Chomsky's expertise is in linguistics and political analysis. Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct is a good, readable introduction to some of Chomsky's work (and the wider field to which he is pivotal.) Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is probably his classic work of political analysis.
You know in the soft sciences everyone is a quack because fundamentally they don't practice - wait for it - science. Science stops false connections by correctly attributing cause to its respective effect. Social sciences do not. For all intents and purposes, the vast majority of social science is either unreproducible, vague, mixing correlation with causation, uses dependent variables, poorly reasoned, statistical quirks, pushed by agendas or fundamentally flawed.
> are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion
That's pretty self-evident to the point of being, well, pointless - admen of the 60s made their bread using this, and the PR pioneers of the 30s were already experts. But please let's all listen to what he has to say next. Let me guess: killing people is bad, and not killing people is good. If you call that amazing thinking, I'd hate to see the idiotic version.
Even better:
> Geoffrey Sampson maintains that universal grammar theories are not falsifiable and are therefore pseudoscientific theory. He argues that the grammatical "rules" linguists posit are simply post-hoc observations about existing languages, rather than predictions about what is possible in a language. Similarly, Jeffrey Elman argues that the unlearnability of languages assumed by Universal Grammar is based on a too-strict, "worst-case" model of grammar, that is not in keeping with any actual grammar. In keeping with these points, James Hurford argues that the postulate of a language acquisition device (LAD) essentially amounts to the trivial claim that languages are learnt by humans, and thus, that the LAD is less a theory than an explanandum looking for theories.
Sampson, Roediger, Elman and Hurford are hardly alone in suggesting that several of the basic assumptions of Universal Grammar are unfounded. Indeed, a growing number of language acquisition researchers argue that the very idea of a strict rule-based grammar in any language flies in the face of what is known about how languages are spoken and how languages evolve over time. For instance, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater have argued that the relatively fast-changing nature of language would prevent the slower-changing genetic structures from ever catching up, undermining the possibility of a genetically hard-wired universal grammar. In addition, it has been suggested that people learn about probabilistic patterns of word distributions in their language, rather than hard and fast rules (see the distributional hypothesis). It has also been proposed that the poverty of the stimulus problem can be largely avoided, if we assume that children employ similarity-based generalization strategies in language learning, generalizing about the usage of new words from similar words that they already know how to use.
Another way of defusing the poverty of the stimulus argument is to assume that if language learners notice the absence of classes of expressions in the input, they will hypothesize a restriction (a solution closely related to Bayesian reasoning). In a similar vein, language acquisition researcher Michael Ramscar has suggested that when children erroneously expect an ungrammatical form that then never occurs, the repeated failure of expectation serves as a form of implicit negative feedback that allows them to correct their errors over time. This implies that word learning is a probabilistic, error-driven process, rather than a process of fast mapping, as many nativists assume.
Finally, in the domain of field research, the Pirahã language is claimed to be a counterexample to the basic tenets of Universal Grammar. This research has been primarily led by Daniel Everett, a former Christian missionary. Among other things, this language is alleged to lack all evidence for recursion, including embedded clauses, as well as quantifiers and color terms. Some other linguists have argued, however, that some of these properties have been misanalyzed, and that others are actually expected under current theories of Universal Grammar.
> You know in the soft sciences everyone is a quack because fundamentally they don't practice - wait for it - science.
I wonder if you know you're being ironic here. Plenty of us have never even read Chomsky's political works and have been exposed to him solely through mentions in the CS literature, like the Dragon book, or more in-depth stuff on his theory of context-free grammars. There is a startling amount of proof that he not only writes about politics but, at one time or another, actually worked for a living and helped our field produce useful stuff.
Angry much? Have you actually read Chomsky, or are you just taking snippets from Wikipedia pages and saying told-you-so? Perhaps you should try reading Manufacturing Consent, it's a very careful and thorough work of analysis and not nearly as bleedingly obvious as you try and portray it.
One point: Sampson's criticisms about linguists producing post-hoc descriptions could just as easily have been (and were, I believe) applied to Newton's theories. Good science includes mapping and describing phenomena.
Another point: negative feedback on errors is not enough to account for the explosive speed of language acquisition in children. Not to say that this sort of feedback doesn't occur, or isn't useful, but it only really is used when children learn exceptions (I.e. irregular verb forms in English) or vocabulary (and even much of vocabulary is rule-generated.) Basic language rules are encoded, and children's brains only require minimal stimulus to record the specific settings of the rules for the language they are learning.
Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying 'inexplicable gaps', that these gaps follow from a cultural principle restricting communication to 'immediate experience', and that this principle has 'severe' consequences for work on universal grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language, especially the rich material in Everett 1986, 1987b, we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical 'gaps' supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world's languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of WH-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993, 2000, 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the 'immediate experience' restriction. We conclude that there is no evidence from Pirahã for the particular causal relation between culture and grammatical structure suggested by Everett. -- Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment, http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3597237
> social science is either unreproducible, vague, mixing correlation with causation, uses dependent variables, poorly reasoned, statistical quirks, pushed by agendas or fundamentally flawed...
Dr. Freud would have had a good deal to say about your apparent fixation with bovine feces...
Seriously though, your comments are playing fast and lose with a range of fields that you’re conflating and dismissing. Not all social sciences are “soft” and many have empirically-based real world applications that shape your (and everyone’s really) everyday lives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky_bibliography
He's no quack.