Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher,
cognitive scientistCognitive science can be defined as the study of mind or the study of thought. It embraces multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and biology. It relies on varying scientific methodology Cognitive...
, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an
Institute ProfessorInstitute Professor is the highest title that can be awarded to a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research university located in , United States...
and professor
emeritusEmeritus is an adjective that is used in the title of a retired professor, bishop, or other professional. Emerita is often used as the female equivalent, although avoided by purists, since phrases such as professor emerita are ungrammatical in Latin...
of
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
at the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a
libertarian socialistLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
intellectual.
In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms." He also established the
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
, a classification of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s in terms of their generative power. In 1959, Chomsky published a widely influential review of
B. F. SkinnerBurrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform, and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974...
's theoretical book
Verbal BehaviorVerbal Behavior is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he analyzes human behavior, encompassing what is traditionally called language, linguistics, or speech...
, which was the first attempt by a
behavioristBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
to provide a functional,
operantOperant conditioning is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. Operant conditioning is distinguished from classical conditioning in that operant conditioning deals with the modification of "voluntary behavior" or operant behavior...
analysis of language. Chomsky used this review to broadly and aggressively challenge the
behavioristBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
approaches to studies of behavior dominant at the time, and contributed to the
cognitive revolutionThe cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences.It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
in psychology. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has influenced the
philosophy of languagePhilosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
and
mindPhilosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
.
Beginning with his
opposition to the Vietnam WarThe Responsibility of Intellectuals is an essay by the US academic Noam Chomsky which was published as a special supplement by the The New York Review of Books on the 23rd of February 1967....
, Chomsky established himself as a prominent critic of US foreign and domestic policy. He is a self-declared adherent of
libertarian socialismLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
which he regards as "the proper and natural extension of
classical liberalismClassical liberalism is a political ideology that developed by the middle of the nineteenth century in England, western Europe, and the Americas, which provided a coherent vision of how society should be organized. Central to the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century is a commitment to...
into the era of advanced industrial society."
According to the
Arts and Humanities Citation IndexThe Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a commercial citation index of over 1,100 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals....
in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–92 period, and was the eighth most-cited source. He is also considered a prominent cultural figure. At the same time, his status as a leading critic of US foreign policy has made him controversial.
Biography
Chomsky was born on the morning of December 7, 1928 to Jewish parents in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of
PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania and the sixth-most-populous city in the United States.In 2008, the population of the city proper was estimated to be over 1.4 million, while the metropolitan area's population of 5.8 million made it the country's fifth-largest...
,
PennsylvaniaThe Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , often colloquially referred to as PA by natives and Northeasterners, is a state located in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States...
, the son of a
HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered a Jewish language. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over...
scholar and
IWWThe Industrial Workers of the World is an international union currently headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. At its peak in 1923 the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a...
(Industrial Workers of the World) member,
William ChomskyWilliam Chomsky was an American scholar of Hebrew, born in Ukraine, who was a professor at Gratz College. He was made faculty president of Gratz in 1932, a position that he held for thirty seven years. He also taught at Dropsie College, a graduate school of Jewish and Semitic studies. from 1955...
(1896–1977), a native of
UkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky), a native of what is present-day
BelarusBelarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel , Mahilyow and Vitebsk...
, grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English." Their first language was
YiddishYiddish is a non-territorial High German language of Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world...
, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish
ghettoOriginally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live, a ghetto is now described as a "portion of a city in which members of a minority group live; especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure." - Etymology :...
," split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side," with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature." Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and
anti-semitismAntisemitism is prejudice against or hostility towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, or religion....
in the mid-1930s. He recalls German-American "Beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ghoXQxdk6s&feature=related. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."
Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at
Oak Lane Country Day School- Oak Lane Day School :Oak Lane Day School, located in Blue Bell, PA, is an independent school serving preschool and elementary-aged children, and operates an eight-week children's camp program in the summer. The school's stated mission is to honor each child's individuality in a setting that...
about the threat of the spread of
fascismFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
, following the fall of Barcelona in the
Spanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil War was a major conflict that devastated Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939. It began after an attempted coup d'état by a group of Spanish Army generals against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, then under the leadership of president Manuel Azaña...
. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.
A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
and
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as
C. West ChurchmanCharles West Churchman was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley...
and
Nelson GoodmanHenry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...
and linguist
Zellig HarrisZellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science...
. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a
mathematical analysisIn mathematics, a linear map is a function between two vector spaces that preserves the operations of vector addition and scalar multiplication. The expression "linear operator" is commonly used for linear maps from a vector space to itself...
of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 Master's Thesis,
The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, as transformations in the sense of
Carnap'sRudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of logical positivism.-Life and work:Carnap was born to a west German family that had been humble...
1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a
context-free grammarIn formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a grammar in which every production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals ....
(derived from
Post production systemsA tag system is a deterministic computational model published by Emil Leon Post in 1943 as a simple form of Post canonical system. A tag system may also be viewed as an abstract machine, called a Post tag machine —briefly, a finite state machine whose only tape is a FIFO queue of unbounded length,...
). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a
BABachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences or both....
in 1949 and an
MAA Master of Arts is a postgraduate academic master degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is typically studied for in English, Fine Arts, History, Nursing, Humanities, Geography, Philosophy, Social Sciences or Theology and can be either fully-taught, research-based, or a...
in 1951.
In 1949, he married linguist
Carol SchatzCarol Chomsky was an American linguist and education specialist who studied language acquisition in children....
. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008. The couple had two daughters,
AvivaAviva Chomsky is currently a professor and the coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State College, Massachusetts. She was previously a professor at Bates College and a faculty research associate at Harvard University, specializing in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean...
(b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967).
Chomsky received his
PhDA doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries represents the highest level of formal study or research in a given field. In some countries it also refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to practice in a specific profession . The best-known example...
in linguistics from the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his
doctoral thesisDoctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced academic degree awarded by universities...
, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book
Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is an influential book by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics, this work laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
, his best-known work in linguistics.
Chomsky joined the staff of the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
(MIT) in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2008, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 53 years.
In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
with the publication of his essay, "
The Responsibility of IntellectualsThe Responsibility of Intellectuals is an essay by the US academic Noam Chomsky which was published as a special supplement by the The New York Review of Books on the 23rd of February 1967....
", in
The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs published in New York City. It takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
. This was followed by his 1969 book,
American Power and the New MandarinsAmerican Power and the New Mandarins is a 1969 book by the US academic Noam Chomsky. It was his first political book and sets out in detail his opposition to the Vietnam War....
, a collection of essays which established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power have
made him a controversial figureNoam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is widely known for his critique of U.S. foreign policy, beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s...
: largely shunned by the
mainstream mediaMass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
in the United States, he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets worldwide.
Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of US foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by
Theodore KaczynskiTheodore John Kaczynski , also known as the Unabomber , is an American mathematician, social critic, and murderer who carried out a campaign of mail bombings, as well as a described anarcho-primitivist.He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as an intellectual child prodigy, he excelled...
, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.
Chomsky resides in Lexington,
MassachusettsThe Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. Most of its population of...
and travels often, giving lectures on politics.
Contributions to linguistics
Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his
Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is an influential book by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics, this work laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
, a distillation of his
Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges
structural linguisticsStructural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
and introduces
transformational grammarIn linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific...
. This theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a
context-free grammarIn formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a grammar in which every production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals ....
extended with transformational rules.
Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e., they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar. This is related to Rationalist ideas of
a prioriA priori may refer to:* A priori , a type of constructed language* A priori , a knowledge of the actual population* A priori and a posteriori, used to distinguish two types of propositional knowledge...
knowledge, in that it is not due to experience.
The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as
Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB)—make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical
morphemeIn morpheme-based morphology, a ' is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes .The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes...
s, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.
Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.
More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the
acquisition of languageLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, instead advocating
emergentistIn philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.-Definitions:...
or connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.
He also theorizes that unlimited extension of a language such as English is possible only by the
recursiveRecursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way...
device of embedding sentences in sentences.
His best-known work in
phonologyPhonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system...
is
The Sound Pattern of EnglishThe Sound Pattern of English is a work on phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. It presents a comprehensive view of the phonology of English, and stands as a landmark both in the field of phonology and in the analysis of the English language...
(1968), written with
Morris HalleMorris Halle, born Pinkowitz, is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
(and often known as simply
SPE). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including
autosegmental phonologyAutosegmental phonology is the name of a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
, lexical phonology and
optimality theoryOptimality theory is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints...
. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.
Generative grammar
The Chomskyan approach towards
syntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages...
, often termed
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed
Universal GrammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge which they attain (the "
poverty of the stimulusThe poverty of the stimulus argument is a variant of the epistemological problem of the indeterminacy of data to theory that claims that grammar is unlearnable given the linguistic data available to children. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition...
" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.
Chomsky's theories are popular, particularly in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, but they have never been free from controversy. Criticism has come from a number of different directions. Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized both on general methodological grounds, and because it has (some argue) led to an overemphasis on the study of English. As of now, hundreds of different languages have received at least some attention in the generative grammar literature,
but some critics nonetheless perceive this overemphasis, and a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on an overly small sample of languages. Some
psychologistsPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
and
psycholinguistsPsycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. More radical critics have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar in order to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.
Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as
head-driven phrase structure grammarHead-driven phrase structure grammar is a highly lexicalized, non-derivational generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag . It is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de...
,
lexical functional grammarLexical functional grammar is a grammar framework in theoretical linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the direction research in the area of transformational grammar had begun to...
and
combinatory categorial grammarCombinatory categorial grammar is an efficiently parseable, yet linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It has a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate-argument structure, quantification and information structure.CCG relies on...
as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.
Cultural anthropologistCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
and linguist
Daniel EverettDaniel Leonard Everett is a linguistics professor best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language....
of
Illinois State UniversityIllinois State University is a public university in Normal, Illinois, United States. Most commonly referred to as ISU, the school was founded in 1857 by Jesse W. Fell ; Abraham Lincoln drew up the legal documents to establish the university...
has proposed that the language of the
Pirahã peopleThe Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. They currently number about 360, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction...
of the northwestern rainforest of
BrazilBrazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is a country in South America. It is the fifth largest country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the fifth most populous country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean...
resists Chomsky's theories of generative grammar. Everett asserts that the
Pirahã languagePirahã is a language spoken by the Pirahã — an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, who live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon....
does not have any evidence of
recursionRecursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way...
