Chomsky wrong on language?

[Hud955]

I think you are right, Alan: there doesn't appear to be any direct connection between Chomsky's politics and his linguistics – if by that you mean no direct intellectual connection.  But that is not what Chris is arguing.  I don't go along with some of his (Chris's) political assumptions and therefore don't agree entirely with the conclusions of his argument, but that's another matter.Chris has regularly expressed admiration for Chomsky's political position and his political courage, at the same time as taking a dim view, not only of his linguistics but of the role this has given him.I'm not sure what people here mean by biological determinism.  I think this is one of those very difficult terms which can have a very wide range of meanings.  It fragments as soon as you start to unpick it. Given our present level of understanding, the idea that our genes have no influence on us could only be held by someone in a powerful state of denial (or possibly a genius about to initiate a gigantic paradigm shift – but I think we can reasonably discount the likelyhood of that right now.)   Biological determinism and cultural determinism in any kind of extreme and exclusionary form both appear to me to be unsustainable. 

[Hud955]

stuartw2112 wrote:

If you go to the link below, you'll find in the second issue of the journal an interview I carried out with Noam Chomsky on these very issues. I was working under the influence and with the help of Chris Knight. As the saying goes, Chomsky cut us both a new arsehole. He will certainly be very surprised to learn that "biological determinism" has been refuted – you should let the Intelligent Design people know! I'm now more with Young Master Smeet – though like him I am no specialist and have no dog in the fight. http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/journal

I'm not sure how you are reading this, Stuart, but I don't see that there is anything here that contradicts what I have so far said.  (I was reading it just the other day.  Good interview!) Some of Chomsky's responses seem rather disingenuous (or 'exceptionally nuanced') to me – the Avalonian Explosion, for instance, which he cites to confirm his view that 'It's a mistake to suppose that capacities must evolve gradually', took millions of years (about 20-odd million if I recall).  In evolutionary terms that is, indeed, an exceptionally rapid evolution, but it is an evolution and hardly what Chomsky has in mind when he later speaks of how the language module appeared from a single mutation or set of mutations in a human individual about 50,000 years ago, spread throughout the population and quickly gave rise to symbolic linguistic culture.  Disingenous?  But maybe that's just me.Unlike Chris, Chomsky has never been very conscientious about accurate citation of sources.

[Young Master Smeet]

Well, my latest comment was after a skim read of:Title:Language and Other Cognitive Systems. What Is Special About Language?Source:Language learning and development [1547-5441] Chomsky Year: 2011 Volume: 7 Issue: 4 Page: 263 -278http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15475441.2011.584041#.VPgo5dhLdhcFrom the abstract:

Quote:

One conclusion that appears to emerge with considerable force is that Aristotle's maxim should be inverted: language is meaning with sound, a rather different matter. The core of language appears to be a system of thought, with externalization a secondary process (including communication, a special case of externalization).

Which I think is a good line.Here's how he characterises the position he argues against:

Chomsky wrote:

Fifty years ago, it was widely held by the most prominent philosophers and psychologists that language is just a matter of conditioning and some obscure general notion of “induction” or “analogy.” A widely held view in professional linguistics was that languages can differ arbitrarily (within very restricted constraints, like choice of phonetic features, perhaps just properties of the articulatory apparatus), and that the subject consists of nothing more than an array of procedures to reduce a corpus to an organized form in one or another way, selected on the basis of the specific goals of the inquiry, with no other criterion of right or wrong. Later versions of the “nonexistence” conception were that rules of language can be justifiably postulated only if they are “in principle” accessible to introspection, a dogma—largely incoherent in my opinion—that excludes almost everything. There are other variants, among them the insistence, again by prominent philosophers and others, that language must be regarded as a socio-political entity of some kind, hence dependent on continuity of empires and literary cultures, national myths, military forces, and so on.

And a footnote:

Chomsky wrote:

Statistically speaking, language use is overwhelmingly internal–“speaking to oneself.” If one chooses to call this “communication,” thus depriving the term of much significance, then imagined social context is relevant.

Quote:

Externalization by the [Sensory Motor] system appears to be a secondary property of language. Externalization is also in part independent of modality, as work of the past few decades on sign language has revealed. Sometimes externalization is employed for communication—by no means always, at least if we invest the term “communication” with some significance. Hence, communication, a fortiori, is a still more ancillary property of language, contrary to much conventional doctrine—and of course language use is only one of many forms of communication.

