Noam Chomsky
Noam Avram Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is a US professor of linguistics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and creator of the Chomsky
hierarchy, a classification of formal languages. Outside of his linguistic
work, Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist and is widely
known for his left-wing political writings.
Short biography
Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar
William Chomsky. Starting in 1945, he studied philosophy, linguistics, and
mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. There he studied under Zellig
Harris, a professor of linguistics whose political views he had some
sympathy with. He received his Ph.D. from Penn in 1955, having conducted
most of his research the previous four years at Harvard University. In his
doctoral thesis he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas,
elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, possibly his best
known work in the field.
After receiving his doctorate, Chomsky taught at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology for nineteen years (he now holds the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of
Modern Languages and Linguistics there). It was during this time that he
became more publicly engaged in politics, arguing against American
involvement in the Vietnam War from around 1965. In 1969 he published
American Power and the New Mandarins, a book of essays on the same subject.
Since then, he has been well known for his radical political views,
lecturing on politics all over the world, and writing several other books on
the subject. His beliefs, broadly classified as libertarian socialism, have
earned him both a large following among the radical Left, as well as many
detractors. He has continued to write and teach on linguistics also.
Contributions to Linguistics
Syntactic Structures was an elaboration on his doctoral thesis from 1955, in
which he introduces transformational grammars. The theory takes utterances
(words, phrases, and sentences) to correspond to abstract "surface
structures," which in turn correspond to more abstract "deep structures."
(The hard and fast distinction between surface and deep structure is absent
in current versions of the theory.) Transformational rules, along with
phrase structure rules and other structural principles, govern both the
creation and interpretation of utterances. With a limited set of grammar
rules and a finite set of terms, man is able to produce an infinite number
of sentences, including sentences nobody has ever said before. The
capability to structure our utterances in this way is innate, a part of the
genetic endowment of human beings, and is called universal grammar. We are
largely unconscious of these structural principles, as we are of most other
biological and cognitive properties.
Recent theories of Chomsky's (such as his Minimalist Program) make strong
claims regarding universal grammar -- that the grammatical principles
underlying languages are completely fixed and innate, 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) and morphemes, and determine the appropriate parameter
settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.
This approach is motivated by the astonishing pace at which children 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 is
being employed).
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating
language development in children, but many of the predictions made by his
theories have been repudiated by recent experiments in the field. This has
led many researchers to challenge the Chomskyan or nativist theory of child
language acquisition, proposing instead the emergentist or connectionist
theory, based more around general processing mechanisms in the brain.
The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, is
dominant among linguists but has been challenged by many, especially those
working outside of the United States. One common criticism concerns the
almost exclusive focus of Chomskyan linguists on English and a few other
European languages. Chomskyan syntactic analyses are often highly abstract,
and are based heavily on careful investigation of the border between
grammatical and ungrammatical constructs in a language. (Compare this to the
so-called pathological cases that play a similarly important role in
mathematics.) Such grammaticality judgments can only be made accurately by a
native speaker, however, and thus for pragmatic reasons such linguists
usually focus on their own native languages, usually English, French,
German, or Italian. Chomskyan linguists assert that this focus is
theoretically sound since, consistent with the principles and parameters
approach, all languages have the same underlying principles, and thus you
need study only one, or a few, languages to determine those principles.
Unfortunately, in practice generative grammar analyses often break down
completely when applied to languages other than the ones that they are based
on. This is one of the prime motivations behind an alternative, approach,
the functional-typological approach or linguistic typology (often associated
with Joseph Greenberg), which is explicitly cross-linguistic and is based
around surveying as wide a variety of the world's languages as possible,
classifying the variation seen, and forming theories based on the results of
this classification.
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal language, and
whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human
language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes 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 modelling some aspects of human language requires a more complex
formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modelling others.
For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English
morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition
to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become
important in computer science, as it has important ties to and isomorphisms
with automata theory.
His seminal work in phonology was The sound pattern of English. He published
it together with Morris Halle. This work is considered outdated, and he does
not publish on phonology anymore.
Contributions to Psychology
Chomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for psychology and
its fundamental direction in the 20th century. His theory of a universal
grammar was a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of
the time and had major consequences for understanding how language is
learned by children and what, exactly, is the ability to interpret language.
The more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the
stronger claims made by the principles and parameters approach described
above) are now generally accepted.
