I can only speak for his linguistic works, but it’s odd how much clearer and more straightforward his earlier works are than his later ones. Syntactic structures and Aspects of a Theory of Syntax are easy enough that I’d even recommend them to Introduction to Syntax students, but starting with Lectures on Government and Binding things get increasingly obtuse to the point that I’d always recommend reading “translations” of his later works rather than the works themselves.
Edit for full transparency, since this comment is getting upvoted while Chomsky is getting blasted in the comments here: Don’t get me wrong, all of Chomsky’s linguistic work is incredibly brilliant. He single-handedly brought about a complete paradigm shift in the field of linguistics. G&B with all of the bells and whistles added by other researchers in the 80s and 90s is still the closest we’ve come to an actual explanatory theory of syntax, and X-bar theory is probably the single most elegant, ingenious innovation in the history of linguistics.
And that’s just syntax. I haven’t even mentioned how he and Morris Halle revolutionized phonology a few years later with The Sound Pattern of English, or how he also revolutionized grammar theory with the idea of context-free and context-dependent grammars the year before publishing Syntactic Structures, and all of this somehow still understates the enormous import of Chomsky’s linguistic work.
If anyone has any questions about Chomsky’s linguistic work, feel free to ask, and I’ll respond as best I can.
pp (very soft) is likely a reference to how the performer has trouble keeping his incredibly small penis erect. This can be common in any part of a song; it mostly depends on how much of a loser the performer is.
The worst part of this comic is that philosophy bro is clearly not even very good at his field, since there’s a much better Cartesian parallel to be made here (and I’m not even a philosopher).
“I think, therefore I am” is actually leaving out (imo) the most important part of Descartes’s argument. He was trying to find literally anything that he could know without a doubt was true. The problem is, that’s really hard, as our existence-troubled shopper has discovered. Descartes could doubt the existence of God, he could doubt the existence of goodness, of truth. All of these things might not actually exist. Descartes could even doubt his own existence.
In fact, literally the only thing Descartes could conclude without a doubt was true was the fact that he was doubting at all. So, since that’s the only thing he could be sure of, that’s what he built his argument for rationalism upon.
This perfectly mirrors the existential crisis the so-called philosopher comes upon, but instead of starting the shopper right where Descartes started, he instead just provides what must seem like almost a non sequitur in context, since if the man is currently doubting his existence, he can also doubt that he’s thinking. What he cannot doubt, is that he is in fact doubting.
“I doubt. Therefore, I think. I think, therefore I am.”
Yup, this is likely a phonological restriction in addition to a syntactic one, though it’s worth noting that the copula (the “be” verb) shows a lot of idiosyncratic behavior in different contexts in different dialects of English.
It seems that this pattern may have something to do with stress assignment within a predicate, but I’m not sure what the conditioning environment is at first glance. Any English phonologists here who can shed some more light on this?