Noam Chomsky
1) His Biography and Main Works:
Noam Chomsky, full name Avram Noam Chomsky, is an American theoretical linguist who transformed the discipline of linguistics in the 1950s by presenting language as a uniquely human, biologically based cognitive function. He was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics and allied subjects, such as cognitive psychology and philosophies of mind and language, were crucial in launching and sustaining the “cognitive revolution.” Chomsky’s analysis of the harmful effect of economic elites on U.S. internal politics, foreign policy, and intellectual culture earned him a worldwide following as a political dissident.
Chomsky, who grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, went to an experimental elementary school where he was encouraged to pursue his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. He penned an editorial for his school newspaper when he was ten years old, bemoaning the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the advent of fascism in Europe. Chomsky’s research at the time and over the next few years was detailed enough to serve as the foundation for “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (1969), a critical assessment of a period study by historian Gabriel Jackson.
Chomsky began conducting solo visits to New York City when he was 13 years old, where he obtained books for his voracious reading appetite and connected with a thriving working-class Jewish intellectual community. The discussion enriched and confirmed the beliefs that would underpin his political views for the rest of his life: that all people are capable of comprehending political and economic issues and making their own decisions on that basis; that all people need and derive satisfaction from acting freely and creatively and associating with others; and that authority—whether political, economic, or religious—that fails to pass a rigorous test of rational justification is illegitimate. The optimum form of political organization, according to Chomsky’s anarchosyndicalism, or libertarian socialism, is one in which all people have the maximum opportunity to engage in cooperative activity with others and to participate in all community decisions that concern them.
Chomsky enrolled to the University of Pennsylvania as a 16-year-old in 1945, but found little that piqued his interest. He pondered quitting university after two years to pursue his political interests, possibly by living on a kibbutz. After meeting linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American inventors of structural linguistics, who shared Chomsky’s political values, he altered his mind. Chomsky studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon, as well as mathematics with Nathan Fine, who was teaching at Harvard University at the time, on Harris’s recommendation. Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to language study and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the philosophy of science and transformed them into something new in his 1951 master’s thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and
especially in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), written while he was a junior fellow at Harvard (1951–55) and published in part in 1975.
Whereas Goodman believed that the mind is largely a blank slate at birth, and that language learning is essentially a conditioned response to linguistic stimuli, Chomsky believed that the basic principles of all languages, as well as the basic range of concepts they are used to express, are innately represented in the human mind, and that language learning consists of the unconscious construction of a grammar from these principles in accordance with cues. Whereas Harris saw language research as a taxonomic classification of “facts,” Chomsky saw it as the discovery, through the use of formal systems, of the innate principles that allow toddlers to learn language quickly and adults to apply it in everyday situations.
Moreover, whereas Goodman believed that linguistic behavior is regular and caused (in the sense of being a specific response to specific stimuli), Chomsky claimed that it is incited by social and discourse context but essentially uncaused—enabled by a distinct set of innate principles but innovative, or “creative.” Chomsky argued that a comprehensive study of linguistic behavior would be unlikely to emerge as a result of this. Chomsky believes that the use of language is due to a “creative principle,” not a causal one, as did the 17th-century French philosopher Réne Descartes.
Harris dismissed Chomsky’s work, and Goodman rejected it when he learned Chomsky would not accept his behaviorism. A great majority of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists shared these reactions, with minor variances. Despite the fact that several linguists and psychologists finally came to embrace Chomsky’s essential assumptions about language and the mind, most philosophers remained skeptical.
After submitting one chapter of LSLT as a doctoral dissertation(Transformational Analysis), Chomsky got a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. In 1956, he was appointed to a teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was required to spend half of his time working on a machine translation project, despite his open reservations about its chances of success. Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle were asked to establish a new graduate program in linguistics after the university was impressed by his book Syntactic Structures (1957), a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to MIT undergraduates. The program quickly attracted several outstanding scholars, including Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul Postal.
Chomsky’s critique of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, published in 1959, is widely regarded as the definitive rejection of behaviorist explanations of language learning. Chomsky’s approach to the study of language and mind gained widespread popularity within linguistics starting in the mid-1960s, with the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966), albeit there were many theoretical variants within the paradigm. Chomsky joined MIT in 1961 as a full professor, then as the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1966 and Institute Professor in 1976. In 2002, he became a professor emeritus.
