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Noam Chomsky

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Linguistics

                   Avram Noam Chomsky
                      Noam Chomsky
         Born December 7, 1928
              East Oak Lane, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
   Occupation Linguist

   Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is the Institute
   Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of
   Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of
   generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant
   contributions to the field of theoretical linguistics made in the 20th
   century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology
   through his review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour, in which he
   challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of mind and language
   dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of
   language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see
   Harman, Fodor). He is also credited with the establishment of the
   Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy, a classification of formal languages
   in terms of their generative power.

   Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky
   has become more widely known — especially internationally — for his
   media criticism and radical politics than for his linguistic theories.
   He is generally considered to be a key intellectual figure within the
   left wing of United States politics. According to the Arts and
   Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Chomsky was cited as a
   source more often than any other living scholar, and the eighth most
   cited scholar overall. Chomsky is widely known for his political
   activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United
   States and other governments. Chomsky describes himself as a
   libertarian socialist and a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism (he is a
   member of the IWW).

Biography

   Chomsky was born in the East Oak Lane neighbourhood of Philadelphia,
   Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar and IWW member William Chomsky,
   who was from a town in Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (born
   Simonofsky), came from what is now Belarus, but unlike her husband she
   grew up in the United States and spoke "ordinary New York English".
   Their first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky says it was "taboo" in
   his family to speak it. He describes his family as living in a sort of
   "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with
   his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in
   Hebrew culture and literature". Chomsky also describes tensions he
   personally experienced with Irish Catholics and anti-Semitism in the
   mid-1930s, stating, "I don't like to say it but I grew up with a kind
   of visceral fear of Catholics. I knew it was irrational and got over it
   but it was just the street experience."

   Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at the age of ten
   about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of
   Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of twelve or thirteen,
   he identified more fully with anarchist politics.

   A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia (184th Class), in
   1945 Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the
   University of Pennsylvania, learning from philosophers C. West
   Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's
   teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical
   analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in
   the set of sentences). Chomsky subsequently reinterpreted these as
   operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from
   Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in
   shaping those of Chomsky.

   In 1949, Chomsky married linguist Carol Schatz. They have two
   daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b.
   1967).

   Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of
   Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted much of his doctoral research during
   four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his
   doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas,
   elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, perhaps his
   best-known work in linguistics.

   Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
   in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of
   Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and
   Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward
   Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was
   appointed Institute Professor. Chomsky has been teaching at MIT
   continuously for the last 50 years.

   It was during this time that Chomsky became more publicly engaged in
   politics: he became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War
   with the publication of his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals"
   in The New York Review of Books in 1967. Since that time, Chomsky has
   become well known for his political views, speaking on politics all
   over the world and writing numerous books. His far-reaching criticism
   of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power has made him a
   controversial figure.

   Chomsky has in the past received various death threats because of his
   criticisms of U.S foreign policy. He was on a list created by Theodore
   Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, of planned targets; during
   the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail
   checked for explosives. Chomsky also states that he frequently receives
   undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus,
   though Chomsky himself states that he does not agree with the police
   protection.

   Despite his criticisms, Chomsky has stated that he continues to reside
   in the United States because he believes it remains the "greatest
   country in the world," a comment that he later clarified by saying,
   "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in
   those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the
   area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular
   struggle, are to be admired." Chomsky travels frequently, giving
   lectures on politics. His lectures have been described as compelling
   and sincere, though largely devoid of personality or emotion. Chomsky
   has acknowledged this criticism, seeing it more as a virtue: "I'm a
   boring speaker and I like it that way…I doubt that people are attracted
   to whatever the persona is…People are interested in the issues, and
   they're interested in the issues because they are important.

   In 2003 he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and
   Arts.

Contributions to linguistics

   Syntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure
   of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75) in which he introduces transformational
   grammars. The theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a
   syntax which can be (largely) characterized by a formal grammar; in
   particular, a Context-free grammar extended with transformational
   rules. Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the
   basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. they
   assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain
   restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as
   universal grammar. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language
   using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language:
   with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans
   are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including
   sentences no one has previously said.

