Bruce Nevin responds to 'The Two Chomskys'

[Image: Zellig Harris]

Chris Knight’s explanation for why Noam’s successive models of language are asocial, abstract, and impracticable may have merit. Who can  say? Attribution of intent is a dicey business. But there are other sources of the abstractness and uselessness.

Chris, you said “The essence of science is abstraction.” This is wrong. Science proceeds by generalization from particulars to principles. Generalization is not the same as abstraction. To confuse these is a category error.

Now, mathematics in itself is an abstract system, though its applications are not. This is perhaps the source of the confusion that leads to this category error. "Mathematics may be applied in [a] complex situation to figure out" how a principle of science works out in detail, but "very little mathematics is needed for the simple fundamental character of the basic laws." I am quoting here from Richard Feynman’s lecture “The Relation of Mathematics to Physics”, which is the second lecture printed in The Character of Physical Law (1965 London: BBC; 12th printing 1985 Cambridge: MIT Press). Mr. Feynman is, I think, a sound reference point for our physics envy.

The law of gravitation was not found by abstraction, it was found by study of a great deal of data of various kinds and finding a succinct way to characterize a general property of them. The mathematical statement of that generalization is an application of mathematics. Op. cit., the first lecture. The complicated facts of apparent planetary motions was explained by complicated calculations deriving from this principle ― again, applied mathematics. The statement of the principle itself is quite simple. Followers of Ptolemy had a pretty accurate way of explaining planetary motions by complicated calculations of cycles and epicycles. This was based on more complicated assumptions involving nested spheres, with less complete and careful observational data. The law of gravity that Newton worked out expresses ― ‘captures’, as some folks like to say ― a generalization over a very much larger domain of observations and data from which predictions have been made about things not yet observed but subsequently confirmed. But the law of gravity is not an abstraction, it is a generalization expressed using the abstractions of mathematics. And to the present point, Newton did not posit the principle first and then look for data, nor did he reach into mathematics or logic for a pre-existing system of abstract statements that was analogous to the movements of planets and then look for anecdotal planetary data to support or refute various candidate mathematical models. Science does not work that way. And Noam is no scientist.

Logicians and mathematicians developed the syntax of logic as a formal system analogous to language. Noam has assumed that those pre-existing systems, with their crystalline tidiness, must be the underlying Real form of language in all its messiness. That assumption leads to abstractness and uselessness.

A little tour of the history

Zellig Harris developed the science of language from a little mathematics, set theory and linear algebra. Descriptive linguistics identifies sets of morphemes and words generalizing their mutual privileges of occurrence—what can co-occur with what. This is called distributional methodology, and in the eclipsing polemics of the 1960s was derided as 'taxonomic'. Algebraic symbols may represent these sets, e.g. N for nouns and V for verbs, and subsets of them. The sets and subsets are generalizations of distributional data, and the symbols are not abstractions, they are abbreviatory representations of generalizations. A 'sentence form' is a sequence of these representing a set of sentences that conform to the given sequence of form-classes (sets of words) and constants (individual words), as e.g. the sentence form N t be V-en by N (where t is the set of tense morphology). In linear algebra, 'transformation' is one name for a mapping from one (sub)set to another. Harris's transformations were mappings from sentence-form to sentence-form.

Such was the world of transformational analysis that Zellig had been teaching since the late 1930s when Noam became his student in 1945. Zellig was then 36, Noam 17. The Harris and Chomsky families were friends, immigrants from Odessa. According to Naomi Sager, Zellig had been Noam's protector (her word). Noam's father had asked Zellig to take Noam under his wing. Zellig sponsored the young undergraduate to logicians Richard Martin and Nelson Goodman and encouraged their interest in him.

During that period, Zellig was publishing a series of 'structural restatements' of descriptive grammars of languages. This was a test of the comprehensiveness and consistency of his systematization of descriptive methods which had appeared piecemeal in various papers and had been circulated in the book manuscript titled Methods in Descriptive Linguistics. As stated, it was also a demonstration that beneath their relatively superficial differences of notation and style these descriptions were commensurate with each other, kind of analogous perhaps to prenex normal form in logic. He indicated ramifications and applications of this which are out of scope for this overview.

It is important to note that ENIAC, the first demonstration of an electronic general-purpose digital computing machine, was right there at Penn in 1945. (Analog computers had been around for some time.) Mathematical logic is foundational to the architecture, functioning, and programming of digital computers. The computational metaphor, the assumption that the human brain is analogous to the hardware and software of a digital computer, very quickly pervaded many fields as a background assumption. It enabled the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology very much in tandem with the ‘generative revolution’ in linguistics.

Cognitive™ psychology folks say cognition is a matter of symbolic rule manipulation and point down the hall where their friends the "Generative™ linguists will talk about how language is an example.

Generative™ linguists point back down the hall to their friends the cognitive psychologists for confirmation of the psychological reality of abstract rule systems for language.

As a student of Martin and Goodman, Noam became deeply involved with the grammar of symbolic logic as developed by Carnap and others. Logic is concerned with the form of inferences that preserve truth value irrespective of the lexical or semantic content.  The syntax of logical systems employs rules that manipulate symbols which are abstract.  They are not derived from generalizations of data, and to work with them no particular referents for the symbols need be stated. Noam has said that he tried to find a way that Zellig’s distributional methods could lead to a formal grammar of this sort, that he was frustrated that he could not, and that therefore he developed transformational grammar. In the various retellings of the Origin Story, the timing of transitions and influences have become obscure. Indications may be seen in the difference between his descriptive statement of the morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew and the radical revisions of it that he made in the early 1950s under the influence of a new friend, the logician Jehoshua Bar-Hillel.

It would not be surprising that Noam took Zellig’s structural restatements as a model of how one does linguistics. Zellig gave Noam data and descriptive analyses which he had done of both historic and modern stages of Hebrew, some of which was published. Noam’s undergraduate and MA study of Hebrew morphophonemics was a restatement of that material. (Zellig had lived extensively in Israel and was fluent in the language; Noam had not, and was not and is not fluent in Hebrew, but says he did some informant work.)

Noam’s phrase-structure grammar (PSG) is a formalization of (a simplified form of) Leonard Bloomfield's descriptive method called immediate constituent (IC) analysis using 'rewrite rules', an invention that tragic figure of mathematics, Emil Post; e.g. S → NP VP. IC analysis derives from the assertion in gestalt psychology that people intuitively know how to analyze a complex situation into components, each of which they might further analyze. In IC analysis a sentence was first divided into a noun phrase and a verb phrase, and these were further subdivided step by step, until individual words and morphemes are reached. (Zellig  (1946) had reformulated the method as word-expansions, which Noam adapted to PSG formalisms only many years later as X-bar notation.)  On the analogy of Zellig’s sequences of form-class labels in descriptive linguistics (labels like N and V for classes of words), Noam provided symbols for classes of phrases, e.g. VP for a verb phrase of indeterminate length. The steps of analysis are turned around to steps of synthesis or ‘generation’, beginning with the abstract symbol S for 'sentence'. The sequence of steps is represented atemporally in the form of a directed, rooted tree graph with S at the root, abstract phrase labels at the preterminal nodes, and sequences of form-classes at the terminal ends of the branches. (Or alternatively with labeled brackets, but that notational variant is scarcely ever used.)

All of this probably is utterly familiar material to anthropologists and philosophers as well as to linguists. The reason for recapitulating is to exemplify the distinction between generalization and abstraction. In the formalization of IC analysis, each phrase is represented by a symbol which (except in the simplest cases just prior to terminal symbols) is defined as a string of other such phrase-symbols, with no principled limit on the depth of the resulting pseudo-hierarchy.

At this stage of development, PSG could still claim that the symbols for classes of phrases correspond to generalizations over language data. But the as with the abstract symbols of mathematical logic no referents are specified for the preterminal symbols. There is no lexical content and no semantic value until the terminal symbols have words associated with them, particular members of the form-classes designated by the form-class labels on the lowest branches of the tree.

Soon, the requirements of the rule systems led to frank abstraction and the retroactive valorization of abstractness for its own sake.

Noam’s transformations were a restatement of Zellig's transformations, formulated as operations on PSG trees rather than as algebraic mappings from subset to subset of sentences. Language data took a subsidiary role, anecdotal examples supporting or contradicting some particular rule formulation. At center stage instead were the trees themselves and the rules specifying the operations on trees. As work on this project of restatement proceeded, transformational mappings were empirically found which such rules could not reach without positing abstract symbols with no direct counterpart in actually encountered  or plausible strings of words. I will not illustrate the point, the literature speaks for itself.
For example, an enormity disputation has concerned rules that move branches of trees from one node to another, and metarules constraining such movement. In Zellig’s analysis, transposition plays a very small part, and the appearance of movement falls out naturally from reductions coincident with word entry in the construction of a sentence. I have written about that elsewhere.

 Abstractness became a cardinal virtue, the distributional basis of all of this was denied and denigrated as ‘taxonomic linguistics’, Noam scoffed at such concerns as ‘data bound’. Instead of writing descriptions of languages, students turned to the mining of fragmentary descriptions for anecdotal examples and counter-examples respecting the properties of Universal Grammar. This is why there are no (zero) broad-coverage Generative™ grammars of any language.

Results in corpus linguistics have long cast all this in doubt. The work of Maurice Gross and colleagues is not the earliest, though his 1990 “On the failure of Generative Grammar” is certainly explicit (Language 55.4:859-885). Today’s Large Language Models (LLMs) have an exclusively distributional basis, an existence proof of Harrisian methodology. A naive computational metaphor is still foundational in Cognitive™ psychology and Generative™ linguistics, but support for this metaphor in neuroscience, never more than presumptive at best, has dwindled to virtually zero over the past decade or two. The brain does not manipulate symbolic representations of the world by rules and operations analogous to those that specify the syntax of symbolic logic and programming 'languages.'

Universal Grammar rests on a 3-legged stool: Paucity of data, cognitive deficiency, and abstract complexity. The great complexity and abstractness of Generative™ grammar is unnecessary, and this has been demonstrated in a number of ways. Infants have been shown to have far greater cognitive capacities than were attributed to them in the 1950s and 1960s when Noam's ideas set. And children are exposed to forms of language ('motherese', etc.) which are explicitly supportive in learning regularities and generalizations and their exceptions and in correcting overgeneralizations and other departures from current norms. Statistical learning theory provides a good account of language (and other) learning as well as of LLMs. The amazing architecture of the cerebellar system is probably instrumental.

No doubt Captains both military and industrial wanted the Star Trek scenario, "Computah! What is the disposition of the enemy in quadrant three, their likely strategy, and our best response?" The generalization of LLMs from large language corpora to nonverbal data of many kinds may afford them this ― if these 'AI' systems can be assured truthful. But I don’t think a case could be made that Noam’s long animosity to Zellig’s work was to delay acquisition of powers we cannot safely manage. Hillary Putnam once started to tell me he had an idea what was behind it, but then cut himself off, saying he did not want to risk losing Noam’s friendship. I have speculated too much about this elsewhere, while trying to avoid psychologizing. Who can  say? Attribution of intent is a dicey business. And as my grandfather used to say, people are funny monkeys.

Bruce Nevin, December 21, 2023

Sources for ‘The Two Chomskys’, Aeon magazine

 My new article for Aeon magazine does not include all the sources that I would have used in a properly footnoted article. Here are the sources I had to leave out:

Wiesner was a self-described ‘military technologist’ who had helped set up the Sandia nuclear weapons laboratory and was now the director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. ...

As he has confirmed in various interviews, MIT was ‘90 per cent Pentagon funded’, ‘almost everybody’ was involved in defence research and he himself ‘was in a military lab’. ...

He refused to get security clearance and made no attempt to understand electronic devices, describing himself as a ‘technophobe’ who can’t even handle a tape recorder. ...

In 1971, Gaines referred to the kind of language research that Chomsky had pioneered in these words: ‘We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control ...

As many as ten of Chomsky’s students played ‘a key role’ in MITRE’s linguistics research – research that was always intended to enhance ‘the design and development of US Air Force-supplied command and control systems.’ ...

MITRE’s role in that war included overseeing the technical side of the McNamara Line. ...

As Partee says: ‘For a while, the Air Force was convinced that supporting pure research in generative grammar was a national priority ...

Researchers at the System Development Corporation were also trying to develop machines that could understand English commands, examples being ‘Blue fighter go to Boston’ ...

Evidently, these generals were following in the tradition of General Eisenhower who, in 1946, directed that military scientists must be given ‘the greatest possible freedom to carry out their research’.

Consider his response when his wife Carol began working on an Air Force project in 1959. This MIT-based project was intended to enable people to communicate with computers in ‘natural language’, one aim being to enhance ‘military command and control systems’. We have it from the project’s head, Bert Green, that Noam was ‘very nervous’ about all this ...

Take MIT’s vice-president in the early 1960s, General James McCormack. He supervised the university’s Center for Communication Sciences which naturally included MIT’s linguists. ...

After all, he was the general who had supervised the creation of the Pentagon’s entire nuclear weapons stockpile. ...

Or take Jerome Wiesner, who not only recruited Chomsky to MIT but who, in 1960, co-founded the university’s linguistics programme. ...

But, again, I doubt it considering he played a significant role in setting up the Pentagon’s entire nuclear missile program as well as its computerised air defence systems. ...

According to one of his MIT colleagues, Wiesner was well-suited for the role as he was ‘soaked’ in military work such as ‘submarine warfare, air defense, atom bombs ...

By the mid-1960s Wiesner’s air defence research at MIT had evolved into what Life magazine described as ‘the backbone of the American field communications in Vietnam’. ...

Meanwhile, various laboratories at MIT continued to research helicopter design, radar, smart bombs and counter-insurgency techniques for use in that brutal war. ...

By 1968, he admitted not only that he feel ‘guilty’ for waiting so long before protesting against the Vietnam War, but that he felt ‘guilty most of the time’. ...

As Chomsky himself says, academics and students were moving between MIT’s campus and its off-campus military labs ‘all the time’.

But to imply that MIT’s natural scientists weren’t also complicit is quite wrong, especially when we know that Wiesner recruited eleven natural scientists from MIT to work on the McNamara Line. ...

On this basis, bizarrely, Chomsky has now extended his claims to the languages of extraterrestrials, arguing that Universal Grammar may prove to be universal ...

Some years ago, the prominent evolutionary linguist and child psychologist Michael Tomasello summed up the prevailing consensus by observing that Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar appears to have reached a final impasse.’

Chris Knight

 My previous article, 'The Unknown Chomsky', is freely accessible here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348615725_The_Unknown_Chomsky_When_the_Pentagon_Used_Chomsky%27s_Linguistics_for_Weapons_Research

This article has other relevant arguments and source details.

Why did Chomsky work with a Pentagon contractor during his retirement?

Noam Chomsky’s admirers are often surprised to hear that he spent the first decades of his MIT career working for the Pentagon. Many will be even more surprised to hear that he continued to work with a Pentagon contractor even after retiring from MIT.

In 2021, the military-funded research company Oceanit hosted an online lecture by Noam Chomsky. The lecture was introduced by Oceanit’s CEO, Patrick Sullivan, followed by its Director of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Jeffrey Watumull.

Introducing the eminent linguist, Dr. Watumull explained:

[Chomsky] has worked with with us at Oceanit on AI programs to push precise ideas to absurd but successful conclusions and applications in this process that [Patrick Sullivan] describes as Intellectual Anarchy.

Chomsky repeated this striking phrase in his lecture, telling his audience:

 What's needed is Patrick's Intellectual Anarchy, [a] willingness to challenge established doctrine with better ideas.

Intellectual Anarchy is also the title of Sullivan’s 2020 book – a book written to describe the ‘Intellectual Anarchy methodology followed at Oceanit’.

More recently, in October 2023, Sullivan gave a talk to a US Army roundtable on ‘Intellectual Anarchy’ and the need for ‘disruptive innovation’. Oceanit’s report of this talk points out that:

With ongoing conflicts and upheavals in places like Ukraine and Israel, gaining a competitive edge through disruptive innovations within the Army could act as a deterrent to other nations contemplating military aggression.

This whole concept of Intellectual Anarchy is reminiscent of Jerome Wiesner’s enthusiasm for the ‘anarchy of science’, ‘scientific anarchy’ and ‘planning for anarchy’ – all of which he saw as crucial in order to encourage the ‘free’ environment necessary for scientific creativity. As readers may know, Wiesner was the influential military scientist and lab director who in 1955 first recruited Chomsky to MIT.

In 2021, Patrick Sullivan contributed to another book, AI at War: How Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning Are Changing Naval Warfare. In this book, Sullivan and his Oceanit co-authors (which presumably include Watumull) made several references to Chomsky’s work and closed their contribution with these words:

… the beginning of anthronoetic AI could be the end of war, and that surely is the ultimate objective of the US military.

Although this anthronoetic, or human-like, AI is inspired by Chomsky’s linguistics, it would be hard to think of a sentence that contrasts more with Chomsky’s passionately anti-militarist politics. Yet this didn’t stop Chomsky working with Oceanit. As the company’s website explains:

Oceanit has been working with Professor Chomsky for around five years, developing a linguistics-based Artificial Intelligence that we affectionately called NoME. NoME stands for Noetic Mathematical Engine, but is pronounced in the same way as its namesake.

Other Oceanit webpages reveal that this NoME system is intended for use in ‘war games’ and ‘cyberwarfare’. We also learn that the company has worked on ‘hundreds’ of US Government contracts. It appears that at least 90 of these were military contracts. Indeed, Sullivan himself says that Oceanit’s AI systems are ‘mostly in industrial and military applications’.

The actual Pentagon contracts that use this ‘anthronoetic AI’ are still more revealing. One 2020 contract is entitled: ‘Navy Technology Acceleration - Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop capabilities and impact mission success’. The abstract for this contract is as follows:

Consistent with the Navy objective, Oceanit is working from foundations in cognitive science, philosophy, and the mathematics of computability theory to create anthronoetic AI (a.k.a. strong AI): human-level/human-style AI capacitated with the linguistic competence to generate causal explanatory models via the Popperian philosophy of critical rationalism: given a set of big or small data, Oceanit’s AI – named NoME (the noetic mathematical engine) – constructs a Chomskyan ‘grammar’ (i.e., explicit theories/programs) to model causal relations, thereby transcending (but obviously including) descriptions that answer what is being observed, transforming data into evidence for/against conjectured explanations that answer why and how the data – or, to be precise, the phenomena underlying the data – exist and behave.

According to the contract, Jeffrey Watumull is the ‘senior scientist’ on the project.

Dr. Watumull was, apparently, Chomsky’s last PhD student. By 2017, he had become the ‘senior scientist’ on a million-dollar US Army project to develop a ‘virtual staff element … to provide a commander both organizational and operational recommendations to meet mission objectives.’

Today, Watumull is a 'principal investigator on programs for DARPA', the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Although it is possible that Chomsky simply overlooked Watumull’s involvement with the US military, this is unlikely considering Chomsky has worked with Watumull on a co-authored book, Life, Information, Language, Intelligence, as well as on several linguistics articles.

