tree of verbal rules. Lisp, a super-recursive programming language, was invented and baptized as the sure-fire code for all future AI, in spite of being really inefficient and hard to read. It was closer to a sterile Spock/Aristotelian logic than anything you might see in an MRI.
In hindsight, it all looks like a plan to fly to the Moon in a hot air balloon. Human brains only get more complicated and daunting every time we get a closer look at them.
I’d say that the dirtiness of evolution does more to undermine Chomsky’s super-clean, classical logic view of language than it does to support it. If he is ultimately right it will have to be with a LOT of qualifications.
dalmeida,
Thanks for the links; they provide examples of linguists doing actual scientific work. When I say that Chomsky is a philosopher rather than a linguist, it is because this is the kind of work that he will not do; he is more interested in building theories. I don’t object to that in principle, but I do object to Chomsky’s dismissal of empiricism. Note, for example, his famous delineation of the proper object of study for linguistics:
He dismisses a priori as irrelevant the environment and cognitive constraints that children bring to the language learning process. His attitude is strikingly unscientific.
For an alternative to the generative view of language learning, this offers a good overview, with extensive references.
@31. When Chomsky says he is concerned with an ideal speaker-listener he is not rejecting empiricism, he is simply saying that he is investigating a natural kind. It is like saying my object of inquiry is not the tiger in my local zoo, it is the natural kind, tiger. Obviously that is an empirical enterprise. As is the investigation of the language faculty as a natural kind. It is an empirical fact that most if not all languages have recursion. It is an empirical fact that most if not all of them allow constituent movement. It is an empirical fact that many of them do not allow constituent movement out of complex noun phrases. Question: given these facts, we ask what are the properties of the natural kind that is the human language organ that explains the facts. A hypothesis is then offered which is designed to explain the facts about this natural kind. That hypothesis is then tested by more data.
How is that “strikingly unscientific”?