Log24

Monday, November 6, 2017

The Chomsky Koan

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:45 pm

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously   is a sentence
composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book 
Syntactic Structures  as an example of a sentence 
that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical."

Wikipedia article on the sentence

Buddhist midrash from The New York Times  today

"For example, psychology has lately started to let go of its
once-sharp distinction between 'cognitive' and 'affective' 
parts of the mind; it has started to see that feelings are so
finely intertwined with thoughts as to be part of their very
coloration." 

See also other recent Log24 posts now tagged Coloration.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Chomsky and Lévi-Strauss in China

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:31 am

Or:  Philosophy for Jews

From a New Yorker  weblog post dated Dec. 6, 2012 —

"Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky" by Gary Marcus—

"… two titans facing off, with Chomsky, as ever,
defining the contest"

"Chomsky sees himself, correctly, as continuing
a conversation that goes back to Plato, especially
the Meno dialogue, in which a slave boy is
revealed by Socrates to know truths about
geometry that he hadn’t realized he knew."

Socrates and the slave boy discussed a rather elementary "truth
about geometry" — A diamond inscribed in a square has area 2
(and side the square root of 2) if the square itself has area 4
(and side 2).

Consider that not-particularly-deep structure from the Meno dialogue
in the light of the following…

The following analysis of the Meno diagram from yesterday's
post "The Embedding" contradicts the Lévi-Strauss dictum on
the impossibility of going beyond a simple binary opposition.
(The Chinese word taiji  denotes the fundamental concept in
Chinese philosophy that such a going-beyond is both useful
and possible.)

The matrix at left below represents the feminine yin  principle
and the diamond at right represents the masculine yang .

      From a post of Sept. 22,
"Binary Opposition Illustrated" —

A symbol of the unity of yin and yang —

Related material:

A much more sophisticated approach to the "deep structure" of the
Meno diagram —

The larger cases —

The diamond theorem

Friday, August 26, 2016

Wolfe vs. Chomsky

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am

1.  Tom Wolfe has a new book on Chomsky, "The Kingdom of Speech."

2.  This suggests a review of a post of Aug. 11, 2014, Syntactic/Symplectic.

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, sentence 1 above is about "correlating in real life"
(cf. Crooked House and Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House ), and may be 
compared to sentence 2 above, which links to a sort of "correlating in
mathematics" that is a particular example of the more general sort of
mathematical correlating mentioned by Wittgenstein in 1939.

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Meditation on a URL:
Putting the “de” in
https://www.hu-berlin.de/

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:28 am

From other posts tagged Tetrahedron vs. Square —

A Scholium for Chomsky

The ABC of words —

A nutshell —

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Releasing the Crimson Kraken

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:37 am

From Chomsky's remarks in The New York Times  today

"It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted,
that so much money and attention should be concentrated
on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted
with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the
words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make 'infinite use of
finite means,' creating ideas and theories with universal reach."

A search in this  journal for Humboldt University  yields . . .

"Cum grano salis" — Boris Karloff in "The Black Cat."

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Preform

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:33 pm

Sometimes  the word "preform"  is not  a misspelling.

"there are present in every psyche forms which are unconscious
but nonetheless active — living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense,
that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions."

The Source:  Jung on a facultas praeformandi  . . .

Illustration —

"A primordial image . . . .
the axial system of a crystal"

For those who prefer a  Jewish  approach to these matters —

(Post last updated at about 2:10 PM ET on Jan. 23, 2023.)

Friday, June 17, 2022

Enola and Sherlock in Nighttown*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:39 am

From my RSS feed yesterday —

Dorothy E. Smith, Groundbreaker in Feminist Sociology, Dies at 95.
NY Times obituary by Clay Risen / June 16, 2022 at 05:22 PM ET.

That obituary describes a background for Smith that makes her seem
like the fictional Enola Holmes, sister of Sherlock.

For her Sherlock, see . . .

Ullin Thomas Place (1924 – 2000): Philosopher and psychologist .

From Place's online bibliography

Chomsky, N., Place, U. T., & Schoneberger, T. (Ed.) (2000),
"The Chomsky-Place Correspondence 1993-1994," in 
The Analysis of Verbal Behavior , 17 (1), 7-38. 
Download:  Chomsky, Place & Schoneberger (2000)
The Chomsky-Place Correspondence.pdf
 .

The word "correspondence" has, of course, a meaning of greater interest.

