Comment by NaiveEmpiricist
1 day ago
Actually, there have been a number of rounds of paradigm shift (or attempted paradigm shift) in linguistics over the past 70 years. The unique thing about linguistics is that they've been compressed into the lifetime of the same central figure.
Also, I'll mention that there is a lot of empirical knowledge about natural language syntax in generative grammar, even if the details aren't quite right about their theoretical underpinnings. And a lot of them were "low-hanging fruit" waiting for someone to point out how to find them and characterize them. That Chomsky did that is the best argument for his intellectual value - permitting all that "normal science" to happen.
Science doesn't guarantee technological applications, whether or not that science is correct.
Finally, just saying: use of a word like "Chomskyism" makes you sound like one of those creationists who call evolution "Darwinism".
So we can't use the word "creationism" without validating their use of "Darwinism"?
This is wholly fallacious ... you may disagree with what you interpret as the implications of attaching "ism" to Chomsky, but in no way does that equate it to attaching "ism" to Darwin -- each of these attachments and their validity are independent.
BTW, even what you see as pejorative in such an attachment is a cultural interpretation ... e.g., it is far more common among British evolutionary biologists than American to view "Darwinism" neutrally -- Dawkins for one uses the term and describes himself as a Darwinist. See, e.g., https://www.edge.org/conversation/richard_dawkins-chapter-3-...