In 1959, Chomsky published a long-circulated critique of B.F. Skinner's
Verbal Behavior, a book in which the leader of the behaviorist psychologists
that had dominated psychology in the 20th century argued that language was
merely a "behavior". Skinner argued that language, like any other behavior
-- from a dog salivating in anticipation of dinner, to a master pianist's
performance -- could be attributed to "training by reward and penalty over
time." Language, according to Skinner, was 100 percent learned by cues and
conditioning from the world around the language-learner.
Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the
way for a revolution against the behaviorist doctrine that had governed
psychology. 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 other 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. The
former view had denied even this, arguing that there were only
"stimulus-response" relationships like "If you ask me if I want X, I will
say yes". By contrast, Chomsky showed that the common way of understanding
the mind, as having things like beliefs and even unconscious mental states,
had to be right. Second, he argued that large parts of what the adult mind
can do are "innate". While no child is born automatically able to speak a
language, all are born with a powerful language learning ability which
allows them to soak up several languages very quickly in their early years.
Subsequent psychologists have extended this thesis far beyond language; the
mind is no longer considered a "blank slate" at birth.
Finally, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" 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).
The 1984 Nobelist in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, 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".
Criticism of post-modern views towards science
Chomsky has written a strong refutation of deconstructionist 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 postmodernism; what I understand is
largely truism 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 notes that critiques of "white male science" are much like the
anti-Semitic attacks against "Jewish physics" (a reference to the
terminology used by the Nazis to denigrate research done by Jewish
scientists.)
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.
Political Views
Chomsky is one of the most well-known figures of the American left. His
traditional definition of himself is a anarchist, a political philosophy he
summarizes as seeking out all forms of hierarchy and attempting to eliminate
them if they are unjustified. Unlike many anarchists, Chomsky does not
always object to electoral politics; he has even endorsed candidates for
office. Chomsky has also stated that he considers himself to be a
conservative (Chomsky's Politics, p. 188, note Ch.6 #24), presumably of the
Classical liberal variety. He has further defined himself as a Zionist;
although, he notes that his definition of Zionism is considered by most to
be anti-Zionism these days; the result of what he perceives to have been a
shift (since the 1940s) in the meaning of Zionism (Chomsky Reader). In a
C-Span Book TV intereview, he stated:
"I have always supported a Jewish ethnic homeland in Palestine. That is
different from a Jewish state. Theres a strong case to be made for an
ethnic homeland, but as to whether there should be a Jewish state, or a
Muslim state, or a Christian state, or a white state--that's entirely
another matter."
Overall, Chomsky is not fond of traditional political titles and categories
and prefers to let his views speak for themselves. His main modes of actions
include writing magazine articles and books and making speaking engagements.
He has a large following of supporters worldwide, leading him to schedule
speaking engagements sometimes up to two years in advance. He is
particularly popular among many groups of university students in the United
States and Canada. He also has a large group of critics, both conservative
and liberal, as well as some anarchists, who, although they normally agree
with his political analysis, consider his aforementioned support of
electoral politics to go against their principles.
Criticism of the United States
He has been a consistent and outspoken critic of the United States
government. In his book 9-11, a series of interviews about the September 11,
2001 terrorist attack, he claims -- as he has done before -- that the United
States government is the leading terrorist state in modern times. He has
criticized the US government for its involvement in the Vietnam War and the
larger Indochina conflict; its interference in Central and South American
countries, and its military support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
Chomsky focuses his most intense criticism on official friends of the United
States government while criticizing official enemies like the former Soviet
Union and the North Vietnamese Army only in passing. He explains this by the
following principle: it is more important to evaluate actions which you have
more possibility of affecting.
Chomsky has repeatedly emphasized his theory that much of the United States'
foreign policy is based on the "threat of a good example" (which he says is
another name for the domino theory). The "threat of a good example" is that
a country could successfully develop independently from United States'
influences, thus presenting a model for other countries, including countries
in which the United States has strong economic interests. This, Chomsky
says, has prompted the United States to repeatedly intervene to quell
"socialist" or other "independence" movements in regions of the world where
it has no significant economic or safety interests. In one of his most
famous works, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky uses this particular
theory as an explantion for the United States' interventions in Guatemala,
Laos, Nicaragua, and Grenada.
Chomsky believes the US government's Cold War policies were not shaped by
anti-Soviet paranoia, but rather to preserve the United States' ideological
dominance of the world. As he wrote in Uncle Sam: "...What the US wants is
'stability,' meaning security for the "upper classes and large foreign enterprises."