Indeed, the author description for one of these articles explains that Watumull is presently a ‘principal investigator’ on both a DARPA seedling and an Office for Naval Research research proposal.

Another Watamull/Chomsky article is referenced in a 2022 US Navy proposal to ‘develop a human-level/human-style artificial intelligence (AI) that can perceive and explain signals ... to achieve long-range detection, tracking, and classification of maritime surface and subsurface contacts.’

This proposal – which explicitly invokes ‘Chomskyan grammar’ – concludes with the hope that it will ‘complete final testing and perform necessary integration and transition for use in antisubmarine and countermine warfare, counter surveillance … and future combat systems.’

So what’s going on here? Why has Chomsky continued to work with someone who is so clearly involved with the US military — despite his own passionate and heartfelt opposition to that same military? Could it be that in his eighties and nineties, Chomsky has been manipulated by a younger and smarter colleague?

I doubt it! Anyone who has watched Chomsky’s numerous YouTube lectures in recent years will know that he retained his wits and intelligence right up until the summer of 2023. Although he seemed to be letting Watumull do much of the writing, Chomsky was still quite capable of authorising texts written in his name.

So, could it be that Chomsky just doesn’t care if his linguistic theories are being used to benefit the US military​? Perhaps he believes, as does Dr. Watumull, that it would be preferable for the military to work with ‘responsible defense contractors’ – i.e. those who are working on intelligent Chomskyan AI, as opposed to unintelligent AI. Again, I doubt it.

Rather, it seems, having become accustomed to Pentagon funding for so long – and having defended this funding for so long – Chomsky just got used to the risk that his work might one day prove useful to the military. The fact that his linguistics has always proved completely unworkable for the Pentagon, or indeed anyone else, has only reinforced Chomsky’s willingness to take such a risk.

'My Response to Chomsky’s Extraordinary Accusations', by Chris Knight

My latest book, The Responsibility of Intellectuals – Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years, will be published in September 2019. Edited jointly with two well-known Chomskyan linguists, Nicholas Allott and Neil Smith, it includes a chapter of mine, ‘Speaking Truth to Power’, and an intemperate response from Noam himself. Here is my reply:

Even at the venerable age of 90, Noam Chomsky remains the most influential left-wing intellectual alive today. Precisely because of this unparalleled influence, in both politics and science, Chomsky’s life and work deserve not only our appreciation and celebration but also our critical understanding. Consequently, in all that I have written, I have tried to avoid the extremes of hagiography on the one hand, denunciation on the other, in search of a more balanced historical account.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth. By this standard, Noam towers above most of his peers. But one thing he finds difficult. He just cannot and will not tell the truth about the US military’s intimate involvement with his own academic institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It is unfortunate that Noam and I are still arguing about this particular issue. It is a fact that MIT has been and remains a centre of US weapons research, and Chomsky would do better to concede the point. Chomsky’s relationship to his institution’s research priorities is less easy to pin down. As I explain in my 2016 book, Decoding Chomsky, the supreme paradox of Noam Chomsky is that throughout much of his career, he has been the world’s leading anti-militarist activist while being employed in the world’s leading centre of military research.

Far from questioning Chomsky’s integrity on this score, I see his commitment to moral principle in the face of intense institutional pressure as in many respects a model for all of us who have no choice but to try to make our way in a capitalist world. After all, most of us on the left are compelled to earn a living in some corporation, institution or business not of our design, aware that our work may have anti-social implications even as we attempt to hold our heads high.

I am genuinely puzzled why Chomsky should want to claim that none of this applies to him. It surely makes no sense for him to downplay the fact that MIT has always focused heavily on war research.[1] In the early years, Chomsky would happily concede the point, as he did in 1970 when reminding a TV audience that ‘MIT is a major institution of war research’.[2]

Throughout his academic career, Chomsky has always been a principled anti-militarist operating in one of the world’s foremost centres of military research. My intention throughout has simply been to bring out the ramifications of this basic tension. On the one hand, Chomsky’s research into the nature of language was officially supposed to lead eventually to military applications. On the other hand, as I have laboriously stressed, Chomsky always had other ideas and was determined to maintain his principles no matter what was going on all around him.

With this in mind, I have tried to show how Chomsky’s original conception of language — puzzling in so many respects — makes better sense when viewed in the light of the ideological forces and institutional pressures against which it was ranged. Chomsky was surrounded by what must have seemed to him a swamp of institutional pressures, behaviourist psychological assumptions and demands for military and other practical applications of his work. I can fully understand his longing to rise above all this, focusing instead on the beauty of mathematical formulae, of previously unsuspected eternal linguistic truths. His concept of language as a natural object was not designed to fit within the messy, corrupted world of human social negotiation, personal ambition and politics. As an aspect of the natural world, it was intended to transcend such things. I can understand the attraction of a vision which sets language apart from the world, from social usage, from contested meanings and from the limitations of the physical brain and body. Chomsky’s whole project can seem inspiring precisely because it lifts us above worldly concerns.

Chomsky’s aim was to bring to light the detailed properties of Universal Grammar, the eternal and unchanging grammar of grammars. Sadly, despite his best efforts, none of his models proved workable in the end. Nowadays, many linguists have concluded that the project’s assumptions were misguided from the start. But what strikes me is the intensity of fury displayed by Chomsky towards anyone who casts doubt on his philosophical assumptions. When discussing politics, Chomsky comes over as principled and intransigent yet, at the same time, level-headed, sure-footed and compelling. Chomsky the activist speaks quietly, in a low monotone; he does not shout. But everything changes when Chomsky the linguist loses his cool. Tangle with Chomsky’s picture of language as individual, private, non-communicative and natural (as opposed to social, public, communicative and cultural) — and you can expect the kind of fireworks he displays in his response to me.

Since readers may not have the patience to work through the details of this dispute, I have opted to relegate the references and documentation to an appendix.

APPENDIX

WHO WAS JEROME WIESNER?

I can easily understand why Chomsky prefers to see the positive in those Pentagon advisors and other colleagues who so consistently supported him at MIT. I can sympathise, but that doesn’t mean that I can agree. Here as elsewhere, our task is to take full responsibilty and tell the truth.

Let me begin with Jerome Wiesner, the highly influential military scientist who, as laboratory director, provost and president, was Chomsky’s manager (in my essay I used the term ‘boss’) at MIT for over 20 years.

Professor Wiesner was an important figure in the development of US defence policy in the 1950s. One of his achievements was his 1957 contribution to the potent myth of a ‘missile gap’ which supposedly left the US lagging dangerously behind the Soviet Union. In his reply to me, Chomsky claims that ‘Wiesner’s role was so slight that he is not even mentioned in authoritative insider accounts of the missile gap.’ Reversing my point, Chomsky insists that Wiesner, in fact, urged disarmament while informing the Kennedy administration that the ‘missile gap’ between the Soviet Union and the US was a myth.[3]

Well, I find it hard to fathom why Noam wishes to portray President Kennedy’s chief science adviser in this way. It is true that, from the mid-1960s, Wiesner did urge some limited measures of disarmament. But he had previously – in his own words – ‘been working very hard on military weapons’.[4] His MIT colleague, Jerrold Zacharias, could hardly have been clearer when he described Wiesner as ‘soaked’ in military work including ‘submarine warfare, air defense, atom bombs, guerrilla warfare, civil defense, and psychological warfare.’[5]

White House cabinet meeting during the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1962. Jerome Wiesner is on the right with a pipe.

As if that wasn’t enough, Wiesner also worked on three of the most important government panels tasked with developing the country’s nuclear missile programme.[6] Rather than relying on commentators’ interpretations, I prefer to quote Wiesner himself who recalls, with evident pride, that

I helped get the United States ballistic missile program established in the face of strong opposition from the civilian and military leaders of the Air Force and Department of Defense.[7]

By 1957, Wiesner had been given the job of estimating how many intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs] the Soviets could produce. It was in this context that Wiesner, in collaboration with a scientific colleague, Herbert York, made their fateful contribution to the whole idea of a ‘missile gap’. I see no reason to doubt York’s words:

I recall Jerome Wiesner and I estimating that [the Soviets] could produce 1000s of ICBM’s in the next few years and urging that the Gaither Committee [of President Eisenhower] base its conclusions and recommendations on that fact.[8]

A decade later, Wiesner himself confirmed this account in a speech during which he referred to the fiction of a ‘missile gap’ as a narrative ‘which, in fact, I helped invent’.[9] So Wiesner himself admitted that he had been a principal architect of the whole myth of a missile gap. Chomsky can make his case against me only by ignoring Wiesner’s own words.

Now, it is true that, in 1961, Wiesner finally admitted that his earlier calculations had been wrong. He also informed President Kennedy that if there was a gap at all, it worked the other way round: compared with the Soviets, the US possessed many more ICBMs. This must be what Chomsky has in mind when he describes Wiesner as a disarmament advocate who exposed the myth of the ‘missile gap’. But I cannot help mentioning that this peace-loving scientist still advised Kennedy as follows:

‘The nation’s ballistic missile program is lagging. The development of the missiles and of the associated control systems, the base construction, and missile procurement must all be accelerated.’[10]

Kennedy now authorised what Chomsky himself has described as ‘the biggest military increase in history’.[11] By this point, as I also said in my chapter, Wiesner was beginning to question the unrestrained stockpiling of nuclear weapons. But his concerns didn’t prevent him from helping to oversee Kennedy’s build-up. Nor did they prevent him from administering laboratories at MIT that were working on even more sophisticated missile systems.[12]

Chomsky’s tireless activism in opposition to the Vietnam War is well-known. At no point have I ever tried to play this down. But it is unclear to me why Chomsky should wish to portray Wiesner in such a positive light given his key initiating role in the development of what became known as the McNamara barrier.

Packed with state-of-the-art electronic sensors and anti-personnel mines, this huge barrier was designed to prevent movement between North and South Vietnam. An article in Volume 5 of the famous Pentagon Papers confirms Wiesner as a leading proponent of this barrier.[13] A further article in the same volume provides some idea of what was involved:

The fragmentation anti-personnel bombs, like the BLU/63, which breaks into dozens of jagged fragments, are larger and calculated to do far more damage than the steel ball-bearing pellets. Similarly, flechettes are tiny steel arrows with larger fins on one end which peel off the outer flesh as they enter the body, enlarge the wound, and shred the internal organs.[14]

Much of the research for the McNamara barrier was organised at an offshoot of MIT called the MITRE Corporation.[15] Despite his own involvement with MITRE, which I discuss later, Chomsky may have been unaware of the corporation’s precise role in Vietnam. But, as an editor of Volume 5 of the Pentagon Papers, he can hardly have missed the part played by Wiesner in the development of the McNamara barrier.

Given these facts, it is hard to understand why Chomsky would want to champion such a colleague.

Radar and bomb guidance developed at MIT aided the bombing of Vietnam.

WHO WAS GORDON MACDONALD?

Now let me come to one of the more surprising of Chomsky’s mirror-image reversals of reality. Gordon Macdonald was another leading scientist who played an important role in the creation of the McNamara barrier. He had worked for MIT in the 1950s and for MITRE from the 1960s. In Chomsky’s view, this ‘Vietnam War protestor’ deserves our gratitude for having been one of the first scientists to warn humanity about the dangers of global warming, setting alarm bells ringing as early as the 1970s.[16]

It is disappointing to find Chomsky describing Macdonald as a Vietnam War protestor, since the claim is so patently wrong. In fact, Chomsky seems to have misread his own source, a 2018 New York Times article. The piece does mention a protest against the Vietnam War, but Chomsky gets things upside down. The article clearly states that a group of anti-Vietnam war protestors ‘set MacDonald’s garage on fire’ in anger at the prominent scientist’s involvement with the infamous McNamara barrier across Vietnam.[17]

As for global warming, Chomsky again gets things upside down. He fails to mention that Macdonald made his initial findings about global warming while investigating ways to manipulate the weather for US military advantage in Vietnam and elsewhere. Among other ingenious projects, Macdonald investigated ways to destroy the ozone layer in order to expose enemy territory to radiation levels that would be ‘fatal to all life’.[18]

Such mistakes and omissions capture what I mean by mirror-image reversals of reality. I don’t think I need to say more.

WHO IS JOHN DEUTCH?

John Deutch is another MIT/MITRE war scientist who Chomsky is anxious to defend.[19] In his response to me, Noam rejects my description of Deutch as someone who brought biological warfare research to MIT. He alleges that in making this claim, I relied exclusively on an unreliable source: the underground student newspaper, The Thistle.[20] This is quite untrue. Simplifying again, Noam overlooks the fact that I backed up my account with additional references from MIT’s own newspaper, The Tech. Let me quote from this newspaper:

Beginning in 1980, Deutch took part in a classified Defense Science Board study on ‘chemical warfare and biological defense,’ and in 1984, Deutch chaired another DSB task force on the same subject. Deutch acknowledged that in that time period he had alerted the chairmen of the [MIT] chemistry department and applied biological sciences department to available army contracts for mycotoxin research. He said he sees nothing inappropriate with that action.

The Tech also reported:

Scientists in chemistry and the applied biological sciences at MIT received $1.6 million from the army to conduct basic research in toxins that could be used in biological warfare.[21]

In the version of my chapter that Chomsky responded to, I did mention a widely circulating claim to the effect that Deutch put pressure on junior faculty members to perform this toxins research. My reference to this claim was not inaccurate but it did little to help us understand Chomsky’s own relationship with MIT. For that reason, I dropped it from the final version. While rechecking my sources in response to Noam’s criticisms, I also realised that it would have served my argument still better to have included this quote from a 1982 edition of the journal Nature:

Two years ago, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, chaired by John Deutch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recommended a start on the production of binary [nerve gas] weapons and that the Department of Defense should prepare for a major increase in its chemical warfare programmes.[22]

I hope that makes the point about the sort of science that Deutch was involved in.

Again, the issue is Noam’s eagerness to defend his MIT colleagues, as if their research priorities were not military at all but were somehow compatible with his own anti-militarist commitments. To shed light on this puzzle, we need to take a look at Noam’s early career at both MIT and MITRE.

CHOMSKY AT MIT AND MITRE

It was in 1955 that Chomsky was recruited to work on a machine translation project at MIT by none other than Jerome Wiesner.[23] Noam claims that this project had ‘zero’ military significance. While it is true that machine translation as conceived at MIT was misconceived and could never work in that form, this was not realised at the time by Chomsky or anyone else. In a rush of enthusiasm, research into machine translation at MIT and elsewhere was heavily funded by the Pentagon for reasons of ‘national intelligence’.[24] As the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, stated:

I should like to reaffirm the deep interest which we in the intelligence field have in the possibility of translation of Russian language materials, particularly in scientific fields, into English by machine.[25]

Chomsky suggests that the more we look at my sources, the more my case about MIT’s military interests crumbles.[26] But my prime source, here as always, is Chomsky himself:

I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics.[27]

Chomsky wants us to believe that Pentagon sponsorship of his linguistics had no direct military purpose and merely reflected the fact that government funding of science had to be justified politically on ‘defense’ grounds.[28] Well, I can only say that the Pentagon themselves thought otherwise. By the 1960s, they were clearly hoping for direct military command and control applications. We have Air Force Colonel Edward Gaines’s own words to verify this:

We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.[29]

In 1971, the Pentagon itself stated that it made ‘a very thorough effort’ to ensure that it funded ‘only research projects directly relevant to the military’s technological needs.’ While we shouldn’t take anything the Pentagon says at face value, it is worth noting that when this particular claim was investigated by anti-militarist academics based at Stanford University, it was found to be largely accurate, even for projects from the 1960s when Pentagon science funding was especially wide-ranging.[30] These anti-militarist academics also stated, in words distinctly at odds with Chomsky’s claim, that:

The [Pentagon] purchases research to develop capabilities needed for its current and projected operational requirements, not to build a generally strong technology base for the nation. [31]

In a 2016 response to my book, Chomsky insisted that the Pentagon’s research interests ‘had nothing at all to do with our studies of universal grammar’.[32] Again, this claim is contradicted by someone who should know, former Air Force Colonel Anthony Debons:

Much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues [has] direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop … languages for computer operations in military command and control systems.[33]

The command and control computer programs then being developed by the Pentagon were designed under the auspices of the System Development Corporation (SDC).[34] A priority for the SDC’s linguists, led by Robert Simmons, was to develop machines that could directly understand English commands, examples being ‘Blue fighter go to Boston’ or ‘Where are the fighters?’[35]

Whether they were linguists or computer programmers, Chomsky was on everyone’s lips. One historian recalls:

Linguists and programmers involved in language-based retrieval systems all around the country, including Simmons’s team at SDC, were paying close attention to Chomsky’s work and sometimes used Chomsky as a consultant.[36]

To have Chomsky as your consultant was considered the ultimate accolade. As I pointed out in the chapter which Chomsky denounces, this estimation of his significance was shared by those who recruited him to the MITRE Corporation.[37] Here is the computer scientist, Allen Newell, giving us an insight into how Chomsky was perceived at the time:

The most ambitious effort to construct an operating grammar is being made by a group at MITRE, concerned with English-like communication in command and control computer systems. It is no accident that Noam Chomsky, the major theorist in all of American linguistics, is located at MIT.[38]

From his response to me, it seems Chomsky wants us to believe that designing military command and control systems was just a side-line for MITRE, which was otherwise a non-military academic institution. If he sincerely believed this, he could never have read the recruitment adverts that appeared in 1963 in the Boston Globe, the New York Times or MIT’s own Technology Review, adverts that loudly spelled out the corporation’s real priorities:

MITRE’s principal job is the design and development of more effective military command and control systems.[39]

MITRE’s prime mission is to design, develop, and help put into operation global command and control systems that give our military commanders extra time for decision and action in case of enemy attack.[40]

MITRE’s prime mission: To design, develop and help put into operation global command and control systems for national defense.[41]

When we look at the MITRE Corporation reports that explicitly name Chomsky as a consultant – reports that he must surely have read – we find that they faithfully reflect these priorities. They clearly state that the whole point was to draw on Chomsky’s theoretical insights to develop ‘a program to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control.’[42]

By the time these documents were published in 1963, Chomsky’s boss, Jerome Wiesner, had already played an important role in helping to set up the Pentagon’s command and control systems for nuclear war.[43] He had also co-founded MIT’s linguistics department – a department that provided as many as ten trained linguists for MITRE’s command and control research.[44]

In my chapter, I describe how several of Chomsky’s students were working on linguistics for the MITRE Corporation. Among them was Jay Keyser, an officer in the Air Force whose interest was in ‘Old English Metrics’, not an obviously military topic. But we have to remember that the Air Force was explicitly interested in English, since they hoped one day to be able to use their own language when giving instructions to their computerised weapons systems. To the military, it seemed clear that Chomsky’s ideas about transformational grammar meant studying not just one form of English but a wide range of variants in order to work out the underlying grammar. If this quasi-mathematical grammar turned out to be computationally workable, then the Air Force’s computers could be programmed with this grammar. So research into Old English was entirely consistent with the dream of discovering an underlying grammar that would allow English to be used as the Air Force’s preferred control language. It was, of course, also important to study the widest variety of other languages in order to discover any underlying universal grammar which the Pentagon might find useful in the longer term.