   The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) — developed in his Pisa
   1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding
   (LGB) — make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the
   grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and
   the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in
   terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop
   parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always
   required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish),
   which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and
   parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child
   learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items
   (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the
   appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key
   examples.

   Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn
   languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability
   to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across
   the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make
   certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language,
   whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and,
   according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather
   than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are
   also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

   More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the
   core concept of "principles and parameters", Chomsky attempts a major
   overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model,
   stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while
   advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language
   faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design,
   reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with
   the largely representational approach of classic P&P.

   Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers
   investigating the acquisition of language in children, though some
   researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's
   theories, often advocating emergentist or connectionist theories
   reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in
   the brain.

Generative grammar

   The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar,
   though quite popular, has been challenged by many, especially those
   working outside the United States of America. Chomskyan syntactic
   analyses are often highly abstract, and are based heavily on careful
   investigation of the border between grammatical and ungrammatical
   constructs in a language. (Compare this to the so-called pathological
   cases that play a similarly important role in mathematics.) Such
   grammatical judgments can only be made accurately by a native speaker,
   however, and thus for pragmatic reasons such linguists often focus on
   their own native languages or languages in which they are fluent,
   usually Spanish, English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese or
   one of the Chinese languages. However, as Chomsky has said:

     The first application of the approach was to Modern Hebrew, a fairly
     detailed effort in 1949–50. The second was to the native American
     language Hidatsa (the first full-scale generative grammar), mid-50s.
     The third was to Turkish, our first Ph.D. dissertation, early 60s.
     After that research on a wide variety of languages took off. MIT in
     fact became the international centre of work on Australian
     Aboriginal languages within a generative framework [...] thanks to
     the work of Ken Hale, who also initiated some of the most
     far-reaching work on Native American languages, also within our
     program; in fact the first program that brought native speakers to
     the university to become trained professional linguists, so that
     they could do work on their own languages, in far greater depth than
     had ever been done before. That has continued. Since that time,
     particularly since the 1980s, it constitutes the vast bulk of work
     on the widest typological variety of languages.

   Sometimes generative grammar analyses break down when applied to
   languages which have not previously been studied, and many changes in
   generative grammar have occurred due to an increase in the number of
   languages analyzed. It is claimed that linguistic universals in
   semantics have become stronger rather than weaker over time. The
   existence of linguistic universals in syntax, which is the core of
   Chomsky's claim, is still highly disputed. Still, Richard Kayne
   suggested in the 1990s that all languages have an underlying
   Subject-Verb-Object word order. One of the prime motivations behind an
   alternative approach, the functional-typological approach or linguistic
   typology (often associated with Joseph Greenberg), is to base
   hypotheses of linguistic universals on the study of as wide a variety
   of the world's languages as possible, to classify the variation seen,
   and to form theories based on the results of this classification. The
   Chomskyan approach is too in-depth and reliant on native speaker
   knowledge to follow this method, though it has over time been applied
   to a broad range of languages.

Chomsky hierarchy

   Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages
   and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of
   human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into
   classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each
   successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than
   the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some
   aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as
   measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example,
   while a regular language is powerful enough to model English
   morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In
   addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has
   also become important in computer science (especially in compiler
   construction and automata theory).

   His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English,
   written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply SPE). Though
   extremely influential in its day, this work is considered outdated
   (though it has recently been reprinted), and Chomsky does not publish
   on phonology anymore.

            Automata theory: formal languages and formal grammars
   Chomsky
   hierarchy Grammars Languages Minimal
   automaton
   Type-0 Unrestricted Recursively enumerable Turing machine
   n/a (no common name) Recursive Decider
   Type-1 Context-sensitive Context-sensitive Linear-bounded
   Type-2 Context-free Context-free Pushdown
   Type-3 Regular Regular Finite
      Each category of languages or grammars is a proper subset of the
                         category directly above it.