, one of the key properties of generative grammar. Additionally, it is claimed that the Pirahan have no fixed words for colors or numbers, speak in single
phonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s, and often speak in
prosodyIn linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of connected speech...
. However, Everett's claims have themselves been criticized. David Pesetsky of MIT, Andrew Nevins of Harvard, and Cilene Rodrigues of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil have argued in a joint paper that all of Everett's major claims contain serious deficiencies. Chomsky himself has commented that "The reports are interesting, but do not bear on the work of mine (along with many others). No one has proposed that languages must have subordinate clauses, number words, etc. Many structures of our language (and presumably that of the Piraha) are rarely if ever used in ordinary speech because of extrinsic constraints." The dispute continues.
Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
partitions
formal grammarA formal grammar is a set of rules for forming strings in a formal language. These rules that make up the grammar describe how to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax...
s into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a
regular languageIn theoretical computer science, a regular language is a formal language that satisfies the following equivalent properties:...
is powerful enough to model English
morphologyMorphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules...
, it is not powerful enough to model English
syntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages...
. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
(especially in
compilerA compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a computer language into another computer language...
construction and
automata theoryIn theoretical computer science, automata theory is the study of abstract machines and problems which they are able to solve. Automata theory is closely related to formal language theory as the automata are often classified by the class of formal languages they are able to recognize.An automaton is...
).
Contributions to psychology
Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of
cognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a discipline within psychology that investigates the internal mental processes of thought such as visual processing, memory, problem solving, and language....
; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
and what, exactly, the ability to use language is. Many of the more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the
principles and parametersPrinciples and parameters is a framework in generative linguistics. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik...
approach described above) are now generally accepted in some circles.
In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's
Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. "Verbal behavior" he defined as learned behavior which has its characteristic consequences being delivered through the learned behavior of others; this makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky-Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.
In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned", cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.
Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper
On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 13, pages 83–99). This and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties; consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy".
It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "
cognitive revolutionThe cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences.It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966
Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.
There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to
Jean PiagetJean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, well known for his pedagogical studies...
at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (
Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by
Jean-Pierre ChangeuxJean-Pierre Changeux is a French neuroscientist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of proteins , to the early development of the nervous system up to cognitive functions...
, Philippe Courrège and
Antoine DanchinAntoine Danchin PhD DSc is a French geneticist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of adenylate cyclase, to modelisation of learning in the nervous system and the early development of genomics and bioinformatics...
, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by
Jacques MehlerBorn in Barcelona in 1936, Jacques Mehler is an influential cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.Mehler studied in the 1960s at Harvard University, at the time of the cognitive revolution, where he worked with George A. Miller...
and
Stanislas DehaeneStanislas Dehaene is a Professor at the Collège de France and has been director of since 1989. He has worked on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness...
in particular in the domain of
numerical cognitionNumerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental...
lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "
modularityModularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established, evolutionarily developed functional purposes. Proponents believe this view is implied by Noam Chomsky's concept of a universal, generative grammar...
" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).
Opinion on cultural criticism of science
Chomsky strongly disagrees with
post-structuralistPost-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of certain continental philosophers and sociologists who wrote within the tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The movement is difficult to define or summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses...
and postmodern criticisms of science:
I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernismPostmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives...
; what I understand is largely truismA truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device....
or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.
Chomsky believes that science is a good way to start understanding history and human affairs:
I think studying science is a good way to get into fields like history. The reason is, you learn what an argument means, you learn what evidence is, you learn what makes sense to postulate and when, what's going to be convincing. You internalize the modes of rational inquiry, which happen to be much more advanced in the sciences than anywhere else. On the other hand, applying relativity theory to history isn't going to get you anywhere. So it's a mode of thinking.
Chomsky has also commented on critiques of "white male science," stating that they are much like the antisemitic and politically motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the
NazisNazism, known officially in German as National Socialism , is the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.Nazism is often considered...
to denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the
Deutsche PhysikDeutsche Physik or Aryan Physics was a nationalist movement in the German physics community in the early 1930s against the work of Albert Einstein, labeled "Jewish Physics"...
movement:
In fact, the entire idea of "white male science" reminds me, I'm afraid, of "Jewish physics." Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can't tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work in class, the office, or somewhere else. I rather doubt that the non-white, non-male students, friends, and colleagues with whom I work would be much impressed with the doctrine that their thinking and understanding differ from "white male science" because of their "culture or gender and race." I suspect that "surprise" would not be quite the proper word for their reaction.
Debates
Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics, and politics. He has had notable debates with such varied intellectuals as
Jean PiagetJean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, well known for his pedagogical studies...
,
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, sociologist and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley.Foucault is best known for his critical studies of...
,
William F. Buckley, Jr.William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist...
,
Christopher HitchensChristopher Eric Hitchens is an English-American author, journalist, and literary critic. He has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets...
,
Richard PerleRichard Norman Perle is an American political advisor and lobbyist who worked for the Reagan administration as an assistant Secretary of Defense and worked on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004...
,
Hilary PutnamHilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science...
, WVO Quine, and
Alan DershowitzAlan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz is known for his career as an attorney in several high-profile law cases and commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict...
, to name a very few.
Political views
Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised
libertarian socialismLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
. He is a sympathizer of
anarcho-syndicalismAnarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. Syndicalisme is a French word, ultimately derived from the Greek, meaning "trade unionism" hence, the "syndicalism" qualification. Syndicalism is an alternative co-operative economic system...
and a member of the
IWWThe Industrial Workers of the World is an international union currently headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. At its peak in 1923 the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a...
union. He has published a book on anarchism titled, "Chomsky on Anarchism", which was published by the anarchist book collective,
AK PressAK Press is a collectively owned and operated independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical and anarchist literature.-History:...
, in 2006. He was named to the
PoliticsPAPoliticsPA.com is a website centered on the politics of Pennsylvania.- Content :The website focuses on news aggregation, linking to major political news making headlines across the state. The editors write occasional features, like the weekly "Up & Down" scorecard and one-off lists like...
list of "Pennsylvania's Top Political Activists."
Noam Chomsky has been engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those which the powerful do not want to hear, and for this reason he is considered an American political
dissidentA dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
. Some highlights of his political views:
- Power
Political power is a type of power held by a group in a society which allows administration of some or all of public resources, including labour, and wealth. There are many ways to obtain possession of such power. At the nation-state level political legitimacy for political power is held by the...
, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate. The burden of proof is on those in authority to demonstrate why their elevated position is justified. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic.
- That there isn't much difference between slavery, and renting one's self to an owner, or "wage slavery
Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person is dependent for a livelihood on the wages earned, especially if the dependency is total and immediate. The term is used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor. Some uses of the term may refer only to an "[un]equal bargaining situation...
." He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that destroys and undermines our freedoms. He holds workers should own and control their own workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls"Lowell Mill Girls" was the name used for female textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 19th century. The Lowell textile mills employed a workforce which was about three quarters female; this characteristic caused two social effects: a close examination of the women's moral behavior, and...
.
- Very strong criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States. Specifically, he claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all, while promoting, supporting and allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
under Augusto PinochetAugusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean army general and later head of state as president. He was the Commander in Chief of the Chilean army from 1973 to 1998, president of the Government Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981 and President of the Republic from 1974 until the return of...
, and argues that this results in massive human rightsHuman rights refer to the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the...
violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the ContrasThe Contras is a label given to the various rebel groups opposing Nicaragua's FSLN Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government following the July 1979 overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle...
in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorismTerrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.At present, there is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism...
.
- He has argued that the mass media
Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
in the United States largely serve as a propagandaPropaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience...
arm and "bought priesthoodBought priesthood is a term originating with the United States labour press in the early to mid-20th century and popularized again more recently by dissident intellectuals like Noam Chomsky...
" of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations, with the three parties all largely intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter LippmannWalter Lippmann was an influential American award-winning writer, journalist, and political commentator...
, Chomsky along with his coauthor, Edward S. HermanEdward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at...
has written that the American media manufactures consentManufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, first published in 1988. The title makes use of the catch phrase coined by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion.-The propaganda model:...
among the public.
- He has opposed the U.S. global "war on drugs
The War on Drugs refers to the controversial prohibition campaign undertaken by the United States government, with the assistance of participating countries, intended to both define and reduce the illegal drug trade. This initiative includes a set of laws and policies that are intended to...
", claiming its language to be misleading, and referring to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana, are specifically targeted because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poorPoverty is the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, health care, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them. This is also referred to as absolute poverty or destitution...
: He has stated:
US domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.
- Critical of the American capitalist
Capitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
system and big business, he describes himself as a libertarian socialist who sympathizes with anarcho-syndicalism and is also critical of Leninist branches of socialismSocialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on...
. He also believes that libertarian socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. Specifically he believes that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Although he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the...
and John DeweyJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been very influential. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology...
, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."
- Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world", a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech
Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak without censorship or limitation. The synonymous term freedom of expression is sometimes used to indicate not only freedom of verbal speech but any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...
, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." He has also said "In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society."
- Chomsky objects to the criticism that anarchism
Anarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state ....
is inconsistent with support for government welfare, stating in part:
One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow -- the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive.
- According to Chomsky: "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way…. I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is…. People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."
- He holds views that can be summarized as anti-war
The term anti-war usually refers to the opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many activists...
but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
and most other wars in his lifetime. He expressed these views through a variety of protest methods, such as withholding taxes and peace walks. He published a number of articles about the war in Vietnam, including "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". However, he maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. In particular, he believes that the dropping of nuclear bombsThe atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks near the end of World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States at the executive order of U.S. President Harry S. Truman on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively...
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".
- He has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media
Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
; he opposes censorshipCensorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.-Rationale:...
and refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeledIn law, defamation–also called calumny, libel , slander , and vilification–is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image...
him.