On a rather minor point, Chomsky is quite right to point out my incorrect description of Keyser as a colonel rather than a lieutenant. I am mystified how that particular gremlin crept into a footnote in the version we sent him and I don’t blame him for making the most of it. But you only have to read Lieutenant Keyser’s 1965 report for the MITRE Corporation to appreciate why the Air Force imagined Chomsky’s insights to be relevant to their specific concerns.

Keyser may have been studying Chaucer, but from this 1965 report, you wouldn’t have known it. In the document, Keyser proposes using Chomsky’s theories for military command and control systems, illustrating his ideas with words such as ‘aircraft’ and ‘missile’ and with sample sentences such as:

The bomber the fighter attacked landed safely.[45]

In his response to me, Chomsky is silent about the actual content of Keyser’s report, just as he says nothing about the various other documents showing that the Air Force expected that his linguistic theories would indeed prove useful for weapons command and control.[46]

Perhaps the most telling of these documents is another article by Lieutenant Keyser in which he refers repeatedly to the US Air Force’s nuclear-armed bomber, the B-58.[47] Here is an extract which nicely illustrates Keyser’s sample sentences:

It is worth noting that Keyser later became head of linguistics at MIT.[48]

Perhaps still more revealing is how another researcher at MITRE, Dr. Donald Walker, justified using Chomsky’s work in his own project for the Corporation. We have the words of Barbara Partee, one of Chomsky’s students employed on this project, who explained to me in a recent email that his justification was that

… in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.[49]

Partee tells me she was never sure whether anyone believed this justification, but, as far as the military were concerned, something along these lines was the general idea. There can be no doubt that the whole point of the project, in the words of those leading it, was to support ‘the design and development of U.S. Air Force-supplied command and control systems.’[50]

This use of MIT’s linguistic research for ‘command language’ was only one aspect of MITRE’s wider project. Documents show that the corporation were also hoping to use MIT’s research for what they called a ‘military information system’.[51] By 1965, MITRE’s researchers claimed to have created a ‘transformational grammar’ for ‘accessing data from military planning files’.[52]

In reality, I doubt whether this transformational grammar was of much practical use considering that, as it turned out, none of Chomsky’s theories actually worked. As I have often pointed out, Chomsky simply wasn’t interested in practical applications. Neither am I trying to denigrate the work of Chomsky’s dedicated students, who were clearly fascinated by the intrinsic nature of language rather than military applications. But as the horrors of the Vietnam War became more apparent, some of these students felt uncomfortable about working for the Air Force at all. I am therefore not surprised that – as Chomsky points out – one of his students, Haj Ross, now claims that he ‘never had any whiff of military work at MITRE’ and that ‘what we talked about had nothing at all to do with command and control or Air Force.’[53] In her more nuanced account, however, Barbara Partee acknowledges the dilemmas they faced:

For a while, the Air Force was convinced that supporting pure research in generative grammar was a national priority, and we all tried to convince ourselves that taking Air Force money for such purposes was consistent with our consciences, possibly even a benign subversion of the military-industrial complex.[54]

Partee also recalls that ‘our standard rationalization was that it was better for defense spending to be diverted to linguistic research than to be used for really military purposes.’[55]

In other words, this group of young researchers genuinely wanted to believe that they were somehow tricking the Pentagon into investing in linguistics as opposed to developing weapons systems. Yet precisely who was tricking who remains an open question. After all, as long as a reasonable percentage of the research that the Pentagon sponsors ends up being militarily useful, why would the Pentagon care what their researchers thought they were doing?

Preparation for nuclear war - SAGE air defense system designed by MITRE

FREEDOM AND ‘ANARCHY’ AT MIT AND MITRE

Professor Partee also told me that she and her colleagues had ‘total freedom’ at MITRE provided their research was related to ‘topics of potential interest to the Air Force.’[56] This rather novel understanding of ‘total freedom’ is reminiscent of MITRE’s public commitment to its employees that:

At MITRE you will work closely with the Air Force, and other military organizations. You will be associated with some of America’s most important defense projects, yet you will pursue your assignments in a free and independent scientific environment.[57]

This commitment – from a 1962 MITRE recruitment advert – is itself reminiscent of General Eisenhower’s 1946 directive that military scientists ‘must be given the greatest possible freedom to carry out their research’.[58] This whole approach to military research is also consistent with what Wiesner himself termed the ‘anarchy of science’, ‘scientific anarchy’ or ‘planning for anarchy’ – all of which he saw as crucial in order to encourage the ‘free’ environment required for scientific creativity.[59]

So, it seems that creating an illusion of freedom, even anarchy, in their research facilities was always the intention of the Pentagon and its top scientists such as Wiesner. Chomsky has a remarkable gift for seeing through propaganda and official smokescreens. But in this instance, his gift seems to have failed him. Instead of exposing the deception, Chomsky has repeatedly described how genuinely free he was at MIT:

You could do what you wanted in your personal and political life, and also in your academic and professional life, within a broad range. It must’ve been one of the most free universities in the world.[60]

Well, yes. That was precisely how the Pentagon wanted its scientists to feel.

To bolster his claims about freedom, Chomsky points out that MIT’s managers were very supportive of him despite his active opposition to the Pentagon.[61] Chomsky does this to suggest that we should see these managers as genuine supporters of political, as well as intellectual, freedom. But I think it more likely that MIT’s managers followed this policy because they were not stupid. They understood perfectly that had they permitted a purge of left-leaning academics, then their entire institution – including its war work – would have been seriously undermined.[62]

To back up his arguments about political freedom, Chomsky claims that his managers created no problems ‘of any moment at MIT, for me or other activists’.[63] While this may have been true for Chomsky himself, we only have to turn to MIT’s own newspaper, The Tech, to see that when students picketed MIT’s missile laboratories or occupied its administrative offices, these managers meted out strikingly harsh punishments. In 1970, for example, they had two anti-war student activists sent to prison for the supposed crime of ‘disruption of classes’.[64] Then, in 1972, MIT took 30 activists to court for participating in an overnight occupation of military offices in the very same building as Chomsky’s own office.[65]

Twenty faculty members signed a petition in support of this particular occupation but Chomsky wasn’t one of them.[66] As he told an interviewer in 2009 while referring to the tactic of occupation: ‘I wasn’t in favor of it myself, and didn’t like those tactics.’[67]

This stance was confirmed in an interview with one of Chomsky’s MIT colleagues, Kenneth Hoffman, when he recalled an attempt in 1969 to occupy the office of MIT’s president:

See, when we were standing in the president’s office trying to protect the president’s office from the radical students, I’d look up and I’d be standing right beside Noam Chomsky.

The interviewer then intervened to say that Chomsky is ‘perceived as quite a radical himself’. Professor Hoffman replied, ‘Yes. But not if you’re going to mess around with our institution.’[68]

50 years later, Chomsky’s attitude hasn’t changed. By continuing to downplay what everyone knows about MIT’s military role, he shows once again his commitment to defending his institution.

Defending an institution like MIT was never going to be easy. When, in the late 1960s, radical students began demanding an end to war-related research at the university, Chomsky faced a serious dilemma. He didn’t want to alienate these students, but neither did he want to risk his§ academic career by fully supporting them.

Chomsky solved the problem in what seems to me to be another mirror-image reversal of reality. He redefined the students’ demand to end all war research as a right-wing position on the grounds that if MIT did comply, its war work would only be conducted somewhere else! Far better, he said, to keep it at MIT where it could be closely watched. This position, he insists, is the only genuinely ‘radical’ or ‘left-wing’ position.[69]

Accordingly, in May 1969, Chomsky signed the initial version of a report produced by the Pounds Commission, a body which had been set up in response to the growing student protests against war research at MIT. This report recommended that the university keep all its military laboratories.[70]

In October 1969, as student unrest grew stronger, Chomsky refrained from signing the final Pounds Commission report. But his proposal, in an appendix to the report – recommending that MIT’s military labs should ‘be restricted to research on systems of a purely defensive and deterrent character’ – could easily be interpreted in a way that allowed much of MIT’s war work to continue.[71]

Leaders of MIT’s anti-war students at the time, Michael Albert and Stephen Shalom, are still critical of Chomsky’s position. Shalom insists:

[We] wanted first and foremost to stop the war research … We didn’t want the war research to go on in divested labs, nor did we want it to go on in affiliated labs. We wanted the war research stopped, period.[72]

Unable to support such genuinely radical demands, Chomsky tries to persuade us that none of this mattered because, in the 1960s, the university ‘did not have war work, war-related work, on the campus.’[73] By defining war work as technically ‘off campus’, Chomsky can even make the highly misleading claim that ‘MIT itself doesn’t have war work’.[74]

The truth is that any distinction between ‘on campus’ and ‘off campus’ research was little more than a smokescreen to hide MIT’s deep military involvement.[75] As we’ve seen, the whole point of Pentagon funding for basic research ‘on campus’ at MIT was that any theoretical findings could then be developed into functional weaponry at various ‘off campus’ facilities such as the MITRE Corporation or MIT’s own Draper Laboratories.

In 1971, the Draper Laboratories – which specialised in nuclear missiles – produced a report which stated that their research facilities were still ‘an integral part of the academic structure of MIT’.[76] Further illustrating the public relations function of the ‘on campus’/’off campus’ distinction, the Pounds Commission report itself cites figures showing that as many as 500 MIT students and academics worked at the Draper and other ‘off campus’ military labs. In 1969, Chomsky himself signed this particular section of the Pounds Commission report.[77] In more recent years, Chomsky has openly admitted that MIT’s military laboratories ‘were very closely integrated with the Institute’, some being located only ‘two inches off campus’.[78]

For well over 50 years, Chomsky has fearlessly exposed and criticised every aspect of the US military machine, with one striking exception: its influence on US universities. Far from hiding or downplaying this attitude, Chomsky is on record as saying that whether a university is ‘being directly funded by the CIA or in some other fashion seems to me a marginal question.’[79] By repeatedly stressing how free he was at MIT and how distant he was from military research, Chomsky has successfully steered many commentators away from even noticing the paradoxes of his institutional position.

In his response to me, one sentence is particularly revealing. Chomsky states that his students at MITRE understood that ‘any imaginable military application [for their linguistics work] would be far in the remote future.’[80] This apparently innocuous remark is significant for two reasons. First, because it may be the nearest he has ever come to admitting that the Pentagon really did fund his linguistics in the hope of military applications. And, second, because although his students may have been reassured by the prospect of a lengthy time delay, Chomsky himself would surely not have been so easily placated.

After all, if MITRE’s linguistics research had actually succeeded, it could have led to a situation in which whenever a US commander targeted a village in a counter-insurgency operation – or targeted an entire city during a nuclear war – they would be unleashing death and destruction thanks ultimately to Chomsky’s theoretical insights. Under such circumstances, knowing that he had only developed the abstract theory, as opposed to workable applications, would have been of little comfort to someone as principled as Chomsky undoubtedly was.

So what could Chomsky do? He was too principled to come up with some convoluted argument about how war research might somehow benefit humanity. That’s the kind of argument that liberal militarists such as Wiesner would have found appealing. Chomsky preferred to keep things simple. He resolved instead, whether consciously or unconsciously, to make all his linguistic theories so utterly abstract that they stood no chance of proving useful for ‘any imaginable military application’ – not even one postponed into the ‘remote future’.

Extract from ‘Current Research and Development in Scientific Documentation’, No. 10, 1962, p. 301.

CHOMSKY’S STRANGE LINGUISTICS

In his reply to me, Chomsky denies that there is anything unusually abstract or other-worldly about his models of language. He even claims to be working in the tradition of ‘the great anthropological linguists’, Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, who did so much to advance linguistics during the early twentieth century.

This claim is so remote from the truth that we have to ask ourselves what is going on here. The idea that cultural relativists such as Boas or Sapir in any way prefigured the Chomskyan approach is jaw-dropping. These pioneering scholars considered it illegitimate to study a language without simultaneously studying the history and culture of those who spoke it. They believed there was no way to make sense of linguistic forms or associated meanings without being aware of how language was used in the speech community concerned, bearing in mind the mode of subsistence, kinship system, economic relationships, rituals, religious beliefs and so forth. Breaking with all this, it was Chomsky who did more than anyone to redefine linguistics completely, disconnecting the discipline from its former home in university cultural anthropology departments.

Chomsky is, in fact, the supreme example of a linguist whose methods relentlessly disconnect abstract theory from the realities of social and cultural life. Consistently, through all its versions and reincarnations, Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar disconnects the human language faculty from the rest of the brain, from speaking and listening, from context and meaning, from communicative usage of any kind, from learning and experience, and finally from culture, history, prehistory and any possible evolutionary precursor in the organic world.

In order to really understand Chomsky, we must treat him as we would any other intellectual. We must make a sustained effort to view his work in the context of his times, his community’s history and the institutional and political environment in which his ideas took shape. In his 2017 reply to me in the London Review of Books, and again in his 2019 response, Chomsky plays back this standard sociological approach of mine in unrecognizably absurd form, almost as if I were claiming a month-by-month correlation between cash receipts from the Pentagon and Chomsky’s latest idea.[81] I can agree with him that had I been distorting his motives in this way, I would deserve the accusations of ‘deceit’ and ‘defamation’ that he hurls my way.[82] Far from claiming a correlation between funds from the Pentagon and Chomsky’s latest idea, I have always argued the exact opposite – that Chomsky consistently avoided any hint of military collusion. He achieved this by disconnecting linguistic theory from linguistic practice, language from any of its possible uses and pure linguistic science from any conceivable application, whether military or not. This could only be accomplished by pursuing a level of abstraction unprecedented in the history of linguistics.   

Among other details which supposedly refute my whole argument, Chomsky points out that his basic philosophical approach is not fundamentally at odds with the one he adopted while still a student. He argues that since his (in my view peculiarly abstract) approach to language pre-dated his paid employment at MIT and then remained constant throughout his life, I must be wrong to perceive any intellectual dependency on the ups and downs of Pentagon funding at MIT.

But, of course, I am not claiming any such crude dependency or correlation. My point, documented exhaustively in my 2016 book, Decoding Chomsky, is that military funding of computers and control systems was a powerful factor influencing the intellectual climate long before Chomsky got his job at MIT in 1955. It is certainly true that Chomsky was working closely with MIT’s Morris Halle on linguistic challenges from 1951, four years prior to his own appointment there.[83] 1951 was also the year when Chomsky formed a close friendship with the Israeli logician Bar-Hillel, who was in charge of all machine translation research at MIT.[84] As early as the 1940s, Chomsky’s first linguistics teacher, Zellig Harris, had already become excited by the prospect of automatic language processing, including machine translation.[85] All those in Chomsky’s circle were excited by computers in one way or another. Such was the climate of the times.

Chomsky’s ideas about language were unprecedentedly abstract from the beginning, and became increasingly so as time went on. During the early years of his academic career, Chomsky’s linguistic models were relatively rich in detail and in that sense concrete. His most fabled early work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, featured page after page of quasi-mathematical formulae, each item fully specified, giving the impression of a richly detailed instruction manual for computer engineers. In other early works, Chomsky was perfectly happy to analyse the sound patterning of a particular spoken language, as he did in his Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew and The Sound Pattern of English.[86]

Yet as time went on, such relatively concrete studies gave way to contributions whose most striking feature was their unprecedented generality and lack of specific content. From the standpoint of a scientist on Mars, Chomsky would eventually claim, only one language existed on Earth. Back In the late 1950s and early 1960s, most of his supporters assumed that Chomsky’s work would help them construct a transformational grammar of any language they chose to study. But these hopes were dashed when Chomsky renounced the very concept of what he termed ‘external’ languages such as spoken French or Swahili, arguing that the only scientific object of study would henceforth be ‘I-language’ – language conceived as silent and internal to the individual mind. Each locally distinctive sound pattern comprising what had previously been viewed as a speech community’s language was, from this standpoint, no more than an ‘externalization’ of something immeasurably more significant – the one language that all human beings know from birth.[87]

It seems clear to me that Chomsky’s attraction for universal and eternal truths was always driven by a felt need to rise above the messiness and temporality of language use and political life. Initially, he was prepared to go along with those of his MIT/MITRE colleagues who imagined that, one day, certain military uses might be found for a transformational grammar of, say, English or Russian. He wouldn’t actively encourage such hopes, but neither did he go out of his way to discourage them.

But then came the war in Vietnam, which revealed, as never before, the horrifying levels of death and destruction that modern armies could inflict by harnessing cutting-edge science. It was just as he was getting active on the public stage as a leading opponent of the war that he set about distancing himself from those teachers and colleagues – among them Zellig Harris – who had previously introduced him to the science of linguistics.

FROM ABSTRACTION TO ABSURDITY

If Chomsky tells me that his linguistics has no significant connection with his moral or political surroundings or ideals, I must respect his insistence on that disconnect. I am well aware that Chomsky has consistently denied any significant connection between his political activism and his science.[88] Paradoxically, however, this only strengthens my case, since my own argument rests on precisely that point.

Chomsky is faithful to a Platonic intellectual tradition in which form and content, eternal soul and mortal body, theory and practice are not required to meet up. From his earliest years right up to the present, Chomsky has always felt most comfortable with models of language so otherworldly and abstract that no one could possibly make use of them for anything at all, let alone for killing people.

This suggestion is controversial.[89] But I have come across no better way to explain some of the more incomprehensible features of Chomsky’s linguistics. Over the centuries, linguists have often adopted an abstract approach to their field. But in Chomsky, abstraction is carried to such an extreme that language is no longer connected with speaking or with social communication, history or culture at all.

According to Chomsky, when language instantaneously emerged in Homo sapiens, the result was that one mutant individual started talking to itself, not to anyone else.[90] Just as Chomsky disconnects language from any function in social communication, he routinely treats a disconnected sentence – for example ‘John is easy to please’ – as an isolated object, to be analysed apart from its conversational use. Criticising this whole approach, the influential linguist Adele Goldberg has described it as ‘akin to studying animals in separate cages in a zoo’ when they should be studied in their natural habitat. The natural habitat of language, she writes, is conversation.[91]

Chomsky also disconnects language from evolution. When asked how the biological faculty evolved, he argues that it did not. Instead he suggests that the brain of some ancestor may have been abruptly and suddenly ‘rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation’.[92] From this moment, mysteriously, the brain contained not only Universal Grammar but also specific words. Chomsky even makes the extraordinary claim that the lexical concepts we combine in sentences – examples being ‘book’, ‘bureaucrat’ and ‘carburettor’ – are genetically determined items which were installed in the mind of Homo sapiens many thousands of years before actual books, bureaucrats or carburettors had come into existence.[93]

Although Chomsky is still hugely respected as the founder of modern theoretical linguistics, the current consensus among linguists is that none of his theoretical models of Universal Grammar has survived the test of time.[94] Over the years, a number of linguists conducting fieldwork in remote corners of the world have brought to light previously unrecognized languages which bring into question Chomsky’s entire theoretical edifice. Chomsky’s response is always to retreat into a new level of generality and abstraction.

