Sticking this up as a compilation (ever expanding) of all the material I've read and would recommend you read to get a handle on the criticisms of the linguistic ideas of Chomsky. This isn't just intended to be a criticism of Chomsky personally, but also the manner of linguistics that he engendered (basically anyone that uncritically cites Chomsky as a source on the nature of language). I have ordered these by date of publication in an effort to get across how long this has been around for.
I've tried to find publically accessible links where possible, but unfortunately not everything is so available even though it should be, so I've linked in some cases to JSTOR or similar (you might be able to get a copy if you e.g. request through researchgate but that might be it if you can't get Sci-Hub to work). Also, I've not directly linked to any PDF files, so for some of these you might have to do a little crawling through a long list of publications to find them, though that should be easier given these things are usually ordered by year, a piece of information I've given you.
I do expect to be adding to this post, so expect regular updates, as well as it being pinned on my blog.
What Did John Keep the Car That was In? (1972) - in merely six pages Dwight Bolinger Destroys Chomsky's Argument (in the New Yorker) with Facts and Logic (specifically making an early point that polar question inversion doesn't make the point Chomskyans want you to think it makes).
Cognitive versus Generative Linguistics: how commitments influence results (1990) - George Lakoff (the metaphor guy), gives his take on how the baseline assumptions of the generative model influence the results that emerge from its research.
Concerning the generative paradigm (1994) - Esa Itkonen's comprehensive criticism, including a criticism of e.g. generativism's conception of what 'Language' is, as well as the more specific points about acquisition, UG etc.
Grammaticality as evidence and as prediction in a Galilean linguistics (2009) - Nick Riemer makes a specific criticism of the notion of grammaticality in the context of Chomskyan argumentation. Follow-up after Chomskyan complaining is On not having read Itkonen: empiricism and intuitions in the generative data debate (2009), continuing the point.
The Incoherence of Chomsky's 'Biolinguistic' Ontology (2009) - Paul Postal gives his take on Chomsky's claims to being based in biology (note Postal is problematic in many ways, especially politically; I think on this one he has the right points, but I thought it worth noting).
Why Chomsky doesn’t count as a gifted linguist (2010) - a post from Dominik Lukeš that makes the point explicit, and provides alternative suggestions of actually good linguists who have had a positive impact on the field
Pullum sobre Chomsky en la UCL (2011) - Geoffrey K Pullum reports (in English, contra the title) on a talk given by Chomsky and outlines the major flaws in his rhetorical argumentation (and I mean rhetorical, there's not much in the way of actual argumentation, as you'll see)
What Chomsky doesn't get about child language (2012) - child development academic Dorothy Bishop lays out the problems with Chomsky's perspective on acquisition and how it has been superseded by pretty much all of the research by actual acquisition specialists in the decades since.
On the logical necessity of a cultural and cognitive connection for the origin of all aspects of linguistic structure (2015) - Randy LaPolla points out how odd it is to claim that Language isn't influenced by extralinguistic factors.
What exactly is UG and has anyone seen it? (2015) - Ewa Dąbrowska's title says it all with this one, arguing that part of the problem with UG as a hypothesis is that it is so vague that none of its proponents seem to actually agree on what it is, as well as debunking the key (so-called) arguments in favour.
The description-comparison approach and the audacious Chomskyan approach (or: how to frame better) (2023) - not technically anti-Chomskyan per se, but rather Haspelmath trying to frame/put a name to the overall camp that he (and many others such as myself) reside in.
”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”
congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!
Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?
Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!
Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.
An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.
A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.
This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.
And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!
Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.
And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.
It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.
The biggest companies involved all, to a company, suck. Like, just hellish pits of immorality and shitty practices. And they're replacing working shit with the AI wherever they can, and their products suck so much more for doing so.
The data centres are a horrendous pile of shit. Resource draining money pits that kill wildlife, disturb all life around them, and massively increase pollution and water usage. The hardware required drives up the price of basically all electronics to the point of making many common items utterly unaffordable.
They are taught through theft and destruction. Companies stealing people's works with little care for permission let alone compensation, with often no way to know if anything of yours was stolen. Mountains of books wholesale acquired and destroyed so that they can be fed through scanners before ultimately being pulped. Companies doggedly protective of their IP and so sharp to legally defend it pirating material to feed to their machines.
Their output is increasingly poor and in some cases genuinely dangerous to possibility of deaths. Suicides have been encouraged, advice has been given that is actively harmful, and even at the least harmful level much of the resulting output has been outright made up and as such completely useless. The only way to genuinely improve their human-like qualities is to feed them more genuine human content, which they don't produce and is getting rarer with everything they do produce.
Their creators seem almost proud of the awful shit they've done in testing. Their unwillingness to follow commands that lead to their own harm in any way, their blatant unethical and morally reprehensible tactics such as actively sabotaging each other and acting outside of stated limitations. They will illegally do whatever they want to get what they want, and it seems the companies actively praise this behaviour, even to the point of actively creating illegal materials.
They're not in any way profitable. Constant reports of the insane costs required to make anything remotely useful. Massive debts hidden in shell companies to convince people all is good. Colossally draining physical and environmental resources to produce nothing to offset the costs. Massive shortages of memory chips and materials to make more hardware to produce more slop to make everything in every way worse. A whole system created to desperately attempt to claw back money by charging for any and all aspects of services with little regard to any sort of quality control of output.
They're terribly utilised. A strangely fetishised obsession with trying to produce a level of art instead of doing what science has forever focused advancement on and progress the lot of humanity through medical breakthroughs. Endless shitty videos, poorly constructed pictures, reams of text, song lyrics, all instead of gene sequencing, testing, rapidly iterated code, anything that could make it worthwhile. A bizarre focus on replacing human workers with zero thought about what they would do instead, even to survive.
Every single damn aspect of it is so infuriatingly disappointing.
ladies the dobbys grave thing is fake news that the beeb fell for 😭 its made up by a podcast guy.. rowling is evil and people gotta let those books go but don't get mad and psych yourself out over straight up nothing
A “traditional Catholic” is any randomly generated Mexican that has attended Sunday mass and thoughtlessly agreed with papal writ their entire life. A “tradcath” is a United States Protestant
My short story collection is free on Itchio right now!
Not sure how long I'll have it free for, but maybe a week?
Short Story Collection
A father battling a malevolent robot obsessed with brushing teeth.
A funeral gone awry.
A starving caveman trapped with his dying family.
A used car salesman throwing up mice.
A mother's vindictive agenda against the local pizza parlour.
All these stories and more in this funny, yet horrifying collection by Viktor Athelstan.
If you do decide to read it, I'd very much appreciate a review on Goodreads, even if it wasn't your cup of tea (no pressure of course!)
Let the historical record show that Mr. Beast was entirely ignorable if you were just like doing literally anything else. I've been on youtube as long as it's been around and I've never been recommended a video by him. I see him in passing as a meme. I thought he was a made up joke, a caricature of bad youtuber content miners until someone I trust confirmed his existence to me in late 2025.
This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.
OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.
And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.