- He has made major criticisms of Israel
Israel officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
and supporters of Israel, arguing that "supporters of Israel are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction", and that "Israel's very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence"
Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views, and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:
I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs. (New Left Review, 57, Sept. – Oct. 1969, p. 21)
Influence in other fields
Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
is often taught in fundamental
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
courses as it confers insight into the various types of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly
combinatorialistsCombinatorics is a branch of pure mathematics concerning the study of discrete objects. It is related to many other areas of mathematics, such as algebra, probability theory, ergodic theory and geometry, as well as to applied subjects in computer science and statistical physics...
. Some arguments in
evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology attempts to explain psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system,...
are derived from his research results.
The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology,
Niels K. JerneNiels Kaj Jerne, FRS was a Danish immunologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984. The citation read "For theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies"...
, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar … with various features of
protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".
Nim ChimpskyNim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee who was the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University, led by Herbert S. Terrace....
, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of
language acquisitionLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
as a uniquely human ability.
Famous computer scientist
Donald KnuthDonald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University....
admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "…I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 … Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".
Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests.
Edward S. HermanEdward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at...
and Chomsky's book
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)
The model attempts to explain this perceived
systemic biasSystemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates.- Bias in...
of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through" which combine to systematically distort news coverage.
The first filter, ownership, notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers), the model would expect them to publish news which would reflect the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups which attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an élite consensus, frame public debate within élite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.
Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples"—pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic élite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."
They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to élite interests.
Academic achievements, awards and honors
In the spring of 1969, he delivered the
John Locke LecturesThe John Locke Lectures are a series of annual lectures in philosophy given at the University of Oxford. They are one of the world's most prestigious academic lecture series, comparable to the Gifford Lectures given in Scottish universities...
at Oxford University; in January 1970, the
Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Although he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the...
Memorial Lecture at
University of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge , located in the City of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, is the second oldest university in the English-speaking world and the fourth oldest in Europe...
; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in
New DelhiNew Delhi is the capital of India. It is situated within the metropolis of Delhi and serves as the seat of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi....
; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in
LeidenLeiden is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland in the Netherlands and has 118,000 inhabitants. It forms a single urban area with Oegstgeest, Leiderdorp, Voorschoten, Valkenburg, Rijnsburg and Katwijk, with 254,000 inhabitants. It is located on the Old Rhine, close to the cities...
; in 1988 the
Massey LecturesThe Massey Lectures are a prestigious annual event in Canada, in which a noted Canadian or international scholar gives a week-long series of lectures on a political, cultural or philosophical topic. They were created in 1961 to honour Vincent Massey, Governor General of Canada...
at the
University of TorontoThe University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated north of the city's Financial District on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. The university was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in the...
, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in
Cape TownCape Town is the second most populous city in South Africa, and the largest in land area, forming part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality. It is the provincial capital of the Western Cape, as well as the legislative capital of South Africa, where the National Parliament and many...
, and many others.
Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following:
{|
| valign="top" |
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher,
cognitive scientistCognitive science can be defined as the study of mind or the study of thought. It embraces multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and biology. It relies on varying scientific methodology Cognitive...
, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an
Institute ProfessorInstitute Professor is the highest title that can be awarded to a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research university located in , United States...
and professor
emeritusEmeritus is an adjective that is used in the title of a retired professor, bishop, or other professional. Emerita is often used as the female equivalent, although avoided by purists, since phrases such as professor emerita are ungrammatical in Latin...
of
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
at the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a
libertarian socialistLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
intellectual.
In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms." He also established the
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
, a classification of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s in terms of their generative power. In 1959, Chomsky published a widely influential review of
B. F. SkinnerBurrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform, and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974...
's theoretical book
Verbal BehaviorVerbal Behavior is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he analyzes human behavior, encompassing what is traditionally called language, linguistics, or speech...
, which was the first attempt by a
behavioristBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
to provide a functional,
operantOperant conditioning is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. Operant conditioning is distinguished from classical conditioning in that operant conditioning deals with the modification of "voluntary behavior" or operant behavior...
analysis of language. Chomsky used this review to broadly and aggressively challenge the
behavioristBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
approaches to studies of behavior dominant at the time, and contributed to the
cognitive revolutionThe cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences.It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
in psychology. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has influenced the
philosophy of languagePhilosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
and
mindPhilosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
.
Beginning with his
opposition to the Vietnam WarThe Responsibility of Intellectuals is an essay by the US academic Noam Chomsky which was published as a special supplement by the The New York Review of Books on the 23rd of February 1967....
, Chomsky established himself as a prominent critic of US foreign and domestic policy. He is a self-declared adherent of
libertarian socialismLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
which he regards as "the proper and natural extension of
classical liberalismClassical liberalism is a political ideology that developed by the middle of the nineteenth century in England, western Europe, and the Americas, which provided a coherent vision of how society should be organized. Central to the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century is a commitment to...
into the era of advanced industrial society."
According to the
Arts and Humanities Citation IndexThe Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a commercial citation index of over 1,100 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals....
in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–92 period, and was the eighth most-cited source. He is also considered a prominent cultural figure. At the same time, his status as a leading critic of US foreign policy has made him controversial.
Biography
Chomsky was born on the morning of December 7, 1928 to Jewish parents in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of
PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania and the sixth-most-populous city in the United States.In 2008, the population of the city proper was estimated to be over 1.4 million, while the metropolitan area's population of 5.8 million made it the country's fifth-largest...
,
PennsylvaniaThe Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , often colloquially referred to as PA by natives and Northeasterners, is a state located in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States...
, the son of a
HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered a Jewish language. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over...
scholar and
IWWThe Industrial Workers of the World is an international union currently headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. At its peak in 1923 the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a...
(Industrial Workers of the World) member,
William ChomskyWilliam Chomsky was an American scholar of Hebrew, born in Ukraine, who was a professor at Gratz College. He was made faculty president of Gratz in 1932, a position that he held for thirty seven years. He also taught at Dropsie College, a graduate school of Jewish and Semitic studies. from 1955...
(1896–1977), a native of
UkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky), a native of what is present-day
BelarusBelarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel , Mahilyow and Vitebsk...
, grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English." Their first language was
YiddishYiddish is a non-territorial High German language of Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world...
, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish
ghettoOriginally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live, a ghetto is now described as a "portion of a city in which members of a minority group live; especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure." - Etymology :...
," split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side," with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature." Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and
anti-semitismAntisemitism is prejudice against or hostility towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, or religion....
in the mid-1930s. He recalls German-American "Beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ghoXQxdk6s&feature=related. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."
Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at
Oak Lane Country Day School- Oak Lane Day School :Oak Lane Day School, located in Blue Bell, PA, is an independent school serving preschool and elementary-aged children, and operates an eight-week children's camp program in the summer. The school's stated mission is to honor each child's individuality in a setting that...
about the threat of the spread of
fascismFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
, following the fall of Barcelona in the
Spanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil War was a major conflict that devastated Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939. It began after an attempted coup d'état by a group of Spanish Army generals against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, then under the leadership of president Manuel Azaña...
. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.
A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
and
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as
C. West ChurchmanCharles West Churchman was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley...
and
Nelson GoodmanHenry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...
and linguist
Zellig HarrisZellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science...
. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a
mathematical analysisIn mathematics, a linear map is a function between two vector spaces that preserves the operations of vector addition and scalar multiplication. The expression "linear operator" is commonly used for linear maps from a vector space to itself...
of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 Master's Thesis,
The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, as transformations in the sense of
Carnap'sRudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of logical positivism.-Life and work:Carnap was born to a west German family that had been humble...
1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a
context-free grammarIn formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a grammar in which every production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals ....
(derived from
Post production systemsA tag system is a deterministic computational model published by Emil Leon Post in 1943 as a simple form of Post canonical system. A tag system may also be viewed as an abstract machine, called a Post tag machine —briefly, a finite state machine whose only tape is a FIFO queue of unbounded length,...
). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a
BABachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences or both....
in 1949 and an
MAA Master of Arts is a postgraduate academic master degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is typically studied for in English, Fine Arts, History, Nursing, Humanities, Geography, Philosophy, Social Sciences or Theology and can be either fully-taught, research-based, or a...
in 1951.
In 1949, he married linguist
Carol SchatzCarol Chomsky was an American linguist and education specialist who studied language acquisition in children....
. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008. The couple had two daughters,
AvivaAviva Chomsky is currently a professor and the coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State College, Massachusetts. She was previously a professor at Bates College and a faculty research associate at Harvard University, specializing in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean...
(b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967).
Chomsky received his
PhDA doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries represents the highest level of formal study or research in a given field. In some countries it also refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to practice in a specific profession . The best-known example...
in linguistics from the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his
doctoral thesisDoctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced academic degree awarded by universities...
, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book
Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is an influential book by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics, this work laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
, his best-known work in linguistics.
Chomsky joined the staff of the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
(MIT) in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2008, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 53 years.
In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
with the publication of his essay, "
The Responsibility of IntellectualsThe Responsibility of Intellectuals is an essay by the US academic Noam Chomsky which was published as a special supplement by the The New York Review of Books on the 23rd of February 1967....
", in
The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs published in New York City. It takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
. This was followed by his 1969 book,
American Power and the New MandarinsAmerican Power and the New Mandarins is a 1969 book by the US academic Noam Chomsky. It was his first political book and sets out in detail his opposition to the Vietnam War....
, a collection of essays which established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power have
made him a controversial figureNoam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is widely known for his critique of U.S. foreign policy, beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s...
: largely shunned by the
mainstream mediaMass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
in the United States, he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets worldwide.
Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of US foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by
Theodore KaczynskiTheodore John Kaczynski , also known as the Unabomber , is an American mathematician, social critic, and murderer who carried out a campaign of mail bombings, as well as a described anarcho-primitivist.He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as an intellectual child prodigy, he excelled...
, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.
Chomsky resides in Lexington,
MassachusettsThe Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. Most of its population of...
and travels often, giving lectures on politics.