Let me illustrate with an example. In his reply to me, Chomsky invokes Kenneth Hale, the brilliant linguist employed alongside him at MIT. Hale is well known for coming up with a language which seemed inconsistent with Chomsky’s theory. Chomsky had argued that all sentences in all languages must consist of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. So these two were considered the basic ‘constituents’ of any sentence. With this in mind, the ‘constituent structure’ of a sentence depended on how these basic elements were configured, how they were arranged with respect to one another. In 1978, however, Hale told Chomsky about a language from Aboriginal Australia – Warlpiri – which violated even this most basic constraint. In this hunter-gatherer language, it seemed to make no difference whether a speaker said ‘The man speared the kangaroo’, ‘The kangaroo speared the man’ or strung the words together in any other order.[95]

Chomsky had always allowed for the fact that languages could differ from each other. But when Hale told Chomsky about Warlpiri, he was concerned that his discovery – or at least his theoretical formulation of it – made ‘languages seem more different than ought to be possible’.[96] In other words, the world’s languages now seemed far more varied than they ought to be if Chomsky’s core assumptions about constituent structure were correct.

Faced with this problem, Hale and Chomsky had to find a solution. They would make the theory of Universal Grammar (UG) so abstract that it could not possibly be wrong. On Hale’s initiative and with his support, Chomsky ruled that the presence or absence of constituent structure was just an optional ‘setting’ within the recently invented ‘principles and parameters’ model of UG. Whatever the nature of UG’s abstract principles, ran this argument, their concrete application depended on parameters which could be switched off or on.[97] Among the newly invented parameters was, Hale suggested, an on/off switch for constituent structure.[98] The beauty of this move was that, from now on, virtually anything could be declared consistent with Universal Grammar simply by inventing this or that optional parameter as required.[99] That was taking abstraction to a yet further extreme.

All this was happening during the late 1970s. Then, in the early 1990s, Chomsky retreated still further into pure abstraction with his ‘Minimalist turn’.[100] Up to this point, the idea had been that Universal Grammar imposed definite constraints because the Language Faculty was part of human nature, and this was genetically fixed. He now surmised that Universal Grammar might, after all, involve no genetic constraints at all. Chomsky suggested that the fundamental properties of language – like those of a snowflake – might instead reflect something like gravity or surface tension, a ‘natural law’.[101]

As a result of all this, one sympathetic interviewer felt bold enough to ask: ‘What exactly is UG at this stage?’ Chomsky replied: ‘Well, what’s Universal Grammar? It’s anybody’s best theory about what language is at this point. I can make my own guesses’.[102] Summing up decades of intensive work, then, Chomsky can only tell us that the nature of UG is anyone’s guess. When a theory tells you that anything goes, you really do know that this is not science.

In the eyes of most contemporary linguists, the whole concept of Universal Grammar has become so empty of content that it no longer serves any useful purpose at all. As the acclaimed psychologist and linguist Michael Tomasello remarked in 2016: ‘[Chomsky’s] universal grammar appears to have reached a final impasse’.[103]

But this still begs the question of why should any of this matter to those of us struggling to build an anti-capitalist movement in the 21st century? My answer is this. Chomsky is still the global left’s most influential living intellectual. The questions he raises are crucial ones. What does it mean to be human? What kind of creatures are we? What is the nature of language and how did it evolve?

Chomsky asks all the right questions. They are anthropological questions. But, as he disconnects mind from body and theory from practice, he inevitably sets up a stumbling block, preventing us from properly addressing such momentous and important issues. The truth is that grammar does not exist, and could not have evolved, in isolation. To understand it we must reconnect it with our social, sexual and political lives – with laughter and song, ritual and play, politics and kinship, not to mention everything else which makes us the human beings we are.

For ninety per cent of our existence as a species, we humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, living long before private property, territorial borders, warfare or despotism had even been invented.[104] I have written elsewhere about how our bodies and minds were shaped under the egalitarian – even communistic – social conditions enjoyed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It was under such liberated conditions that we developed the most extraordinarily social of our genetic capacities, our ability to agree on words, construct sentences and by such means share our thoughts and dreams.[105]

Successful use of language depends on previous shared understandings, trust in communicative intentions and a willingness to hear our own words from the listener’s standpoint instead of just our own. There can be no doubt that these capacities have a genetic basis. There is such a thing as human nature and it is wired into our brains. But our capacity for language is quintessentially social, not just a device enabling us to talking silently to ourselves.[90]

Whereas Chomsky’s individualist paradigm relentlessly excludes social functions and dimensions, almost every other linguist or evolutionary anthropologist would agree with me that it is our unique social intelligence which enables language to be endlessly reinvented and creatively used. It is insights like these that have led to a growing scientific interest in the kinds of political organization which best promote the flourishing of language and creative thought.[106]

To conclude, for many years Chomsky was in the paradoxical position of being a principled anti-militarist conducting his research in an electronics lab funded by the US military. I would be disappointed if my argument were ever used to imply that Chomsky was somehow guilty of trickery or double-dealing. I am saying no such thing. In a world riven by conflicts and contradictions, all of us must somehow survive while holding our heads high. Chomsky is no exception. When I suggest that his institutional position at MIT must have involved moral challenges, I am not claiming to have any special psychological insight. In fact, I am only endorsing what Chomsky himself evidently knows. Nothing can summarise my thinking more eloquently than these words from Chomsky himself:

We’re all familiar with it in our own lives. You have interests and perceived needs, and you figure out ways of dealing with them. And unless you’re a total cynic, which few people are, you construct a belief-system which justifies them. Then you believe this belief-system and set about pursuing the needs. You do it with a high moral stance and a great sense of self-justification. Everyone does this. … Very few people are capable of saying one thing and believing another, or doing something that they recognize is completely cynical and immoral. [107]

Avoiding cognitive dissonance is not easy. It means disconnecting one part of your brain from the rest. At one level, Chomsky seems to know. I think this explains his astonishing anxiety and hostility toward anyone who probes too close.[108]

NOTES

Extracts from ‘Grammars of Number Theory Some Examples’ (MITRE Corp. 1963) by Arnold Zwicky.

1. Noam also downplayed MIT’s war research when asked by the New York Times to respond to my book (Sam Tanenhaus, ‘On Being Noam Chomsky’, New York Times, 31 October 2016). For Chomsky’s other responses to my book, see: Tom Bartlett, ‘The Chomsky Puzzle’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 August 2016; Sam Fenn, ‘Chomsky's Carburetor’, Cited Podcast, no. 23, 2016 (http://citedpodcast.com/23-chomskys-carburetor/); Noam Chomsky, ‘Chomsky Says’ and ‘Chomsky has the Last Say’, London Review of Books, vol.39, no.12, 15 June 2017 and no.16, 17 August 2017. Also see note 20 on page 247 of the paperback edition of Decoding Chomsky (2018) for more examples of Noam understating MIT’s involvement in military research.

2. ‘Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Human Nature: Justice versus Power’ in: Arnold Davidson, Foucault and his Interlocutors, 1997, p. 144.

3. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 98.

4. Louis Smullin, ‘Jerome Bert Wiesner, 1915-1994’, National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs, vol.78, 2000, p. 9.

5. Daniel Lang, ‘Profiles, a Scientist’s Advice - 1’, New Yorker, 19 January 1963, pp. 40, 45-6.

6. Max Rosenberg, Plans and Policies for the Ballistic Missile Initial Operational Capability, 1960, pp. iii-iv, 6-7, 17, 22; David Snead, ‘Eisenhower and the Gaither Report: The Influence of a Committee of Experts on National Security Policy in the Late 1950s’, PhD thesis, University of Virginia, 1997, pp. 59-60, 79, 153, 196, 205. Wiesner’s New York Times obituary says that he ‘argued fervently for developing and manufacturing ballistic missiles.’ Eric Pace, ‘Jerome B. Wiesner, President of MIT, is Dead at 79’, New York Times, 23 October 1994.

7. Jerome Wiesner, ‘Prof. Wiesner Explains’, Chicago Tribune, 29 June 1969, p. 24.

8. Snead, ‘Eisenhower and the Gaither Report’, 1997, pp. 188-9.

9. Donald Brennan, ABM, Yes or No? 1969, p. 33. In 1958, Wiesner publicly promoted the concept of a ‘missile gap’ – if not the exact phrase – when he told a national television audience that the Soviets ‘are ahead of us in the missile field’. Snead, Eisenhower and the Gaither Report, 1997, p. 183.

10. Jerome Wiesner, Report to the President-Elect of the Ad Hoc Committee on Space, 10 January 1961 (https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/report61.html).

11. ‘Noam Chomsky interviewed by Jerry Brown’, SPIN Magazine, vol.9, no.5, August 1993.

12. Although Wiesner became quite outspoken about the dangers of new missile systems, he apparently felt no qualms about administering the technical research required for just such systems at MIT. When asked directly how he could do this, he left little room for doubt, explaining: ‘I don’t believe I should use my position in this institution to subvert a policy of the government, even if I disapprove’ (Victor McElheny, ‘For Jerome Wiesner the Past is Prologue’, Boston Globe, 7 March 1971, p. 103.)
Wiesner’s criticisms of US nuclear policy were hardly motivated by principled anti-militarism. Rather, he believed that an overemphasis on nuclear weapons distracted the US from building what he called the ‘truly effective conventional army’ required to ‘protect the oil fields’ of the Middle East (‘The Level of Might that’s Right: An interview with Jerome B. Wiesner’, Technology Review, vol.83, no.3, January 1981, pp. 59-62).
His concerns about nuclear proliferation were equally disingenuous. So, when, in the 1970s, the Shah of Iran wanted to develop nuclear weapons, Wiesner was happy to do a deal with him – a deal which Chomsky himself summed up as MIT ‘leasing’ the university’s ‘nuclear engineering department to the Shah’. Farah Stockman, ‘Iran’s Nuclear Vision Initially Glimpsed at Institute’, The Tech, vol.127, no.11, 13 March 2007; Abbas Milani, ‘The Shah’s Atomic Dreams’, Foreign Policy, 29 December 2010.

13. Gabriel Kolko, ‘The American Goals in Vietnam’ in: Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (eds), The Pentagon Papers, Critical Essays, Vol.5, 1972, p. 12. Volume 4 of the Pentagon Papers also mentions Wiesner’s involvement with the McNamara barrier and explains that its key requirements would include ‘20 million Gravel mines per month; possibly 25 million button bomblets per month; 10,000 SADEYE-BLU-26B clusters per month.’
A 1972 article in The Tech explains that, as MIT’s provost in the 1960s, Wiesner had been the chief officer responsible for military research and that, as its president, he now signed all its military contracts. The article then goes on to say that:
In each phase of the [Vietnam] war, MIT’s contributions have become progressively more important, until now MIT-based technology dominates the air war, and in some cases makes it possible. Failure to put a stop to MIT’s work in the past has made possible the air war and social redesigning (i.e. genocide) in Indochina today.
The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Vol.4, 1972, p. 122; Wells Eddleman, ‘Commentary: MIT may be Dangerous to the World’, The Tech, vol.92, no.21, 28 April 1972, p. 5.

14. Fredric Branfman, ‘Beyond the Pentagon Papers: The Pathology of Power’ in: Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (eds), The Pentagon Papers, Critical Essays, Vol.5, 1972, p. 303. See also: Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons: The secret history of science’s post-war elite, 2007, pp. 65-66, 75-76; Sarah Bridger, Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research, 2015, ch.5.

15. In its section on the Vietnam War, MITRE’s official history states that, by 1967:
MITRE was devoting almost one-quarter of its total resources to the command, control, and communications systems necessary to the conduct of that conflict.
Robert Meisel and John Jacobs, MITRE: The First Twenty Years, A History of the MITRE Corporation (1958-1978), 1979, pp. 114-5.

16. Walter Munk, et al., ‘Gordon James Fraser Macdonald’, National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs, vol.84, 2004, p. 242; Meisel and Jacobs, MITRE: The First Twenty Years, 1979, p. 266.

17. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 93; Nathaniel Rich, ‘Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change’, New York Times, 1 August 2018.

18. Gordon MacDonald, ‘How to Wreck the Environment’ in: Nigel Calder (ed.), Unless Peace Comes; A scientific forecast of new weapons, 1968, p. 182, 191; Gordon Macdonald, Oral History Interview, no.3, American Institute of Physics, 21 March 1994. Macdonald not only investigated the use of ‘weather modification’ in Vietnam but also the use of chemical and nuclear weapons in that terrible conflict. Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices; Presidential science advisers from the atomic bomb to SDI, 1992, pp. 158-9; Macdonald, Oral History Interview, no.3, 1994.

19. ‘Nomination of John M Deutch’, Hearings before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the US Senate, 1995, p. 110; Daniel Glenn, ‘MIT research heavily dependent on defense department funding: A Crack in the Dome’, The Tech, vol.109, no.7, 28 February 1989, p. 2.

20. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 97.

21. Thomas Huang, ‘Examining John Deutch’s Pentagon connections’ and ‘ABS, Chemistry Faculty did Bio-Warfare Research’, The Tech, vol.108, no.26, 27 May 1988, pp. 2, 11. In our Responsibility of Intellectuals book, Chomsky discusses the Clinton-era military doctrine that the US should portray itself as a country that ‘may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked’. What Noam doesn’t mention, however, is that this doctrine was developed while his MIT colleague, John Deutch, was Deputy Defense Secretary and that it is likely that Deutch had significant input into the policy. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, pp. 84-5.

22. David Dickson, ‘Chemical Warfare Protest Plans’, Nature, vol.295, 18 February 1982, p. 545.

23. Noam Chomsky, ‘Video interview for MIT 150 Infinite History Project’, 2009 (https://archive.org/details/NoamChomsky-InfiniteHistoryProject-2009/).

24. US House of Representatives, Research on Mechanical Translation, Report of the Committee on Science and Astronautics, 1960, pp. 6-7, 10-11.

25. US House of Representatives, Research on Mechanical Translation, Report of the Committee on Science and Astronautics, 1960, pp. 6-7, 10-11. By 1968, the US Air Force were mechanically translating around 100,000 words of Russian every day. Sergei Perschke, ‘Machine Translation – the second phase of development’, Endeavour, vol.27, 1968, p. 97-9. See also: Michael Gordin, ‘The Dostoevsky Machine in Georgetown: Scientific translation in the Cold War’, Annals of Science, vol.73, no.2, 2016, pp. 208-23, and Janet Nielsen, ‘Private Knowledge, Public Tensions: Theory commitment in postwar American linguistics’, PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2010, pp. 39-42, 194, 338.

26. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, pp. 97-9.

27. ‘Afterword, Business School: An Interview with Noam Chomsky’ in: Geoffry White and Flannery Hauck (eds), Campus Inc.: Corporate power in the ivory tower, 2000, p. 445. Funding for linguistics in this military lab was certainly generous. As Chomsky’s friend and colleague, Morris Halle, said:
There was always money available. It wasn’t a question of trying to find money, it was a question of thinking of ways of spending it. (Morris Halle, ‘50 Years of Linguistics at MIT, Lecture 10’, 2011, Youtube, 7 mins, 30 seconds.)

28. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 94. Life today is dominated by computers, the Internet and other by-products of post-war military research spending. It is therefore easy to be persuaded by Noam’s argument that this spending was primarily intended to develop ‘today’s high-tech economy’. But, of course, many other technologies – such as for example, low-pollution energy sources – were never fully developed although they could have made an equally important contribution to ‘today’s high-tech economy’. One obvious reason for this discrepancy is that low-pollution energy sources have no clear military use, whereas computers, the early Internet and – for a while – Chomsky’s linguistics were considered militarily useful.

29. Frederick Newmeyer, The Politics of Linguistics , 1986, pp. 85-6.

30. These Stanford academics mostly researched military funding that originated before the 1969 Mansfield Amendment which sought to restrict such funding to projects of direct military relevance. They were particularly critical of military-funded researchers who like to think that their research ‘is not dictated by any military problem’ and who thereby ‘ignore the fact that the [Pentagon] funds their research because it contributes explicitly to solving a military problem’. These academics also quoted a top US Air Force official who insisted that:
We don’t support broad research programs … which have little direct and apparent mission applicability to the Air Force.
Stanton Glantz and Norm Albers, ‘Department of Defense R&D in the University’, Science, vol.186, no.4165, 22 November 1974, pp. 706, 710-11; Stanton Glantz, et al., DOD Sponsored Research at Stanford: Its impact on the university, Vol. 1, ‘The Perceptions: The investigator’s and the sponsor’s’, 1971, SWOPSI, p. 7.

31. Glantz and Albers, ‘Department of Defense R&D in the University’, Science, 1974, p. 707.

32. ‘Chomsky’s Carburetor’, Cited Podcast, 2016.

33. Anthony Debons, ‘Command and Control: Technology and social impact’, Advances in Computers, vol.11, 1971, p. 354.

34. Claude Baum, The System Builders: The story of SDC, 1981, pp. 53-7, 71-7; Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (eds), Uncertain Empire: American history and the idea of the Cold War, 2012, pp. 285-6.

35. C. Baum (ed.), ‘Natural-Language Processing’, Research Directorate Report, SDC, January 1964, pp. 7-8, 91.

36. Charles Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, A History of Online Information Systems, 1963-1976, 2003, pp. 17, 20, 43. See also: C. Baum, Research and Technology Division Report for 1966, SDC, January 1967, pp. 11-14 .

37. Arnold Zwicky, ‘Grammars of Number Theory: Some Examples’, Working Paper W-6671, MITRE Corporation, 1963, Foreword, last page; Arnold Zwicky and Stephen Isard, ‘Some Aspects of Tree Theory’, Working Paper W-6674, MITRE Corporation, 1963, Foreword, last page.

38. Allen Newell, ‘The Trip Towards Flexibility: An ongoing case of interaction between the behavioral and computer sciences’ in: George Bugliarello, Bioengineering: An engineering view, 1968, p. 271.

39. ‘Putting the World on a Blackboard’, Boston Globe, 2 June, 4 August, 25 August 1963, pp. A-9 to A-10; ‘Space Command and Control System’, New York Times, 4 August 1963, p. 117.

40. ‘How Much do you Know about MITRE?’, Technology Review, vol.64, no.4, February 1962, p. 36.

41. ‘Systems Men: Contact MITRE’, Boston Globe, 10, 17 and 31 March, 1963, pp. A-9 to A-12. See also: Meisel and Jacobs, MITRE: The First Twenty Years, 1979, especially pages: xiii, 18-9, 59, 65, 114-5.

42. Zwicky, ‘Grammars of Number Theory: Some Examples’, MITRE, 1963, Foreword, last page; Zwicky and Isard, ‘Some Aspects of Tree Theory’, MITRE, 1963, Foreword, last page.