* Tonight's date, June 17, is the anniversary of "Nighttown" in Joyce's Ulysses .

Friday, November 13, 2020

Deep State, Deep Mind, Deep Structure

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:08 pm

. . . .

In Weber’s hands, the professor and the politician
are not figures to be joined. Each remains a lonely hero
of heavy burden, sent to ride against his particular foe:
the overly structured institution of the modern mind,
the overly structured institution of the modern state.”

 

See also Chomsky in this  journal.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Deep Learning for Jews

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:23 pm

From The New York Times  on June 20, 2018 —

" In a widely read article published early this year on arXiv.org,
a site for scientific papers, Gary Marcus, a professor at
New York University, posed the question:

'Is deep learning approaching a wall?'

He wrote, 'As is so often the case, the patterns extracted
by deep learning are more superficial than they initially appear.' "

See as well an image from posts tagged Quantum Suffering  . . .

The time above, 10:06:48 PM July 16, is when  I saw

"What you mean 'we,' Milbank?"

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Design Grammar***

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:22 pm

The elementary shapes at the top of the figure below mirror
the looking-glass property  of the classical Lo Shu square.

The nine shapes at top left* and their looking-glass reflection
illustrate the looking-glass reflection relating two orthogonal
Latin squares over the three digits of modulo-three arithmetic.

Combining these two orthogonal Latin squares,** we have a
representation in base three of the numbers from 0 to 8.

Adding 1 to each of these numbers yields the Lo Shu square.

Mirror symmetry of the ninefold Lo Shu magic square

* The array at top left is from the cover of
Wonder Years:
Werkplaats Typografie 1998-2008
.

** A well-known construction.

*** For other instances of what might be
called "design grammar" in combinatorics,
see a slide presentation by Robin Wilson.
No reference to the work of Chomsky is
intended.

Saturday, April 29, 2017

For the Church of Synchronology*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

A book cover from Amazon.com —

See also this journal on the above date, September 27, 2016 —

Chomsky and Levi-Strauss in China,
Or: Philosophy for Jews
.

Some other remarks related to the figure on the book cover —

Field Theology and Galois Window.

* See Synchronology in this journal.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Analogical Extension Meets Analytic Continuation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:35 pm

From Models and Metaphors , by Max Black,
Cornell University Press, 1962 —

I do not recommend the work of Lewin, nor that of a later
science groupie, Keith Devlin

In September 2014, Devlin wrote an ignorant column about
a sort of bad mathematical joke based on a divergent infinite series.

He has now returned to the topic, this time writing more about
its proper mathematical background: analytic continuation .

Lewin is to Devlin as Lévi-Strauss is to Chomsky.
None of these four should be taken very seriously.

Max Black, however, should .

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Language Game

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Unity of Opposites: Plato and Beyond

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The "unity" of the title was suggested by this morning's update
at the end of yesterday's post Paz.

For the Plato of the title, see the Sept. 27, 2016, post

Chomsky and Lévi-Strauss in China
Or:  Philosophy for Jews

For glyphs representing the "unity of opposites" of the title,
see a webpage linked to here on Groundhog Day 2014

The above image is related to Jung's remarks on Coincidentia
Oppositorum
 
. (See also coincidentia in this journal.)

A different Jung, in a new video with analogues of the rapidly
flashing images in Ajna's webpage "Diamond Theory Roullete" —

The above video promotes Google's new open-source "Noto" font

Monday, September 12, 2016

The Kummer Lattice

The previous post quoted Tom Wolfe on Chomsky's use of
the word "array." 

An example of particular interest is the 4×4  array
(whether of dots or of unit squares) —

      .

Some context for the 4×4 array —

The following definition indicates that the 4×4 array, when
suitably coordinatized, underlies the Kummer lattice .

Further background on the Kummer lattice:

Alice Garbagnati and Alessandra Sarti, 
"Kummer Surfaces and K3 surfaces
with $(Z/2Z)^4$ symplectic action." 
To appear in Rocky Mountain J. Math.

The above article is written from the viewpoint of traditional
algebraic geometry. For a less traditional view of the underlying
affine 4-space from finite  geometry, see the website
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.

Some further context

"To our knowledge, the relation of the Golay code
to the Kummer lattice is a new observation."

— Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
"The overarching finite symmetry group of
Kummer surfaces in the Mathieu group M24 
"

As noted earlier, Taormina and Wendland seem not to be aware of
R. W. H. T. Hudson's use of the (uncoordinatized*) 4×4 array in his
1905 book Kummer's Quartic Surface.  The array was coordinatized,
i.e. given a "vector space structure," by Cullinane eight years prior to
the cited remarks of Curtis.

* Update of Sept. 14: "Uncoordinatized," but parametrized  by 0 and
the 15 two-subsets of a six-set. See the post of Sept. 13.

The Kingdom of Arrays

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Chomsky and arrays, from Tom Wolfe's 'The Kingdom of Speech'

See also Array  in this journal.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Bedtime Story

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am

For midnight retirees —

See also Leibniz medal in this journal.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Raiding Minsky’s

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm

In honor of Emil Post and Robin Williams:

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Sermon

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

From The Mathematics of Language:
10th and 11th  Biennial Conference….
Berlin,  Springer, 2010 —

Creation Myths of Generative Grammar
and the Mathematics of Syntactic Structures
by Geoffrey K. Pullum, University of Edinburgh

Abstract

Syntactic Structures  (Chomsky [6])  is widely believed to have laid
the foundations of a cognitive revolution in linguistic science, and
to have presented (i) the first use in linguistics of powerful new ideas
regarding grammars as generative systems, (ii) a proof that English
was not a regular language, (iii) decisive syntactic arguments against
context-free phrase structure grammar description, and (iv) a
demonstration of how transformational rules could provide a formal
solution to those problems. None of these things are true. This paper
offers a retrospective analysis and evaluation.”

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Syntactic/Symplectic

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Syntactic  Structure —

See the Lightfoot of today’s previous post:

Symplectic  Structure —

See the plaited, or woven, structure of  August 6:

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven).

See also Deep  Structure  (Dec. 9, 2012).

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Sequel

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 9:00 am

A sequel to the 1974 film
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot :

Contingent and Fluky

Some variations on a thunderbolt  theme:

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

These variations also exemplify the larger
Verbum  theme:

Image-- Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher’s Verbum

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

A search today for Verbum  in this journal yielded
a Georgetown 
University Chomskyite, Professor
David W. Lightfoot.

"Dr. Lightfoot writes mainly on syntactic theory,
language acquisition and historical change, which
he views as intimately related. He argues that
internal language change is contingent and fluky,
takes place in a sequence of bursts, and is best
viewed as the cumulative effect of changes in
individual grammars, where a grammar is a
'language organ' represented in a person's
mind/brain and embodying his/her language
faculty."

Some syntactic work by another contingent and fluky author
is related to the visual patterns illustrated above.

See Tecumseh Fitch  in this journal.

For other material related to the large Verbum  cube,
see posts for the 18th birthday of Harry Potter.

That birthday was also the upload date for the following:

See esp. the comments section.

Monday, March 31, 2014

The Story of Noam

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

On The Blazing World , a new novel —

“Hustvedt uses fragment-stories, frame narratives, and unreliable
narrators to talk about the ways in which brilliant women across
history have been silenced, forgotten, and appropriated by men.
This is a narrative suspicious of narratives, a story that
demonstrates how damaging stories can be.”

— Review by Amal El-Mohtar

The protagonist of Hustvedt’s novel is named Harriet Burden.

A midrash for Darren Aronofsky, director of The Fountain*  and Noah

Part I: The Burden of Proof —

Part II: The Story of Noam

* See The Fountain  in “The Story Theory of Truth,” Columbus Day, 2013

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Deep Structure

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:18 am

The concept of "deep structure," once a popular meme,
has long been abandoned by Chomskians.

It still applies, however, to the 1976 mathematics, diamond theory  ,
underlying the formal patterns discussed in a Royal Society paper
this year.

A review of deep structure, from the Wikipedia article Cartesian linguistics

[Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in the original 1966 Harper edition of Chomsky's book Cartesian Linguistics .]

Deep structure vs. surface structure

"Pursuing the fundamental distinction between body and mind, Cartesian linguistics characteristically assumes that language has two aspects" (32). These are namely the sound/character of a linguistic sign and its significance (32). Semantic interpretation or phonetic interpretation may not be identical in Cartesian linguistics (32). Deep structures are often only represented in the mind (a mirror of thought), as opposed to surface structures, which are not.

