Decoding Chomsky Chris Knight Yale University Press 2016, pp. 304 By Robert F. Barsky Chris Knight’s new book begins with the unpromising statement that he, in encountering Chomsky’s work, would have to “put aside” his “own cultural prejudices and assumptions” to “avoid dismissing every strange belief as incomprehensible nonsense.” The reader has to wonder where Knight has been for the past half-century to view Chomskian linguistic work as though it was a “previously unknown tribe,” and the reader familiar even slightly with Chomsky might be very concerned that Knight prejudges the “doctrines” encountered therein as “absurd”—unless of course Knight is a great expert on language research that has been undertaken for the past couple of thousand years. No such luck. He has had “no training in theoretical linguistics,” by his own admission, but is nonetheless confident enough in his lack...

Continue reading