Contributions to linguistics
Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his
Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is an influential book by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics, this work laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
, a distillation of his
Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges
structural linguisticsStructural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
and introduces
transformational grammarIn linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific...
. This theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a
context-free grammarIn formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a grammar in which every production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals ....
extended with transformational rules.
Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e., they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar. This is related to Rationalist ideas of
a prioriA priori may refer to:* A priori , a type of constructed language* A priori , a knowledge of the actual population* A priori and a posteriori, used to distinguish two types of propositional knowledge...
knowledge, in that it is not due to experience.
The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as
Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB)—make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical
morphemeIn morpheme-based morphology, a ' is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes .The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes...
s, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.
Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.
More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the
acquisition of languageLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, instead advocating
emergentistIn philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.-Definitions:...
or connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.
He also theorizes that unlimited extension of a language such as English is possible only by the
recursiveRecursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way...
device of embedding sentences in sentences.
His best-known work in
phonologyPhonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system...
is
The Sound Pattern of EnglishThe Sound Pattern of English is a work on phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. It presents a comprehensive view of the phonology of English, and stands as a landmark both in the field of phonology and in the analysis of the English language...
(1968), written with
Morris HalleMorris Halle, born Pinkowitz, is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
(and often known as simply
SPE). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including
autosegmental phonologyAutosegmental phonology is the name of a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
, lexical phonology and
optimality theoryOptimality theory is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints...
. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.
Generative grammar
The Chomskyan approach towards
syntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages...
, often termed
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed
Universal GrammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge which they attain (the "
poverty of the stimulusThe poverty of the stimulus argument is a variant of the epistemological problem of the indeterminacy of data to theory that claims that grammar is unlearnable given the linguistic data available to children. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition...
" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.
Chomsky's theories are popular, particularly in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, but they have never been free from controversy. Criticism has come from a number of different directions. Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized both on general methodological grounds, and because it has (some argue) led to an overemphasis on the study of English. As of now, hundreds of different languages have received at least some attention in the generative grammar literature,
but some critics nonetheless perceive this overemphasis, and a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on an overly small sample of languages. Some
psychologistsPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
and
psycholinguistsPsycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. More radical critics have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar in order to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.
Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as
head-driven phrase structure grammarHead-driven phrase structure grammar is a highly lexicalized, non-derivational generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag . It is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de...
,
lexical functional grammarLexical functional grammar is a grammar framework in theoretical linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the direction research in the area of transformational grammar had begun to...
and
combinatory categorial grammarCombinatory categorial grammar is an efficiently parseable, yet linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It has a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate-argument structure, quantification and information structure.CCG relies on...
as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.
Cultural anthropologistCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
and linguist
Daniel EverettDaniel Leonard Everett is a linguistics professor best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language....
of
Illinois State UniversityIllinois State University is a public university in Normal, Illinois, United States. Most commonly referred to as ISU, the school was founded in 1857 by Jesse W. Fell ; Abraham Lincoln drew up the legal documents to establish the university...
has proposed that the language of the
Pirahã peopleThe Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. They currently number about 360, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction...
of the northwestern rainforest of
BrazilBrazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is a country in South America. It is the fifth largest country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the fifth most populous country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean...
resists Chomsky's theories of generative grammar. Everett asserts that the
Pirahã languagePirahã is a language spoken by the Pirahã — an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, who live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon....
does not have any evidence of
recursionRecursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way...
, one of the key properties of generative grammar. Additionally, it is claimed that the Pirahan have no fixed words for colors or numbers, speak in single
phonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s, and often speak in
prosodyIn linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of connected speech...
. However, Everett's claims have themselves been criticized. David Pesetsky of MIT, Andrew Nevins of Harvard, and Cilene Rodrigues of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil have argued in a joint paper that all of Everett's major claims contain serious deficiencies. Chomsky himself has commented that "The reports are interesting, but do not bear on the work of mine (along with many others). No one has proposed that languages must have subordinate clauses, number words, etc. Many structures of our language (and presumably that of the Piraha) are rarely if ever used in ordinary speech because of extrinsic constraints." The dispute continues.
Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
partitions
formal grammarA formal grammar is a set of rules for forming strings in a formal language. These rules that make up the grammar describe how to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax...
s into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a
regular languageIn theoretical computer science, a regular language is a formal language that satisfies the following equivalent properties:...
is powerful enough to model English
morphologyMorphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules...
, it is not powerful enough to model English
syntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages...
. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
(especially in
compilerA compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a computer language into another computer language...
construction and
automata theoryIn theoretical computer science, automata theory is the study of abstract machines and problems which they are able to solve. Automata theory is closely related to formal language theory as the automata are often classified by the class of formal languages they are able to recognize.An automaton is...
).
Contributions to psychology
Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of
cognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a discipline within psychology that investigates the internal mental processes of thought such as visual processing, memory, problem solving, and language....
; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
and what, exactly, the ability to use language is. Many of the more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the
principles and parametersPrinciples and parameters is a framework in generative linguistics. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik...
approach described above) are now generally accepted in some circles.
In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's
Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. "Verbal behavior" he defined as learned behavior which has its characteristic consequences being delivered through the learned behavior of others; this makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky-Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.
In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned", cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.
Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper
On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 13, pages 83–99). This and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties; consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy".
It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "
cognitive revolutionThe cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences.It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966
Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.
There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to
Jean PiagetJean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, well known for his pedagogical studies...
at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (
Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by
Jean-Pierre ChangeuxJean-Pierre Changeux is a French neuroscientist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of proteins , to the early development of the nervous system up to cognitive functions...
, Philippe Courrège and
Antoine DanchinAntoine Danchin PhD DSc is a French geneticist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of adenylate cyclase, to modelisation of learning in the nervous system and the early development of genomics and bioinformatics...
, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by
Jacques MehlerBorn in Barcelona in 1936, Jacques Mehler is an influential cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.Mehler studied in the 1960s at Harvard University, at the time of the cognitive revolution, where he worked with George A. Miller...
and
Stanislas DehaeneStanislas Dehaene is a Professor at the Collège de France and has been director of since 1989. He has worked on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness...
in particular in the domain of
numerical cognitionNumerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental...
lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "
modularityModularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established, evolutionarily developed functional purposes. Proponents believe this view is implied by Noam Chomsky's concept of a universal, generative grammar...
" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).
Opinion on cultural criticism of science
Chomsky strongly disagrees with
post-structuralistPost-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of certain continental philosophers and sociologists who wrote within the tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The movement is difficult to define or summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses...
and postmodern criticisms of science:
I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernismPostmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives...
; what I understand is largely truismA truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device....
or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.
Chomsky believes that science is a good way to start understanding history and human affairs:
I think studying science is a good way to get into fields like history. The reason is, you learn what an argument means, you learn what evidence is, you learn what makes sense to postulate and when, what's going to be convincing. You internalize the modes of rational inquiry, which happen to be much more advanced in the sciences than anywhere else. On the other hand, applying relativity theory to history isn't going to get you anywhere. So it's a mode of thinking.
Chomsky has also commented on critiques of "white male science," stating that they are much like the antisemitic and politically motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the
NazisNazism, known officially in German as National Socialism , is the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.Nazism is often considered...
to denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the
Deutsche PhysikDeutsche Physik or Aryan Physics was a nationalist movement in the German physics community in the early 1930s against the work of Albert Einstein, labeled "Jewish Physics"...
movement:
In fact, the entire idea of "white male science" reminds me, I'm afraid, of "Jewish physics." Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can't tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work in class, the office, or somewhere else. I rather doubt that the non-white, non-male students, friends, and colleagues with whom I work would be much impressed with the doctrine that their thinking and understanding differ from "white male science" because of their "culture or gender and race." I suspect that "surprise" would not be quite the proper word for their reaction.
Debates
Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics, and politics. He has had notable debates with such varied intellectuals as
Jean PiagetJean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, well known for his pedagogical studies...
,
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, sociologist and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley.Foucault is best known for his critical studies of...
,
William F. Buckley, Jr.William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist...
,
Christopher HitchensChristopher Eric Hitchens is an English-American author, journalist, and literary critic. He has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets...
,
Richard PerleRichard Norman Perle is an American political advisor and lobbyist who worked for the Reagan administration as an assistant Secretary of Defense and worked on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004...
,
Hilary PutnamHilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science...
, WVO Quine, and
Alan DershowitzAlan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz is known for his career as an attorney in several high-profile law cases and commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict...
, to name a very few.
Political views
Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised
libertarian socialismLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
. He is a sympathizer of
anarcho-syndicalismAnarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. Syndicalisme is a French word, ultimately derived from the Greek, meaning "trade unionism" hence, the "syndicalism" qualification. Syndicalism is an alternative co-operative economic system...
and a member of the
IWWThe Industrial Workers of the World is an international union currently headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. At its peak in 1923 the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a...
union. He has published a book on anarchism titled, "Chomsky on Anarchism", which was published by the anarchist book collective,
AK PressAK Press is a collectively owned and operated independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical and anarchist literature.-History:...
, in 2006. He was named to the
PoliticsPAPoliticsPA.com is a website centered on the politics of Pennsylvania.- Content :The website focuses on news aggregation, linking to major political news making headlines across the state. The editors write occasional features, like the weekly "Up & Down" scorecard and one-off lists like...
list of "Pennsylvania's Top Political Activists."
Noam Chomsky has been engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those which the powerful do not want to hear, and for this reason he is considered an American political
dissidentA dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
. Some highlights of his political views:
- Power
Political power is a type of power held by a group in a society which allows administration of some or all of public resources, including labour, and wealth. There are many ways to obtain possession of such power. At the nation-state level political legitimacy for political power is held by the...
, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate. The burden of proof is on those in authority to demonstrate why their elevated position is justified. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic.
- That there isn't much difference between slavery, and renting one's self to an owner, or "wage slavery
Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person is dependent for a livelihood on the wages earned, especially if the dependency is total and immediate. The term is used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor. Some uses of the term may refer only to an "[un]equal bargaining situation...