43. Rebecca Slayton, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing and Missile Defense, 1949-2012, 2013, pp. 47, 55-6, 156; Security Resources Panel, Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age [Gaither Report], 1957, pp. v, 6-10, 27-30; Jerome Wiesner, Warning and Defense in the Missile Age, 1959 (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB43/doc2.pdf); Howard Murphy, The Early History of the MITRE Corporation: Its background, inception, and first five years, Vol.1, 1972, pp. 180-1, 199, ch.7.

44. Kathyrn O’Neill, ‘Scientific Reunion Commemorates 50 years of Linguistics at MIT’, 2011 (https://shass.mit.edu/news/news-2011-scientific-reunion-commemorates-50-years-linguistics-mit); Antonio Zampolli, et al., Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honor of Don Walker, 30 June 1994, pp. xxi-xxii.

45. Samuel Jay Keyser, ‘Linguistic Theory and System Design’ in: Information System Sciences, Joseph Spiegel and Donald Walker (eds), 1965, MITRE Corporation, pp. 495-505.

46. Another of Chomsky’s colleagues who worked for MITRE was G. Hubert Matthews. It is worth noting that, in his response to me, Chomsky is keen to mention Matthew’s work on Amerindian languages while omitting to mention his involvement with MITRE. It is also worth noting that Noam’s closest colleague at MIT, Morris Halle, ran an Air Force sponsored project to develop Chomsky’s theories or ‘computer control’ – a project with apparent connections to this MITRE work. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 95; Keyser, ‘The Case for Ordinary English’, System Engineering, 1963, pp. 20-1; Current Research and Development in Scientific Documentation, No. 14, 1966, pp. 111.

47. Samuel Jay Keyser, ‘The Case for Ordinary English’, System Engineering: an intensive course for engineers and scientists, 1963, pp. 5, 13, 19-21.

48. Samuel Jay Keyser, Mens et Mania: the MIT nobody knows, p.8.

49. ‘Chomsky’s students recall their time at the MITRE Corporation’, February 2018 (http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2018/2/17/chomskys-students-recall-their-time-at-the-mitre-corporation).

50. Current Research and Development in Scientific Documentation, No. 10, 1962, pp. 301-2.

51. The MITRE Corporation, Research and Experimentation, 1960-1964, January 1966, p. 90.

52. Current Research and Development in Scientific Documentation, No. 14, 1966, pp. 111-2.

53. ‘Chomsky’s students recall their time at the MITRE Corporation,’ 2018.

54. Barbara Partee, ‘Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of February 2005’ (https://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/BHP_Essay_Feb05.pdf), p. 8n.

55. ‘Chomsky’s students recall their time at the MITRE Corporation,’ 2018.

56. ‘Chomsky’s students recall their time at the MITRE Corporation,’ 2018.
Professor Jonathan King revealed the level of self-delusion of many MIT researchers in the 1980s when he told an interviewer:
There were hundreds and hundreds of physics and engineering graduate students working on these weapons. … They’re working on [what was called] the hydrodynamics of an elongated object passing through a deloop fluid at high speed. ‘Well, Isn’t that a missile?’ – ‘No, I’m just working on the basic principle; nobody works on weapons.‘
Colm Renehan, ‘Peace Activism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1975 to 2001: A case study’, PhD thesis, Boston College, 2007, p. 247.

57. ‘Now at the MITRE Corporation’, Boston Globe, 4 November 1962, p. A-18. See also: Meisel and Jacobs, MITRE: The First Twenty Years, 1979, p. 101.

58. James Killian, Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A memoir of the first special assistant to the President on science and technology, 1977, p. 59.

59. Daniel Kevles, The Physicists, 2013, p. 404; Jerome Wiesner, ‘Thinking Ahead with … Jerome Wiesner’, International Science and Technology, no.2, February 1962, pp. 28-33; Engineering in Biology and Medicine Training Committee, Status of Research in Biomedical Engineering, 1968, p. 69.

60. White and Hauck, ‘Afterword …’, Campus Inc.., 2000, pp. 445-6.

61. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 97.

62. MIT was always more interested in its researchers’ contributions to military science than in their political views. This was particularly evident during Senator McCarthy’s purges of the 1950s. A former MIT provost, Walter Rosenblith, recalls with some pride that when McCarthy’s envoys came to the ‘tower of war research’ that is MIT, the university’s president, James Killian, ‘showed them the door’. ‘Online Oral History Interview: Walter A. Rosenblith’, 19 July 2000, (https://libraries.mit.edu/_archives/oral-history-transcripts/rosenblith-pdf/rosenblith-session%202.pdf) pp. 20-2.

63. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 101, note 36.

64. Michael Feirtag, ‘Battering Ram III’, The Tech, vol.91, no.55, 14 December 1971, p. 8; Bruce Schwartz, ‘Kats, Bohmer, Mom Jailed’, The Tech, vol.90, no.28, 22 May 1970, p. 1.

65. Curtis Reeves, ‘19 Appeal Trespass Cases’, The Tech, vol.92, no.28, 4 August 1972, pp. 1, 13.

66. ‘A Faculty Petition in Support of the ROTC Occupation’, The Tech, vol.92, no.27, 19 May 1972, p. 3.

67. Noam Chomsky, ‘Video interview for MIT 150 Infinite History Project’, 2009 (https://archive.org/details/NoamChomsky-InfiniteHistoryProject-2009/).

68. Joel Segel, Recountings: Conversations with MIT mathematicians, 2009, pp. 206-7.

69. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, pp. 96, 115-6; Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky, a life of dissent, 1997, p. 140.

70. Dorothy Nelkin, The University and Military Research, 1972, pp. 81-2; Eugene Skolnikoff, ‘Video Interview for MIT 150 Infinite History Project’, 2011 (https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/eugene-b-skolnikoff-’50-sm-’50-phd-’65).
See also: Noam Chomsky, MIT Review Panel on Special Laboratories, Final Report, October 1969, pp. 17, 31.

71. MIT Review Panel on Special Laboratories, Final Report, October 1969, pp. 37-8.

72. Stephen Shalom, ‘A Flawed Political Biography’, New Politics, vol.6(3), no.23, summer 1997. Michael Albert, has since described Noam’s position as, in effect, ‘preserving war research with modest amendments.’ Michael Albert, Remembering Tomorrow: From the politics of opposition to what we are for, 2006, p. 98.

73. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 115.

74. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 116.

75. In the 1980s, MIT justified its continuing research on nuclear and other weapons on the grounds that such research was acceptable because it wasn’t ‘operational weapons work’. As one anti-militarist campaigner said at the time:
MIT is so deeply involved in work relating to weapons systems that they have to resort to some sort of sophistry to justify it.
The same article that reported this, also reported Wiesner saying:
If you’re going to do defense research, you should do it as well as you can. At MIT we can do it very, very well.
Robert Levey, ‘MIT Role in Research and Military Questioned: Classified Work is Done at Off-Campus Labs’, Boston Globe, 7 August 1983, pp. 1, 16.

76. James Hand (ed.), MIT’s Role in Project Apollo, vol.1, October 1971, p. 5. MIT’s president in the 1980s, Paul Gray, has clearly stated that, during the 1960s, the university’s military labs were ‘an integral part of MIT’. Jerome Wiesner, Jerry Wiesner: Scientist, statesman, humanist: memories and memoirs, 2003, p. 109.

77. MIT Review Panel on Special Laboratories, 1969, pp. 59-69.

78. Chomsky, ‘Video Interview for MIT 150 Infinite History Project’, 2009; Noam Chomsky, ‘Interview with Noam Chomsky’, Works and Days, vol.26-7, 2008-9, pp. 530-34. Chomsky has continued to contradict himself on the issue of whether MIT’s military labs were integrated with the university’s academic activities. For example, in his 2019 response to me, Chomsky clearly stated that MIT’s military labs were ‘entirely separate from the academic program’. Yet in an earlier response, in 2017, he stated that there would have been no point in separating MIT’s military labs from the university because they ‘would continue their work as before, also effectively maintaining relations with academic programmes.’ Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 96; Noam Chomsky, ‘Chomsky Says’, London Review of Books, vol.39, no.12, 15 June 2017.

79. Milan Rai, Chomsky’s Politics, 1995, p. 130.

80. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 93.

81. Noam Chomsky, ‘Chomsky Says’ and ‘Chomsky has the Last Say’, London Review of Books, vol.39, no.12, 15 June 2017 and no.16, 17 August 2017; Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 91-2.

82. Allott et al., The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019, p. 101, 96-9 .

83. Mark Liberman, ‘Morris Halle: an appreciation’, Annual Review of Linguistics, vol.2 no.1, January 2016, p. 8.

84. Barsky, 1997, p. 54, 81; Chris Knight, Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary and politics, p. 60.

85. Chris Knight, Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary and politics, p. 56.

86. Noam Chomsky, Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (Reprint of PhD thesis, 1951), 1979; Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, The Sound Pattern of English, 1968.

87. Noam Chomsky, ‘Language and Mind: Current Thoughts on Ancient Problems’ in Lyle Jenkins (ed.), Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics, 2004, p. 405.

88. Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures, 1988, p. 2; Denis Staunton, ‘Iconoclast and radical who takes a long view‘, Irish Times, 21 January 2006.

89. For more on my approach to Chomsky’s linguistics, see the Open Democracy debate involving myself, Fritz Newmeyer, Randy Allen Harris, Wolfgang Sperlich and others HERE.

90. ‘Actually you can use language even if you are the only person in the universe with language, and in fact it would even have adaptive advantage. If one person suddenly got the language faculty, that person would have great advantages; the person could think, could articulate to itself its thoughts, could plan, could sharpen, and develop thinking as we do in inner speech, which has a big effect on our lives. Inner speech is most of speech. Almost all the use of language is to oneself. Noam Chomsky, On Nature and Language, 2000, p. 148.

91. Adele Goldberg, Explain Me This. Creativity, competition, and the partial productivity of constructions, 2019, p. 145.

92. Chomsky, ‘Three factors in language design’, Linguistic Inquiry, vol.36, no.1, 2005, pp. 11-12.

93. In 2000, Chomsky said ‘there is overwhelming reason to believe that concepts like, say, climb, chase, run, tree and book and so on are fundamentally fixed.’ In 2010, when again discussing the innate nature of such concepts, he wrote:
Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburetor and bureaucrat. … However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.
Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, 2010, pp. 64-6; Noam Chomsky, The Architecture of Language, 2000, p. 75.

94. This point has been conceded by Chomsky himself, but if readers require further evidence, they can turn to the work of Christina Behme, Margaret Boden, Cedric Boeckx, Rudolf Botha, Daniel Everett, Vyvyan Evans or Michael Tomasello. These days, the theoretical approach developed by Adele Goldberg and her colleagues – known as ‘construction grammar’ – is considerably more influential and widely admired within the discipline of linguistics than Chomsky’s so-called ‘generative’ approach. Noam Chomsky, On Nature and Language, 2002, p. 151; Christina Behme, ‘A “Galilean” science of language’, Journal of Linguistics, vol.50, no.3, November 2014; Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A history of cognitive science, 2006; Cedric Boeckx, 2017, ‘Not only us’, Inference, vol.3, no.1; Rudolph Botha, Challenging Chomsky: The generative garden game, 1989; Daniel Everett, Language, the Cultural Tool, 2012; Vyvyan Evans, The Language Myth: Why language is not an instinct, 2014; Michael Tomasello and Paul Ibbotson, ‘Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning’, Scientific American, November 2016; Adele Goldberg, Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language, 2006. See also: Chris Knight, Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary and politics, 2016, pp. 150-6, 162-8.

95.  Kenneth Hale, 'On the position of Warlpiri in a typology of the base', Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1981. See also: Kenneth Hale, 'Warlpiri and the grammar of non-configurational languages', Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Vol.1, 1983, pp. 5-47; Kenneth Hale, 'On Nonconfigurational Structures' in: Laszlo Maracz and Pieter Muysken, Configurationality: The typology of asymmetries, 1989.

96.  Hale, 'Warlpiri and the grammar...', 1986; Hale, 'On Nonconfigurational Structures...', 1986, p. 352.

97.  Noam Chomsky, Lectures on Government and Binding, 1981.

98.  Kenneth Hale, 'Warlpiri and the grammar of non-configurational languages', Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol.1, 1983, pp. 5-47. See also Kenneth Hale, 'On nonconfigurational structures', 1989.

99. David Golumbia, 'The interpretation of nonconfigurationality', Language and Communication, vol.24, 1-22.

100. Noam Chomsky, The Minimalist Program Cambridge, 1995.

101. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky, 'The biolinguistics programme: the current state of its development', in: Anna Maria Di Sculio and Cedric Boeckx, The Biolinguistic Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty; Noam Chomsky, 'Of minds and language', Biolinguistics, vol.1, 2007, pp. 9-27.

102. Noam Chomsky, The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray, p. 41.

103. Tomasello and Ibbotson, 'Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning', Scientific American, 2016.

104. Richard Lee (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers, 1999.

105. Chris Knight, 'Language and revolutionary consciousness' in: Alison Wray, The Transition to Language, pp. 138-60; Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, 'Vocal deception, laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance' in: Dan Dor, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language, 2014, pp. 297-314.

106. Dor, Knight and Lewis, The Social Origins of Language, 2014, pp. 228-46; Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, 'Wild voices: Mimicry, Reversal, Metaphor and the Emergence of Language', Current Anthropology, 2017, vol.58, no.4, pp. 435-53.

107. Adam Jones, 'The Radical Vocation: An Interview with Noam Chomsky', 1990.

108. Margaret Boden writes: ‘A remarkable case of unrestrained abuse on Chomsky’s part was noted by William Bright, an expert on indigenous American languages and the key founder of sociolinguistics. As editor of Language for the previous twenty years, Bright had written to Chomsky in 1984 urging him to submit a paper. It was a pity, he felt, that the discipline’s leading journal hadn’t published anything by its leading theorist for many years… Chomsky’s reply was not your usual polite brush-off: Sorry: too busy, too many deadlines . . . . To Bright’s amazement, Chomsky wrote (alongside other abuse) that he would never consider publishing in a journal that had published “flat lies . . . couched in a rhetoric of a sort that might be appropriate to some criminal, but that one is surprised to find in a scholarly journal.”’ [Margaret A. Boden, 2008. Odd man out: Reply to reviewers. Artificial Intelligence, 172: 1944-1964, p. 1961; ref.: J. Hill, obituary of William Oliver Bright, Language 83 (3) (2007) 628–641. Quote is on page 636].

Chomsky does not quite call me a criminal, but comes near.

Fritz Newmeyer, Randy Allen Harris, Wolfgang Sperlich and others join the debate at Open Democracy

Chris Knight, 'Chomsky's choice: how the linguist's early military work led to a life of campaigning against the military.' (March 28, 2018)

Frederick Newmeyer, 'Chomsky's linguistics and military funding: a non-issue.' (April 15, 2018)

Chris Knight, 'Why Chomsky felt "guilty most of the time": war research and linguistics at MIT.' (April 24, 2018)

Randy Allen Harris, 'The history of science: unreliable narrators and how science moves on.' (May 9, 2018)

Chris Knight, 'Explaining Chomsky’s strange science: a reply to Randy Allen Harris' (6 September, 2018)

Les Levidow, 'The Chomsky paradox: the responsibility of intellectuals, revisited' (6 September, 2018)

David Golumbia, ‘The Chomskyan revolution and the politics of linguistics’ (25 September, 2018)

Wolfgang Sperlich, ‘The latter day critics of Noam Chomsky’ (15 October, 2018)

Peter Jones, ‘Gaining perspective on Chomsky’s linguistics’ (8 November 2018)

Randy Allen Harris, ‘A response to Wolfgang Sperlich on “The latter day critics of Noam Chomsky”’ (8 November 2018)

REVIEW OF 'DECODING CHOMSKY' IN THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Double Agent

Some contradictions between linguistic and political philosophy

Times Literary Supplement, October 6, 2017

Noam Chomsky has led an unusually public double life, as both a ground-breaking linguistic scholar and a trenchant political polemicist. Over the years he has taken pains to stress that these two métiers have occupied wholly distinct spheres, but Chris Knight begs to differ: Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics avers that Chomsky’s linguistics work was inextricably bound up in politics, often in ways that ran counter to his left-wing beliefs. If the suggestion that Chomsky was ethically compromised by his decades-long association with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – with its deep connections to the US military-industrial complex – is hardly new, Knight’s contention that his linguistic theories are implicitly reactionary in themselves is altogether more intriguing.

            At the heart of Chomsky’s theory is the proposition that our capacity for language and the basic structures that underpin it are innate. Knight, who is an anthropologist at University College London, traces the genealogy of this idea back to the revolutionary futurism of the Russian formalists. The poetic visionary Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) believed in the existence of a universal language rooted in laws of nature – a kind of skeleton key whereby each speech sound, vowel or consonant, has its own intrinsic meaning, transcending national or local variations; this concept resurfaced in the work of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), who conceived of a universal alphabet of ‘distinctive features’. Knight dismisses this as scientifically unfounded ‘delightful nonsense’; what interests him is how these ideas, which originated in a vision of anti-militarist, internationalist utopianism, found themselves enlisted in the service of US geo-strategic policy in the latter half of the twentieth century.

            By repudiating the then-prevalent behaviourist ideas associated with B. F. Skinner – which prioritized environmental factors in the shaping of language and culture – Chomsky played his part in what would come to be known as the ‘cognitive revolution’, which brought together psychology, anthropology and linguistics to spur the development of the emergent fields of artificial intelligence and computer science. This coincided with the stepping up of US Army interest in precisely these domains: at the dawn of the Cold War, it was increasingly clear that electromechanical military systems – in which the human soldier is merely a subordinate cog in the technological machinery – would be the future of warfare. Knight contends that the demise of behaviourism was the product of ‘Corporate America’s urgent need for a mind-centred psychology’.

            Chomsky’s assertion that language is essentially a scientific phenomenon, the product not of human interaction but of biology, was also expedient on the ideological battlefield. Never mind whether it relieved him of any pangs of conscience regarding his work at MIT (because, so the argument goes, if linguistics is mere science, then it is politically neutral by definition); more importantly, this divorcing of mind from matter has profound philosophical implications, turning on its head Marx and Engels’s dictum that ‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’. The mutability of mankind has been a longstanding kernel of progressive thought, whereas dogmatic talk of human nature belongs to the pessimistic vernacular of conservatism. Knight even discerns, in Chomsky’s emphasis on the separateness of human ontology from questions of materiality and society, a degree of overlap with religious mysticism. Invited to address a Vatican audience in Rome in 2014, Chomsky gave a talk in which he suggested that the origin of language evolution was likely to remain a mystery. Here, then, was a most unusual thing: a scholar, a scientific thinker, seemingly deferring to the unknowability of truths.

            Having begun his inquiry in a tone of friendly scepticism, Knight proceeds to quietly eviscerate Chomsky’s entire system of thought, highlighting a number of lacunae. By the late 1970s, Chomsky himself had disowned his notion of a ‘deep structure’ of semantics hidden within the ‘syntactic component’ of the digital blueprint. Conversely, he has staunchly defended the idea that even such words as ‘carburettor’ have been genetically programmed in humans for thousands of years before the objects they denoted had even come into being. Knight argues that once you strip away from the theory all the caveats, qualifications and vacillations that have accumulated over the years, there is very little left of it.

