James Baquet

    Some people only know 87-year-old Noam Chomsky (1928- ) as a cranky old man who is constantly criticizing things, especially in election years in the United States. He has long been an outspoken critic of American policies, including its history of imperialism, its encouragement of materialism, and the way its media support government policy.

    What many don’t know is that he is one of America’s greatest living philosophers.

    His thinking was foundational in the formation of the modern discipline called cognitive science, which studies the importance of mental processes in responding to external events.

    Prior to this, B. F. Skinner and the behaviorists had held that there was a rather direct connection between stimulus and response: One thinks of Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell. Cognitive science notes that in humans, something important may happen between the stimulus and the response — thinking, or cognition.

    Chomsky’s contribution to the discussion was based on his experience as a linguist. He had previously pioneered the idea of “transformational grammar,” the process that allows us to create new sentences — some that have never been spoken before — from old ones.

    Chomsky distinguished “grammatical” from “meaningful.” Here is a famous example sentence: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Although it follows all the rules of grammar, it makes no sense. But look at this “sentence”: Man the bit sandwich the. This is completely ungrammatical, yet we know what it means. Chomsky would label the first sentence “grammatical but meaningless,” and the second “ungrammatical but meaningful.”

    This is heady stuff. I recall struggling through a book on Chomsky assigned by one of my college professors (he was all the rage then), and I confess that I never did completely get it — even now.

    Nevertheless, scholars like Chomsky play an important role in pushing the boundaries of knowledge. This is helpful in everything from understanding the human mind to the development of machine intelligence.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. policy of taking over other countries to create an empire

    2. exciting, affecting the mind or senses

    3. bad-tempered, grouchy

    4. outside of (the body)

    5. one who studies the science of language

    6. not afraid to speak

    7. overly concerned with getting money and things

    8. very popular

    9. related to thinking

    10. area of study