." He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that destroys and undermines our freedoms. He holds workers should own and control their own workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls"Lowell Mill Girls" was the name used for female textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 19th century. The Lowell textile mills employed a workforce which was about three quarters female; this characteristic caused two social effects: a close examination of the women's moral behavior, and...
.
- Very strong criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States. Specifically, he claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all, while promoting, supporting and allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
under Augusto PinochetAugusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean army general and later head of state as president. He was the Commander in Chief of the Chilean army from 1973 to 1998, president of the Government Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981 and President of the Republic from 1974 until the return of...
, and argues that this results in massive human rightsHuman rights refer to the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the...
violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the ContrasThe Contras is a label given to the various rebel groups opposing Nicaragua's FSLN Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government following the July 1979 overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle...
in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorismTerrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.At present, there is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism...
.
- He has argued that the mass media
Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
in the United States largely serve as a propagandaPropaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience...
arm and "bought priesthoodBought priesthood is a term originating with the United States labour press in the early to mid-20th century and popularized again more recently by dissident intellectuals like Noam Chomsky...
" of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations, with the three parties all largely intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter LippmannWalter Lippmann was an influential American award-winning writer, journalist, and political commentator...
, Chomsky along with his coauthor, Edward S. HermanEdward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at...
has written that the American media manufactures consentManufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, first published in 1988. The title makes use of the catch phrase coined by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion.-The propaganda model:...
among the public.
- He has opposed the U.S. global "war on drugs
The War on Drugs refers to the controversial prohibition campaign undertaken by the United States government, with the assistance of participating countries, intended to both define and reduce the illegal drug trade. This initiative includes a set of laws and policies that are intended to...
", claiming its language to be misleading, and referring to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana, are specifically targeted because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poorPoverty is the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, health care, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them. This is also referred to as absolute poverty or destitution...
: He has stated:
US domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.
- Critical of the American capitalist
Capitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
system and big business, he describes himself as a libertarian socialist who sympathizes with anarcho-syndicalism and is also critical of Leninist branches of socialismSocialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on...
. He also believes that libertarian socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. Specifically he believes that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Although he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the...
and John DeweyJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been very influential. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology...
, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."
- Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world", a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech
Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak without censorship or limitation. The synonymous term freedom of expression is sometimes used to indicate not only freedom of verbal speech but any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...
, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." He has also said "In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society."
- Chomsky objects to the criticism that anarchism
Anarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state ....
is inconsistent with support for government welfare, stating in part:
One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow -- the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive.
- According to Chomsky: "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way…. I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is…. People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."
- He holds views that can be summarized as anti-war
The term anti-war usually refers to the opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many activists...
but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
and most other wars in his lifetime. He expressed these views through a variety of protest methods, such as withholding taxes and peace walks. He published a number of articles about the war in Vietnam, including "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". However, he maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. In particular, he believes that the dropping of nuclear bombsThe atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks near the end of World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States at the executive order of U.S. President Harry S. Truman on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively...
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".
- He has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media
Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
; he opposes censorshipCensorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.-Rationale:...
and refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeledIn law, defamation–also called calumny, libel , slander , and vilification–is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image...
him.
- He has made major criticisms of Israel
Israel officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
and supporters of Israel, arguing that "supporters of Israel are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction", and that "Israel's very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence"
Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views, and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:
I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs. (New Left Review, 57, Sept. – Oct. 1969, p. 21)
Influence in other fields
Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
is often taught in fundamental
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
courses as it confers insight into the various types of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly
combinatorialistsCombinatorics is a branch of pure mathematics concerning the study of discrete objects. It is related to many other areas of mathematics, such as algebra, probability theory, ergodic theory and geometry, as well as to applied subjects in computer science and statistical physics...
. Some arguments in
evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology attempts to explain psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system,...
are derived from his research results.
The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology,
Niels K. JerneNiels Kaj Jerne, FRS was a Danish immunologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984. The citation read "For theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies"...
, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar … with various features of
protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".
Nim ChimpskyNim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee who was the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University, led by Herbert S. Terrace....
, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of
language acquisitionLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
as a uniquely human ability.
Famous computer scientist
Donald KnuthDonald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University....
admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "…I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 … Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".
Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests.
Edward S. HermanEdward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at...
and Chomsky's book
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)
The model attempts to explain this perceived
systemic biasSystemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates.- Bias in...
of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through" which combine to systematically distort news coverage.
The first filter, ownership, notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers), the model would expect them to publish news which would reflect the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups which attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an élite consensus, frame public debate within élite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.
Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples"—pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic élite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."
They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to élite interests.
Academic achievements, awards and honors
In the spring of 1969, he delivered the
John Locke LecturesThe John Locke Lectures are a series of annual lectures in philosophy given at the University of Oxford. They are one of the world's most prestigious academic lecture series, comparable to the Gifford Lectures given in Scottish universities...
at Oxford University; in January 1970, the
Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Although he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the...
Memorial Lecture at
University of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge , located in the City of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, is the second oldest university in the English-speaking world and the fourth oldest in Europe...
; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in
New DelhiNew Delhi is the capital of India. It is situated within the metropolis of Delhi and serves as the seat of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi....
; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in
LeidenLeiden is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland in the Netherlands and has 118,000 inhabitants. It forms a single urban area with Oegstgeest, Leiderdorp, Voorschoten, Valkenburg, Rijnsburg and Katwijk, with 254,000 inhabitants. It is located on the Old Rhine, close to the cities...
; in 1988 the
Massey LecturesThe Massey Lectures are a prestigious annual event in Canada, in which a noted Canadian or international scholar gives a week-long series of lectures on a political, cultural or philosophical topic. They were created in 1961 to honour Vincent Massey, Governor General of Canada...
at the
University of TorontoThe University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated north of the city's Financial District on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. The university was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in the...
, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in
Cape TownCape Town is the second most populous city in South Africa, and the largest in land area, forming part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality. It is the provincial capital of the Western Cape, as well as the legislative capital of South Africa, where the National Parliament and many...
, and many others.
Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following:
{|
| valign="top" |
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher,
cognitive scientistCognitive science can be defined as the study of mind or the study of thought. It embraces multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and biology. It relies on varying scientific methodology Cognitive...
, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an
Institute ProfessorInstitute Professor is the highest title that can be awarded to a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research university located in , United States...
and professor
emeritusEmeritus is an adjective that is used in the title of a retired professor, bishop, or other professional. Emerita is often used as the female equivalent, although avoided by purists, since phrases such as professor emerita are ungrammatical in Latin...
of
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
at the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a
libertarian socialistLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
intellectual.
In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms." He also established the
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
, a classification of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s in terms of their generative power. In 1959, Chomsky published a widely influential review of
B. F. SkinnerBurrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform, and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974...
's theoretical book
Verbal BehaviorVerbal Behavior is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he analyzes human behavior, encompassing what is traditionally called language, linguistics, or speech...
, which was the first attempt by a
behavioristBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
to provide a functional,
operantOperant conditioning is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. Operant conditioning is distinguished from classical conditioning in that operant conditioning deals with the modification of "voluntary behavior" or operant behavior...
analysis of language. Chomsky used this review to broadly and aggressively challenge the
behavioristBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
approaches to studies of behavior dominant at the time, and contributed to the
cognitive revolutionThe cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences.It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
in psychology. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has influenced the
philosophy of languagePhilosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
and
mindPhilosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
.
Beginning with his
opposition to the Vietnam WarThe Responsibility of Intellectuals is an essay by the US academic Noam Chomsky which was published as a special supplement by the The New York Review of Books on the 23rd of February 1967....
, Chomsky established himself as a prominent critic of US foreign and domestic policy. He is a self-declared adherent of
libertarian socialismLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
which he regards as "the proper and natural extension of
classical liberalismClassical liberalism is a political ideology that developed by the middle of the nineteenth century in England, western Europe, and the Americas, which provided a coherent vision of how society should be organized. Central to the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century is a commitment to...
into the era of advanced industrial society."
According to the
Arts and Humanities Citation IndexThe Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a commercial citation index of over 1,100 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals....
in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–92 period, and was the eighth most-cited source. He is also considered a prominent cultural figure. At the same time, his status as a leading critic of US foreign policy has made him controversial.
Biography
Chomsky was born on the morning of December 7, 1928 to Jewish parents in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of
PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania and the sixth-most-populous city in the United States.In 2008, the population of the city proper was estimated to be over 1.4 million, while the metropolitan area's population of 5.8 million made it the country's fifth-largest...
,
PennsylvaniaThe Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , often colloquially referred to as PA by natives and Northeasterners, is a state located in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States...
, the son of a
HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered a Jewish language. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over...
scholar and
IWWThe Industrial Workers of the World is an international union currently headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. At its peak in 1923 the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a...
(Industrial Workers of the World) member,
William ChomskyWilliam Chomsky was an American scholar of Hebrew, born in Ukraine, who was a professor at Gratz College. He was made faculty president of Gratz in 1932, a position that he held for thirty seven years. He also taught at Dropsie College, a graduate school of Jewish and Semitic studies. from 1955...
(1896–1977), a native of
UkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky), a native of what is present-day
BelarusBelarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel , Mahilyow and Vitebsk...
, grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English." Their first language was
YiddishYiddish is a non-territorial High German language of Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world...
, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish
ghettoOriginally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live, a ghetto is now described as a "portion of a city in which members of a minority group live; especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure." - Etymology :...
," split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side," with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature." Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and
anti-semitismAntisemitism is prejudice against or hostility towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, or religion....
in the mid-1930s. He recalls German-American "Beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ghoXQxdk6s&feature=related. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."
Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at
Oak Lane Country Day School- Oak Lane Day School :Oak Lane Day School, located in Blue Bell, PA, is an independent school serving preschool and elementary-aged children, and operates an eight-week children's camp program in the summer. The school's stated mission is to honor each child's individuality in a setting that...
about the threat of the spread of
fascismFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
, following the fall of Barcelona in the
Spanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil War was a major conflict that devastated Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939. It began after an attempted coup d'état by a group of Spanish Army generals against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, then under the leadership of president Manuel Azaña...
. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.
