политический идиотизм Докинза

[avva]

Ричард Докинз в "Independent", об итогах 2002-го года:

Hero: Robert Fisk
He is not afraid to tell the truth, however unpleasant. His serious sincerity redeems the profession of journalist from the dishonour inflicted by the tabloids.

Villain: George Bush
This illiterate buffoon cheated his way into the White House with the help of his well-connected family and friends. Having dismally failed to anticipate or prevent the atrocity of September 11, he spent the rest of the day zigzagging around the country like a jet-propelled chicken. His personal cowardice was mirrored in the country at large, and he fanned it to his advantage in the mid-term elections, and now, to foment an unprovoked war that has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with oil. His record on the environment is as appalling as you would expect. Bush is rightly despised throughout the world, and it is humiliating that Britain is seen as his only ally.

В общем, подтверждает моё мнение о Докинзе (резко отрицательное). Конечно, он в принципе может писать полную чушь о политике и быть при этом замечательным учёным (case in point: Хомский). Да я и не могу судить Докинза-учёного. Но его популяризаторские книги об эволюции и дарвинизме вызывают у меня отвращение.

Comments

Chomsky is not an exception

[(Anonymous)]

As a trained linguist, I assure you Chomsky is as much a scientist as Freud. (Apologies to those who still consider the latter one.)

Steve

Re: Chomsky is not an exception

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

I think there's a difference. Freud's theories are 1)a vast generalization drawn from less than (not very successful) 10 cases. 2) unfalsifiable. No matter how un-freudian your behavior is, to a psychoanalyst it's all Egos, Ids, complexes and phallic symbols. While Freud did have some insights on human psyche, psychoanalysis is not science by any stretch of imagination.

Chomskian lingustic theory, on the other hand, is much more well-defined. It gives certain predictions that can be tested. You can actually use it to, say, write a natural language computer system. The system may or may not work very well, but it's something concrete. You can preform tests, make predictions, have sensible discussion, prove or disprove theorems. (see, for example, http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0212024)

Re: Chomsky is not an exception

[avva.livejournal.com]

I'll have to disagree with you here. While I have many reservations and objections to Chomskyanism, and while we'd probably agree that it has in some ways deeply corrupted contemporary linguistics, this does not translate into claiming that Chomsky's theories were nothing much to be excited about, to begin with.

I think they merited a lot of excitement, but the whole movement bogged down too quickly in marshes of faux mathematical exactness and oversimplifying abstractness.

Chomsky may've led a lot of people down the path of false grandeur, but his original insights in phonology and syntax were and remain pretty important.