Noam Chomsky. Wikicommons/ Andrew Rusk from Toronto, Canada. Some rights reserved.
Hello Wolfgang. I wondered where you went after our brief exchange following my articIe. I had just shown how you misrepresented your own book, and was waiting for some kind of response from you. ... crickets... Rather, I find you over in another corner of openDemocracy with a brace of new misrepresentations, centring on the claim that I am part of a dogpile on Noam Chomsky, led by Chris Knight and including Frederick J. Newmeyer, David Golumbia, and Lev Levidow.
I won't catalogue all your misrepresentations, but let's be clear that those on your list are not marching in lockstep under Knight's flag. Newmeyer and I explicitly reject Knight's argument – to wit, that Chomsky designed his linguistic theories so as to make them unusable by the military for such things as command-and-control missile systems. We both offer plenty of evidence that undermines (in my case) or completely rejects (in Newmeyer's case) Knight's claims. That's the whole point of our commentaries. They were invited as responses to Knight's piece, and they both come out against it. Newmeyer and I are, by the way, with Chomsky on this, who has firmly rejected Knight's argument.