Quote:

Something like that seems to be true for animal communication. Symbols appear to relate to physically identifiable external or internal states: motion of leaves elicits a warning cry (maybe an eagle is coming); “I'm hungry”; etc. Nothing remotely like that is true for even the simplest elements of human language: cow, river, person, tree—pick any one you want.There are inklings of that understanding in classical philosophy, in Aristotle's Metaphysics, particularly. It was considerably enriched, with a shift from metaphysics to epistemology and cognition, in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the work of British neo-Platonists and classical empiricists. They recognized that there is no direct link between the elementary elements of language and thought and some mind-independent external entity. Rather, these elements provide rich perspectives for interpreting and referring to the mind-independent world involving Gestalt properties, cause-and-effect, “sympathy of parts,” concerns directed to a “common end,” psychic continuity, and other such mentally-imposed properties. In this respect, meaning is rather similar to sound: every act of articulating some item, say the internal syllable [ta], yields a physical event, but no one seeks some category of physical events associated with [ta]. Similarly, some (but by no means all) uses of the word river relate to physically identifiable entities, but there is no category of such entities identifiable in principle by a physicist investigating the mind-external world. In David Hume's phrase, summarizing a century of inquiry, the “identity, which we ascribe” to vegetables, animal bodies, artifacts, persons and their minds, and so on—the array of individuating properties—is only a “fictitious one,” established by our “cognoscitive powers,” as they were termed by his 17th century predecessors.

For example, the question of people born blind whop develop a full linguistic range, including concepts of things they have never (and will never) see.

[stuartw2112]

Thanks Hud, glad you liked the interview. At the very least, what I learned from it is that Chomsky is a highly skilled operator in debate – as Chris would agree. You have to get up very early in the morning indeed to get one past him. Cheers

[Hud955]

Under pressure now, so just a quick response.  I'll comment in more detail if I have time.  This issue has nothing to do with whether we speak to ourselves internally more commonly than we speak to others.  This is a red herring.  The issue is how did language come into existence.  The route by which Chomsky slowly backtracked stage by stage in response to the demolition of each new iteration of his theory until he had pasted himself into a tight corner is fascinating and worth reading.  But let me try to give an abstract summary.  In the RAG article,  Chomsky claims that language begins as a single mutation event in an individual which is then selected for and spreads through the community – there is no drawn out process of evolution whereby a series of mutations are subjected to a variety of selection pressures: there is a single, very remarkable event – particularly remarkable given the complexity of the outcome and the time frame within which occurs.  In this conception, language itself (as opposed to its many varieties) arises fully formed and without human communication having played any part in its formation.  It must therefore begin as a hermetically sealed internal activity.  And here we have the origins of Chomsky's individualism.In the same article Chomsky speaks of this newly emerged language faculty as a symbolic process.  The question then arises if 'language' is at this stage an internal process, where did the symbols come from?  If they did not emerge by intraspecific agreement between indivuals through a process of communcation, they must have emerged from within the minds of those individuals with this remarkable mutation. It is this conundrum (I'm simplifying, but this is basically the problem Chomsky faced) that eventually forces him in his later work to hold what certainly seems to me to be the bizarre view that specific concepts/symbols together with the structures for relating them to one another to produce meaning are themselves all innate.  And not only is this vast apparatus innate, it is the result of a single mutation event in recent human history.  Hence his insistence that a symbolic entity like carburetor was already lodged in the mind of these early internally revolving individuals.  You seem to be able to accept this withoug demur, YMS.  I certainly can't.Talk of recursion is all very well,  but recursion has to have something to work on. 

[Hud955]

Ah!  I'm really glad you said that, Stuart.  I've sometimes wondered if it is only me that thinks Chomsky is as slipperty as an eel. Sadly, I don't think he is always very honest either.  I followed up a lot of his quoted references about ten years ago and was taken aback to find that in many cases he had distorted or misquoted them to fit his claims.  I take no pleasure in that discovery, because I think he has been an important and positive voice in the world.  

[Hud955]

I think it is very typical of Chomsky and characterises his whole approach to language, that he claims it is not necessary to know any language other than your native one to become a linguist.  Linguistics for him is not about communication or any actual languages.  I think he reveals his intellectual origins there.  He was very influenced in his early years by the Russian formalists.

