Wonderful resource for a birdseye view of significant observations of the world changes for 2000plus. Stimulates individual thought and also excellent for a group discussion launching pad. Scholars and students will find it engaging and meaningful.

Baker and Hacker offer an incisive critique of modern linguistic theorising and philosophical conceptions of language based upon this mode of reasoning. Drawing heavily, but productively, upon the later logical work of Wittgenstein, they show, decisively in my view, that the Chomskian project is through-and-through misconceived, as are the philosophical works which ensued from his baleful influence. Applying recursive-function-theoretic concepts to the analysis of parts-of-speech (syntax), Chomsky believed that his analyses would cast light upon the universal grammar of all human languages, thence upon the essence of human mentality. Baker and Hacker (sometimes mercilessly) attack the very bases of such a project, including its apparently deep motivating concern: the new sentence production phenomenon. Nowhere in contemporary critisicm of modern linguistics can you find a more sustained, informed and well-argued attack upon the mythologies being perpetrated by the MIT linguists than here in this wonderful, scholarly and remarkably wide-ranging book.

... Wittgenstein intelligentsia. The author is so arrogant and pretentious that in one section he proposes to overthrow the empirical discipline of cognitive science by examining the English grammar of the word "mind". If the brain is truly not the organ of thinking, as you claim, Mr. Hacker; then I suppose it shall come as no insult to you that I believe *your* mental processes would suffer no loss even if said organ were removed from your skull. This book is trash and should not be read by anyone.