            The suggestion that Chomsky’s elimination of politics from linguistics was essentially instrumental and self-serving will be attractive to his detractors, who will doubtless enjoy the irony of seeing him subjected to precisely the kind of critique – apropos of his proximity to power – he is known for dishing out. The proposition that his entire oeuvre has been one long exercise in making a virtue of necessity is enticing, but ultimately speculative and futile. Chris Knight is nevertheless to be commended for this engaging and thought-provoking intellectual history of a thesis that remains hotly contested – and the reverberations of which, as he rightly observes, resonate far beyond academia.

* * * * * * 

Dan Everett's review of 'Decoding Chomsky'

Language and Cognition (2017)

An anthropologist contemplates Chomsky

Chris Knight, an anthropologist at University College London, has produced a well-written, thought-provoking, and controversial examination of the interaction of politics and science in the work of Avram Noam Chomsky, the most dominant figure in linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy from the latter half of the twentieth century. In linguistics Chomsky’s influence is unique. Perhaps only Charles Darwin in biology has been equally influential in a single field of study. This means that, like Darwin, linguistics for a long period at least, has been constrained by Chomsky’s work and ideas. For many years research could be classified as either advancing it or criticizing it (though for a growing number of linguists, psychologists, and others these days, I suspect that Chomsky’s work has simply become irrelevant). Some believe that Chomsky’s influence has been detrimental. Others believe it has transformed linguistics from a pre-scientific exercise in taxonomy into a genuine science, on solid intellectual footing for the first time in its long history.

            Knight’s purpose is to explain, describe, and criticize Chomsky’s nativist, non-sociological theory of the nature, origins, and use of human language, and to draw special attention to what he takes to be an enormous disconnect between Chomsky’s politics, in which social engagement is crucial, and his science, in which it is to be avoided at all costs. Knight agrees with Chomsky’s politics, but disagrees with his linguistics. This is in part because the former concerns itself with the socio-cultural existence of Homo sapiens, whereas the latter ignores it.

            This is a courageous project for at least two reasons. First, the history of the field of linguistics is something every linguist has a slightly different take on, so anything spoken against received narratives is going to provoke a chorus of disagreements. Second, any criticism of Chomsky’s work is almost always greeted by the refrain that “This person doesn’t understand Chomsky”. And indeed, Decoding Chomsky has faced vociferous criticisms of both types.

            As an anthropologist, Knight enjoys a vantage point that many historians of science lack, an understanding of the role of culture and society in shaping individual and group thought, not only in science but in life more generally. At the same time, not being a linguist brings at least one disadvantage: Knight fails to provide convincing examples to the effect that formal linguistics cannot account for its own primary empirical focus, grammar, without a theory in which socio-cultural constraints are causally implicated.[1]  After all, Chomsky must be evaluated based on the goals he himself sets for his theory, not on what others think his goals should be. Therefore, Decoding Chomsky  would have been more effective had it included more discussion of the empirical shortcomings of Chomsky’s views that devolve from the failure to engage culture and society. Merely juxtapositioning Chomsky’s different approaches to the separate issues of US foreign policy and the nature of grammar does not demonstrate that Chomsky is mistaken to include social considerations in the former and ignore them in the latter. This is the principal flaw in an otherwise wonderful book. But, by any standards, the book affords an interesting, rich, and well-argued perspective on Chomsky’s development and subsequent intellectual influence.

            Decoding Chomsky  is organized into twenty-three chapters, beginning with Chomsky’s early days learning and writing about politics and language up to his current thoughts about the origin of language. The first chapter of the book, ‘The revolutionary’, explores the idea that Chomsky’s work is a sterling example of “disruptive innovation” in the 1950s. This chapter is important for a number of reasons. But its principal significance is that it clarifies some of the myths surrounding Chomsky’s ascent, a common one being that he sprung Minerva-like from the forehead of science, a fully formed intellect, presenting a new perspective to the world that had not been available before he appeared. In fact, the truth is more mundane. Chomsky was a brilliant reflection of the zeitgeist – the beginning of a computational and cognitive subculture – in which he was raised and worked. His math came from others, as Knight points out (and is otherwise well known). Some of his leading linguistics ideas came from others (X-bar theory and Transformations came – in slightly different form – from his thesis advisor, Zellig Harris). Whenever we idealize “geniuses”, we forget the social nature of knowledge and progress. As I say elsewhere (Everett, 2017b):

But what is an invention? It is a creation of culture. Edison did not invent the light bulb. He needed Franklin’s work in electricity nearly two-hundred years before him. No one person invents anything. Everyone is part of a culture and each other’s creativity, ideas, earlier attempts, and the general world of knowledge in which they live. Every invention is built up over time, bit by bit. (Everett, 2017b, p. xviii)

The present paper does not review each chapter of Knight’s book. But it does review both Knight’s account of Chomsky’s early history, as well as what Knight sees as the apparent contradiction between Chomsky’s political stance and his employment by one of the institutions most responsible for the technology of war in world history, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From the outset, it is worth mentioning that Knight’s narrative matches a first-hand account relayed to me by someone who was there.

            The late Hu Matthews, a former professor of linguistics at MIT cum missionary linguist, recounted to me, about thirty years ago, his version of how Chomsky came to MIT in the late 1950s. As he told it, Victor Yngve had taken over the direction of the research on Machine Translation from Yeshua Bar-Hillel.[2]

            In Matthews’ narrative, Yngve was already working with Morris Halle when he began searching for additional linguistic talent for the project. Zellig Harris strongly recommended Noam Chomsky and Hu Matthews. Hu told me that it was obvious from the first that Chomsky was of high intelligence, even for the MIT crowd. He worked on the project, focusing on his theory of syntax, but, according to Hu’s recounting, would say to others that machine translation was not going to work. Another person working there was Robert Lees. He started using less discretion in repeating Chomsky’s assessment of the possibilities of machine translation to others and, according to Matthews, was consequently terminated by Yngve.[3] But he was then taken on as a PhD student by Chomsky once the linguistics program began, shortly thereafter, in 1961.[4] From this point, Halle and Chomsky together founded the most important linguistics department ever established, judged by influence in linguistics hirings around the world and citation indices.

         Chomsky’s methodology has always been based on the idea that native speakers’ intuition is the best source of data on their grammars. Such intuitions, ex hypothesis, provide better data, for example, than is possible for a nonnative- speaker field researcher from another culture. Clearly native speakers enjoy advantages. But when any methodology relies on intuition, in particular when Generative Grammar ignores standard social science research methods, as it has by and large, it runs the risk of becoming less closely driven by the facts.[5] For example, although Chomsky has given lip service to field research in his career, he has preferred to rely on the highly problematic, nonquantitative methodology of looking at his own intuitions – a feature of the humanities rather than the sciences – as opposed to the application of quantitative methodologies common in science (for example, one can work in Chomsky’s theory just fine with no math background at all).[6] This hasn’t prevented him from endorsing field research as important, however:

It is only through intensive studies of particular languages that one can hope to find crucial evidence for the study of Universal Grammar. One study such as that of Matthews on Hidatsa is worth one thousand superficial studies of varied languages from this point of view. (Chomsky, 1972, p. 167)

  And yet the field has long favored “superficial” non-grammar-length studies. Actual grammars produced by theoretical linguists are relatively rare compared to those produced by linguists from other subfields of linguistics, such as typology, descriptive linguistics, and documentary linguistics. Grammars still lack the cachet of papers in high-impact journals, such as Linguistic Inquiry  – the gold standard among generativists. It is more common to find grammars emerging from the work of a resurgent group of descriptive linguists interested in documenting endangered languages. Yet such efforts still lack (at least in their citation indices) the prestige among theoretical linguists that Chomsky attributes to Matthews’ grammar. That is not Chomsky’s fault, but the quote above is ironic when we consider that Chomsky himself has never attempted a grammar or any “intensive study” of any particular language.

            The peculiar absence of the cultural in Chomsky’s theory is highlighted by Knight on page 124 (and elsewhere), where he discusses Chomsky’s rejection of socio-cultural sources of concepts. Chomsky (1995) says, “The very notion of ‘lexical entry’ presupposes some sort of fixed, universal vocabulary in terms  of which these objects are characterized, just as the notion of ‘phonetic representation’ presupposes some sort of universal phonetic theory.” Knight goes on to discuss how Chomsky believes that all humans, therefore, have innate concepts – such as ‘carburetor’. In Chomsky’s view:

Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburetorand bureaucrat [Chomsky’s emphasis, DLE], which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it … However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities. (Knight, p. 164)

Knight rightly finds Chomsky’s proposal here a bit strained. To me it is more than that.[7] It ignores nearly all of the work of philosophers and anthropologists over the past century on the acquisition of concepts. For example, C.S. Peirce had a great deal to say about concepts and how we come by them, still some of the best work ever done on the subject.[8] Robert Brandom (Brandom, 1998) has also written extensively on the nature and origin of concepts, but Chomsky ignores such work entirely. Rather, Chomsky bases his speculation here on an over-inflated concept of “poverty of stimulus” (what Dan Slobin (1988) has called “poverty of imagination”).

            Chomsky’s work is in several senses similar to that of Sigmund Freud. It has been influential, inspiring to some, original to many, but overall it has arguably failed to sustain itself empirically, because it has failed to engage the interactions of human psychology and language, as each emerge from local societies and cultures, as Knight is careful to point out in detail.[9] Moreover, Chomsky, like Freud, proposed many fascinating ideas about the unconscious workings of the mind, most of which have turned out to be wrong (deep structure, clarity of poverty of stimulus arguments, surface structure, X-bar theory, rules, transformations, movement as more than a metaphor, syntactic chains, government, and so on). Knight doesn’t really address the many changes in the theory so much as Chomsky’s avoidance of the social in his linguistic theory.

            Chris Knight’s book has been derided by Chomsky (as Knight mentions in the ‘Introduction’) as nearly completely in error. To the contrary, after forty years in this business, my conclusion is that Knight is overall unerringly accurate in his portrayal of Chomsky and his intellectual legacy. The view that emerges from Decoding Chomskyis one that surprises few of us who have scratched our heads for decades about Chomsky’s appeal – Chomsky’s theories emerge in large part from non-quantitatively based intuition, combined with strong personal opinions about how the world works, driven by a largely deductive theory.[10]

            Nevertheless, Chomsky’s work has brought him great acclaim. So much so that throughout his adult life Chomsky has enjoyed privilege and wealth. His brilliance, luck of the draw, the appeal of his politics, and a ferocious work ethic, especially in rebutting critics, have all contributed to his influence, wealth, and success. Evidence of his intellectual influence is easy enough to find. For example, his numbers on Google Scholar are astounding (see Figure 1).

            The i10 index of 860 means that 860 of Chomsky’s works have been cited at least ten times. Chomsky’s h-index means that he has had more than one hundred publications cited heavily. And then there is just the raw fact of over 300,000 citations period. If Google Scholar were taken as an absolute measure of scientific importance then the New York Timeswould be correct in its description of Chomsky as “arguably the most important intellectual alive” (Robinson, 1979).

            But of course Google Scholar is also a social measure in part. It can measure popularity as much as scientific accomplishment. And our cultural assumption is that popularity among scientists means importance. Clearly it can indicate important research. But not always. What I have elsewhere (Everett, 2016) called “Ivy League Bias” means that it is simply easier, for scientists, reporters, and teachers, to take the words of a culturally prestigious members of society than to work out things independently. Chomsky’s amazing citation numbers do show that there are many, many researchers for whom his research is a touchstone, and there is no disputing that this means he is hugely influential among a wide variety of scientists, especially linguists.

            Among those under his influence, many have great devotion to him and to his research program or activism, such as they interpret that. As Knight points out, moreover, for many of his political fellow travelers and admirers, it is desirable to think of Chomsky as a genius of the level of Newton or Einstein. If he indeed occupies the Newtonian heights of importance and brilliance then his political judgments necessarily must carry more weight, so some believe. This sounds plausible initially. But there are a couple of problems with this idea. First, it breeds ad-hominem arguments in politics and linguistics, as people appeal to the person of Chomsky rather than the ideas in debate. Second, Chomsky is no Newton nor Einstein. This is not to  say that he is not as intelligent as they were.  

Fig. 1. Chomsky’s citation indices on Google Scholar

I have no idea. But the former established mathematically based fields of study that were universally recognized as accurate in their contexts.[11]  Chomsky’s principal proposals over the years, those for which he became famous originally, such as ‘deep structure’, ‘surface structure’, ‘meaning-preservation’, the ‘structure preservation principle’, and many other aspects of Chomsky’s theory of syntax, have been abandoned. His most recent work on the centrality of the operation ‘Merge’ faces severe (and well-known) empirical problems from languages that appear to have linear, non-recursive grammars or ternary branching syntax, or exocentric structures.[12]  Such problems are linked directly to cultural constraints on syntactic operations in some analyses (Everett, 2012). Moreover, Chomskyan theory does not now, nor has it ever, taken ‘language’ – a necessarily socio-cultural construct – as its object. Chomsky (1995) claims these days that he studies ‘I-language’, which is “Language is taken to be the object of study in linguistic theory; it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker of a language has, and is therefore a mental object”. In other words, the grammar in someone’s head.

            But there are a couple of sleights of hands in this definition. The first is that it does not tell us what the linguistic knowledge is. There are many types of linguistic knowledge. But when Chomsky talks about it, here is roughly what he means: knowledge of recursive syntax that cannot be explained by logic, history, culture, society, physics, or any experience of the speaker outside of the mastery of their native language before puberty. In other words an I-language is knowledge that is unique to grammar. The problem is, outside of Chomsky’s theory, many linguists doubt the extent of such knowledge.  Cognitive Linguistics, for example, would be unlikely to acknowledge little if any grammatical knowledge that meets that definition. Moreover, a priori, under these constraints, we cannot tell what empirical facts such a theory should study. The theory itself offers little guidance as to which syntactic constraints could be due to extrinsic factors.

            A common example Chomsky gives concerns the structures proposed by many linguists as models for what the speaker knows. For example, consider the hierarchical structure of constituents. This type of ‘chunking’ of units has been well known even long before the pioneering work of Herbert Simon’s (1962) ‘Architecture of complexity’ and George Miller’s (1956) ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two’, and is not limited to grammar. Recursive structures are common apart from language, as Simon pointed out.[13]  Therefore, Chomsky was far from the first to notice ‘chunking’ in human languages or constituent structures. Nor did he, unlike others, note how pervasive recursion is in nature, especially in information transfer.

            Language evolution is of interest to linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and the general public. Here Knight is right on when he focuses (p. 167) on puzzling statements by Chomsky and Robert Berwick, in their (2016) book, Why Only Us? Language and evolution. Throughout their book, they make statements like the following: “In some completely unknown way, our ancestors developed human concepts. At some time in the recent past … a small group of hominids in East Africa underwent a minor biological change that provided the operation Merge – an operation that takes human concepts as computational atoms and yields structured expressions … [that] provide a rich language of thought.” For Berwick and Chomsky language did not arise from anything social. Rather, because they believe that grammar is not only central to language, but in effect grammar is language, and that language is not for communication, this statement makes sense to them.

            Knight is not amused. He says that such vague statements should not be confused with science. And Knight is indisputably correct here.[14] Knight is also right to point out that Why Only Us?  is deeply flawed because it lacks any engagement with the social origins of language, much of which is not “completely unknown”.

            In fact, the ‘argument’ by Berwick and Chomsky seems to be based largely on Chomsky’s reputation rather than any solid evidence, the ‘ad-hominem danger’ that I mentioned earlier. They offer the thinnest of speculations, ignoring huge amounts of work in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, appearing to be utterly unaware of huge amounts of recent work in archaeology and Peircean semiotics that bears directly on the origins of human language, appealing instead implicitly to Chomsky’s non-existent authority in this area. Knight is absolutely correct to knock a hole in their conjectures on the non- Darwinian appearance of language for, along with other things, ignoring the social aspects of language and, from my own perspective, inflating the importance of grammar in language. (There are languages today, such as Pirahã and Riau, that seem to use linear grammars, avoid embedding, yet people communicate and think in them just fine.) Moreover, though Knight doesn’t mention this, the crucial component of human languages is not grammar but the symbol, in the sense of Peirce’s semiotics. Development of the symbol was the birth of language, not grammar (see Everett, 2017a, 2017b).

            On various pages Knight takes Chomsky to task for his Cartesianism. Interestingly, C. S. Peirce, the founder of Semiotics (and Pragmatism) invested a good deal of space in his writings to criticisms of Cartesian ideas – Dualism, the Cartesian concept of intuition (to Peirce, Descartes’ notion of intuition was but another example of some philosophers’ confused thinking), and Cartesian epistemology, among others. Cartesianism and Rationalism, by avoiding the social, the cultural, the background knowledge that Peirce and Hume occasionally labeled ‘instinct’, have done linguistics no favors. Among the consequences, again, is the failure of some Chomskyans to regularly apply standard social science methodology, to an aversion to evidence that supports the communicative basis of language, towards a shaky empirical foundation based on the Cartesian notion of intuition, and so on (see, e.g., Peirce, 1878).

            Knight, in chapter five especially, explains how Chomsky’s views were and are shaped by a seriously questionable metaphor, namely, that the mind is a computer, a metaphor that was beginning to appear during Chomsky’s appointment as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, one of the most prestigious positions in the academic world at the time. This metaphor was and is harmful to the development of linguistics as a discipline because it leads to the idea that language is primarily a type of software that underwrites only a narrow set of operations to constrain language emergence (the rules, constraints, and so on of phonology, syntax, and morphology). Knight cites Hilary Putnam (1960), Chomsky’s old high school and undergraduate classmate, then world-class philosopher, in this regard (p. 46):

It is important to recognize that machine performances may be wholly analogous to language, so much so that the whole of linguistic theory can be applied to them. If the reader wishes to check this, he may go through a work like Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures carefully, and note that at no place is the assumption employed that the corpus of utterances studied by the linguist was produced by a conscious organism.

One vital question raised in several studies of the history of North American linguistics, one that Knight addresses, is how and why Chomsky came to dominate the field of linguistics so unquestionably for so long. Of course there have always been dissenters and pockets of linguists outside of Chomsky’s gravity, but he not only immediately attracted many while in his twenties, even today, at eighty-nine years of age, he dominates the field as no other ever has. To my mind, there are at least three reasons for Chomsky’s rise, each mentioned by Knight.

            Knight traces the precipitous rise of Chomsky in the early chapter, referring back to the roots of his ideas throughout the book. Chomsky’s early personal history is well known. As a young man from Philadelphia, he completed his bachelor’s degree, master’s, and PhD, all in linguistics, under a single influential figure, Zellig Harris at the University of Pennsylvania. Harris attracted Chomsky because he was a family friend and defended a political perspective close to Chomsky’s own.

