Cultural Logic or Transcendental Interpretation? Golumbia on Chomsky's Computationalism

Abstract

In The Cultural Logic of Computation David Golumbia offers a critique of Chomsky and of computational linguistics that is rendered moot by his poor understanding of those ideas. He fails to understand and appreciate the distinction between the abstract theory of computation and real computation, such as that involved in machine translation; he confuses the Chomsky hierarchy of language types with hierarchical social organization; he misperceives the conceptual value of computation as a way of thinking about the mind; he ignores the standard account of the defunding of machine translation in the 1960s (it wasn’t working) in favor of obscure political speculations; he offers casual remarks about the demographics of linguistics without any evidence, thus betraying his ideological preconceptions; and he seems to hold a view of analog phenomena that is at odds with the analog/digital distinction as it is used in linguistics, computation, and the cognitive sciences.

Keywords: cultural criticism, media, computing, critique, computationalism, Chomsky, linguistics