[Anonymous]

I am not an expert in linguistic, but I think that he is mistaken, and in regard to his political point of view, he is just like any other left winger, if he calls himself a socialist, he should have become a member of a real socialist party, and during the time of election, he has asked the workers to vote for the parties of the ruling classNoam Chomsky is a very ambivalent person. He calls himself an anarchist, and he has supported the  leaders of  the state capitalist governments of Cuba and Venezuela, and Vietnam, instead of supporting the workers of those countriesHe might be the best linguistic of the English language,  but there had been some others linguistics in the Spanish language who  were as good as him.He might be a good linguistic, but  as a  politician,  historian, or economist, he always mix up everything. I do not support his theory about an universal grammar,  languages are learned by children according to the environmental that they have grown.It is very difficult for many American to learn another language besides English, even more, Americans hate all foreign languages,  but it is easier for others peoples from others countries to learn different languages, because language is considered  as a cultural phenomenon, and the educational system force, or motivate  students to learn several languages.I studied under the educational system created by Eugenio Maria de Hostos and his pedagogical  system motivated students to learn different languages such as:  Latin, French, English, and Portuguese.I do not think his theory about Creoles languages is correct either , for example,  in Haiti most peoples speak Patois ( or Patua, speaking with your feet  ) and they have an African accent, but most peoples learn that language through their parents, or in the village where they have grown, and it is spoken by the peasants and the poor peoples, the children of the wealthy peoples they do not learn Patois, they speak French, and sometimes they do not understand each other.The peoples called as Cocolos ( racial slur )  which are the inhabitants of the Virgin Islands living in the Dominican Republic, they have created a mix of English and Spanish, and they  have converted English word into Spanish ( Chorcha= church, ) and most of their children speak Spanish with an English accentThe Cuban and the Dominican they speak Spanish ( or Castilian ) but they have an African accent including the descedents of the Criollos, or Spaniard born in the Caribbean, that linguistic behavior is not wired in their brain, it is learned from others peoples Thee is a French historian   who has discovered that  the so called Romance languages  did not originate from the Latin language, (http://www.amazon.fr/français-vient-pas-latin-linguistique/dp/2296030815  ) they came from a language spoken by the peasants and the common peoples  of Rome and Italy. I do not know if Noam Chomsky is aware of that

[Hud955]

"For example, the question of people born blind who develop a full linguistic range, including concepts of things they have never (and will never) see."You keep bringing this issue up, YMS so let me take a moment to say that I have not the slightest problem with it: it is a quite common and well-understood argument.  It is, indeed, a necessary condition for Chomsky's theory of language.  But it is hardly a sufficient one.  There is a world of difference between the claim, first, that language structures human thought in ways that are different from animal signalling systems, and, second,  the Chomskyan claim that every child comes into the world knowing what a "house" is and that for the child to use this knowledge to communicate with others, she only has to learn how to connect her innate concept with the local sound for a 'house'.  Interestingly, this view didn't originate with Chomsky, but with Chomsky's student Jerry Fodor (He of recent 'What Darwin Got Wrong' fame, a dense philosophical analysis which attempts – and fails – to undermine the foundation of Darwinian natural selection. If we didn't know before where this line of argument leads, Fodor has made it plain.) Fodor began working on the theory of innate concepts in response to the unravelling, yet again, of a previous less extreme Chomsky position.  Chomsky picked it up and ran with it as a way of patching his previous theory.  Then, as is his habit, he presented it to the world, not as a hypothesis, but as a species of unchallengeable necessity (he frequently attempts to bomb-proof himself with this kind of language – there is a fair bit of it in the RAG interview link above).  Words like 'house' and 'book' are far too 'complex', he claims, to be simply learned.  Are they?  It hardly needs to be pointed out that unless you believe in alien interventions there were no books around when, according to Chomsky, these innate ideas were first installed in the human brain, so there can be no doubt as to his intended meaning here.  So, yes, a blind person in our culture may exhibit a full range of verbalised concepts, YMS, but we still need to ask how and from where that blind person initially acquired them: spontaneously from the depths of her inherited 'mind', or externally from the culture in which she was linguistically raised?  Here's another question:  What kind of a linguistic tool box do you think a community composed entirely of blind people would generate if they were isolated from the rest of the world at birth?  A 'full set'?  I wonder.  As far as I am aware, Chomsky still holds this view today. Chomsky: "There’s a fixed and quite rich structure of understanding associated with the concept ‘house’ and that’s going to be cross-linguistic and it’s going to arise independently of any evidence because it’s just part of our nature."  

