Royal Road to...: Responsible Intellectual- Noam Chomsky

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As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

You never need an argument against the use of violence; you need an argument for it.

-Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is a US linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and political theorist and activist, and professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect. In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time". Alongside his career as a linguist, Chomsky has been active in left-wing politics. He has been extremely prolific as a writer: his web-site in 2003 listed 33 book publications in linguistics (broadly construed), and although the individuation of his political books is complicated, their number definitely exceeds 40. According to a 1992 tabulation of sources from the previous 12 years in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was the most frequently-cited person alive, and one of the eight most frequently-cited authors of all time.

Professor Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At that time his family was the only Jewish family around. He grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. According to him “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”. His undergraduate and graduate years were spent at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, "Transformational Analysis." The major theoretical viewpoints of the dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, which was published in 1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published in 1975. Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others.

He is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language" (in 1987 and 1989). In 2005, Chomsky received an honorary fellowship from the Literary and Historical Society. Chomsky received The Uppsala University (Sweden) Honorary Doctor's degree in commemoration of Carolus Linnaeus in 2007. He received the President's Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway in February 2008. In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany.

Professor Chomsky has received honorary degrees from University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Harvard University, University of Calcutta, and Universidad Nacional De Colombia.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Social Sciences and Faculty Advisory Board of MIT Harvard Research Journal.

On January 22, 2010, a special honorary concert for Chomsky was given at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The concert, attended by Chomsky and dozens of his family and friends, featured music composed by Edward Manukyan and speeches by Chomsky's colleagues, including David Pesetsky of MIT and Gennaro Chierchia, head of the linguistics department at Harvard University

Chomsky has described his own politics variously as anarchist, anarchosyndicalist, and libertarian socialist, allying himself with both classical anarchism and the critical libertarian Marxist and left communist traditions equally hostile to orthodox Marxism and Leninism. Chomsky maintains that these currents represent the logical development of the Enlightenment precepts of rational and critical inquiry engaged with the social world of which they are part. Chomsky's position on achieving small victories in the short term which "expand the floor of the cage" -- for example, struggles to defend universal public services from privatization -- has not been without controversy, with some anarchists accusing him of reformism and in some cases "statism." Chomsky has countered such accusations with the response that short-term victories aimed at expanding the cage in which we are trapped by capital and state should be seen as "preliminaries to dismantling it."

In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", in The New York Review of Books. This was followed by his 1969 book, American Power and the New Mandarins, a collection of essays that established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have made him a controversial figure: largely shunned by the mainstream media in the United States. In particular, he believes that the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".

Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, 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.

He contends that there isn't much difference between slavery, and renting one's self to an owner, or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that destroys and undermines individual freedom. He holds workers should own and control their own workplace.

Chomsky has strongly criticized 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 under Augusto Pinochet, and argues that this results in massive human rights violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the Contras in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorism.

Chomsky has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media; he opposes censorship and refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeled him. He has argued that the mass media in the United States largely serve as a propaganda arm and "bought priesthood" 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 Lippmann, Chomsky along with his coauthor, Edward S. Herman, has written that the American media manufactures consent among the public. Chomsky has condemned the 2010 Supreme Court ruling revoking the limits on campaign finance, calling it "corporate takeover of democracy." Edward S. Herman 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.

Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language to be misleading, and referring to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use.

Chomsky is critical of the American state capitalist system and big business, he describes himself as a socialist who sympathizes with anarcho-syndicalism, but is strongly critical of Leninist branches of socialism. He also believes that 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 Russell and John Dewey, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."

Chomsky has stated “America’s advances, particularly in the area of free speech, 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 has made major criticisms of the Israeli government, he supports secularism. Chomsky hesitated before publishing work critical of Israeli policies while his parents were alive, because he "knew it would hurt them" he says, "mostly because of their friends, who reacted hysterically to views like those expressed in my work."

Linguistics Journey

He started his linguistic journey by challenging structural linguistics and introduced transformational grammar with his Syntactic Structures, a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75),. This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar although it is also related to Rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.

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 they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap. 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.

Some psychologists and psycholinguists, 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. Other critics have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.

Given the aims of Chomskyan linguistic theory, the proper objects of study are the I-languages internalized by native speakers, rather than public E(xternal)-languages used by populations. Chomsky denies that public E-languages are interesting objects of scientific study. Indeed he denies that E-languages can be coherently specified as they simply do not exist. The proper objects of inquiry are I-languages; ‘I’ standing for intensional, internal and individual. An I-language is individual in that each speaker has one. This focus turns the common wisdom on its head. E-languages like English, Swahili and so forth are (at best) radical idealizations for Chomsky, or (at worst) incoherent pseudo-objects. At best, E-languages are the intersection of the common properties of various I-languages. Thus, for example, it is not that speakers communicate because they have a language in common; rather wherever I-languages overlap communication is possible.

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars 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 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 compiler construction and automata theory.

His contribution to psychology is also noteworthy. Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature.

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. Like optical illusions cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions, this model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process.

Chomsky’s models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results. Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures 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!". The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate 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".