Noam Chomsky: 'I'm Criticized for Advocating a Politics of Fear. That's Not Criticism. That's Sanity.'

By Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times

03 November 16

t 87, Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguistics, remains a vital presence in American intellectual life. An emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he still teaches, he has a dual identity, reflected in his several dozen books. Many are on theoretical linguistics and the philosophy of mind. Others are sharp, leftish polemics on American politics. Dr. Chomsky is back in the news, thanks to a pair of high-profile attacks. In “The Kingdom of Speech,” Tom Wolfe pairs Dr. Chomsky (“Noam Charisma”) with Darwin as the malign Ur-theorists of evolution. In “Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics,” the British anthropologist Chris Knight explores “the Chomsky problem” — the paradox of a thinker who belongs to the “professional and scientific elite” even as he espouses populist political ideas.

It will soon be 60 years since your first book, “Syntactic Structures,” was published. Where was the study of linguistics then and what did you see that could be done?

The belief at the time was that languages can vary arbitrarily, so when you study a new language you should come to it without any preconceptions. Such views are still held, although the evidence to undermine them, I think, is simply overwhelming. Studies have shown that the diversity and complexity is superficial, while the internal system, which yields the fundamental properties of language as a system of thought, may be close to uniform among humans — basically following very simple genetically determined properties and general laws, like principles of computation. Some of the most exciting work in the field is going in that direction.

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