2) Main Themes in His Works:
Plato’s Problem:
Philosophical rationalism’s central discovery is that human creativity is inextricably linked to an inbuilt system of concept creation and combining. Chomsky claims that children show “ordinary” creativity—appropriate and original use of complexes of concepts—from the time they are able to speak. When they play, innovate, and speak to and understand each other, they bring hundreds of rich and articulate notions to bear with language. They appear to know far more than they have been taught—or could possibly learn. As a result, such knowledge must be innate in some way. However, to claim it is innate does not imply that the infant is aware of it or that it exists fully developed at birth. It simply means that it is produced by the child’s concept generation and combination system, in line with the system’s biological and physical development courses, in response to specific types of environmental input.
Despite the lack or even absence of substantial evidence and teaching in their early years, children have been observed to acquire both concepts and language with surprising ease and speed. The argument from the “poverty of the stimulus” leads to the conclusion that much of what they acquire must be innate. The “basic difficulty” of linguistics, as Chomsky put it in LSLT, is defining precisely what infants acquire and how they acquire it. He referred to this as “Plato’s problem” in his work, a reference to Plato’s attempt (in his dialogue the Meno) to explain how an illiterate youngster may solve geometrical problems with sufficient urging but no specific instruction or background in mathematics. Chomsky, unlike Plato, believed that solving Plato’s issue is a task for natural science, particularly cognitive science and linguistics.
Philosophy of Mind and Human Nature:
Human conceptual and linguistic innovation requires the use of various mental faculties as well as some form of mental organization. Of course, it is dependent on perceptual-articulatory and conceptual-intentional systems, but it is also dependent on many other factors, such as vision. Chomsky claims that the mind is made up of a large number of intrinsic “modules,” one of which is language. Each module operates automatically, without individual control, according to a separate, domain-specific set of rules that take determinate inputs from some modules and produce definitive outputs for others. These procedures were previously known as “derivations,” but they are now known as “computations.” Perception, cognition, and a wide range of other cognitive outputs are the result of complex interactions between the many modules.
The language module appears to be involved in the coordination of other modules’ output. Language’s generative—specifically, recursive—properties allow people to combine arbitrary notions in an infinite number of ways, effectively expanding the spectrum of human thought. Humans can say almost anything and cooperate and plan with one other when concepts and sounds are combined in lexical items (words). The fact that the language faculty allows for such
flexibility shows that the emergence of language in human evolutionary history occurred at the same time as the creation of other recursive cognitive capacities, such as quantification.
Chomsky and his coauthors Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch separated the language faculty in a fashion that reflected Chomsky’s earlier difference between competence and performance in a 2002 article titled “The Language Faculty.” The recursive computational system is the faculty of language in the “narrow” sense (FLN), whereas the faculty in the broad sense (FLB) encompasses perceptual-articulatory systems (for sound and sign) and conceptual-intentional systems (for meaning). At the computational system’s interfaces, these are the systems with which it interacts. In terms of evolution, the authors point out that while the perceptual-articulatory and conceptual-intentional systems have homologues and analogues in other species, the computational system, or FLN, does not. Although some animal cognitive systems, such as bird navigational systems, may use recursion, there is no computing system that compares to FLN, especially none that links sound and meaning and produces limitless sentential “output.” FLN is arguably what distinguishes humans from other animals in terms of cognition.
As previously stated, UG, or the language faculty strictly defined (FLN), could be made up exclusively of Merge and possibly some language-specific features. This begs the question of what FLN’s biological foundation must be. What aspect of human biology, or the human genome, distinguishes FLN from other species? Chomsky pointed out in a 2005 paper titled “Three Factors in Language Design” that organic development and growth entails more than biological (genomic) specification and environmental input. A third issue is the general growth constraints imposed by physical structural limitations and data analysis constraints, including those that may apply to computational systems (such as language). A bee’s DNA, for example, does not need to direct it to form hexagonal hives. The lattice is a physics requirement because it is the most stable and efficient of the applicable structures. Similar arguments can be made concerning the human brain’s development, structure, and operation.
