>> the feud between Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett
That "feud" is as much a feud as the "controversy" over climate change. Daniel Everett is very obviously a complete and utter crank, who has made absolutely ridiculous claims about Piraha the language and Piraha the people (e.g. that they can't learn basic arithmetic skills, like 1 + 1), to which he claims to be the sole authority.
To give an account of his "feud" with Chomsky, Chomsky claims that recursion (in the sense of embedding sentences into sentences) is the defining characteristic of human language that sets it apart from other animal languages. Everett claims that the Piraha language doesn't display recursion and therefore Chomsky's claim is wrong.
Stop for a moment and consider this. It's like claiming that, only Europeans have pale skin, but if we find one European population with brown skin, then it's not true that only Europeans have pale skin. What Everett is claiming is exactly that wrong.
Everett has only risen to prominence because he's a big old troll, and there are lots of people in cognitive science and linguistics who are very frustrated with the inability of both fields to make any progress on natural language, despite everyone's best efforts- and who have somehow singled out Chomsky as the culprit, because he had the audacity to hold on to a theory that hasn't really been comprehensively disputed yet.
Far from a feud, this is just a case of shoot-the-messenger. Shoot him with sour grapes that is.
The other side isn't exactly a bunch of careful scientists either [0].
Other people have visited the Pirahã and done experiments with them. It is true that they do not understand counting, for example [1][2], though I'm sure they could learn it if they had to.
Other linguists have also independently claimed that other languages lack recursive embedding, for example Riau Indonesian, so the claim about Pirahã is not isolated or crazy a priori.
The Chomskyan side of the argument has also been characterized by moving the goalposts and formal incoherence. See for example [3].
Basically, amidst a huge storm of verbiage and anger and inflated claims from both sides, all of which is about personalities and definitions and not at all about science, there are a few mildly interesting findings about Pirahã and language.
As I have tried to show, those issues, whilst important and interesting in themselves, have little to do with recursion as this concept has been understood within mathematical logic, the connotation Chomsky has always employed, it seems. As such, there is a bit of a disconnect between what Chomsky is talking about when talking about recursion and what other linguists are talking about when talking about recursion. As a result, rather incompatible claims are being put forward in the literature; indeed, to defend that what is universal in linguistics is the recursively-defined operations of a computational system (clearly Chomsky's take) is very different from the claim that all languages must exhibit self-embedded sentences if recursion is to be accepted as such a central concept (Everett is probably the most prominent example of this line of thought).
Like I say- that paper basically claims that Chomsky's version of recursion in language has changed very little if at all, and that Everett is grossly misrepresenting it (or its consistency).
>> Other people have visited the Pirahã and done experiments with them. It is true
that they do not understand counting, for example [1][2],
Those are not "other people". The first reference is a paper where Everett is
one of the authors and the other is a paper from a collaborator of Everett:
the author even studied the Piraha and their arithmetic skills while living with
the Piraha along with the Everetts. Show me a paper on the Piraha language
that has nothing to do with Everett and that duplicates Everett's findings.
>> The Chomskyan side of the argument has also been characterized by moving the
goalposts and formal incoherence. See for example [3].
I don't think that reference means what you think it means. Actually I think
it means exactly the opposite:
What I can say, what I have said, with most certainty is what recursion is
supposed to stand for within the theory Chomsky has constructed—with
remarkable consistency, I should add.
Which is what I've also heard before from critics of Chomsky in general (frex,
I believe Alex Clark has said similar things, but I might be wrong). Chomsky
himself has been remarkably consistent, to the point he sounds like a broken
record, regarding what recursion in language means.
Whether "his side" (other linguists of his school) has been more or less
consistent, I don't know but in any case I'm more interested in the fact that
Daniel Everett seems to be a complete and utter sleazebag who is unashamedly
taking advantage of a peoples who can't really speak for themselves (because
he's standing in the way!) to further some obscure personal agenda.
>> Other linguists have also independently claimed that other languages lack recursive embedding, for example Riau Indonesian, so the claim about Pirahã is not isolated or crazy a priori.
I hadn't heard of Riau Indonesian, so I looked it up in wikipedia and I could not find anything about it lacking recursive structure. Instead it "is considered by linguists to have one of the least complex grammars among the languages of the world,[citation needed] apart from creoles, possessing neither noun declensions, temporal distinctions, subject/object distinctions, nor singular/plural distinction."
"To give an account of his "feud" with Chomsky, Chomsky claims that recursion (in the sense of embedding sentences into sentences) is the defining characteristic of human language that sets it apart from other animal languages. Everett claims that the Piraha language doesn't display recursion and therefore Chomsky's claim is wrong."
I realize that your summary of Chomsky's theory is short, pithy, and misrepresents Chomsky, but your argument here is incorrect.
You say,
* X is the defining characteristic of Y.
* Z (a purported element of Y) does not have X.
The only possible conclusion is that Z is not an element of Y: the Piraha do not speak a human language.
That "feud" is as much a feud as the "controversy" over climate change. Daniel Everett is very obviously a complete and utter crank, who has made absolutely ridiculous claims about Piraha the language and Piraha the people (e.g. that they can't learn basic arithmetic skills, like 1 + 1), to which he claims to be the sole authority.
To give an account of his "feud" with Chomsky, Chomsky claims that recursion (in the sense of embedding sentences into sentences) is the defining characteristic of human language that sets it apart from other animal languages. Everett claims that the Piraha language doesn't display recursion and therefore Chomsky's claim is wrong.
Stop for a moment and consider this. It's like claiming that, only Europeans have pale skin, but if we find one European population with brown skin, then it's not true that only Europeans have pale skin. What Everett is claiming is exactly that wrong.
Everett has only risen to prominence because he's a big old troll, and there are lots of people in cognitive science and linguistics who are very frustrated with the inability of both fields to make any progress on natural language, despite everyone's best efforts- and who have somehow singled out Chomsky as the culprit, because he had the audacity to hold on to a theory that hasn't really been comprehensively disputed yet.
Far from a feud, this is just a case of shoot-the-messenger. Shoot him with sour grapes that is.