A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
and
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as
C. West ChurchmanCharles West Churchman was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley...
and
Nelson GoodmanHenry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...
and linguist
Zellig HarrisZellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science...
. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a
mathematical analysisIn mathematics, a linear map is a function between two vector spaces that preserves the operations of vector addition and scalar multiplication. The expression "linear operator" is commonly used for linear maps from a vector space to itself...
of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 Master's Thesis,
The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, as transformations in the sense of
Carnap'sRudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of logical positivism.-Life and work:Carnap was born to a west German family that had been humble...
1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a
context-free grammarIn formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a grammar in which every production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals ....
(derived from
Post production systemsA tag system is a deterministic computational model published by Emil Leon Post in 1943 as a simple form of Post canonical system. A tag system may also be viewed as an abstract machine, called a Post tag machine —briefly, a finite state machine whose only tape is a FIFO queue of unbounded length,...
). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a
BABachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences or both....
in 1949 and an
MAA Master of Arts is a postgraduate academic master degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is typically studied for in English, Fine Arts, History, Nursing, Humanities, Geography, Philosophy, Social Sciences or Theology and can be either fully-taught, research-based, or a...
in 1951.
In 1949, he married linguist
Carol SchatzCarol Chomsky was an American linguist and education specialist who studied language acquisition in children....
. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008. The couple had two daughters,
AvivaAviva Chomsky is currently a professor and the coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State College, Massachusetts. She was previously a professor at Bates College and a faculty research associate at Harvard University, specializing in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean...
(b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967).
Chomsky received his
PhDA doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries represents the highest level of formal study or research in a given field. In some countries it also refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to practice in a specific profession . The best-known example...
in linguistics from the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his
doctoral thesisDoctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced academic degree awarded by universities...
, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book
Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is an influential book by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics, this work laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
, his best-known work in linguistics.
Chomsky joined the staff of the
Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
(MIT) in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2008, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 53 years.
In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
with the publication of his essay, "
The Responsibility of IntellectualsThe Responsibility of Intellectuals is an essay by the US academic Noam Chomsky which was published as a special supplement by the The New York Review of Books on the 23rd of February 1967....
", in
The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs published in New York City. It takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
. This was followed by his 1969 book,
American Power and the New MandarinsAmerican Power and the New Mandarins is a 1969 book by the US academic Noam Chomsky. It was his first political book and sets out in detail his opposition to the Vietnam War....
, a collection of essays which established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power have
made him a controversial figureNoam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is widely known for his critique of U.S. foreign policy, beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s...
: largely shunned by the
mainstream mediaMass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
in the United States, he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets worldwide.
Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of US foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by
Theodore KaczynskiTheodore John Kaczynski , also known as the Unabomber , is an American mathematician, social critic, and murderer who carried out a campaign of mail bombings, as well as a described anarcho-primitivist.He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as an intellectual child prodigy, he excelled...
, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.
Chomsky resides in Lexington,
MassachusettsThe Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. Most of its population of...
and travels often, giving lectures on politics.
Contributions to linguistics
Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his
Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is an influential book by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics, this work laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
, a distillation of his
Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges
structural linguisticsStructural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
and introduces
transformational grammarIn linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific...
. This theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a
context-free grammarIn formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a grammar in which every production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals ....
extended with transformational rules.
Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e., they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar. This is related to Rationalist ideas of
a prioriA priori may refer to:* A priori , a type of constructed language* A priori , a knowledge of the actual population* A priori and a posteriori, used to distinguish two types of propositional knowledge...
knowledge, in that it is not due to experience.
The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as
Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB)—make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical
morphemeIn morpheme-based morphology, a ' is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes .The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes...
s, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.
Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.
More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the
acquisition of languageLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, instead advocating
emergentistIn philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.-Definitions:...
or connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.
He also theorizes that unlimited extension of a language such as English is possible only by the
recursiveRecursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way...
device of embedding sentences in sentences.
His best-known work in
phonologyPhonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system...
is
The Sound Pattern of EnglishThe Sound Pattern of English is a work on phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. It presents a comprehensive view of the phonology of English, and stands as a landmark both in the field of phonology and in the analysis of the English language...
(1968), written with
Morris HalleMorris Halle, born Pinkowitz, is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
(and often known as simply
SPE). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including
autosegmental phonologyAutosegmental phonology is the name of a framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
, lexical phonology and
optimality theoryOptimality theory is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints...
. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.
Generative grammar
The Chomskyan approach towards
syntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages...
, often termed
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed
Universal GrammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge which they attain (the "
poverty of the stimulusThe poverty of the stimulus argument is a variant of the epistemological problem of the indeterminacy of data to theory that claims that grammar is unlearnable given the linguistic data available to children. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition...
" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.
Chomsky's theories are popular, particularly in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, but they have never been free from controversy. Criticism has come from a number of different directions. Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized both on general methodological grounds, and because it has (some argue) led to an overemphasis on the study of English. As of now, hundreds of different languages have received at least some attention in the generative grammar literature,
but some critics nonetheless perceive this overemphasis, and a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on an overly small sample of languages. Some
psychologistsPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
and
psycholinguistsPsycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. More radical critics have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar in order to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.
Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as
head-driven phrase structure grammarHead-driven phrase structure grammar is a highly lexicalized, non-derivational generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag . It is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de...
,
lexical functional grammarLexical functional grammar is a grammar framework in theoretical linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the direction research in the area of transformational grammar had begun to...
and
combinatory categorial grammarCombinatory categorial grammar is an efficiently parseable, yet linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It has a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate-argument structure, quantification and information structure.CCG relies on...
as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.
Cultural anthropologistCultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology . It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept....
and linguist
Daniel EverettDaniel Leonard Everett is a linguistics professor best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language....
of
Illinois State UniversityIllinois State University is a public university in Normal, Illinois, United States. Most commonly referred to as ISU, the school was founded in 1857 by Jesse W. Fell ; Abraham Lincoln drew up the legal documents to establish the university...
has proposed that the language of the
Pirahã peopleThe Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. They currently number about 360, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction...
of the northwestern rainforest of
BrazilBrazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is a country in South America. It is the fifth largest country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the fifth most populous country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean...
resists Chomsky's theories of generative grammar. Everett asserts that the
Pirahã languagePirahã is a language spoken by the Pirahã — an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, who live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon....
does not have any evidence of
recursionRecursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way...
, one of the key properties of generative grammar. Additionally, it is claimed that the Pirahan have no fixed words for colors or numbers, speak in single
phonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s, and often speak in
prosodyIn linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of connected speech...
. However, Everett's claims have themselves been criticized. David Pesetsky of MIT, Andrew Nevins of Harvard, and Cilene Rodrigues of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil have argued in a joint paper that all of Everett's major claims contain serious deficiencies. Chomsky himself has commented that "The reports are interesting, but do not bear on the work of mine (along with many others). No one has proposed that languages must have subordinate clauses, number words, etc. Many structures of our language (and presumably that of the Piraha) are rarely if ever used in ordinary speech because of extrinsic constraints." The dispute continues.
Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
partitions
formal grammarA formal grammar is a set of rules for forming strings in a formal language. These rules that make up the grammar describe how to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax...
s into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a
regular languageIn theoretical computer science, a regular language is a formal language that satisfies the following equivalent properties:...
is powerful enough to model English
morphologyMorphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules...
, it is not powerful enough to model English
syntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages...
. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
(especially in
compilerA compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a computer language into another computer language...
construction and
automata theoryIn theoretical computer science, automata theory is the study of abstract machines and problems which they are able to solve. Automata theory is closely related to formal language theory as the automata are often classified by the class of formal languages they are able to recognize.An automaton is...
).
Contributions to psychology
Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of
cognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a discipline within psychology that investigates the internal mental processes of thought such as visual processing, memory, problem solving, and language....
; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a
universal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
and what, exactly, the ability to use language is. Many of the more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the
principles and parametersPrinciples and parameters is a framework in generative linguistics. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik...
approach described above) are now generally accepted in some circles.
In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's
Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. "Verbal behavior" he defined as learned behavior which has its characteristic consequences being delivered through the learned behavior of others; this makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky-Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.
In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned", cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.
Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper
On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 13, pages 83–99). This and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties; consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy".
It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "
cognitive revolutionThe cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences.It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966
Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.
There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to
Jean PiagetJean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, well known for his pedagogical studies...
at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (
Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by
Jean-Pierre ChangeuxJean-Pierre Changeux is a French neuroscientist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of proteins , to the early development of the nervous system up to cognitive functions...
, Philippe Courrège and
Antoine DanchinAntoine Danchin PhD DSc is a French geneticist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of adenylate cyclase, to modelisation of learning in the nervous system and the early development of genomics and bioinformatics...
, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by
Jacques MehlerBorn in Barcelona in 1936, Jacques Mehler is an influential cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.Mehler studied in the 1960s at Harvard University, at the time of the cognitive revolution, where he worked with George A. Miller...
and
Stanislas DehaeneStanislas Dehaene is a Professor at the Collège de France and has been director of since 1989. He has worked on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness...
in particular in the domain of
numerical cognitionNumerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental...
lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "
modularityModularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established, evolutionarily developed functional purposes. Proponents believe this view is implied by Noam Chomsky's concept of a universal, generative grammar...
" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).
Opinion on cultural criticism of science
Chomsky strongly disagrees with
post-structuralistPost-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of certain continental philosophers and sociologists who wrote within the tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The movement is difficult to define or summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses...
and postmodern criticisms of science:
I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernismPostmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives...
; what I understand is largely truismA truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device....
or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.
Chomsky believes that science is a good way to start understanding history and human affairs:
I think studying science is a good way to get into fields like history. The reason is, you learn what an argument means, you learn what evidence is, you learn what makes sense to postulate and when, what's going to be convincing. You internalize the modes of rational inquiry, which happen to be much more advanced in the sciences than anywhere else. On the other hand, applying relativity theory to history isn't going to get you anywhere. So it's a mode of thinking.