Deep structures vary less between languages than surface structures. For instance, the transformational operations to derive surface forms of Latin and French may obscure common features of their deep structures (39). Chomsky proposes, "In many respects, it seems to me quite accurate, then, to regard the theory of transformational generative grammar, as it is developing in current work, as essentially a modern and more explicit version of the Port-Royal theory" (39).

Summary of Port Royal Grammar

The Port Royal Grammar is an often cited reference in Cartesian Linguistics  and is considered by Chomsky to be a more than suitable example of Cartesian linguistic philosophy. "A sentence has an inner mental aspect (a deep structure that conveys its meaning) and an outer, physical aspect as a sound sequence"***** This theory of deep and surface structures, developed in Port Royal linguistics, meets the formal requirements of language theory. Chomsky describes it in modern terms as "a base system that generates deep structures and a transformational system that maps these into surface structures", essentially a form of transformational grammar akin to modern studies (42).

The corresponding concepts from diamond theory are

"Deep structure"— The line diagrams indicating the underlying
structure of varying patterns

"A base system that generates deep structures"—
Group actions on square arrays for instance, on the 4×4 square

"A transformational system"— The decomposition theorem 
that maps deep structure into surface structure (and vice-versa)

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Defining the Contest…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 5:48 am

Chomsky vs. Santa

From a New Yorker  weblog yesterday—

"Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky." by Gary Marcus—

"… two titans facing off, with Chomsky, as ever,
defining the contest"

"Chomsky sees himself, correctly, as continuing
a conversation that goes back to Plato, especially
the Meno dialogue, in which a slave boy is
revealed by Socrates to know truths about
geometry that he hadn’t realized he knew."

See Meno Diamond in this journal. For instance, from 
the Feast of Saint Nicholas (Dec. 6th) this year—

The Meno Embedding

Plato's Diamond embedded in The Matrix

For related truths about geometry, see the diamond theorem.

For a related contest of language theory vs. geometry,
see pattern theory (Sept. 11, 16, and 17, 2012).

See esp. the Sept. 11 post,  on a Royal Society paper from July 2012
claiming that

"With the results presented here, we have taken the first steps
in decoding the uniquely human  fascination with visual patterns,
what Gombrich* termed our ‘sense of order.’ "

The sorts of patterns discussed in the 2012 paper —

IMAGE- Diamond Theory patterns found in a 2012 Royal Society paper

"First steps"?  The mathematics underlying such patterns
was presented 35 years earlier, in Diamond Theory.

* See Gombrich-Douat in this journal.

Thursday, August 5, 2004

Thursday August 5, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:06 pm

In the beginning
was…
the recursion?

"Words are events."
— The Walter J. Ong Project,
    quoted in Log24 on Aug. 25, 2003 

"Words are events."
— The Walter J. Ong Project,
    quoted in the Heckler & Coch weblog
    on July 17, 2004 as part of a section
    titled "Recursive, Wide, and Loopy"

Walter J. Ong was a Jesuit.  The Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, is celebrated on July 31 each year.

"Recursive, Wide, and Loopy 2", a Heckler & Coch entry dated July 31, 2004, leads to the following:

MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2004:

How humans got
the gift of gab
:

Why do other primates
lag behind in language?
 

"New research may help scientists dissect just what it is about the human brain that endows us with language.

Researchers have found that tamarin monkeys have some distinctly languagelike abilities but that they can’t quite master the more complex rules of human grammar. The findings appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the non-profit science society.

 The grammatical toolkit

'A relatively open question concerning language evolution is, "What aspects of the language faculty are shared with other animals, and what aspects are unique to humans?" ' said study author Marc Hauser of Harvard University.

To investigate, Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, devised tests for cotton-top tamarin monkeys and human volunteers. Tamarins have been evolving separately from humans for approximately 40 million years –suggesting that any shared machinery in human and tamarin brains is old enough to be relatively common among primates.

Instead of trying to teach the monkeys real words, Hauser and Fitch generated strings of one-syllable words that followed various grammatical rules.

According to linguistics expert Noam Chomsky, the simplest type of grammar is a 'finite state grammar' or 'FSG,' which dictates which types of words go near each other in a sentence. In English, for example, an adjective like 'fast' must go directly in front of 'car,' the noun it's describing.

Building on previous experiments, Hauser and Fitch recorded word-strings that obeyed a specific FSG, in which any syllable spoken by a female voice was automatically followed by one from a male voice.

Audio: Listen to an FSG word-string.
(Requires Windows Media Player.)

