Discover the biography of Noam Chomsky, one of the brightest minds of the 20th century who, at 91, continues to write and lecture, as well as being one of the most critical voices in American society against established governments, politicians, and powers.
Linguisticist, philosopher and political analyst, he is considered the father of modern linguistics for having been the creator of a new model of language description.
- Chomsky made great contributions to cognitive science with his theories.
- The life of this emeritus professor has been a remarkable journey through history.
- Science and human understanding during the twentieth century.
- Knowing the biography and work of Noam Chomsky is almost fundamental to understanding the world in which we live.
- Today.
Multidisciplinary author, considered by the New York Times to be “the most important contemporary thinker”. An author who, while highly controversial, has not escaped criticism for his positions in the face of empiricism and his criticism of capitalism.
We face a fundamental figure whose contributions have influenced fields as disparate as science, politics and psychology; He is also considered a true revolutionary in linguistics and has therefore become indispensable for philology.
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in December 1928, born into a Jewish immigrant family, his father was a respected Hebrew teacher, working at a prestigious school dedicated to the training of Hebrew teachers.
Chomsky spent his childhood between Philadelphia and New York, and was marked by the Great Depression that affected the United States. Although he belonged to a middle-class family, he had the opportunity to witness many social injustices around him. However, he was described as a bright and curious child.
At the age of ten, he was already attending adult conversations on politics and social rights, and his worldview quickly became a form. At that time, when he was still a child, he wrote an article for the university on the rise of fascism in Europe after the Spanish Civil War. This article served as the basis for a later essay to be presented at New York University.
Chomsky once argued that people can understand politics and economics and make their own decisions; he also argued that authority must be tested before being considered legitimate and powerworthy. Such thoughts, developed in his youth, were marked throughout his work. .
Noam Chomsky graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in linguistics, philosophy and mathematics under Professor Zellig Harris. This professor and others definitely influenced Chomsky’s political ideas.
In addition, he performed at the Harvard Society of Fellows, a group of academics recognized for their extraordinary potential, who had different opportunities for individual growth and intellectual collaboration.
Chomsky was moved by what language could reveal about society, something radically different from approaches that regarded the human mind as a blank slate.
For him, the basic concepts of language were innate, in the minds of all human beings, and were influenced only by each other’s syntactic environment. His thesis explores several ideas that, finally, in 1957, will be exhibited in one of his works. best-known books of linguistics: Syntactic Structures.
To talk about Chomsky is to talk about universal generation and grammar. Universal grammar usually consists of the idea that there are certain principles common to all languages of the world; these principles are therefore innate.
When we talk about natural languages, we should emphasize that we also include sign languages, which are acquired in the same way as an oral language.
Universal grammar does not mean that all the languages of the world have the same grammar, but that there is a certain inactivity in us, a certain predisposition to the acquisition of the mother tongue, whatever it may be. default process in our brain that, under normal developmental conditions, will receive the external stimulus of the mother tongue and trigger the process of language acquisition.
Chomsky worked as an emeritus professor in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for half a century, before retiring from active teaching in 2005. He was also a visiting professor at other universities, such as Columbia, UCLA, Princeton and Cambridge.
One of his most famous contributions was his system of hierarchy, a division of grammar into groups, which go up or down in their expressive skills, this hierarchy is linked to generative grammar, which seeks to answer the question of why certain syntactic combinations are possible in one language and in another give non-grammatical results.
Generative grammar, however, is not normative, but descriptive. In other words, it is not intended to establish what is right and what is not; seeks to define the rules and principles followed by a speaker to determine and produce all possible phrases in their language.
Chomsky points out that in each language we can produce and understand an infinite number of sentences, so we start from an internal, innate grammar, that is, a finite mechanism of knowledge with infinite possibilities.
These theories and Chomskyan’s hierarchy, in addition to his obvious contributions to linguistics, have had a great influence on modern psychology and philosophy and help to understand human nature and how information is processed.
In 1967, Noam Chomsky published an essay entitled The Responsibility of Intellectuals, in protest at America’s intervention in Vietnam, followed by more sporadically published political analyses.
His political and social vision of the world was a constant that always worked in parallel with his studies in linguistics and cognitive sciences, which generated many criticisms from the most extreme political and intellectual factions.
Among his many books of political analysis are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Illusions of the Middle East (1974) and Manufacturing Consent (1988).
Today, Noam Chomsky remains a highly respected and controversial thinker who remains active on the conference circuit. He has amassed numerous academic and humanitarian awards, including the American Psychology Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award and the Sydney Humanitarian Peace Award.
He is certainly a controversial but certainly very prolific author, harshly critical of capitalism and, in particular, the American system.
We may be more or less in accordance with their theories, but their contributions were certainly very relevant and served in different areas. Today, his work focuses more on political activism, but without leaving aside his passion for knowledge and research.