Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomskyis an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 December 1928
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.
There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.
I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?
Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.
If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.
It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.
[I]n the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on ... people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much.
It is pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advanced' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.
Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.
Over the years, there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin.
Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.
Remember, weapons of mass destruction don't mean missiles.