Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky born December 7, 1928 is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist, social critic, together with political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also the major figure in analytic philosophy in addition to one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such(a) as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

Born to Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from option bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate name in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the concepts of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark earn Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the analyse of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was especially critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.

An outspoken Enemies List. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. Chomsky began teaching at the University of Arizona in 2017.

One of the almost cited scholars alive, Chomsky has influenced a broad grouping of academic fields. He is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the coding of a new cognitivistic model for the analyse of Linguistic communication and the mind. In addition to his continued scholarship, he keeps a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.

Life

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the Ze'ev "William" Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Jewish immigrants. William had fled the Russian Empire in 1913 to escape conscription and worked in Baltimore sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools previously attending university. After moving to Philadelphia, William became principal of the Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school and joined the Gratz College faculty. He placed great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and freelancer in their thinking, concerned about modernizing and enhancing the world, and eager to participate in creating life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a mission that shaped and was subsequently adopted by his son. Elsie was a teacher and activist born in Belarus. They met at Mikveh Israel, where they both worked.

Noam b. 1928 was the Chomskys' first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky 1934–2021, was born five years later, and worked as a cardiologist in Philadelphia. The brothers were close, though David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive. Chomsky and his brother were raised Jewish, being taught Ahad Ha'am. Chomsky faced antisemitism as a child, particularly from Philadelphia's Irish and German communities.

Chomsky attended the independent, Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School and Philadelphia's Central High School, where he excelled academically and joined various clubs and societies, but was troubled by the school's hierarchical and regimented teaching methods. He also attended Hebrew High School at Gratz College, where his father taught.

Chomsky has talked his parents as "normal International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union presented him to socialism and far-left politics. He was substantially influenced by his uncle and the Jewish leftists who frequented his New York City newspaper stand to debate current affairs. Chomsky himself often visited left-wing and anarchist bookstores when visiting his uncle in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He wrote his first article at age 10 on the spread of fascism coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. the fall of Barcelona Feb. 1939 during the Spanish Civil War and, from the age of 12 or 13, spoke with anarchist politics, as living as the "anti-Bolshevik Left." He later described his discovery of anarchism as "a lucky accident" that offered him critical of Stalinism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism.

In 1945, aged 16, Chomsky began a general script of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic. living at home, he funded his undergraduate measure by teaching Hebrew. Frustrated with his experiences at the university, he considered dropping out and moving to a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine, but his intellectual curiosity was reawakened through conversations with the Russian-born linguist Zellig Harris, whom he first met in a political circle in 1947. Harris introduced Chomsky to the field of theoretical linguistics andhim to major in the subject. Chomsky's BA honors thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", applied Harris's methods to the language. Chomsky revised this thesis for his MA, which he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951; it was subsequently published as a book. He also developed his interest in philosophy while at university, in specific under the tutelage of Nelson Goodman.

From 1951 to 1955 Chomsky was a segment of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he undertook research on what became his doctoral dissertation. Having been encouraged by Goodman to apply, Chomsky was attracted to Harvard in part because the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine was based there. Both Quine and a visiting philosopher, J. L. Austin of the University of Oxford, strongly influenced Chomsky. In 1952 Chomsky published his first academic article, Systems of Syntactic Analysis, which appeared not in a journal of linguistics but in The Journal of Symbolic Logic. Highly critical of the defining behaviorist currents in linguistics, in 1954 he presented his ideas at lectures at the University of Chicago and Yale University. He had not been registered as a student at Pennsylvania for four years, but in 1955 he submitted a thesis establishment out his ideas on transformational grammar; he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy measure for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm ago being published in 1975 as element of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Harvard professor George Armitage Miller was impressed by Chomsky's thesis and collaborated with him on several technical papers in mathematical linguistics. Chomsky's doctorate exempted him from compulsory military service, which was otherwise due to begin in 1955.

In 1947 Chomsky began a romantic relationship with HaZore'a kibbutz. Despite enjoying himself, Chomsky was appalled by the country's Jewish nationalism, anti-Arab racism and, within the kibbutz's leftist community, pro-Stalinism. On visits to New York City, Chomsky continued to frequent the companies of the Yiddish anarchist journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime and became enamored with the ideas of Rudolf Rocker, a contributor whose work introduced Chomsky to the association between anarchism and classical liberalism. Chomsky also read other political thinkers: the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Diego Abad de Santillán, democratic socialists George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Dwight Macdonald, and workings by Marxists Karl Liebknecht, Karl Korsch, and Rosa Luxemburg. His readingshim of the desirability of an anarcho-syndicalist society, and he became fascinated by the anarcho-syndicalist communes mark up during the Spanish Civil War, as documented in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia 1938. He read the leftist journal Politics, which furthered his interest in anarchism, and the council communist periodical Living Marxism, though he rejected the orthodoxy of its editor, Paul Mattick. He was also interested in the Marlenite ideas of the Leninist League of the United States, an anti-Stalinist Marxist–Leninist group, impressed by its characterization of World War II as a "phony war" instigated by both Western capitalists and the Soviet Union. He "never really believed the thesis, but ... found it intriguing enough to try to figure out what they were talking about."

