not a satisfactory substitute

IN FEBRUARY I POSTED a video of the critic of Noam Chomsky ,Chris Knight, in which he laid out an explanation of how he thinks Chomksy's dual life, as Knight sees it, can explain how he came under the sway of the criminal and conman Jeffrey Epstein.   I've casually looked more at Knight's criticism of Chomsky, supposedly from the "left" of Chomsky, on the basis of Knight's quasi if not consciously Marxist materialism - which, somehow, he also considers Darwinist - and with that I think his theory seems a lot weaker to me now than it did a few months back.   I now disavow it though I didn't strongly endorse it even then. 

You probably won't be surprised if I repeat what I've said before,  neither linguistics nor anthropology, the academic fields of Chomsky and Knight, respectively, are in any way sciences.   

There are a number of facts about them that definitively remove them from any plausible identification with scientific method.  They purport to study things that cannot be directly observed, many of their claims aren't even capable of being indirectly observed being entirely artifacts, creations, really of everything from academic ideology to the necessity of supporting their wider ideology.   In that they have this in common with the epicycles of the scientists who elucidated the Ptolemaic astronomy, they created things that didn't exist to make their systems function.  Unlike them, the Ptolemaics could make accurate predictions about some things.   You could see what they were talking about, at least. 

Many of their claims cannot be known to have now or ever had any material or mental or temporal existence before those story telling deivices were thought up by academics.  Anything said about "languages" which are claimed to have gone extinct before there was written recording of them or without any record of the actual words and how they were used is as real as Grimm's fairy stories.   And huge swaths of current and past linguistics are founded on such "objects" of study.   

And there are insurmountable problems in collecting "data" and measuring and analyzing the results, as there are in all of the soft sciences but especially in such pseudo-science. 

When you insert claims about the "evolution" of languages, the physical bases presumed to have comprised that "evolution" and claims about things in the as forever lost past,  it may add an air of scincyness to it, but it is as imaginary as anything in medieval or classical history that is looked on with condescension by academics today.   Only the medieval and classical scholars had the excuse that they were pre-scientific, modern academics who do the same thing today while looking down on them have no such excuse.   And that is rampant in current academia and the general culture.  

We are in no way "evolved" beyond the medieval or classical mind.  We have not moved on from the 19th or 18th or, in fact, any century before that.   If anything we are less moral in our modern materialism than the violent warring, conquering and oppressing People of the past.   My evidence of that is that we are currently  recapitulating all of the worst acts committed in the 20th century and are reproducing the record-breaking murder, maiming and genocide that exists in living memory with even worse technology - which is relevant to Knights original critique of Chomsky.  It is a fact that he, his lab and his university, MIT, were and are an intrinsic part of the military industrial complex,  Chomsky's purported attempts to make sure his work would not be used in war is a paper-thin ass covering for his professional life.    

And what you can say in that regard about linguistics is as true of anthropology, which, when it's not playing at being biologists with everything I said above applying, they claim to be able to scientifically study human communities, societies, even the entire human species though coming up with generalized claims about any of those and presenting that as science is at least as much of a fraud.   Here's a relevant claim made by the Radical Anthropology Group, founded around Chris Knight's students and colleagues. 

Anthropology asks one big question: what does it mean to be human? To answer this, we cannot rely on common sense or on philosophical arguments. We must study how humans actually live – and the many different ways in which they have lived. This means learning, for example, how people in non-capitalist societies live, how they organise themselves and resolve conflict in the absence of a state, the different ways in which a ‘family’ can be run, and so on.

Anyone who thinks you can answer that question by any or all of those methods is setting themselves a vast array of impossible tasks, maybe an effectively infinite number of impossible tasks.  Just gathering "data" that can achieve factual reliability (impossible when you rely on such things as People telling you about their inner life and their activities you can't verify),  with a large enough sample to get to even theoretically plausible numbers to come up with accurate generalizations about human life,  and to filter out the researchers ideological or other intents in analyzing whatever probabilistic hocus-pocus you choose to use on it (and THAT choice will, I guarantee you, be the subject of anthropological controversy) will never produce a clean analysis.  

And it only gets worse as their claims are compounded and multiplied. 

