Noam Chomsky's influence as a thinker is immense, and it is unfortunate that he has come to be judged largely by his political thought. Tom's post below is a case in point, and a cursory reading of his work could support the picture of a slightly cantankerous and senile critic of US foreign policy, a mere 'good writer'. But the great man deserves more than this. Chomsky's enduring contribution to human knowledge does indeed stem from his linguistic work, so a brief dose of CHOM 101 might help set this in context.
In the first half of the 20th century, a dominant school of thought held that human behaviour was best explained in terms of an input/output machine, since the brain itself was impenetrable and irreducibly complex. Behaviourism, as this insidious movement was known, is preposterous because it postulates that our minds are blank slates and have no innate mechanisms to do anything. Apparently, all human behaviour is nothing but a process of social conditioning and environmental learning.
But cometh the hour, cometh Noam. In the mid 50s, as a young firebrand linguist working at MIT he destroyed the behaviourist programme by elucidating the human linguistic faculty. He showed that our rich patterns of speech and understanding simply cannot follow from the limited amount of language we are exposed to, and that an expanation of such a key feature of human behaviour is incoherent without invoking an innate ability of the mind. His 1959 review of BF Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour is the most concise statement of his crushing rebuttal.
Chomsky's virtuosity ignited what is now known as the cognitive revolution which continues apace, bringing together research strands from psychology, anthropology, philosophy and computer science to forge a far more complete and satisfying understanding of the human condition. The vestigal traces of behavioursim have been banished to the poststructuralists and the postmodernists, and lack mainstream currency in the cognitive sciences. In my view, this is a victory.
The humanities and the social sciences have long shyed away from a rigourous examination of the explanatory hypotheses they take for granted. A serious attempt to understand and explain our social, cultural and political worlds can only be forged once we can understand the nature of people, the atomic constituents of society. Why are we such prosocial primates? How rational are we really? These are the questions which we need to illuminate, and Noam Chomsky was the first to travel down the only path which can coherently answer them.
In the first half of the 20th century, a dominant school of thought held that human behaviour was best explained in terms of an input/output machine, since the brain itself was impenetrable and irreducibly complex. Behaviourism, as this insidious movement was known, is preposterous because it postulates that our minds are blank slates and have no innate mechanisms to do anything. Apparently, all human behaviour is nothing but a process of social conditioning and environmental learning.
But cometh the hour, cometh Noam. In the mid 50s, as a young firebrand linguist working at MIT he destroyed the behaviourist programme by elucidating the human linguistic faculty. He showed that our rich patterns of speech and understanding simply cannot follow from the limited amount of language we are exposed to, and that an expanation of such a key feature of human behaviour is incoherent without invoking an innate ability of the mind. His 1959 review of BF Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour is the most concise statement of his crushing rebuttal.
Chomsky's virtuosity ignited what is now known as the cognitive revolution which continues apace, bringing together research strands from psychology, anthropology, philosophy and computer science to forge a far more complete and satisfying understanding of the human condition. The vestigal traces of behavioursim have been banished to the poststructuralists and the postmodernists, and lack mainstream currency in the cognitive sciences. In my view, this is a victory.
The humanities and the social sciences have long shyed away from a rigourous examination of the explanatory hypotheses they take for granted. A serious attempt to understand and explain our social, cultural and political worlds can only be forged once we can understand the nature of people, the atomic constituents of society. Why are we such prosocial primates? How rational are we really? These are the questions which we need to illuminate, and Noam Chomsky was the first to travel down the only path which can coherently answer them.