            During this period of time, the late 1940s and early 1950s, mathematical modeling of communication was on the rise, especially in the work of Claude Shannon at Bell Labs, who later joined the same laboratory as Chomsky, MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, under the direction of Jerome Wiesner. Upon completion of his master’s thesis, Chomsky received the above mentioned multi-year position as a Junior Fellow at Harvard, in order to pursue his PhD work.

            Once his work got underway at Harvard, Chomsky absorbed what was around him and wove it all into his own ideas. The first reason for Chomsky’s rise – as we have seen – was the zeitgeist. Chomsky tapped into the desire to connect the study of language to computers, formal communication theory, and the hard sciences, at the same time that he shaped a new identity for the field that succeeded in getting many folks from other fields interested in linguistics to a degree not seen before in linguistic history. In his The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory  (Chomsky, 1975 [1955]) he outlined a formal model of linguistics that derived forms from a deductive model.

            Thus, this common base hypothesis eventually took two separate paths. In the Universal Base Hypothesis of Generative Semantics, all languages shared a common semantic substrate, an underlying meaning structure. But in Chomsky’s own work the universal base was Universal Grammar. I have questioned a lot of non-linguists over the years and my anecdotal evidence is that the average person finds it quite likely that culture, however they define it, affects the way we talk and the grammars that we employ. But if Chomsky is right, this cannot be the case, because the core of language is a computational system based on extremely simple principles (at least they have been claimed to have become more simple over the years) that allows – requires – formal operations orthogonal to social organization or cultural values. Chomsky also produced, however much he might have borrowed from professional mathematicians, the idea of the ‘Chomsky hierarchy of grammars’ that became important for computer scientists, philosophers, and psychologists. Chomsky made utterly brilliant contributions on numerous fronts, across several disciplines. This is the first reason that he rose to dominance so quickly. He was a comet across the sky.

            The second reason for Chomsky’s quick rise to power was that the US government was spending heavily on linguistics – from machine translation efforts to the study of foreign languages through the Department of Defense, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. One program, the National Defense Foreign Language Fellowships, though not related directly to Chomsky, was very helpful to the field of linguistics, by funding PhD dissertations on foreign languages. At one time just about any foreign language fit the specifications of the program.[15] Many field researchers at the time received significant financial assistance through this program. Knight, as have many other works, shows how the growth of Chomsky’s theory was funded directly by the US military.

            The third reason for Chomsky’s rise was the state of linguistics as a field when Chomsky’s work began. Linguistic work until this point was largely inductive. But Chomsky proposed a theory that was deductive and that in principle required no field research. This work could be done just fine from one’s office. Chomsky’s theory, moreover, predicted things, things that had not been imagined before him, such as the differential complexity in the derivation of structures (e.g., the passive being derivationally more complex than the active since the passive was proposed to be the active subject to the ‘passive transformation’). Thus, psychologists became keen to test the idea that more derivationally complex sentences were harder to process, among other ideas of Chomsky’s. He claimed that meanings were determined exclusively by Deep Structures (deriving from his even earlier idea of ‘kernel sentences’), and that transformations produced different surface structures, which were stylistic or discourse variants (which was the basic idea of Zellig Harris; in Harris’s system, the active and the passive were paraphrases, linked as a transformation pair, though Harris did not claim that one was derived from the other). This was exciting, in spite of the fact that Deep Structure wasmisunderstood almost from the outset as the universal semantic basis shared by all languages (which is indeed what Generative Semantics took it to be; Lakoff, 1971). But this misunderstanding helped Chomsky solidify his position because it was an extremely attractive idea for many – the idea that in spite of superficial dissimilarities between all languages, in the core meaning of sentences, all languages shared a common base.

            As discussed also in Frederick Newmeyer’s well-known history of Generative Grammar (a topic I also engage in Everett, 1990 [1983]), the state of linguistics at the time of Chomsky’s early work was concerned primarily with the twin issues of methodology and description. The field arguably lacked the kind of theory, purpose, and rigor in argumentation that Chomsky introduced to it.[16] Chomsky’s attacks on description for its own sake, i.e., in the absence of an overarching theory, as well as his rejection of the methodological goals that previous linguistics so favored, excited many young students of language as holding the promise of making linguistics a theoretical science. There were, to be sure, American linguists like Bloomfield, Pike, Hockett, Bloch, Trager, and – above all – Sapir, who preceded Chomsky, but no one had the bold theoretical vision of Chomsky that could bring linguistics into line with the computational and cognitive winds that were beginning to blow. The methodology focused on describing and classifying (more charitably, on the getting the facts down and understood as a prolegomena to theorizing). Chomsky brought a sense of purpose to many linguistic graduate students for the first time, transforming the perception of the activities of linguists into the enterprise of understanding, it was argued, the innate linguistic component of the mind/brain.

            Yet, early on in the history of Chomskyan theory, some philosophers raised doubts, as in the following Chomsky quote from Searle (1972):

The syntactical structures of human languages are the products of innate features of the human mind, and they have no significant connection with communication, though, of course, people do use them for, among other purposes, communication. The essential thing about languages, their defining trait, is their structure. The so-called ‘bee language,’ for example, is not a language at all because it doesn’t have the right structure, and the fact that bees apparently use it to communicate is irrelevant. If human beings evolved to the point where they used syntactical forms to communicate that are quite unlike the forms we have now and would be beyond our present comprehension, then human beings would no longer have language, but something else.

Searle concludes that “It is important to emphasize how peculiar and eccentric Chomsky’s overall approach to language is.”

            Knight further traces the roots of the ideas that led to Transformational Generative Grammar. Commenting on the obvious inspiration of the Russian–American linguist Roman Jakobson, Knight suggests that a direct influence on Jakobson, and thus indirectly Chomsky, was the Russian futurist–poet–philosopher–linguist Velimir Khlebnikov. Khlebnikov in fact did espouse some ideas that appear to prefigure Chomskyan theory. For example, he advocated a ‘universal language’ of elemental sounds inseparable from atoms of meaning, in particular noting the likely importance and universality of ‘sound symbolism’. This is an interesting story, but I doubt that the ideas of Khlebnikov are likely to have had even an indirect influence on Chomsky via Jakobson. Chomsky has never been interested in the kinds of topics, such as sound symbolism, that so animated Khlebnikov. One cannot rule it out, however. The story earns its place in Knight’s book because it traces influences on Jakobson’s thought and there is no question that Jakobson was a crucial figure in the development of Generative Grammar, especially Generative Phonology.

            Another reason for Chomsky’s rise, according to Knight and David Golumbia, is his status as brilliant opponent to Marxist dogma integrating the social and science. Knight begins with this quote from Golumbia (2009, pp. 31–32):

Scholars have offered any number of plausible explanations for Chomsky’s rise to prominence, not least his own personal brilliance, and the incisiveness of his linguistic theories. Yet it seems reasonable to set aside some of these explanations and to think carefully about just what the times were and just what was the content of Chomsky’s writing that made it seem not merely compelling but revolutionary. In what sense was the world ready and waiting for this particular Chomsky to emerge.

According to Knight (p. 196), Chomsky’s “revolution in linguistics – crown jewels of the cognitive revolution – satisfied a deep social need”. This need was the splitting of the social from the intellectual, breaking science from the pragmatics of social revolution. Chomsky produced a ‘safe’ revolution that had no worrisome social consequences, allowing scholars to have their cake and eat it too – drawing great salaries in great jobs without fear of major disruption. Chomsky of course did participate in many protests and was even arrested on occasion. But these were not protests against Capitalism but against specific US foreign policies, not the economic basis of the country.

            Chomsky even spoke against the potential utility of a society of scientists in one of his more slanderous, condescending passages (Chomsky, 2008, p. 23): “If scientists and scholars were to become ‘collectively self-organized and consciously activist’ today, they would probably devote themselves to service to state and private power.”

            My own work for the past thirteen or so years has been focused on how the cultural is causally implicated in the psychological. This was also Sapir’s work and a common concern of many US anthropological linguists prior to Chomsky’s rise. Therefore, Knight’s perception that Chomsky’s theory is bizarre and deeply misguided in ignoring the social and political in understanding human language is a judgment I share.

            Having said that, once again, I believe that the case could have been much stronger had Knight taken actual Chomskyan analyses and shown how they could have been improved or how they failed at their own objectives by failing to recognize that the social and cultural are causally implicated in the mental. Also, I believe that the criticisms would have more likely found their mark had Knight engaged the workings of the American Pragmatists, especially C.S. Peirce, who made it clear that cognition is embodied and socially shaped (Everett, forthcoming). Since Chomsky was influenced by Peirce (in particular via Peirce’s notion of ‘abduction’ or ‘retroduction’), one does wonder why he, Chomsky, failed to engage with more significant points of Peirce’s philosophy. With all of Knight’s criticisms, and even to some degree with his particular Marxist perspective on the importance of integrating the social and the mental, I am in strong agreement. But were I working in the Chomskyan paradigm, I would not feel that the nail had in fact been hit on the head. Crucial arguments are missing. Still, the points are well taken and should be explored more in the future.

            Knight’s exploration of Chomsky’s politics, linguistics, and intellectual history is unparalleled. No other study has provided such a full understanding of Chomsky’s background, intellectual foibles, objectives, inconsistencies, and genius. If Knight had himself been more linguistically analytic, probing ways in which Chomsky’s own objectives are short-changed by his failure to see language as a communicative tool for building society, it would have been stronger (some examples are found in Everett, 2012). But as is, it is a worthy read for all cognitive scientists. It is a rich, detailed, and well-written book, written by a well-informed outsider to the generative enterprise of Chomsky. It is full of interesting facts and criticisms that can help all linguists better understand their discipline. It isn’t always as on point as it might have been, and there are moments of speculation in trying to establish historical correlations and causes. But read it!

REFERENCES

Behme, Christina (2014). A ‘Galilean’ science of language. Journal of Linguistics, 50(3), 671–704.

Berwick, Robert C., & Chomsky, Noam (2016). Why only us? Language and evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1991). On the exploitation of computerized corpora in variation studies. In K. Aijmer & B. Altenberg (Eds.), English corpus linguistics: studies in honour of Jan Svartvik (pp. 204–220). London: Longman.

Blumberg, Marc (2006). Basic instinct: the genesis of behavior. New York: Basic Books.

Brandom, Robert (1998). Making it explicit: reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press.

Chomsky, Noam (1975 [1955]). The logical structure of linguistic theory. London: Plenum Press.

Chomsky, Noam (1972). Language and mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chomsky, Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam (2008). Interview with Noam Chomsky. Radical Anthropology, 2, 19–23.

Everett, Daniel L. (1990 [1983]). A Lingua Pirahã e a Teoria da Sintaxe: Descrição, Perspectivas e Teoria. Campinas, Brazil: Editora da UNICAMP.

Everett, Daniel L. (2012). Language: the cultural tool. New York: Pantheon Books.

Everett, Daniel L. (2016). Dark matter of the mind: the culturally articulated unconscious. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Everett, Daniel L. (2017a). Grammar came later: triality of patterning and the gradual evolution of language. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 43(B), 133–165.

Everett, Daniel L. (2017b). How language began: the story of humanity’s greatest invention. London: Profile Books.

Everett, Daniel L. (forthcoming). Peircean linguistics: a chapter in the history of empiricist thought.

Futrell, Richard, Stearns, Laura, Everett, Daniel L., Piantadosi, Steven T., & Gibson, Edward (2016). A corpus investigation of syntactic embedding in Pirahã. PLOS One, online: <http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0145289>.

Gibson, Edward, & Fedorenko, Evelina (2010). The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(1/2), 88–124.

Golumbia, David (2009). The cultural logic of computation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jackendoff, Ray, & Wittenberg, Eva (2017). Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(1), 219–224.

Lakoff, George (1971). On generative semantics. In D. D. Steinberg & L. A. Jakobovits (Eds.), Semantics (pp. 232–296). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.

Newmeyer, Frederick (1980). Linguistic theory in America: the first quarter century of Transformational Generative Grammar. New York: Academic Press.

Peirce, C. S. (1878). Illustration of the Logic of Science, VI. Popular Science Monthly, 12, 286–302.

Pullum, Geoffrey K., & Scholz, Barbara C. (2002). Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. Linguistic Review, 19, 2–50.

Putnam, H. (1960). Minds and machines. In S. Hook (Ed.), Dimensions of mind (pp. 148–180). New York: University of New York Press.

Robinson, Paul (1979). The Chomsky Problem. New York Times, 25 February.

Searle, John (1972). Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics. New York Review of Books, June 29, 16–24. [Reprinted in Gilbert Harman (Ed.) (1974), On Noam Chomsky: critical essays (pp. 2–33). Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Simon, Herbert A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106(6), 467–482.

Slobin, Dan I. (1988). Confessions of a Wayward Chomskyan. In Eve V. Clark & Yo Matsumoto (Eds.), Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, Vol. 27 (pp. 131–137).

Yngve, Victor H. (2000). Early research at M.I.T.: in search of adequate theory. In W. John Hutchins (Ed.), Early years in machine translation: memoirs and biographies of pioneers (pp. 39–72). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

[1] Readers of this journal, however, will be familiar with such examples.

[2] According to Hutchins’ (2012) obituary of Yngve: “After Bar-Hillel’s departure from MIT, he was appointed in July 1953 by Jerome Wiesner at the Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE) to lead the MT research effort there (for a retrospective survey of his MT research activities see Yngve, 2000), online: <http://cognet.mit.edu/pdfviewer/journal/coli_a_00115>.

[3] Lees was known for his strong opinions and defense of Chomskyan methodology. When he learned of a grant to Nelson Francis for the creation of the Brown Corpus, he remarked: “That is a complete waste of your time and the government’s money. You are a native speaker of English; in ten minutes you can produce more illustrations of any point in English grammar than you will find in many millions of words of random text.” (Biber & Finegan, 1991.

[4] Interestingly, in the 1990s, Yngve phoned me out of the blue, when I was Chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of Pittsburgh, to repeat much of this history and to complain about Chomsky’s subsequent fame.

[5] C. S. Peirce wrote a good deal on the philosophical shortcomings of intuition as a source of knowledge. Unfortunately, his criticisms of Cartesianism never had the influence on modern linguistics they should have had.

[6]  Ted Gibson and Evelina Fedorenko (2010) have demonstrated clearly the problems with this methodology.

[7] See, for example, Pullum & Scholz (2002) and Blumberg (2006).

[8] For example, Peirce (1878) discusses the sources of concepts in great detail.

[9] For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Everett (2016).

[10] Nevertheless, it is difficult not to admire Chomsky. I don’t think I would have become a professional linguist were it not for him (and the myths that surround him), as well as the personal intellectual energy he exudes.

[11] Chomsky often disputes this, in his regular mention of the questionable notion of ‘Galilean Science’ (see Behme, 2014).

[12] Jackendoff & Wittenberg (2017); Everett (2017a, 2017b); Futrell, Stearns, Everett, Piantadosi & Gibson (2016).

[13] Recursion is very useful, as I have pointed out in many places, for information transfer, and so in that sense is not grammar-specific. Binary-branching, likewise, to the degree that it exists in natural languages follows from the notion of adjacency, that things which affect one another prefer to be adjacent to one another. See especially Everett (2012).

[14] See Everett (2012, 217b).

[15] Many early missionary-linguists, for example, were supported in their dissertation

research by the NDFLF program, now known as FLAS (Foreign Language and Area

Studies Fellowships).

[16] [16] Everett (1990 [1983]); Newmeyer (1980).

More Reviews of 'Decoding Chomsky' by Chris Knight

Decoding Chomsky has been generally well reviewed:

Gary Lupyan in The American Journal of Psychology

Sean O’Neill in The American Ethnologist

Thomas Klikauer in The European Legacy

Tom Bartlett in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Bruce Nevin in The Brooklyn Rail

Peter Seyferth in Anarchist Studies

Rupert Read in Philosophy

Marek Kohn in The New Scientist

Houman Barekat in the Times Literary Supplement

Daniel Everett’s review in Language and Cognition

But the book clearly upset Chomsky and some of his supporters. If you enjoy shrill partisanship and name-calling, check out these four delightfully hostile reviews: (1) Norbert Hornstein & Nathan Robinson (2) Robert Barsky, (3) Wolfgang Sperlich and (4) Peter Stone [who, bizarrely, seems to be accusing this old Trot of being a Stalinist for daring to critique Noam's linguistics!]

Here are some more positive responses to Decoding Chomsky: Labour Briefing, Weekly Worker, Babel's Dawn, Overweening Generalist, Tendance Coatesy, Doug Lain's podcast, Laura Gawne's Superlinguo blog.

“The whole story is a wreck... complete nonsense throughout.” — Noam Chomsky

“I can say that this is the best critique of Chomsky from the left that I have ever read. I disagree with Knight quite profoundly on a number of key issues, but in every chapter I learned something new and, in fact, found myself agreeing with him more and more as the book progressed.” — Frederick Newmeyer, author of 'Linguistic Theory in America'.

“This is Chomsky from a new perspective, the perspective of a social anthropologist. It connects his science with his politics in a novel and convincing way. Knight has dug deeper and made more interconnections than anyone has done before. The result is truly revelatory.” — Michael Tomasello, author of 'A Natural History of Human Thinking.'

“Chris Knight tells a compelling story with startling clarity and forceful elegance, about the bizarre results of studying language, that most human of faculties, by removing it as far as possible from lived human experience. He provides a persuasive explanation for Chomsky’s strategy that reveals striking perspectives on the relationship between science, politics and values.” — Marek Kohn, author of 'As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind.'

“Knight’s exploration of Chomsky’s politics, linguistics, and intellectual history is unparalleled. No other study has provided such a full understanding of Chomsky’s background, intellectual foibles, objectives, inconsistencies, and genius. ” — Daniel L. Everett, author of ‘How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.’

“History comes alive via compelling narrative. As a devoted historian of the profession, I was particularly delighted by the sections on how Russian linguistics influenced the development of cognitive science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the height of the Cold War and for many decades thereafter. The revealing sections on Roman Jakobson and his own intellectual predecessors are worth the price of the book. Knight is indeed an impressive historian when it comes to recounting the gripping personal histories behind Chomsky’s groundbreaking contributions to science and philosophy.” — Sean O'Neill, American Ethnologist.

“Fascinating on so many levels, Knight’s critique of an academic demigod is a compelling case study of the institutional, personal, interpersonal, historical and accidental forces shaping one of the major intellectual movements of our time.” — N.J. Enfield, author of ‘How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation.’

“Few disagree that language has been a game-changer for the human species. But just how we came by language remains hotly contested. In ‘Decoding Chomsky’, Chris Knight strides into this minefield to bravely replace miraculous leaps and teleology with a proposal that actually makes evolutionary sense.” — Sarah Hrdy, author of 'Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.'

“This is one of the most exciting scholarly books I have read in years. Decoding Chomsky will be required reading for anyone at all interested in the history of intellectual and political thought since the 1950s.” — David Golumbia, author of 'The Cultural Logic of Computation.'