Additionally, it means studying other species and other times. What might it mean to be almost – but not quite – human? How socially self-aware, for example, is a chimpanzee? Do nonhuman primates have a sense of morality? Do they have language? And what about distant times? Who were the Australopithecines and why had they begun walking upright? Where did the Neanderthals come from and why did they become extinct? How, when and why did human art, religion, language and culture first evolve? While RAG has never defined itself as a political organization, the implications of some forms of science are intrinsically radical, and this applies in particular to the theory that humanity was born in a social revolution. Many RAG members choose to be active in Survival International and/or other indigenous rights movements to defend the land rights and cultural survival of hunter-gatherers. Additionally, some RAG members combine academic research with activist involvement in environmentalist, anti-capitalist and other campaigns.

Human beings are opaque boxes even with the possibility of People telling researchers about themselves, their lives, their experiences, their actions and, worse still, their inner lives,  doing that with animals who cannot tell us any of that is much worse.  Typically such pseudo-scientists fill in a lot of that inability by simplifying animals into unconscious or semi-conscious machines, which anyone who doesn't share their ideological and professional self-interests are entirely within their rights to call bullshit.  And I do. 

As for their pretenses of studying our humanoid and primate ancestors, as if those could tell us anything about us,   none of the preceding species in our direct line "went extinct" they evolved into modern humans, we now know that modern humans ancestors included "Neanderthals" and, I'd guess, since they claim we are descended from them, Australopithecus and other such species.   They're no more extinct than your great-great-grandparents are.  They just happened to have died a lot longer ago and looked somewhat different. 

This is the smoking gun that the whole thing is complete bullshit, "How, when and why did human art, religion, language and culture first evolve?"   You might, possibly, though I doubt it, come up with a "when" answer to that question in terms of art - if you can find and discern its material artifacts and accurately date them, though, as the more recently discovered Neanderthal art deep within quite hard to access caves show,* you could never discern if it was its "first" occurrence.  How can you even guess that you'd recognize the beginnings of art?   If you want to call whatever claims modern academics want to make about any physical and verifiably human made artifacts such as stone tools as comprising a "culture" then you might do that BUT IT WILL ACTUALLY TELL YOU VERY LITTLE ABOUT ANY CULTURE THAT THOSE PEOPLE EXPERIENCED OR CREATED BY THAT EXPERIENCE AND THEIR ACTIONS.   Multiply that impossibility by an enormous factor for non-humanoid animals. 

Anything about any culture or religion or language which left absolutely no physical trace, and that would be most of it, is forever, completely and irretrievably lost AND YOU CANNOT CONSTRUCT THAT OUT OF WHAT YOU HAVE.   That will always tell you far, far, . . . entirely far more about YOUR MIND AND CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL SELF than it will about them. 

As I said in February the only person we could possibly get the information of why Chomsky fell under the spell of such a crass, cheap, vile and evil conman as Epstein is Chomsky.  That can only come from the man, himself and, as it's reported, he is so disabled by a stroke, he can't tell us that.  And even then, it would not be verifiable.   It would be a report on things that cannot be checked for accuracy or truth.  Chris Knight's claims of explanation are of a piece with the practices of anthropology, and that's not a satisfactory substitute.  

* I once heard a video in which Chomsky entirely dismissed the possibility of Neanderthals having language.  I'd already read about the cave art which Neanderthals for which they would have had to carry a paint kit deep within totally dark caves - so with a planned and carried light source - to produce for whatever motive they had to do that so I was shocked that someone like Chomsky who I assume was still reading about such things could conclude could have happened without language being involved.  Certainly implausible if it happened by more than one Neanderthal person.    But, given his own imaginary origin of language - even if you don't rely on Knight's sneering description of it - I can guess why he would make that claim as recently as he did.   Ideological commitments, especially if those commitments were your invention and part of your claim to academic fame, can blind you to even physical evidence.  Such is always the case in the sciences that rely on making up stuff not in evidence and for which evidence will never be had. 

Update:  I should add that the "beginning of Art" which might have left artifacts is a severely limited view of art.  Physical objects which may well have left no artifacts, through everything from total decay past recovery to intentional destruction (such as may have comprised sacrifices of things like textiles or as known in several sand painting traditions) are such things.  

And that leaves out what the Anthropologist Franz Boaz observed, that in hunter-gatherer societies, plastic arts that create objects account for very little of the artistic activity of such People.  They can create literature and music in their minds while waiting for an animal or for a fish to take their bait.  They can create verses and stories and have religious or other experiences, they can come up with abstract thoughts and things like mathematical calculations, they can observe topology and geometric figures and come up with ideas about them, accurate or inaccurate.  The pre-literate calculations that, we guess, explain some of the more astronomically accurate placement of huge stones to achieve effects are a lot more plausibly speculated about that any of the rest of it.  But without a record of what they were thinking, that's all conjecture about a very limited range of physical evidence.