[Anonymous]

If Noam Chomsky is a linguistic, Why he does not speak several languages ?  He should be fluent in different languages. At the present time he is more concern about politics than about linguistic. He is very popular because the left agree with him on many of his analysis which most of the times are not correct either.In South America he was confronted about his stand regarding the two superpowers, and  he said that the US was the big empire, and that Russian was the small empire,it sounds closely to  Lenin theory of Imperialism, therefore, the major problem of the world is the US, it is not capitalism, and he has reflected the same ideas in all his books Besides being influenced by  the Russian School of Formalism, he has also been influenced by the US society, and the racist conception of the American ruling class which has also spread the idea that speaking one language is enough, and that  English is the only language that must be spoken by their citizens,( it is like saying that the world is flat and the US is an island ) and that the language spoken by others peoples has not value, and it is also inferior  He should be the director of the program of English onlyMost  peoples do not understand that when a person has a different accent, it means that he or she is able to speak more than one language, and also Americans have their own particular accent,( European and Afro-American have two different intonation or accent )  and the English language is articulated using American idiomatic expressions. Within 30 or 40 years the Spanish language is going to be one of the prevalent languages in the US, if the population of peoples coming from Latin America continue increasing, probably, it is going to become the first language. I do not know how Chomsky is going to explain that social phenomenon, because most of those peoples are going to be bilinguals, and their accent is going to be different too.In the South of the US peoples have their own Patois ( or Patwa ) which is a combination of English and French, and their accent and lexicon is different to the peoples from the North, and the east, it is a historical phenomenon due to the influence of the French in that area.. The whole linguistic theory of Chomsky falls apart in his own backyard.There are certain areas in the south of the US where peoples  supposedly speak English but they are hardly to be understood, and their accent is like the peasant of any third world country, and their children go to the university, and become English teachers,  and they continue speaking with the same intonation, how did they learn it ? From their own environmental and the influence of their parents, friends and relative.There is not such thing as an universal grammar, the grammar of the Romance language is different to the language of the Germanic and the  Anglo -Saxon, and in some language the verbs are completely irregular, for example, the Spanish language  only has 5 sounds, and with those sounds a combinations of thousands of words can be implemented. There are many examples that can be used in order to prove that he is wrongI would prefer the explanation given by Frederic Engels that it took thousands of years for human being to  be able to create a medium of communications, and it  took many years to develop the  vocal cords, we do not need a PHD in order to understand that

[LBird]

I'd like to support mcolome1's view that Chomsky's political ideology plays a massive role in his views about linguistics. It could not be otherwise.The view expressed earlier on the thread that Chomsky is an 'apolitical academic', a 'scientist simply seeking the Truth', and that his notion of a 'universal grammar inherent in biological individuals' is not political, is simply laughable. Science is political.I gave up commenting when that view seemed to be expressed as the agreed way to understand science, Chomsky, and 'LAD's.I leave it at that – good luck with the 19th century ideology, comrades!Perhaps you'll have more success than me, mcolome1. I hope so.

[Young Master Smeet]

I believe Chomsky is fluent in several languages, and I beleive hs published an analysis of Hebrew.As for rationalism: part of the problem, as I suggest is once you elimjinate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be da troot, as someone never said.If I understand what I've read of what he's saying, it's not that "carburetor" relates to any real world object, but to a mental position.  It's rather like there is a filing cabinet in our minds, and an empty drawer gets made into the parking space for a new concept (and the same parking space in each mind).  That's slightly less implausible, if each mind is using the same indexing instrucions (lets all play spot the librarian).What this does, in effect, is take the ball away from the post modernists.  They play with the radical disconnect between signifier and signified, and eventually come up with the impossibility of communication.  He takes that, and, in much the same way as Russell, says that concepts are only ever interior, and there is no connection between signifier and signified at all.  There is a common "meaning" grounded ultimately in biology, and common humanity.If Chomsky is right, not only is communication possible, but it is possible without ideology, it holds open the prospect for genuine human communication.What, thouh, this ultimately comes down to is: how do you deal with the poverty of stimulous? Eitehr you experimentally disprove it, or you account for it, and the only account that can make sense is that there is firmware behind language.