If the parameters of UG are determined by third factors rather than language-specific sections of the human genome, the only language-specific information carried by the genome would be an instruction set for developing a single principle, Merge (which takes external and internal forms). If this is the case, then the emergence of language may have been caused by a single genetic mutation in a single person, as long as the mutation was transmissible to offspring. The necessary genes would, without a doubt, provide significant benefits to any human who possessed them. A saltational account like this is supported by evidence: Humans began to examine the heavens, to draw and paint, to wonder, and to find explanations for natural phenomena between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, and the exodus from Africa began. This amazing cognitive awakening could have been triggered by the arrival of the computing system of language.
Politics of Noam Chomsky:
Chomsky’s political ideas appear to be bolstered in part by his approach to the study of language and cognition, which suggests that the ability to be creative is a fundamental aspect of human
nature. Chomsky frequently emphasizes, however, that there is only a “abstract” link between his linguistic theories and his politics. A tight link would have to be based on a fully established science of human nature, which could identify or derive essential human wants. However, such a science does not exist. Even if there was, the link would be predicated on the notion that the best form of political structure is one that optimizes human needs fulfilment. Then there’s the matter of figuring out what actual steps should be taken to meet those demands. Clearly, scientific methods cannot be used to answer such problems.
Chomsky was always engaged in politics, but it wasn’t until 1964 that he felt forced to offer his voice to protests against the United States’ engagement in the Vietnam War (or, as he prefers to call it, the United States’ invasion of Vietnam), putting his career and personal safety at danger. He claims that the Vietnam War was only one in a succession of instances in which the US used military might to gain or solidify economic control over ever-larger swaths of the developing world. In a similar vein, he sees the domestic political landscapes of the United States and other big capitalist countries as arenas in which giant firms and their elite management struggle to defend and improve their economic and political privileges.
This effort necessitates a form of “propaganda” in democracies like the United States, where ordinary citizens’ compliance cannot be guaranteed by force. The powerful must persuade ordinary citizens that vesting economic control of society in the hands of a small minority of the population is to their benefit. Part of this initiative entails recruiting the help of “intellectuals,” or people who gather, transmit, and interpret political and economic data for the general public (mostly journalists and academics). Unfortunately, Chomsky claims, this endeavor has proven to be quite simple.
Chomsky presented case after case in one of his first political essays, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1967), in which intellectuals in positions of power, including prominent journalists, failed to tell the truth or purposefully lied to the public in order to conceal the goals and consequences of the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Chomsky and economist Edward Herman analyzed the reporting of journalists in the mainstream (i.e., corporate-owned) media on the basis of statistically careful studies of historical and contemporary examples in their two-volume work The Political Economy of Human Rights (1979) and later in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). Their research revealed stunning evidence of data skewing, information filtering, and blatant fabrication in favor of ideas that helped to explain corporations’ dominance in U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics.
These and other studies used matched cases to demonstrate how very identical events can be reported in very different ways depending on whether and how state and corporate interests are impacted. Chomsky and Herman, for example, linked reporting on Indonesia’s armed invasion and occupation of East Timor with reporting on the communist Khmer Rouge regime’s behavior in Cambodia in The Political Economy of Human Rights. In both situations, the events occurred in roughly the same part of the world and at roughly the same time (the mid- to late 1970s). The number of East Timorese tortured and murdered by the Indonesian military was roughly equal to the number of Cambodians tortured and murdered by the Khmer Rouge as a percentage of the population.
Despite this, the American mainstream media paid far greater attention to the second case (almost 1,000 column inches in the New York Times) than to the first (about 70 column inches). Furthermore, there were many evident incidents of exaggeration and fabrication in reporting on the Khmer Rouge’s operations, whereas reporting on Indonesia’s actions portrayed them as essentially benign. Exaggerated accusations of atrocities helped the US continue the Cold War and secure and increase its access to the region’s natural resources (particularly East Timorese oil deposits) through client nations in the instance of the Khmer Rouge. Indonesia, on the other hand, was a state that benefited greatly from US military and economic aid.
While Americans were powerless to stop the Khmer Rouge, they could change their country’s support for Indonesia by voting their government out of office. However, given the media’s favorable coverage of the invasion, it’s quite doubtful that they’d be inspired to do so. This and other examples, according to Chomsky, show that prominent journalists and other intellectuals in the United States essentially serve as “commissars” for elite interests. In his book Necessary Illusions, he wrote: “The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.” (1998).