After listening to a series of word-strings, the monkeys were able to distinguish between those that followed this rule and others that didn't. Human test subjects could tell the difference as well, implying that tamarins and humans may share at least some components of what Hauser called 'the universal toolkit underlying all languages.'

Mastering this type of grammar represents the ability to compute some simple statistics, something human infants accomplish early on as they learn to speak. This ability may not be specific to language, however.

'Either the same mechanism or some approximation of it is used in mathematics, vision, music and other activities,' Hauser said.

Upping the Complexity

The grammatical rules of real languages govern more than just the placement of neighboring words, as anyone who had to diagram sentences in English class may remember all too well.

One of the more complex types of grammar is known as a 'phrase structure grammar,' or PSG. These grammars involve relationships between words that aren't next to each other in a sentence and thus allow for a more complex range of expression. The 'if … then' construction is an example of a PSG.

The researchers generated a second set of word-strings that followed a PSG in which a pairing of syllables spoken by a female and a male could be embedded within another pairing. This grammar produces structures like [female [female, male] male].

Audio: Listen to a PSG word-string.
(Requires Windows Media Player)

After playing these recordings repeatedly to the monkeys, the researchers found that the animals didn't seem to notice the difference between word strings that obeyed the PSG and other strings that did not. In contrast, the human volunteers did notice the difference."

— Kathleen Wren

"The grammar or syntax of human language is certainly unique. Like an onion or Russian doll, it is recursive: One instance of an item is embedded in another instance of the same item. Recursion makes it possible for the words in a sentence to be widely separated and yet dependent on one another. 'If-then' is a classic example…. Are animals capable of such recursion? Fitch and Hauser have reported that tamarin monkeys are not capable of recursion. Although the monkeys learned a nonrecursive grammar, they failed to learn a grammar that is recursive. Humans readily learn both."

— David Premack (Science 2004 303:318, quoted in ScienceWeek)

These citations by Heckler & Coch show that inability to understand complex language is not limited to monkeys.

The examples given by Wren in the audio samples are of alternating female (Hi) and male (Lo) voices, thus —

FSG:  Hi Lo Hi Lo Hi Lo

PSG:  Hi Hi Hi Lo Lo Lo

As these examples show, neither monkeys nor humans heard the sound of parentheses (or square brackets) as Wren describes them:

"structures like [female [female, male] male]."

There of course is, in ordinary language (which does not include the monologues of Victor Borge), no such thing as the sound of parentheses.

Thus the research of Hauser and Fitch is not only invalid, but ridiculous.

This point is driven strongly home by the following two articles:

Greg Kochanski, Research Fellow,
 Oxford University Phonetics Lab
:

Is a Phrase Structure Grammar
the Important Difference
between Humans and Monkeys?
,

and

Mark Liberman, Professor,
University of Pennsylvania

Departments of Linguistics
and of Computer Science,
and co-director of the
Institute for Research
in Cognitive Science,
in his

Language Log,
January 17, 2004:

Hi Lo Hi Lo,
it's off to
formal language theory
we go
.

Friday, November 28, 2003

Friday November 28, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:31 pm

Understanding Media

BBC News, March 2, 2002:

"The Reverend Billy Graham has apologised for a taped conversation with former President Nixon in which he said the Jewish 'stranglehold' of the media was ruining the United States and must be broken."

"The ‘propaganda model’ of media operations laid out and applied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media postulates that elite media interlock with other institutional sectors in ownership, management and social circles, effectively circumscribing their ability to remain analytically detached from other dominant institutional sectors. The model argues that the net result of this is self-censorship without any significant coercion." 

A Critical Review and Assessment of
   Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model'
   by Jeffery Klaehn,
   European Journal of Communication,
   2002,
Vol 17(2): 147–182. 

"We are in a war of ideas."

— Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
   Oct. 24, 2003


Toby Ziegler
of West Wing

THE WEST WING
"NIGHT FIVE"

WRITTEN BY: AARON SORKIN

Transcription from http://communicationsoffice.tripod.com
/3-13.txt

Episode 3.13 — "Night Five"
Original Airdate: February 6, 2002

**************************

PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT
DEALING WITH A
UN FOREIGN POLICY SPEECH

**************************

TOBY
Our goal is to proclaim American values.

ANDY
This speech isn't supposed to be about ideology. It's supposed to be about reality.

TOBY
I think the President will decide what the speech is suppose to be about, but the reality is, the United States of America no longer sucks up to reactionaries, and our staunch allies will know what we mean.