Chomsky has also commented on critiques of "white male science," stating that they are much like the antisemitic and politically motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the
NazisNazism, known officially in German as National Socialism , is the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.Nazism is often considered...
to denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the
Deutsche PhysikDeutsche Physik or Aryan Physics was a nationalist movement in the German physics community in the early 1930s against the work of Albert Einstein, labeled "Jewish Physics"...
movement:
In fact, the entire idea of "white male science" reminds me, I'm afraid, of "Jewish physics." Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can't tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work in class, the office, or somewhere else. I rather doubt that the non-white, non-male students, friends, and colleagues with whom I work would be much impressed with the doctrine that their thinking and understanding differ from "white male science" because of their "culture or gender and race." I suspect that "surprise" would not be quite the proper word for their reaction.
Debates
Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics, and politics. He has had notable debates with such varied intellectuals as
Jean PiagetJean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, well known for his pedagogical studies...
,
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, sociologist and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley.Foucault is best known for his critical studies of...
,
William F. Buckley, Jr.William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist...
,
Christopher HitchensChristopher Eric Hitchens is an English-American author, journalist, and literary critic. He has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets...
,
Richard PerleRichard Norman Perle is an American political advisor and lobbyist who worked for the Reagan administration as an assistant Secretary of Defense and worked on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004...
,
Hilary PutnamHilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science...
, WVO Quine, and
Alan DershowitzAlan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz is known for his career as an attorney in several high-profile law cases and commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict...
, to name a very few.
Political views
Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised
libertarian socialismLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
. He is a sympathizer of
anarcho-syndicalismAnarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. Syndicalisme is a French word, ultimately derived from the Greek, meaning "trade unionism" hence, the "syndicalism" qualification. Syndicalism is an alternative co-operative economic system...
and a member of the
IWWThe Industrial Workers of the World is an international union currently headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. At its peak in 1923 the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a...
union. He has published a book on anarchism titled, "Chomsky on Anarchism", which was published by the anarchist book collective,
AK PressAK Press is a collectively owned and operated independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical and anarchist literature.-History:...
, in 2006. He was named to the
PoliticsPAPoliticsPA.com is a website centered on the politics of Pennsylvania.- Content :The website focuses on news aggregation, linking to major political news making headlines across the state. The editors write occasional features, like the weekly "Up & Down" scorecard and one-off lists like...
list of "Pennsylvania's Top Political Activists."
Noam Chomsky has been engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those which the powerful do not want to hear, and for this reason he is considered an American political
dissidentA dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
. Some highlights of his political views:
- Power
Political power is a type of power held by a group in a society which allows administration of some or all of public resources, including labour, and wealth. There are many ways to obtain possession of such power. At the nation-state level political legitimacy for political power is held by the...
, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate. The burden of proof is on those in authority to demonstrate why their elevated position is justified. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic.
- That there isn't much difference between slavery, and renting one's self to an owner, or "wage slavery
Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person is dependent for a livelihood on the wages earned, especially if the dependency is total and immediate. The term is used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor. Some uses of the term may refer only to an "[un]equal bargaining situation...
." He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that destroys and undermines our freedoms. He holds workers should own and control their own workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls"Lowell Mill Girls" was the name used for female textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 19th century. The Lowell textile mills employed a workforce which was about three quarters female; this characteristic caused two social effects: a close examination of the women's moral behavior, and...
.
- Very strong criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States. Specifically, he claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all, while promoting, supporting and allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
under Augusto PinochetAugusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean army general and later head of state as president. He was the Commander in Chief of the Chilean army from 1973 to 1998, president of the Government Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981 and President of the Republic from 1974 until the return of...
, and argues that this results in massive human rightsHuman rights refer to the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the...
violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the ContrasThe Contras is a label given to the various rebel groups opposing Nicaragua's FSLN Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government following the July 1979 overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle...
in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorismTerrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.At present, there is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism...
.
- He has argued that the mass media
Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
in the United States largely serve as a propagandaPropaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience...
arm and "bought priesthoodBought priesthood is a term originating with the United States labour press in the early to mid-20th century and popularized again more recently by dissident intellectuals like Noam Chomsky...
" of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations, with the three parties all largely intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter LippmannWalter Lippmann was an influential American award-winning writer, journalist, and political commentator...
, Chomsky along with his coauthor, Edward S. HermanEdward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at...
has written that the American media manufactures consentManufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, first published in 1988. The title makes use of the catch phrase coined by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion.-The propaganda model:...
among the public.
- He has opposed the U.S. global "war on drugs
The War on Drugs refers to the controversial prohibition campaign undertaken by the United States government, with the assistance of participating countries, intended to both define and reduce the illegal drug trade. This initiative includes a set of laws and policies that are intended to...
", claiming its language to be misleading, and referring to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana, are specifically targeted because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poorPoverty is the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, health care, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them. This is also referred to as absolute poverty or destitution...
: He has stated:
US domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.
- Critical of the American capitalist
Capitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
system and big business, he describes himself as a libertarian socialist who sympathizes with anarcho-syndicalism and is also critical of Leninist branches of socialismSocialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on...
. He also believes that libertarian socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. Specifically he believes that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Although he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the...
and John DeweyJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been very influential. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology...
, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."
- Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world", a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech
Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak without censorship or limitation. The synonymous term freedom of expression is sometimes used to indicate not only freedom of verbal speech but any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...
, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." He has also said "In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society."
- Chomsky objects to the criticism that anarchism
Anarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state ....
is inconsistent with support for government welfare, stating in part:
One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow -- the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive.
- According to Chomsky: "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way…. I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is…. People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."
- He holds views that can be summarized as anti-war
The term anti-war usually refers to the opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many activists...
but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
and most other wars in his lifetime. He expressed these views through a variety of protest methods, such as withholding taxes and peace walks. He published a number of articles about the war in Vietnam, including "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". However, he maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. In particular, he believes that the dropping of nuclear bombsThe atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks near the end of World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States at the executive order of U.S. President Harry S. Truman on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively...
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".
- He has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media
Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
; he opposes censorshipCensorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.-Rationale:...
and refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeledIn law, defamation–also called calumny, libel , slander , and vilification–is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image...
him.
- He has made major criticisms of Israel
Israel officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
and supporters of Israel, arguing that "supporters of Israel are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction", and that "Israel's very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence"
Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views, and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:
I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs. (New Left Review, 57, Sept. – Oct. 1969, p. 21)
Influence in other fields
Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
is often taught in fundamental
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
courses as it confers insight into the various types of
formal languageA formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined...
s. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly
combinatorialistsCombinatorics is a branch of pure mathematics concerning the study of discrete objects. It is related to many other areas of mathematics, such as algebra, probability theory, ergodic theory and geometry, as well as to applied subjects in computer science and statistical physics...
. Some arguments in
evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology attempts to explain psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system,...
are derived from his research results.
The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology,
Niels K. JerneNiels Kaj Jerne, FRS was a Danish immunologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984. The citation read "For theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies"...
, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar … with various features of
protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".
Nim ChimpskyNim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee who was the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University, led by Herbert S. Terrace....
, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of
language acquisitionLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
as a uniquely human ability.
Famous computer scientist
Donald KnuthDonald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University....
admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "…I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 … Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".
Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests.
Edward S. HermanEdward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at...
and Chomsky's book
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)
The model attempts to explain this perceived
systemic biasSystemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates.- Bias in...
of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through" which combine to systematically distort news coverage.
The first filter, ownership, notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers), the model would expect them to publish news which would reflect the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups which attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an élite consensus, frame public debate within élite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.
Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples"—pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic élite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."
They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was a Cold War military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1959 to 30 April 1975...
. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to élite interests.
Academic achievements, awards and honors
In the spring of 1969, he delivered the
John Locke LecturesThe John Locke Lectures are a series of annual lectures in philosophy given at the University of Oxford. They are one of the world's most prestigious academic lecture series, comparable to the Gifford Lectures given in Scottish universities...
at Oxford University; in January 1970, the
Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Although he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the...
Memorial Lecture at
University of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge , located in the City of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, is the second oldest university in the English-speaking world and the fourth oldest in Europe...
; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in
New DelhiNew Delhi is the capital of India. It is situated within the metropolis of Delhi and serves as the seat of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi....
; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in
LeidenLeiden is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland in the Netherlands and has 118,000 inhabitants. It forms a single urban area with Oegstgeest, Leiderdorp, Voorschoten, Valkenburg, Rijnsburg and Katwijk, with 254,000 inhabitants. It is located on the Old Rhine, close to the cities...
; in 1988 the
Massey LecturesThe Massey Lectures are a prestigious annual event in Canada, in which a noted Canadian or international scholar gives a week-long series of lectures on a political, cultural or philosophical topic. They were created in 1961 to honour Vincent Massey, Governor General of Canada...
at the
University of TorontoThe University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated north of the city's Financial District on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. The university was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in the...
, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in
Cape TownCape Town is the second most populous city in South Africa, and the largest in land area, forming part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality. It is the provincial capital of the Western Cape, as well as the legislative capital of South Africa, where the National Parliament and many...
, and many others.
Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following:
{|
| valign="top" |
- University of London
Based primarily in London, England, United Kingdom, the University of London is a federal mega university made up of 31 affiliates: 19 separate university institutions, and 12 research institutes...
- University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private, coeducational research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by oil magnate and benefactor John D...
- Loyola University of Chicago
- Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
- University of Delhi
The University of Delhi ' is a central university situated in Delhi, India and is funded by Government of India. Established in 1922, it offers courses at the undergraduate and post-graduate level...
- Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860, is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:Bard has a 600-acre campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, near the town of Red Hook, overlooking the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, within the Hudson River Historic District,...
- University of Massachusetts
The University of Massachusetts is the five-campus public university system of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts....
- University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
- Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a Jesuit private university located in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Father John Carroll founded the school in 1789, though its roots extend back to 1634. While the school struggled financially in its early years, Georgetown expanded into a branched university after the...
- Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. Founded in 1821, it is the third oldest college in Massachusetts, and has been coeducational since 1975...
