Re: logic makes a comeback

Russell Stewart (diamond@rt66.com)
Fri, 20 Jun 1997 13:48:12 -0600

Gene Godbold:
>Please wait; my initial reaction was the same as Mr. Bell's; I'm not
>very familiar with Mr. Chomsky's work, though I know he is thought to be
>one of the premier linguists and induced some sort of paradigm shift in
>the field with a publication in the 1950s (?) Could you inform those of
>us who are ignorant of what he has accomplished?

That will be hard to summarize in a short message, but in a nutshell,
Chomsky has been one of the most influential and admired political activists
of the last 30 years. The majority of his work is in pointing out human-rights
abuses, particularly in Latin America, and particularly those abuses that
one does not normally read about. What I find most interesting about him
is that, even though he is quite Left-wing in his beliefs, he has managed to
earn a great deal of respect from conservatives and liberals alike. This is
no doubt owing to his strong libertarian stance, and the fact that he has been
just as critical of Democratic politicians as of Republican ones.

And as for his religious stance, Chomsky is somewhere between an agnostic
and an outright atheist.

Anyway, that is my capsule summary of Chomsky's work. You can get a better
idea of who he is if you check out the Chomsky archive on the web at
<http://www.worldmedia.com/archive/>

_____________________________________________________________
| Russell Stewart |
| http://www.rt66.com/diamond/ |
|_____________________________________________________________|
| Albuquerque, New Mexico | diamond@rt66.com |
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2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2.