Chomsky and Socialism
Chomsky is deeply opposed to the system of "corporate state capitalism"
practiced by the United States and its allies. Chomsky instead believes in
the superiority of "control of production by the workers themselves, not
owners and managers who rule them and control all decisions", refering to
this as "real socialism". At the same time, he denounced the Soviet Union
for running a brutal authoritarian police state while claiming to be
socialist, and viewed the evolution of the Soviet state as a natural growth
of the Bolshevik ideology. He calls Soviet-style Communism as "fake
socialism," and said that contrary to what many claim, the collapse of the
Soviet Union should be regarded "a small victory for socialism."
Instead of a capitalist system in which people are "wage slaves" or an
authoritarian system in which decisions are made by a centralized committee,
in For Reasons of State Chomsky advocates a society with no paid labor. He
argues that a nation's populace should be free to pursue jobs of their
choosing. People will be free to do as they like, and the work they
voluntarily choose will be both "rewarding in itself" and "socially useful."
Society would be run under a system of peaceful anarchism, with no "state"
or "government" institutions.
Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream
media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and
its role in supporting big business and government interests. He once
described America's media as being a "mirror image" of the media in the
Soviet Union, claiming that both nations have equally tightly controlled
presses that are not allowed to express dissent or divergence from
government (or "ruling class") policy.
His book Manufacturing Consent -- The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
co-authored with Edward Herman, explores this topic in depth, though most of
his work incorporates some aspect of this analysis.
Chomsky and the Middle East
Chomsky "grew up...in the Jewish-Zionist cultural tradition" (Peck, p. 11).
His father was one of the foremost scholars of the Hebrew language and
taught at a religious school. Chomsky has also had a long fascination with
and involvement in left-wing Zionist politics. As he described:
"I was deeply interested in...Zionist affairs and activities -- or what
was then called 'Zionist,' though the same ideas and concerns are now
called 'anti-Zionist.' I was interested in socialist, binationalist
options for Palestine, and in the kibbutzim and the whole cooperative
labor system that had developed in the Jewish settlement there (the
Yishuv)...The vague ideas I had at the time [1947] were to go to
Palestine, perhaps to a kibbutz, to try to become involved in efforts
at Arab-Jewish cooperation within a socialist framework, opposed to the
deeply antidemocratic concept of a jewish state (a position that was
considered well within the mainstream of Zionism)." (Peck, p. 7)
He is extremely critical of the policies of Israel towards the Palestinians
and ethnic minority Jewish populations within Israel. Among many articles
and books, his book The Fateful Triangle is considered one of the premier
texts among those who oppose Israeli treatment of Palestinians and American
support for Israel. He has also condemned Israel's role in "guiding state
terrorism" for selling weapons to Latin American countries that he
characterizes as U.S. puppet states, e.g. Guatemala in the 1970s. (What
Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chapter 2.4) In addition, he has repeatedly and
vehemently condemned the United States for its military and diplomatic
support for Israel, and sectors of the American Jewish community for their
role in obtaining this support. For example, he says of the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL):
"The leading official monitor of anti-Semitism, the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai Brith, interprets anti-Semitism as unwillingness to
conform to its requirements with regard to support for Israeli
authorities.... The logic is straightforward: Anti-Semitism is
opposition to the interests of Israel (as the ADL sees them).
"The ADL has virtually abandoned its earlier role as a civil rights
organization, becoming 'one of the main pillars' of Israeli propaganda
in the U.S., as the Israeli press casually describes it, engaged in
surveillance, blacklisting, compilation of FBI-style files circulated
to adherents for the purpose of defamation, angry public responses to
criticism of Israeli actions, and so on. These efforts, buttressed by
insinuations of anti-Semitism or direct accusations, are intended to
deflect or undermine opposition to Israeli policies, including Israel's
refusal, with U.S. support, to move towards a general political
settlement." Necessary Illusions
Middle East Politics, speech Columbia University 1999
Accusations of anti-semitism
Partially because of these criticisms, Chomsky has been accused of being
anti-semitic on many occasions. The most outspoken of his critics include
journalist David Horowitz, who has toured college campuses distributing
anti-Chomsky pamphlets, attorney/professor Alan Dershowitz, with whom
Chomsky has engaged in many verbal battles through the media, and sociology
professor emeritus Werner Cohn, who has written an entire book; Partners in
Hate, about Chomsky's relationship to Faurisson (below). One of the most
common charges is that the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
is theoretical, and in practice anti-Zionism is a manifestation of
anti-Semitism.
Chomsky's support for Israel Shahak, author of Jewish History, Jewish
Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years - a book that claims that
Judaism is a fundamentally chauvinistic religion, has led to more
accusations of anti-semitism.