- University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge , located in the City of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, is the second oldest university in the English-speaking world and the fourth oldest in Europe...
| valign="top" |
- University of Buenos Aires
The University of Buenos Aires is the largest university in Argentina and the largest university by enrollment in Latin America, surpassing both the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Universidade Estácio de Sá of Brazil...
- McGill University
McGill University is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
- Universitat Rovira i Virgili
University of Rovira i Virgili is located in the city of Tarragona, Catalonia,Spain. Its name is in honour to Antoni Rovira i Virgili.This university has also other centres in Reus, Vila-seca, Tortosa and El Vendrell....
- Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
- Villanova University
Villanova University is a private university located in Radnor Township, a suburb northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States...
- University of Connecticut
The University of Connecticut is the State of Connecticut's land-grant university. It was founded in 1881 and serves more than 28,000 students on its six campuses, including nearly 8,000 graduate students in multiple programs....
- University of Maine
The University of Maine is a public research university located in Orono, Maine, United States. The university was established in 1865 as a land grant college and is referred to as the flagship university of the University of Maine System. The university has an enrollment of over 12,000 students...
- Scuola Normale Superiore
- University of Western Ontario
The University of Western Ontario is a public research university located in London, Ontario. It was founded in 1878 by Bishop Isaac Hellmuth of Bishop's University and the Anglican Diocese of Huron as The Western University of London Ontario.Huron College, established in 1863 as an Anglican...
- University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated north of the city's Financial District on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. The university was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in the...
- Harvard University
Harvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
| valign="top" |
- Universidad de Chile
- University of Bologna
The University of Bologna is the oldest continually operating degree-granting university in Europe, the word 'university' being first used by this institution at its foundation. The true date of its founding is uncertain, but believed by most accounts to have been 1088...
- Universidad de la Frontera
University of the Frontier or UFRO is a university in Temuco Chile. It is a derivative university and part of the Chilean Traditional Universities. UFRO boasts a student body with a variety of abilities and from a variety of backgrounds, many of Mapuche descent....
- University of Calcutta
Formally established on the 24 January 1857, the University of Calcutta , , situated in the city of Kolkata , India, is the first modern university in the Indian subcontinent. It is a state-government administered urban-based affiliating and research university...
- Universidad Nacional de Colombia
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Flemish university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has two campuses referred to as Etterbeek and Jette.The university's name is sometimes abbreviated by "VUB" or translated to "Free University of Brussels"...
- Santo Domingo Institute of Technology
- Uppsala University
Uppsala University is a research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded as early as 1477, it is the oldest such institution in the Nordic countries, and for centuries has been one of Europe's most renowned seats of learning....
- University of Athens
- University of Cyprus
The University of Cyprus is a public coeducational university established in 1989. It admitted its first students in 1992 and has currently approximately 3,500 students . It was the first university to be established in Cyprus.-Academic profile:Based at the Capital of Cyprus, Nicosia...
- Central Connecticut State University
Central Connecticut State University's annual Commencement Exercises are held each May at the XL Center in Hartford. In most years, a separate graduation ceremony for recipients of advanced degrees is held on campus at Herbert D. Welte Hall....
|}
He is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and SciencesThe American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
, the
National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine."The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code....
, and the
American Philosophical SocietyThe American Philosophical Society is a discussion group founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin as an offshoot of his earlier club, the Junto...
. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the
American Psychological AssociationThe American Psychological Association is a professional organization representing psychologists in the U.S., with around 150,000 members and an annual budget of around $70m...
, the
Kyoto PrizeThe has been awarded annually since 1985 by the Inamori Foundation, founded by Kazuo Inamori. The prize is a Japanese award similar in intent to the Nobel Prize, as it recognizes outstanding works in the fields of philosophy, arts, science and technology...
in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The
Orwell AwardThe NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language , established in 1975 and given by the National Council of Teachers of English Public Language Awards Committee, recognizes writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis...
, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language" (in 1987 and 1989).
He is a member of the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and ArtsThe Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts is the most prominent academic institution in Serbia.- Foundation :...
in Department of Social Sciences.
Chomsky is a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of MIT Harvard Research Journal.
In 2005, Chomsky received an honorary fellowship from the
Literary and Historical SocietyLiterary and Historical Society may refer to:*Literary and Historical Society a debating society at University College Dublin, Ireland.*Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, a learned society in Quebec, Canada....
.
In 2007, Chomsky received The
Uppsala UniversityUppsala University is a research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded as early as 1477, it is the oldest such institution in the Nordic countries, and for centuries has been one of Europe's most renowned seats of learning....
(
SwedenSweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe...
) Honorary Doctor's degree in commemoration of
Carolus LinnaeusCarl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature...
.
In February 2008, he received the President's Medal from the
Literary and Debating SocietyThe Literary & Debating Society is a debating society of the National University of Ireland, Galway. The society was founded as the Literary and Scientific Society in 1846, and incorporated into the then Queen's College Galway in 1852...
of the
National University of Ireland, GalwayThe National University of Ireland, Galway is a tertiary-level educational institution located in Galway, Ireland...
.
Chomsky has an
Erdős numberThe Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers....
of four.
Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in
The 2005 Global Intellectuals PollThe Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll was conducted in November 2005 and June 2008 by Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy on the basis of responding readers' ballot...
conducted by the British magazine
ProspectProspect is a monthly British general interest magazine, specialising in politics and current affairs. Frequent topics include British, European, and US politics, social issues, art, literature, cinema, science, the media, history, philosophy, and psychology...
. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls". In a list compiled by the magazine
New StatesmanThe New Statesman is a British left-wing political magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".
Actor
Viggo MortensenViggo Peter Mortensen, Jr. is a Danish-American actor, poet, musician, photographer, and painter.His film roles include Aragorn in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Frank T...
with avant-garde guitarist
BucketheadBrian Patrick Carroll, better known as Buckethead, is an American musician and songwriter. He has released 28 solo albums and performed on over 50 more...
dedicated their 2006 album, called
PandemoniumfromamericaPandemoniumfromamerica or also called Pandemonium From America is the sixth studio album by the actor Viggo Mortensen and the fourth collaboration with avant-garde guitarist Buckethead, released in 2003. The album is dedicated to Noam Chomsky...
to Chomsky.
Criticism
Much Chomsky criticism revolves around his
political viewsNoam Chomsky is a widely known intellectual, political activist, and critic of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. Noam Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist, a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism and is considered to be a key intellectual figure within the...
. His status as an intellectual figure within the left wing of American politics has resulted in much criticism from the left and the right.
Filmography
- Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media is a multi award-winning documentary film that explores the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky, a linguist, intellectual, and political activist...
, Director: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick (1992)
- Last Party 2000, Director: Rebecca Chaiklin and Donovan Leitch (2001)
- Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, Director: John Junkerman (2002)
- Distorted Morality—America's War On Terror?, Director: John Junkerman (2003)
- Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause (TV), Director: Will Pascoe (2003)
- The Corporation
The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering it as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a...
, Directors: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott; Writer: Joel Bakan (2003)
- Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land is a 2004 documentary by Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff which—according to the film's official website—"provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S...
, Directors: Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff (2004)
- On Power, Dissent and Racism: A discussion with Noam Chomsky, Journalist: Nicolas Rossier; Producers: Eli Choukri, Baraka Productions (2004)
- Lake of Fire, Director: Tony Kaye (2006)
- American Feud: A History of Conservatives and Liberals, Director: Richard Hall (2007)
- Chomsky & Cie Director: Olivier Azam (out in 2008)
- An Inconvenient Tax
An Inconvenient Tax is a 2009 documentary film produced by Life Is My Movie EntertainmentAn Inconvenient Tax explores the history of the income tax and the causes of its many complexities. The film follows...
, Director: Christopher P. Marshall (out in 2009)
- The Money Fix, Director: Alan Rosenblith (2009)
See also
- American philosophy
American philosophy is the philosophical activity or output of Americans, both within the United States and abroad. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that while American philosophy lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and...
- Axiom of categoricity
The Axiom of Categoricity is a tenet of linguistic theory that remained practically undisputed before the inception of modern sociolinguistics in the mid-twentieth century. The term was coined by J.K...
- Chomsky hierarchy
Within the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
- Chomsky normal form
In computer science, a context-free grammar is said to be in Chomsky normal form if all of its production rules are of the form:Every grammar in Chomsky normal form is context-free, and conversely, every context-free grammar can be efficiently transformed into an equivalent one which is in Chomsky...
- Chomskybot
The Chomskybot is a program that generates paragraphs which appear similar to those in the corpus of Noam Chomsky's linguistic works, but are humorously devoid of any meaning, by combining at random phrases taken from Chomsky's actual works...
- Chomsky-Schützenberger theorem
- Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but whose semantics are nonsensical, and therefore has no meaning to understand...
- English studies
English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...
- Important publications in computability
- Intellectual worker
- Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
- Nim Chimpsky
Nim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee who was the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University, led by Herbert S. Terrace....
- Politics of Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is a widely known intellectual, political activist, and critic of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. Noam Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist, a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism and is considered to be a key intellectual figure within the...
- Propaganda model
The propaganda model is a theory advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that alleges systemic biases in the mass media and seeks to explain them in terms of structural economic causes.- Overview :...
- List of American philosophers
External links
- Noam Chomsky homepage
- Noam Chomsky at MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
- Noam Chomsky's page on Academia.edu
- Noam Chomsky at Zmag
Z Communications is a media group founded in 1986 by Michael Albert and Lydia Sargent. Its publications include Z Magazine, ZNet, Z Media, and Z Video and are generally of a left perspective....
- Talks by Noam Chomsky at A-Infos Radio Project
The was formed in October 1996 by Lyn Gerry and other grassroots broadcasters, free radio journalists and cyber-activists to provide the means to share radio programs via the Internet, in direct response to a reorganisation of the Pacifica radio station that eliminated many of its more...
- Chomsky media files at the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the World Wide Web....
- Articles and videos featuring Noam Chomsky at AnarchismToday.org
- The Political Economy of the Mass Media Part 1 Part 2 (March 15, 1989), lecture delivered at the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin
- OneBigTorrent.org (formerly "Chomsky Torrents") Lots of links to Chomsky-related media