Contributions to psychology

   Chomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for modern
   psychology. For Chomsky linguistics is a branch of cognitive
   psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant
   understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His
   theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to
   the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major
   consequences for understanding how language is learned by children and
   what, exactly, the ability to use language is. Many of the more basic
   principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims
   made by the principles and parameters approach described above) are now
   generally accepted in some circles.

   In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's
   Verbal Behaviour, a book in which Skinner offered a speculative
   explanation of language in behavioral terms. "Verbal behavior" he
   defined as learned behavior which has its characteristic consequences
   being delivered through the learned behaviour of others; this makes for
   a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually
   addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances
   in which language was used; for example, asking for water was
   functionally a different response than labeling something as water,
   responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally
   different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate
   explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of
   language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that
   a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of
   communicative performance ignored important questions.
   (Chomsky-Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning
   the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable
   of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and
   phrases into intelligible utterances.

   In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of
   behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in
   explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an
   account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to
   external conditions, to "what is learned", cannot adequately account
   for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language
   acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to
   form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use
   of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's
   view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued
   that to understand human verbal behaviour such as the creative aspects
   of language use and language development, one must first postulate a
   genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of
   language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to
   Skinner's radical behaviorism.

   Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most
   famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper On
   Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour (Journal of the
   Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, volume 13, pages 83-99). This and
   similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged
   outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did
   not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology
   in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other
   varieties; consequently, it is argued that he made several serious
   errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain
   that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as
   doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's
   paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or
   never actually read it. Chomsky has maintained that the review was
   directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioural psychology "was
   being used in Quinean empiricism and`naturalization of philosophy"
   (quoted in Barsky- Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent .

   It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology
   and basic assumptions paved the way for the " cognitive revolution",
   the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s
   from being primarily behavioural to being primarily cognitive. In his
   1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an
   explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for
   investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present
   conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found
   their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

   There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or
   that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so
   on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language
   and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a
   result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the
   experiential input of the external environment. Subsequent
   psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond
   language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of " modularity" a critical
   feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of
   an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of
   inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea
   that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any
   other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be
   "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).

Opinion on criticism of science culture

   Chomsky strongly disagrees with post-structuralist and postmodern
   criticisms of science:

     I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these,
     using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science",
     "rationality", "logic" and so on. I therefore read the papers with
     some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or
     perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was
     disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite
     regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse
     on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I
     understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction
     of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I
     don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and
     physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the
     latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so,
     in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people
     in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that
     I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no
     one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest
     post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error,
     or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

   Chomsky has also commented on critiques of "white male science",
   stating that they are much like the anti-Semitic and politically
   motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the Nazis to
   denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the Deutsche Physik
   movement:

     In fact, the entire idea of "white male science" reminds me, I'm
     afraid, of "Jewish physics". Perhaps it is another inadequacy of
     mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can't tell whether the
     author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work
     in class, the office, or somewhere else. I rather doubt that the
     non-white, non-male students, friends, and colleagues with whom I
     work would be much impressed with the doctrine that their thinking
     and understanding differ from "white male science" because of their
     "culture or gender and race." I suspect that "surprise" would not be
     quite the proper word for their reaction.

Chomsky's influence in other fields

   Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other
   fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer
   science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal
   languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms
   and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly
   combinatorialists. A number of arguments in evolutionary psychology are
   derived from his research results.

   The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K.
   Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune
   system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various
   features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel
   lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".

   Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal
   language acquisition at Columbia University, was named in honour of
   Chomsky.

