background preloader

Noam chomsky

Facebook Twitter

Noam Chomsky's Legacy. Noam Chomsky turns eighty-four today, more than a half century after he exploded onto the scene of linguistics, in in the late nineteen-fifties, as a young professor at M.I.T. His career began perhaps most notably with a book review that helped launch an entire field of linguistics (known as generative grammar) and laid waste to another (the behaviorist view of B. F. Skinner that then dominated psychology). From that moment forward, linguistics truly has never been the same. He remains as influential, and divisive, as he was when Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a Profile of Chomsky in The New Yorker nearly a decade ago (“The Devil’s Accountant”). I can’t speak to his politics, for which he is equally well known. That idea of universal grammar didn’t just change linguistics, it had repercussions for virtually every field that concerns the mind. At times, Chomsky can be maddening. Chomsky can also be dismissive, in ways that still rankle—and stir people to action.

His Ideas. Generative grammar. Early versions of Chomsky's theory were called transformational grammar, and this term is still used as a general term that includes his subsequent theories. There are a number of competing versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics. Chomsky's current theory is known as the Minimalist program. Other prominent theories include or have included dependency grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, categorial grammar, relational grammar, link grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. [citation needed] Chomsky has argued that many of the properties of a generative grammar arise from an "innate" universal grammar. Proponents of generative grammar have argued that most grammar is not the result of communicative function and is not simply learned from the environment (see the poverty of the stimulus argument). Most versions of generative grammar characterize sentences as either grammatically correct (also known as well formed) or not.

Behaviorism. Behaviorism (or behaviourism), is the science of behavior that focuses on observable behavior only,[1] it is also an approach to psychology that combines elements of philosophy, methodology, and theory.[2] It emerged in the early twentieth century as a reaction to "mentalistic" psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested using rigorous experimental methods. The primary tenet of behaviorism, as expressed in the writings of John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and others, is that psychology should concern itself with the observable behavior of people and animals, not with unobservable events that take place in their minds.[3] The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as thoughts and beliefs.[4] Versions[edit] Two subtypes are: Definition[edit] Experimental and conceptual innovations[edit] Relation to language[edit]

Commentary. Jerne-lecture. Profiles: The Devil’s Accountant. PROFILE of Noam Chomsky... Writer describes the scene during Chomsky’s Thursday evening M.I.T. class about politics... When Chomsky likened the September 11th attacks to Clinton’s bombing of a factory in Khartoum, many found the comparison not only absurd but repugnant: how could he speak in the same breath of an attack intended to maximize civilian deaths and one intended to minimize them? But, in another sense, Chomsky’s argument was a powerful one. Chomsky is a rationalist: central both to the linguistics for which he first became famous and to his political thinking is the belief that the human mind contains at birth the structures of thought-even moral thought-through which it perceives the world. Chomsky is not a pacifist on principle, but when it comes to the United States he has never supported an intervention... Chomsky’s intellectual influence is still extraordinary...

Exposures. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.[4] From 1939–1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge.[5] During his lifetime he published just one slim book, the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children's dictionary.[6] His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. Philosophical Investigations appeared as a book in 1953 and by the end of the century it was considered an important modern classic.[7] Philosopher Bertrand Russell described Wittgenstein as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating".[8] Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited a large fortune from his father in 1913.

Background[edit] The Wittgensteins[edit] Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics - Gennaro Chierchia, Sally McConnell-Ginet. Critiques of Chomsky. On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning. At the Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium held during MIT's 150th birthday party, Technology Review reports that Prof. Noam Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don't try to understand the meaning of that behavior.

The transcript is now available, so let's quote Chomsky himself: It's true there's been a lot of work on trying to apply statistical models to various linguistic problems. I think there have been some successes, but a lot of failures. There is a notion of success ... which I think is novel in the history of science. This essay discusses what Chomsky said, speculates on what he might have meant, and tries to determine the truth and importance of his claims. Noam Chomsky Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. What did Chomsky mean, and is he right? Claude Shannon.