Phillip Winn, over at W6 Daily, responded to my comment on his and Rebecca Blood’s posts on MIT linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky.
He and I will have to agree to disagree on Chomsky’s relevance on politics. I think Chomsky does have intelligent things to say, but says them in a way that infuriates people*.
I agree with Phillip that you can’t use competence or expertize in one field to claim competence in another. I’ve only read Manufacturing Consent, and Deterring Democracy, and his exchange with Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, but I have not read him claim that you should believe or listen to him because he’s an MIT professor.
Phillip rightfuly dismisses the chomskyBots who do use that strategy to defend Chomsky from his critics.
But I think it follows from that, that even if you disagree with Chomsky’s politics or analysis, I don’t think you can dismiss his academic work. Pundits aren’t subject to peer review. Chomsky’s essays for Z and his political books are reviewed by an editor, but they don’t go out to a panel of anonymous reviewers such as his academic papers would.
If his academic work in linguistics is bunk, then you’re not calling into question the work of one person, but a whole field of study. That’s a lot more involved, and a few political webloggers such as I aren’t the right people for that task.
But pardon me, it’s time for “Farscape”.
* For instance, his comments right after September 11th reminded me of the guy at the funeral who tells the widow that if her late husband hadn’t been a drunk and a womanizer, he wouldn’t had been shot in the parking lot of that strip club. While that may be true, and it’s probably something unspoken among the mourners, nobody’s in the mood for hearing it. The widow’s angry at the bastard who killed her husband.
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