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Cognitive revolution in the human sciences
- Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind.
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Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind.
- Overview
- Life and basic ideas
Noam Chomsky was raised in Philadelphia and attended an experimental elementary school where he could freely explore his intellectual interests. At age 10 he wrote a school newspaper editorial bemoaning the rise of fascism in Europe. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania at age 16 and developed an interest in structural linguistics.
How did Noam Chomsky influence the field of linguistics?
Noam Chomsky’s linguistic research in the 1950s aimed to understand the tools and means through which children acquire language. He proposed a system of principles and parameters that suggested a child’s innate understanding of syntax and semantics. Although controversial among linguists, Chomsky’s theorization revolutionized and reoriented academic approaches to language.
What are Noam Chomsky’s politics?
Noam Chomsky, an anarcho-syndicalist, orients his politics around maximizing communal decision-making and cooperative activity for all. Chomsky views the accurate provision of information to the public as necessary for societal engagement, and he is deeply critical of intellectuals and journalists who conceal information in order to protect cultural and economic elites.
Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) American theoretical linguist whose work from the 1950s revolutionized the field of linguistics by treating language as a uniquely human, biologically based cognitive capacity. Through his contributions to linguistics and related fields, including cognitive psychology and the philosophies of mind and language, Chomsky helped to initiate and sustain what came to be known as the “cognitive revolution.” Chomsky also gained a worldwide following as a political dissident for his analyses of the pernicious influence of economic elites on U.S. domestic politics, foreign policy, and intellectual culture.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later as the basis of “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (1969), Chomsky’s critical review of a study of the period by the historian Gabriel Jackson.
When he was 13 years old, Chomsky began taking trips by himself to New York City, where he found books for his voracious reading habit and made contact with a thriving working-class Jewish intellectual community. Discussion enriched and confirmed the beliefs that would underlie his political views throughout 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 from associating with others; and that authority—whether political, economic, or religious—that cannot meet a strong test of rational justification is illegitimate. According to Chomsky’s anarchosyndicalism, or libertarian socialism, the best form of political organization is one in which all people have a maximal opportunity to engage in cooperative activity with others and to take part in all decisions of the community that affect them.
In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania but found little to interest him. After two years he considered leaving the university to pursue his political interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind, however, after meeting the linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American founders of structural linguistics, whose political convictions were similar to Chomsky’s. Chomsky took graduate courses with Harris and, at Harris’s recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics with Nathan Fine, who was then teaching at Harvard University. 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, Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the philosophy of science and transformed them into something novel.
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Philosophy 101
Whereas Goodman assumed that the mind at birth is largely a tabula rasa (blank slate) and that language learning in children is essentially a conditioned response to linguistic stimuli, Chomsky held 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 drawn from the child’s linguistic environment. Whereas Harris thought of the study of language as the taxonomic classification of “data,” Chomsky held that it is the discovery, through the application of formal systems, of the innate principles that make possible the swift acquisition of language by children and the ordinary use of language by children and adults alike. And whereas Goodman believed that linguistic behaviour is regular and caused (in the sense of being a specific response to specific stimuli), Chomsky argued that it is incited by social context and discourse context but essentially uncaused—enabled by a distinct set of innate principles but innovative, or “creative.” It is for this reason that Chomsky believed that it is unlikely that there will ever be a full-fledged science of linguistic behaviour. As in the view of the 17th-century French philosopher Réne Descartes, according to Chomsky, the use of language is due to a “creative principle,” not a causal one.
For Chomsky, the ultimate goal of linguistic science is to develop a theory of universal grammar that provides a descriptively adequate grammar for any natural language given only the kind of “primary linguistic data” available in the social environments of children.
Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, often considered to be the most significant contribution to the field of theoretical linguistics in the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior , in which he challenged the ...
- Emily Mace
Oct 11, 2022 · This chapter seeks to offer a broad biographical overview of Chomsky’s life and works and, using a variety of primary and second-hand sources, aims to illustrate some of his motivations, key contributions, and legacies.
This article will present an overview of some of Noam Chomsky’s most important contributions to linguistics. The presentation will mostly focus on a set of themes suitable for organizing Chomsky’s ideas and scholarly impact.
Noam Chomsky is an American linguist who has had a profound impact on philosophy. Chomsky’s linguistic work has been motivated by the observation that nearly all adult human beings have the ability to effortlessly produce and understand a potentially infinite number of sentences.