[Hud955]

It is hard to pin Chomsky down on exactly what his 'innate concepts' consist of, but there is no doubt that, whatever they are, he believes their boundaries closely map onto the words of our actual languages.  He begins to make his case by arguing from 'simple' concrete terms relating to 'things' and 'actions' but soon realises that if his argument is to hold water he must extend it to include all concepts, not only those that were meaningful to the earliest population of language-possessing humans, but also to all future generations in all future cultures as well.   Ultimately he supplements his Cartesianism with a form of Platonism. Chomsky: "Acquisition of lexical items poses what is sometimes called ‘Plato’s problem’ in a very sharp form…At peak periods of language acquisition, children are acquiring (‘learning’) many words a day, perhaps a dozen or more, meaning that that they are acquiring words on very few exposures, even just one. This would appear to indicate that the concepts are already available, with much or all of their intricacy and structure predetermiuned, and that the child’s task is to assign labels to concepts, as might be done with limited evidence given sufficiently rich innate structure."It doesn't matter how Chomsky actually understands his "innate concepts" it follows from his theory that, at the moment of mutation and the installation of the 'language module', evolution was able to anticipate all the contingencies of all future human environments and latently provide us with all the innate concepts we would ever need.You suggest that, "once you elimjinate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be da troot, as someone never said."I think this is where I depart from your line of thinking most completely, YMS.Chomsky is very adept at declaring himself in absolutist terms, implying that anything other than his own line of argument is 'impossible' and that therefore his own view triumphs by necessity.  But what makes you think there is any need to accept these claims?  Undoubtedly we are dealing with very puzzling phenomena (anything to do with the mind sets us a huge conceptual challenge).  But there exist a number of approaches to this problem apart from Chomsky's, all of which have their conceptual issues, but none of these are more problematic than Chomsky's own.From my perspective, I think you have this upside down.  Rather than accepting that Chomsky has indeed eliminated the 'impossible,' from his premises, as he claims, we should accept that any premises which lead to an impossible conclusion, no matter how closely we argue from them, need to be abandoned and a search made for sounder set of conceptual starting points.

[Hud955]

"I'd like to support mcolome1's view that Chomsky's political ideology plays a massive role in his views about linguistics. It could not be otherwise."I'm sure it has occurred to you, LB, that your own political ideology is playing a massive role in your insistance on this claim, but it might be worth considering the implications of that.In general, I would agree with you.  In the individual instance, though, the influence of a political idieology on a train of thought may presumably be greater or less.  It may also be influenced by the swirl of ideological currents other than political ones.  I've put this challenge to you before. Show us exactly how Chomsky's political ideology plays a massive role in his views about linguistics and you will have made a substantial contribution to the discussion.  Merely wave the claim like an ideological banner above our heads and it is simply meaningless.  Generalisations whose feet never touch the ground are no more than ideological bludgeons, and provide us with no insight into the actual world. As a matter of fact I do think Chomsky's politics have a bearing on his linguistics and vice versa but perhaps not in the direct way that I think you are insisting on here.  As I have already said, although my conclusions are not exactly the same as Chris Knight's they are heavily influenced by the contents of his forthcoming book, and I don't want to take advantage of  the massive amount of work he has put into it or his resulting insights by commenting on that now.  But watch this space.

[LBird]

Hud955 wrote:

I'm sure it has occurred to you, LB, that your own political ideology is playing a massive role in your insistance on this claim…

That's perfectly correct, and I clearly and openly tell everyone what ideology I am employing.I'm a Democratic Communist, and a Marxist.But… no-one else will declare which ideology tells them what to say. They all appear to believe that they are all individuals, and their opinions are their personal thoughts. Crazy, isn't it, to anyone who's lived through the 20th century. But there you go – a site which claims to be giving a lead to workers in the 21st century actually espouses 19th century scientific thought. Y'know, 'academics' are outside of political ideology, and 'science' has an 'objective method' which is a 'neutral' route to The Truth.Einstein, never mind Marx, would weep. Over a hundred years later, and workers still look to 'elite experts' to 'tell them The Truth'. Who'd've thought it?And mention 'democracy' in the production of social knowledge, and the 'individualists' really start to protest!