Political views

   Noam Chomsky has been engaged in political activism all of his adult
   life and expressed a wide range of opinions on politics and world
   events which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Within the
   United States, many consider his views to be on the far end of the
   political spectrum, and thus outside the mainstream. Chomsky has in
   turn argued that his views are those which the powerful "don't want to
   be heard" and for this reason he is often termed and considered an
   American political dissident. Some highlights of his political views:
     * Much of his political writings offer very strong criticisms of the
       foreign policy of the United States. Specifically, he denounces
       what he considers to be the "double standards" of the US
       government, which he claims results in massive human rights
       violations. Chomsky argues that while the U.S. may preach democracy
       and freedom for all, the U.S. has a history of doing exactly the
       opposite by promoting, supporting and allying itself with
       non-democratic and repressive organizations and states.
     * He has argued that the mass media in the United States largely
       serves as a propaganda arm of the U.S. government and U.S.
       corporations, with the three parties all largely intertwined
       through common interests. He has famously said that the American
       media " manufactures consent" among the public.
     * He has opposed the U.S. global war on drugs, claiming its language
       to be misleading, and referring to it as "The war on certain
       drugs". He favors education and prevention in the issue, as opposed
       to military and police action.

   "US domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and
   policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing
   substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from
   current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be
   criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous
   classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique
   of social control"
     * Critical of the American capitalist system and big business, he
       describes himself as a libertarian socialist who sympathizes with
       anarcho-syndicalism and is highly critical of Leninist branches of
       socialism. He also believes that libertarian socialist values
       exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original
       unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an
       industrial context. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of
       his two major influences, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, were
       "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain
       their revolutionary character.".
     * He holds views that can be summarized as anti-war but not strictly
       pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam War and most other
       wars in his lifetime. However, he maintains that U.S. involvement
       in World War II was probably justified, with the caveat that a
       preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war
       through earlier diplomacy. In particular, he believes that the
       dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "among the
       most unspeakable crimes in history".
     * He has a view of broad free-speech rights, especially in the mass
       media; he opposes censorship and refuses to take legal action
       against those who may have libeled him.

   Chomsky has made connections between his linguistics research and more
   political topics. An example is a 1971 debate with French philosopher
   Michel Foucault on the question of human nature, where Chomsky used the
   idea of innate linguistic capacity to criticize the idea that all human
   values and knowledge are entirely conditioned by societal conditions.
   However, Chomsky makes such connections only rarely, and is generally
   critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics
   requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he
   said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in
   linguistics:

          I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection.
          I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something
          to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their
          ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some
          concept of human nature and human needs. (New Left Review, 57,
          Sep-Oct 1969, pg. 21)

   On September 20, 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave Chomsky's
   book entitled Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global
   Dominance a sales boost, raising it to first place on the Amazon.com
   bestsellers list after he recommended it during his speech at the U.N.
   General Assembly. Chávez stated that it was a good book to read because
   it demonstrates why the greatest danger to world peace currently is the
   United States, causing a prolonged round of applause from the majority
   of the General Assembly. The New York Times erroneously reported that
   Chavez said he regretted not being able to meet Chomsky before his
   death, not knowing he was still alive. Subsequently, the Times
   published an acknowledgement of the error.

Criticism of Chomsky's politics

   Chomsky has acquired many critics from both the right and left ends of
   the political spectrum. Despite his Jewish heritage he has been accused
   of "anti-semitism" for his views on Israel's foreign policy and his
   involvement in the Faurisson affair, among other issues. Chomsky has
   argued that his actions in the Faurisson affair were limited to a
   defense of the rights of free expression of someone he disagrees with,
   and that critics subsequently subjected this limited defence to various
   interpretations. His critics contend that Chomsky went further than a
   defence of free speech, effectively protecting the character of a
   holocaust denier as well as supporting the legitimacy of his research.

   In the late 1970s he was accused of apologism for the Khmer Rouge,
   after he and Edward S. Herman charged that publicized accounts of the
   Cambodian genocide, also known as the Killing Fields, in the Western
   media were anti-communist propaganda.