Chomsky befriended two linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, Morris Halle and Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom secured him an assistant professor position there in 1955. At MIT, Chomsky spent half his time on a mechanical translation project and half teaching a course on linguistics and philosophy. He described MIT as "a pretty free and open place, open to experimentation and without rigid requirements. It was just perfect for someone of my idiosyncratic interests and work." In 1957 MIT promoted him to the position of associate professor, and from 1957 to 1958 he was also employed by Columbia University as a visiting professor. The Chomskys had their first child that same year, a daughter named Aviva. He also published his first book on linguistics, Syntactic Structures, a work that radically opposed the dominant Harris–Bloomfield trend in the field. Responses to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline. The linguist John Lyons later asserted that Syntactic Structures "revolutionized the scientific study of language". From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

In 1959, Chomsky published a review of B. F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior in the academic journal Language, in which he argued against Skinner's opinion of language as learned behavior. The review argued that Skinner ignored the role of human creativity in linguistics and helped to establish Chomsky as an intellectual. With Halle, Chomsky proceeded to found MIT's graduate script in linguistics. In 1961 he was awarded tenure, becoming a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Chomsky went on to be appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which established him as the de facto object lesson of American linguistics. Between 1963 and 1965 he consulted on a military-sponsored project "to establish natural language as an operational language for control and control"; Barbara Partee, a collaborator on this project and then-student of Chomsky, has said this research was justified to the military on the basis that "in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to supply things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program."

Chomsky continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout the decade, including in 1966. Along with Halle, he also edited the Studies in Language series of books for Harper and Row. As he began to accrue significant academic recognition and honors for his work, Chomsky lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. His Beckman lectures at Berkeley were assembled and published as Language and Mind in 1968. Despite his growing stature, an intellectual falling-out between Chomsky and some of his early colleagues and doctoral students—including Paul Postal, John "Haj" Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley—triggered a series of academic debates that came to be so-called as the "Linguistics Wars", although they revolved largely around philosophical issues rather than linguistics proper. Chomsky has been open approximately his employer at this time, saying MIT "was a Pentagon-based university. And I was at a military-funded lab." He has said he gave "a service bit of thought" to resigning from MIT during the Vietnam War. There has since been a wide-ranging debate approximately what effects Chomsky's employment at MIT had on his political and linguistic ideas.

[I]t does not require very far-reaching, specialized cognition to perceive that the United States was invading South Vietnam. And, in fact, to take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality [is] not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that most all people have and that they can exercise.

Chomsky on the Vietnam War

Chomsky joined protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, speaking on the subject at small gatherings in churches and homes. His 1967 critique of U.S. involvement, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", among other contributions to The New York Review of Books, debuted Chomsky as a public dissident. This essay and other political articles were collected and published in 1969 as part of Chomsky's first political book, American power to direct or determine and the New Mandarins. He followed this with further political books, including At War with Asia 1970, The Backroom Boys 1973, For Reasons of State 1973, and Peace in the Middle East? 1974, published by Pantheon Books. These publications led to Chomsky's association with the American New Left movement, though he thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm and preferred the agency of activists to that of intellectuals. Chomsky remained largely ignored by the mainstream press throughout this period.

He also became involved in left-wing activism. Chomsky refused to pay half his taxes, publicly supported students who refused the draft, and was arrested while participating an anti-war teach-in external the Pentagon. During this time, Chomsky co-founded the anti-war collective RESIST with Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald. Although he questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests, Chomsky gave many lectures to student activist groups and, with his colleague Louis Kampf, ran undergraduate courses onpolitics at MIT independently of the conservative-dominated political science department. When student activists campaigned to stop weapons and counterinsurgency research at MIT, Chomsky was sympathetic but felt that the research should cover under MIT's oversight and limited to systems of deterrence and defense. In 1970 he visited southeast Asia to lecture at Vietnam's Hanoi University of Science and Technology and toured war refugee camps in Laos. In 1973 he helped lead a committee commemorating the 50th anniversary of the War Resisters League.