ANDY
We don't have any staunch allies in the Arab world; just reluctant ones.  We've a coalition held together with duct tape! A coalition without which we cannot fight!

TOBY
Nobody's blowing off the coalition, and that coalition will be plenty strong….

ANDY
What's Egypt going to think? Or Pakistan?

TOBY
That freedom and democracy are coming soon to a theatre near them, so get dressed.

He sits on the edge of his desk.

ANDY
…. this one moment in time, you have to
get off your horse and just… simply put – be nice to the Arab world.

TOBY
Be nice?

ANDY
Yes.

TOBY
Well… How about when we, instead of
blowing Iraq back to the seventh century for harbouring terrorists and trying to develop nuclear weapons,
we just imposed economic sanctions and were reviled by the Arab world….

Supplemental reading:

Who Rules America?

Review of Abraham Foxman's
Never Again? The Threat of
The New Anti-Semitism
,
NY Times Book Review,
November 30, 2003
 

Friday, April 18, 2003

Friday April 18, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:17 pm

To the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuits):

Have a Good Friday, Traitors

Prompted by Pilate’s question “What is truth?” and by my March 24 attack on Noam Chomsky, I decided this afternoon to further investigate what various people have written about Chomsky’s posing of what he calls “Plato’s problem” and “Orwell’s problem.”  The former concerns linguistics, the latter, politics.  As my March 24 entry indicates, I have nothing but contempt for both Chomsky’s linguistics and Chomsky’s politics.  What I discovered this afternoon is that Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, in 2001 appointed a Chomskyite, David W. Lightfoot, as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Why do we know so much more than we have evidence for in certain areas, and so much less in others? In tackling these questions — Plato’s and Orwell’s problem — Chomsky again demonstrates his unequalled capacity to integrate vast amounts of material.” — David W. Lightfoot, review of Chomsky’s Knowledge of Language

What, indeed, is truth?  I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown.  For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma.

See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum, which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.”

Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day.  See

The Shining of May 29.

“Examples are the stained glass windows of knowledge.” — Vladimir Nabokov

AGEOMETRETOS MEDEIS EISITO

Motto of Plato’s Academy


The Exorcist, 1973

Monday, March 24, 2003

Monday March 24, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:52 pm

Orwell’s question, according to
an admirer of leftist Noam Chomsky:

“When so much of the BS is right out in the open,
why is it that we know so little about it?
Why don’t we see what’s right in front of our eyes?”


Oscar
Deep Chomsky:
Lying, Truth-Telling,
and the Social Order
 
 
 
 
 Michael
 Moore

“First of all, I’d like to thank the Academy….”
— Quotation attributed to Plato

The New Yorker of March 31, 2003, discusses leftist academic Noam Chomsky.  The online edition provides a web page listing pro-Chomsky links.

Chomsky’s influence is based in part on the popularity of his half-baked theories on linguistics, starting in the 1950’s with “deep structure” and “transformational,” or “generative,” grammar.

Chomsky has abandoned many of his previous ideas and currently touts what he calls The Minimalist Program.

For some background on Chomsky’s recent linguistic notions, see the expository essay “Syntactic Theory,” by Elly van Gelderen of the Arizona State University English Department.  Van Gelderen lists her leftist political agenda on her “Other Interests” page.  Her department may serve as an example of how leftists have converted many English departments in American universities to propaganda factories.

Some attacks on Chomsky’s scholarship:

The Emperor’s New Linguistics

The New Grammarians’ Funeral

Beyond Chomsky

Could Chomsky Be Wrong? 

Forty-four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken

Call for Papers, Chomsky 2003

Chomsky’s (Mis)Understanding of Human Thinking

Anatomy of a Revolution… Chomsky in 1962

…Linguistic Theory: The Rationality of Noam Chomsky

A Bibliography

Some attacks on Chomsky’s propaganda:

LeftWatch.com Chomsky page

Destructive Generation excerpt

The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky

Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers

Chomsky and Plato’s Diamond

Like another purveyor of leftist nonsense, Jacques Derrida, Chomsky is fond of citing Plato as a precedent.  In particular, what Chomsky calls “Plato’s problem” is discussed in Plato’s Meno.  For a look at the diamond figure that plays a central role in that dialogue, see Diamond Theory.  For an excellent overview of related material in Plato, see Theory of Forms.

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