   Chomsky has also received criticism from many revolutionary anarchists
   who claim he is too much of a reformist, in that he encourages some
   level of participation in the electoral system.

Academic achievements, awards and honours

   In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford
   University; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial
   Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in
   New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey
   Lectures at the University of Toronto titled "Necessary Illusions:
   Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; and in 1997, The Davie
   Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, among many others.

   Noam Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from the most
   prestigious universities around the world, including the following:
   University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of
   Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University
   of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University,
   Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires,
   McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia
   University, University of Connecticut, , University of Maine, Scuola
   Normale Superiore, Pisa, University of Western Ontario, University of
   Toronto, Harvard University, Universidad de Chile, University of
   Calcutta, Universidad Nacional De Colombia, and Vrije Universiteit
   Brussel. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
   the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical
   Society. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned
   societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the
   Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American
   Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the
   Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben
   Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is
   twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of
   Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and
   Clarity in Public Language" . Early in his career Chomsky was granted
   the prestigious MacArthur Award.

   Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005
   Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect.
   He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls" . In a
   list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted
   seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".

Authors on Chomsky

     * Rai, Milan (1995). [Broken Chomsky's Politics]. Verso. ISBN
       1859840116. Retrieved on 2006- 09-05.
     * Barsky, Robert (1997). Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge:
       MIT Press. ISBN 0262522551.
     * Goldsmith, John (1998). " Review of Noam Chomsky: A Life of
       Dissent, by Robert Barsky". Journal of the History of the
       Behaviorial Sciences 34 (2): 173-180. Retrieved on 2006- 09-04.
     * Dershowitz, Alan (May 10, 2002). " Chomsky’s Immoral Divestiture
       Petition". The Tech 122 (25). Retrieved on 2006- 09-04.
     * Roy, Arundhati (2003-08-24). " The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky". The
       Hindu. Retrieved on 2006- 09-05.
     * (2004) Collier, Peter; Horowitz, David: The Anti-Chomsky Reader.
       Encounter Books. ISBN 189355497X.
     * Pateman, Trevor (2004). Wittgensteinians and Chomskyans: In Defence
       of Mentalism, Language in Mind and Language in Society.
     * Blackburn, Robin, Kamm, Oliver (November 2005). " For and Against
       Chomsky" (PDF). Prospect (116). Retrieved on 2006- 09-04.
     * (2005) McGilvray, James: The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky.
       Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI:
       10.2277/0521780136. ISBN 0521780136.
     * Paradis, Michel (2005). Review of Government in the Future, by Noam
       Chomsky. Oxonian Review of Books 2005 4.3: 4-5
     * Schoneberger, T. (2000). A Departure from cognitivism: Implications
       of Chomsky's second revolution in linguistics. The Analysis of
       Verbal Behaviour, 17, 57-73.
     * Sperlich, Wolfgang B. (2006). Noam Chomsky. London: Reaktion Books.
       ISBN 1861892691. Retrieved on 2006- 09-05.

Filmography

     * Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Director: Mark
       Achbar and Peter Wintonick (1992)
     * Last Party 2000, Director: Rebecca Chaiklin and Donovan Leitch
       (2001)
     * Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, Director: John
       Junkerman (2002)
     * Distorted Morality — America's War On Terror?, Director: John
       Junkerman (2003)
     * Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause (TV), Director: Will Pascoe
       (2003)
     * The Corporation, Director: Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar (2003)
     * Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, Directors: Sut Jhally and
       Bathsheba Ratzkoff (2004)

Interviews

By Maria Hinojosa

     * Noam Chomsky on America's Foreign Policy

By David Barsamian

     * Keeping the Rabble in Line (1994)
     * Class Warfare (1996)
     * The Common Good (1998)
     * Propaganda and the Public Mind (2001)
     * Imperial Ambitions - Conversations With Noam Chomsky On The
       Post-9/11 World (2005)

By others

     * See complete list of interviews here: chomsky.info

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