Thursday, December 18, 2014
A panel of experts debunks Evans
Ok, some hyperbole here. But I wanted to get your attention. As I mentioned at the end of the this post, linguists need to go after this junk as a public service, both to ourselves and to the larger public interested in research on language. To this end, Ewan Dunbar, Dave Kush, David Adger and moi have started putting together meatier rejoinders to Evans' confused and deeply misleading paper and book. We posted it on Reddit (here). Direct those interested to this discussion. We want to sink this before it gains traction. Feel free to point out other lapses in logic and non-sequiturs and add them to the feed. Oh yes, we gave the thing a catchy title that, we hope, leaves little room for doubt about how bad this work is.
Happy New Year, everyone on Norbert's always entertaining blog. To kick off 2015 Phil Lieberman posted a review of "The science of Language" here http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002352 and it has been downloaded in record numbers and generated lively discussion already. It also makes my piece [available here http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001592 look fairly charitable [to the book and to Chomsky's work in general]. Yes, Norbert, that is c h a r i t a b l e. So I thought maybe this team of experts you have been drumming up here can be doing a thorough debunking - a two for one deal. Enough bio-expertice do you certainly have amongst you, right? But you may want to task at least one expert with actually reading the fine volume. It helps to know what Chomsky really said...
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