Hud955 wrote:

In general, I would agree with you.

Yes, everyone who has read any methodology at all says this. It's in the preface of every academics' book. And every student genuflects to the 'theory-ladenness of facts'. Some here have actually read Carr's What is History?But… when it comes to their 'practice', proclaimed 'theory' goes out of the window, and we return to 19th century science, within which the 'facts' speak for themselves, and if we just stick to the empirical detail, the correct theory will emerge.If I ask what ideology they use to critically understand a rock, they all appear completely baffled. 'Rock?'. 'Theory?' And worst of all, 'Criticism?'.No, they always say 'I know what a rock is when I see one, and I'm not having a democratic commune telling me otherwise!'. Who shall gainsay individual experience and sensual feeling?

Hud955 wrote:

In the individual instance, though, the influence of a political idieology on a train of thought…

Ahhh… the 'get-out clause'. Lip service to 'theory', then return to 'facts' and 'individuals'. Which 19th century ideology stressed facts, individualism, and 'amateur experts'? Liberalism, perchance?

Hud955 wrote:

I've put this challenge to you before. Show us exactly how Chomsky's political ideology plays a massive role in his views about linguistics and you will have made a substantial contribution to the discussion.

Let's see. Chomsky stresses 'individuals', their 'biology' (not their socially-produced thought) and the role of 'elite experts' like himself, in the production of social knowledge. Chomsky would shit himself at the very idea that a vote by workers should determine whether his ideas have any 'truth' or not. Some here would, too. So much for socialism being workers' power.But you apparently can't see this, Hud. You can't see how Chomsky's political ideology plays, not only a massive role in his views on linguistics, but also a massive role in his so-called 'Anarchism'. We have quite a few here who also subscribe to 'free individuals', rather than 'democratic control of production'.

Hud955 wrote:

As a matter of fact I do think Chomsky's politics have a bearing on his linguistics and vice versa but perhaps not in the direct way that I think you are insisting on here.

Well, you'll have to explain to me how you conceive of 'politics having a bearing' in a 'non-political' way.Perhaps you have a 'theory' of 'indirect ideology'? I've never heard of this, but I'm all ears, for yet another attempt to remove social theories from individuals' thinking.Why not just assume Chomsky isn't very bright? Academics, in my experience as a worker, have an inflated sense of their own abilities, and dislike us talking to them they way they talk to us. Y'know, condescendingly.

Hud955 wrote:

As I have already said, although my conclusions are not exactly the same as Chris Knight's they are heavily influenced by the contents of his forthcoming book, and I don't want to take advantage of  the massive amount of work he has put into it or his resulting insights by commenting on that now.  But watch this space.

I have no problem at all with you being circumspect about Chris Knight's work. We all have a crust to earn.But my questions aren't really about the intricacies of a single, modern academic's attempt to justify their existence to their bosses, but about why 19th century scientific method, which is entirely outdated, has such a hold over socialists, now.How can't you see that 'theory' precedes 'practice'? Regarding Chomsky, and Knight, and you, and me, and all humans.And if you can, tell me your 'theory'. This does not require 'empirical facts', 'anthropological details', or 'subtleties of linguistics'.Chomsky is an individualist, and assumes that the answer to social questions lies in 'biological tissue'. He has an ideology, and that provides the basis for his research. As Lakatos called it, 'negative and positive heuristics': 'what' to look for, and 'what' to ignore. We all do it, we all wear ideological blinkers, and that's the human condition.That's the lesson of the 20th century, and why it seems not to have any affect on socialists and so-called 'Marxists', baffles me. Our answers lie in criticising Chomsky's ideological beliefs, not in trying to disprove his wacky ideas. They can't be disproved, because we don't share the same ideology. There are not a set of undisputed facts 'out there' waiting to be 'discovered', which will allow us to show him to be wrong.And anyone who argues that 'we need to keep an open mind', as if that's what scientists do, needs to read some philosophy and methodology. The 20th century kind. Marx and Einstein have been dead for years, and yet we're still under the influence of the ruling class ideas that their work undermined.'Academics'?Mengele.

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