3) His Influence:
Chomsky began the “cognitive revolution” in linguistics, according to McGilvray, and he is largely responsible for establishing the subject as a formal, natural science, shifting it away from the procedural form of structural linguistics that dominated in the mid-twentieth century. Chomsky has been dubbed “the father of modern linguistics” by some. Linguist John Lyons went on to say that Chomskyan linguistics has become “the most dynamic and influential” school of thinking in the field within a few decades of its publication. His work had a significant impact on philosophy by the 1970s, and a poll at Minnesota State University Moorhead selected Syntactic Structures as the single most influential work in cognitive science. In addition, his work on automata theory and the Chomsky hierarchy has gained widespread recognition in computer science, and he is frequently mentioned in computational linguistics.
Chomsky’s criticisms of behaviorism had a significant role in the demise of behaviorist psychology, and he is widely considered as one of the key pioneers of cognitive science. Some evolutionary psychology arguments are based on his findings; Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the focus of a Columbia University study on animal language acquisition, was named after Chomsky in honor of his belief that language acquisition is a uniquely human skill.
Chomsky’s work helped Donald Knuth merge his interests in mathematics, linguistics, and computer science, according to ACM Turing Award winner Donald Knuth himself. Another Turing Award winner, IBM computer scientist John Backus, used some of Chomsky’s ideas to help design FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level computer programming language. In his 1984 Nobel talk, immunologist Niels Kaj Jerne applied Chomsky’s generative grammar theory to the immune response process. Chomsky’s generative grammar theory has had an impact on music theory and analysis.
Chomsky is one of the most widely quoted authors, both living and deceased. From 1980 to 1992, he was cited more than any other living scholar in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. During the same time period, Chomsky was heavily cited in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Science Citation Index. The figures demonstrate that “he is very widely read across fields and that his work is used by researchers across disciplines… it seems that you can’t produce a paper without citing Noam Chomsky,” according to the librarian who did the study.
Chomsky’s political publications, which much exceed his linguistics writings, have earned him the title of “most-quoted living author.” Wolfgang B. Sperlich, a biographer of Chomsky, describes him as “He has been called a “genuine people’s hero; an inspiration for struggles all over the world for that basic decency known as freedom.” Journalist John Pilger has described him as “one of the most notable contemporary champions of the people.” He is dependably supportive of a lot of individuals on the margins—activists and movements.”
“One of the best, most radical public intellectuals of our time,” according to Arundhati Roy, and “one of the most prominent challenges of unjust authority and delusions,” according to Edward Said. Chomsky had become a “guru” for the world’s anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements by the turn of the century, according to Fred Halliday. The propaganda model of media criticism that he and Herman developed has been widely accepted in radical media critiques and adopted to some extent in mainstream media criticism, as well as having a significant impact on the growth of alternative media such as radio, publishers, and the Internet, all of which have helped to disseminate his work.
Chomsky’s broad criticisms of American foreign policy and the legitimacy of American power have sparked debate. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) watched his activities, according to a document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the US government. The CIA denied doing so for years. Chomsky’s files were also deleted by the CIA at some stage, potentially in violation of federal law. At MIT and when lecturing on the Middle East, he has frequently had covert police security, but he has refused uniformed police protection.
Chomsky has been labelled an anti-Semite and a traitor to the Jewish people because of his criticism of Israel. Werner Cohn branded Chomsky “the most important benefactor” of the neo-Nazi movement, criticizing Chomsky’s defense of people’ right to engage in Holocaust denial on the grounds that freedom of speech must be granted to all opinions. He was labelled a Holocaust denier by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who described him as a “dupe of intellectual pride so overweening that he is incapable of distinguishing between totalitarian and democratic societies, oppressors and victims.” Chomsky, for his part, has asserted that the ADL is dominated by “Stalinist types” who reject Israeli democracy. Chomsky has been labelled a “false prophet of the left” by lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who has called Chomsky “a total fraud” who is “on a crazy crusade, investing much of his life to trying to damage my reputation.”
Chomsky signed a letter condemning the abuse of freedom of speech in the emirate, referring to the detention of human rights campaigner Ahmed Mansoor, in February 2020, before attending
the 2020 Hay Festival in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Authors Stephen Fry and Jung Chang were among the others who signed the petition.
Chomsky was designated one of the “makers of the twentieth century” by the London Times in 1970. In The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll, sponsored jointly by American journal Foreign Policy and British magazine Prospect, he was elected the world’s leading public intellectual. Chomsky was named one of the world’s greatest heroes by New Statesman readers in 2006.