Chomsky rejects charges of anti-Semitism, citing that the definition
presented by Israeli apologists is itself racist and ethnocentric. Often
speaking out against bigotry of all forms, including anti-Semitism, Chomsky
is nevertheless often a victim of such accusations, which he dismisses as
"ad-hominem attacks" and "typical propaganda."
The Faurisson Affair
In 1979, Robert Faurisson, a French professor, wrote a book claiming that
the Nazis did not have gas chambers, did not attempt a genocide of Jews (or
any other groups), and that the "myth" of the gas chambers had been put
forth by Zionist swindlers for the benefit of the state of Israel and to the
detriment of Germans and Palestinians. (Hitchens, 1985) The Chorus and the
Cassandra.
Shortly thereafter, Chomsky signed a petition condemning the treatment of
Faurisson on account of his writings. (Faurisson had been beaten up by
students, then suspended from teaching by his university on the grounds that
the university could not guarantee his safety. Later he was charged in court
with "falsification of history".) A furore soon arose over the wording of
the petition, which referred to Faurisson's "extensive historical research"
and described his conclusions as "findings". Chomsky's critics saw this as a
defence of Faurisson's opinions and not merely of his right to state them.
In reply, Chomsky wrote an essay entitled Some Elementary Comments on The
Rights of Freedom of Expression, which dealt mainly with the freedom to
conduct and publish unpopular research, but also stated that he had not
found evidence of anti-Semitism in the parts of Faurisson's work that he had
reviewed. Chomsky writes:
"Faurisson's conclusions are diametrically opposed to views I hold and
have frequently expressed in print (for example, in my book Peace in
the Middle East?, where I describe the Holocaust as "the most fantastic
outburst of collective insanity in human history"). But it is
elementary that freedom of expression (including academic freedom) is
not to be restricted to views of which one approves, and that it is
precisely in the case of views that are almost universally despised and
condemned that this right must be most vigorously defended. It is easy
enough to defend those who need no defense or to join in unanimous (and
often justified) condemnation of a violation of civil rights by some
official enemy.
Chomsky granted permission for this essay to be used for any purpose; it was
used as the preface for a book by Faurisson. (Later Chomsky requested that
Faurisson cease using it, but that request was declined.) Chomsky went on to
write:
"I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas
chambers or even denial of the Holocaust. Nor would there be
anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the Holocaust
(whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited,
viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see
no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson's work" (quoted in
Noam Chomsky's Search for the Truth).
Chomsky's writings sparked a great furor. Many people held that Faurisson's
statements were the archetype of anti-Semitism, and that the logical
conclusion of Chomsky's statement would be that Nazism was not anti-semitic.
For example, Deborah Lipstadt, author of a book about holocaust denial,
wrote in Dimensions, the journal of the ADL:
"Intellectuals are hardly immune from irrational, mystical thinking.
Some do so in the name of "free speech," free inquiry," or
"intellectual freedom." It is this commitment to free inquiry and the
power of mythical thinking that explains, at least in part, how
revisionists have attracted leading figures and institutions. Noam
Chomsky is probably the best known among them....Though Alfred Kazin
was right on target when he recently described Chomsky as a "dupe of
intellectual pride so overweening that he is incapable of making
distinctions between totalitarian and democratic societies, between
oppressors and victims," Chomsky's argument shocked many people,
including those who thought they were inured to Chomsky's antics.
Chomsky's example shows why the dangers of free inquiry should be taken
seriously. [3]
She calls the belief that all arguments are equally legitimate a "convoluted
notion" and states that Holocaust deniers are not interested in truth, but
"motivated by racism, extremism, and virulent anti-Semitism."
In His Right to Say It, published in The Nation, Chomsky states: "It seems
to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these
issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression
for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of
the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers. " [4] His
argument stressed the conceptual distinction between endorsing someone's
view and defending his right to say it. Insofar as the latter does not imply
the former, condemning censorhip should not be read as espousing the
censored view.
Other criticisms
Chomsky has been involved in many very public disagreements over policy and
scholarship. For example, when Chomsky and Herman wrote After the Cataclysm,
Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, a book
claiming that American media used "unsubstantiated" refugee testimonies,
focused uniquely on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge Pol Pot regime, and
ignored the US atrocities in Cambodia which preceded and led to the Khmer
Rouge taking power, many attacked him as an apologist for those atrocities.
He was also often criticized as being a conspiracy theorist, for his often
elaborate explanations of the US government's "concealed" motivations, which
some critics view as unsubstantiated.
Quotes Regarding Chomsky
* "In all American history, no one's writings are more
unsettling...Chomsky is among our greatest dissenters." -- James Peck