“Decoding Chomsky reads like a detective novel. So many of the arguments I found right on the mark, but I would recommend it just for the pleasure of reading Knight’s great English prose, particularly his talent for understatement. A truly fantastic work, simply brilliant. I could not put it down.” — Luc Steels, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Free University, Brussels.

“Decoding Chomsky was a decade in the making and may be the most in-depth meditation on ‘the Chomsky problem’ ever published. A compelling read.” — Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Chris Knight is to be commended for this engaging and thought-provoking intellectual history of a thesis that remains hotly contested – and the reverberations of which, as he rightly observes, resonate far beyond academia.” — Houman Barekat, Times Literary Supplement.

“Simply brilliant. Others have noted the systematic disjunct between Chomsky’s Pentagon-funded linguistics and his political dissidence, but this is the first theoretically sophisticated analysis of a chasm between mind and body, theory and practice which has become profoundly symptomatic of postmodern culture as a whole.” — David Hawkes, author of ‘Ideology.’

“Decoding Chomsky is a groundbreaking analysis of the wide chasm that now exists between modern language science and Chomsky’s view of language. A must-read for anyone trying to understand the history and trajectory of Chomsky’s ideas.” — Gary Lupyan, University of Wisconsin.

“This book provides a fascinating account of the disconnect and symmetry between Chomsky’s value-free science and his science-free politics. Knight roots this in the tension between Chomsky ‘s detestation of the US military and his dependence on military funding for his linguistic research.” — Les Levidow, editor, 'Science as Culture.'

“Intellectually hip and iconoclastic, ‘Decoding Chomsky’ surveys 1950s McCarthyite politics and 1960s student unrest in order to get a handle on the extraordinary influence of Noam’s ideas. If you’re a former New Left protestor against university collaboration with the US war machine or a current 21st-century anti-war student, you’ll find Knight’s chapter on MIT’s historical relationship to the Pentagon – titled ‘The Most Hideous Institution On This Earth’ – especially cutting-edge, ground-breaking and informative.” — Bob Feldman, Students for a Democratic Society Steering C'ttee, Columbia University 1968.

“A totally engrossing roller coaster ride. Riveting and revealing, ‘Decoding Chomsky’ gives badly needed perspective to an American icon.” — David Wineberg, Amazon.com

“An authoritative, deeply thoughtful and very well written analysis, shedding light on a hitherto incomprehensible tangle. Knight’s revelatory investigation helps me understand why for so many decades I could never make sense of Chomsky’s various pronouncements about the evolution of language.” — ‘Fifth Generation Texan’, Amazon.com

“Social anthropologist Chris Knight has, almost miraculously, solved the Chomsky Problem. I’ve been trying to solve it for 20 years; I now feel the euphoria that one of us has solved it. ‘Decoding Chomsky’ is an astonishingly well-written and researched volume that will probably be the most important work in the history of ideas, post World War II, that you’ll read for quite some time. It’s so lucid and well-researched and intellectually and emotionally gripping I couldn’t find a fault with it, though I tried.” — Michael Johnson, 'Overweening Generalist.'

“Really important books do not come along very often. But here is one of them.” — Jack Conrad, 'Weekly Worker.'

“‘Decoding Chomsky’ will make uncomfortable reading for some because while Knight celebrates Chomsky’s anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics, he reminds us of the other Chomsky, the world-famous linguist. Most of us in the labour movement know little and care less about this side of Chomsky’s work. Why should we? It’s highly technical, appears irrelevant to our activism and anyway, who am I to judge? Chris Knight thinks we should care.” — Jackie Walker, 'Labour Briefing.'

“Knight offers a sustained argument against the view that Chomsky’s work as a linguistic scientist can be separated (compartmentalised) from the military and state ties of the institution in which he worked, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” — Andrew Coates, 'Tendance Coatesy.'

“Knight argues that Chomsky needed to deny any connection between his science and his politics in order to practise both while based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution that was heavily funded by the US military. Trenchant and compelling.” — Marek Kohn, 'New Scientist.'

“I enjoyed reading this book... If you’ve ever pondered the way Chomsky acts like he’s basically two separate people, you will find this book well-stocked with quotes and anecdotes that outline the strange relationship between Chomsky and Chomsky…” — Lauren Gawne, 'Superlinguo.'

“Knight says his ‘subversive intention’ is ‘to serve justice on Chomsky the scientist without doing an injustice to Chomsky the conscience of America.’ Now why should that be subversive? Any voice critical of Chomsky risks being dismissed as yet another right-wing defender of political orthodoxy, but given even the most superficial examination of Knight’s biography one could hardly question that he supports the substance of Chomsky’s views (as do I). Nonetheless, he shows how Chomsky has acquiesced in – more than that, has participated in and abetted – a radical post-war transformation of the relation of science to society, legitimating one of the significant political achievements of the right, the pretense that science is apolitical.” — Bruce Nevin, 'The Brooklyn Rail.'

Chris Knight’s book on the science and politics of the world’s most influential intellectual — Noam Chomsky — is an insightful book and, one might say, a-pleasure-to-read kind of book. — Thomas Klikauer, The European Legacy

Decoding Chomsky ... is a straightforward, clear and fast read. It focuses on all the major phases of Chomsky's linguistic theories, their institutional preconditions and their ideological and political ramifications. And it is absolutely devastating. — Peter Seyferth, Anarchist Studies

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London Review of Books Debate on 'Decoding Chomsky'

Chomsky Says (LRB Letters, 1 June 2017)

Hilary Rose says

Jackson Lears asserts that since the 1970s left-wing intellectuals have been drifting away from Chomsky’s rationalist humanism towards a hermeneutics of suspicion (LRB, 4 May). Yet Foucault was politically engaged, especially with the prisoners’ movement, and although today’s Foucauldians may have retreated from the barricades, Chomsky is still a towering figure of the left, unsilenced and unsilenceable.

However, Lears doesn’t mention the contradictions in Chomsky’s radical position, and seems to regard Chomsky’s academic home, MIT, as if it were like any other powerful university. It isn’t. MIT’s chief source of funding has long been the US military. Chomsky sees his linguistics as parallel to pure physics, floating above and entirely uninfluenced by the social; thus being funded by the military cannot influence his science. But since the mid-1970s Everett Mendelsohn, based just across the road in Harvard’s history of science department, has argued – he isn’t the only one – that science and society are co-constructed. Each shapes the other.

Chris Knight, in Decoding Chomsky (2016), tells a story that bears on the happy marriage between Chomsky’s research and the military’s need for a cognitive account of mind. MIT was a prime target of the student movement against the Vietnam War. Chomsky, who was opposed to the war, was caught between the students’ attack on military research at MIT and his reliance on military funding. He was invited by a canny MIT administration to join the committee it had established to discuss the matter. While one activist student on the committee remained hostile to each and every military research project on campus, another joined Chomsky in his more selective criticism. Chomsky’s contribution helped take the steam out of the student revolt.

Hilary Rose
London WC1

Chomsky says (LRB Letters, 15 June 2017)

Hilary Rose’s letter concerning alleged ‘contradictions’ in my ‘radical positions’ relies on an account by Chris Knight that is rich in innuendo and falsification, but lacking in evidence (Letters, 1 June). Knight’s crucial charge, which Rose repeats, is that military funding influenced my scientific work. There is a very simple way to verify the charge: determine whether (and if so how) the work changed from the time I was a graduate student at Harvard with no military funding, to my early years at MIT, when its funding was quite generally military, to subsequent years when I received no military funding at all. Answer: not in the slightest relevant way – which is doubtless why Knight evades this test. Exactly the same is true of the other researchers in the same programme. End of story. And an end to the slanderous charges against all of us.

Further, during the years of military funding in the 1960s our group was at the centre of academic resistance – not protest, resistance – to the war in Vietnam. My own involvement in such activities was even more direct. Knight sidesteps all this.

Rose mentions one specific example, a faculty-student committee on military labs of which I was a member. Following Knight, she misrepresents the issues and the background. In fact the issue of military funding of academic research never came up. As for the labs, it was understood, of course, that whatever the commission determined, the military work would continue. The only question was where. One position, which prevailed, was to end ‘each and every military research project on campus’ (Rose’s approving words). The meaning was obvious: while formally separated from the campus, the military labs would continue their work as before, also effectively maintaining relations with academic programmes, though not visibly. It’s quite true that I didn’t share this concern for the purity of campus, which was a matter of no interest to the Vietnamese or any of the US military’s other victims. Again, no contradiction.

There is much more to say about Knight’s quite astonishing performance and, more important, about the idea that scientific work is necessarily influenced by its source of funding (corporate, military, whatever). That claim, easily refuted, should not be confused with the work of Everett Mendelsohn on science-society relations that Rose adduces. But no need to pursue these matters here.

Noam Chomsky
Cambridge, Massachusetts

JACKSON LEARS SAYS

Noam Chomsky is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. From the centre and the right he has been vilified for his alleged anti-Americanism, and from the left for his supposed complicity with Pentagon-supported research at MIT. Hilary Rose takes this latter tendency and runs with it, concluding that Chomsky’s putative failure to condemn all military-funded projects at MIT ‘helped take the steam out of the student revolt’. Chomsky is not above criticism, but this is a bizarre claim. Surely there were other more compelling causes for the weakening of anti-war protest: the infiltration of the student movement by FBI agents provocateurs, the ending of the draft, the rise of identity politics. Whatever the ambiguities of Chomsky’s actions at MIT during the Vietnam War, he played a major role in legitimating the anti-war position among the American intelligentsia at a moment when Cold War liberalism was still ascendant and speaking out against militarist pieties required real courage.

There is also an epistemological argument in Rose’s letter, which contrasts Chomsky’s faith in pure science with the historicist view that ‘science and society are co-constructed.’ As a historian I am committed to that constructivist perspective, and there is nothing in my essay to suggest otherwise. What I argued was that Chomsky’s philosophical position is idiosyncratic: he is a rationalist and humanist who believes in the reality of such universal ideals as truth and justice, while at the same insisting that certain problems may remain forever resistant to questions posed by scientific research. From a constructivist view, as I acknowledged, Chomsky’s universalist epistemology may be naive, even fundamentally mistaken. But it may also provide a firmer foundation for political action than a postmodern impulse to question absolutes and universals. In this Chomsky resembles Orwell, whose slogan ‘good prose is like a windowpane’ embodied a simple-minded view of language but also underwrote a commitment to truth-telling in a time of lies.

Jackson Lears
Ringoes, New Jersey

 

Chomsky Says (LRB letters 13 July)

CHRIS KNIGHT SAYS

Much as I admire Noam Chomsky’s politics, I have to take him to task for trying to dragoon sympathisers like myself into accepting his linguistics as ‘science’ (Letters, 15 June). I can’t accept that the biological capacity underlying language didn’t gradually evolve, that it had no precursors but instead sprang up, perfectly formed, via a single mutation, or that it wasn’t designed for communication but remained inactive in speechless individuals for millennia following its installation. These notions are so asocial, apolitical and devoid of practical application that I can only assume Chomsky favoured them to keep his conscience clear: he needed them to ensure that his militarily funded linguistics couldn’t possibly have any military use.

That is the argument of my book: not that Chomsky colluded with his military sponsors but that, given his situation at MIT, he had to move mountains to avoid collusion. In his letter, Chomsky claims that I sidestep his central role in resisting the US war effort in Vietnam. In fact his courageous resistance to the US war machine is my central theme. Had these not been his politics, he wouldn’t have needed to make his work under military funding so utterly useless.

Chomsky says that if my argument were true, it would have been logical for him to have switched between one approach to language and another as military funding waxed and waned. But his entire intellectual milieu was shaped by military preoccupations, the dream of accurate machine translation among them. Chomsky’s concept of language as a stand-alone digital ‘device’ was a product of its time. No one expects an academic who has committed his career to a particular paradigm to discard it just because the funding stops.

I accept that Einstein’s theory of relativity would have been just as scientifically credible whether funded by the church, the military or no one at all. But when something doesn’t work as science, makes no sense, has no practical application and essentially no connection with the rest of science? Then we have to seek a different explanation for its prevalence.

Chris Knight
London SE22

HILARY ROSE SAYS

Noam Chomsky may honestly believe that the source of his funding in the 1960s was irrelevant but the funder may have had a different perspective. When a government body funds research, it does so on the basis that it considers the research relevant to the department’s brief. To the funder there is no disinterested knowledge. In the decades following the Second World War, not all military funding was directed at finding better ways of killing or maiming more of the enemy’s population than your own; significant funds were directed at information and control, seen as key in future forms of war. Research funded by the military with these ends in mind ushered in artificial intelligence, informatics, the web, GPS, smartphones and Siri, as well as Chomsky’s revolution in linguistic theory.

Hilary Rose
London WC1

Chomsky has the last say (LRB 17 August)

The distasteful correspondence that Chris Knight and Hilary Rose have carried forward began with their very serious charges against the linguistics programme at MIT, and against me in particular: namely, that we abandoned honest research and scholarship and followed the demands of the military (Letters, 1 June). Though the charges did not merit attention, I did respond, and suggested a simple test: show how our work changed in any relevant respect from what preceded it (Letters, 15 June). There was no change. End of story. All that remains is the need for apologies.

Knight now claims that work I completed before there was any thought of military funding was undertaken ‘to ensure that [my] militarily funded linguistics couldn’t possibly have any military use’ (Letters, 13 July). He further claims that when I continued exactly the same work at MIT, I ‘had to move mountains to avoid collusion’ with the military. Evidently, he couldn’t know whether that claim was true or false. In fact, there was no pressure at all, as is demonstrated by the record of appointments and promotions during the period when the programme he maligns was becoming the main academic centre for resistance (not protest) against the war in Vietnam.

Knight goes on to claim that I have been trying to ‘dragoon’ him into accepting my linguistics as ‘science’. I couldn’t care less what he thinks about my work.

Rose’s response is even worse. She now reduces her charges to the claim that the Pentagon considered ‘the research relevant to [its] brief’. She doesn’t even attempt to justify the claim. Doctrinal verities suffice. (Knight tries, at least: he says that my work was inspired by ‘the dream of accurate machine translation’ – a topic I have never had the slightest interest in, and to which my work has no relevance.) Rose is effectively claiming that the Pentagon was greatly interested in Turkish nominalisation (the first dissertation in our programme), Australian aboriginal languages, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s inquiries into language and the political order, and other work of comparable military relevance. And, by the same logic, that it took a similar interest in the incipient programme in philosophy and other teaching and research programmes sustained in the same manner, including undergraduate courses in radical politics. As for her claim that the military funded these endeavours along with ‘Chomsky’s revolution in linguistic theory’ because they were ‘seen as key in future forms of war’ – I will make no comment, out of politeness.

Noam Chomsky
Cambridge, Massachusetts

NOTE:

By titling this letter 'Chomsky has the last say', the LRB prevented me or Hilary from continuing the debate. Much of what I would have said will be in the new edition of my book, out in January 2018.

Lieutenant Jay Keyser on the value of Chomsky's work for Air Force command and control

In the 1960s, it was not uncommon for US scientists to justify their research projects on military grounds, if only to get Pentagon funding. Some of these justifications may have been spurious, but as long as a reasonable percentage of the projects being funded turned out to be militarily useful, the Pentagon wouldn’t have cared too much.

As this article shows, some MIT/MITRE linguists were seriously attempting to enhance Air Force military systems.

‘Linguistic Theory and System Design’ by Samuel Jay Keyser, in Joseph Spiegel and Donald Walker, Information Systems Sciences, Washington DC: 1965

MIT's Anti-War Protests 1967-1972

The protests that erupted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s were an important part of the wider student unrest that shook the US in this period.

Noam Chomsky has often talked sympathetically about these protests, which focused on MIT's development of both nuclear weapons and weapons used in the Vietnam war. However, Chomsky also has a strong loyalty to MIT – at one point describing the university as ‘the freest and the most honest and has the best relations between faculty and students than any other ... [with] a good record on civil liberties’ – and it seems this loyalty has prevented him from giving a full account of these events. The following links show the remarkable story of what happened when students at the centre of the US’s university-based war research program decided to rebel.

New York Times copyright applied for.

• Stuart W Leslie, The Cold War and American Science – the military-industrial complex at MIT and Stanford, Chapter 9.

• Chris Knight, Decoding Chomsky, science and revolutionary politics, Chapter 4.

• Noam Chomsky:

‘The responsibilities of intellectuals’, New York Review of Books, February 1967.

Letter in New York Review of Books, March 1967 – where Chomsky said MIT’s ‘involvement in the war effort is tragic and indefensible.’

Letter in New York Review of Books, April 1967 – where Chomsky said ‘MIT as an institution has no involvement in the war effort.’

TV debate with Michel Foucault, 1971 – where Chomsky said MIT ‘embodies very important libertarian values' but that he hoped his presence there helped ‘to increase student activism against a lot of things that MIT as an institution does.’

'MIT review panel on special laboratories final report', October 1969 – includes contributions by Noam Chomsky and Jon Kabat (now known as Jon Kabat-Zinn).

• 'Why smash MIT?', The Old Mole, November 1969 – where radical students said: 'MIT isn’t a center for scientific and social research to serve humanity. It’s a part of the US war machine. Into MIT flow over $100 million a year in Pentagon research and development funds, making it the tenth largest Defense Department R&D contractor in the country. MIT’s purpose is to provide research, consulting services and trained personnel for the US government and the major corporations – research, services, and personnel which enable them to maintain their control over the people of the world. NAC’s (November Action Coalition’s) campaign was directed against MIT as an institution, against its central purpose.'

Courtesy of MIT Museum

Courtesy of MIT Museum

ACCOUNTS FROM MIT'S RADICAL STUDENTS

• Stephen Shalom:

'A flawed political biography'
– a review of Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky: a life of dissent.

• George Katsiaficas:

'Prototype of radicalization'.

'Katsiaficas on ice'.

The Imagination of the New Left – a global analysis of 1968.

'Review of MIT president Howard Johnson's Holding the Center'.

'Comments on Decoding Chomsky'.

• Michael Albert:

Remembering Tomorrow, Chapters 4-9
– in which Michael Albert described MIT as another 'Dachau’ whose ‘victims burned in the fields of Vietnam’ (p9, 99).

‘From SDS to life after capitalism.’

Associated Press copyright applied for.

ACCOUNTS FROM MIT'S NEWSPAPER, THE TECH

'SDS sits-in on Dow recruiter', 7 November 1967. (Vol.87 Issue 43)

'Sala [army deserter] sanctuary established', 1 November 1968. (Vol.88 Issue 41)

'March 4 activities fill Kresge', 7 March 1969. (Vol.89 Issue 8)
See also 'Beyond March 4', the founding document of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

'Rostow defends [Vietnam] policies in Kresge confrontation', 11 April 1969. (Vol.89 Issue 15)

'Johnson confronted on I-Lab', 22 April 1969. (Vol.89 Issue 18)
In this article, one student justified his determination to stop MIT's scientists from doing military research by saying that 'one doesn't have the right to build gas chambers to kill people.' He went on to explain that 'the principle that people should not kill other people is more important than notions of freedom to do any kind of research one might want to undertake.'

‘150 students peacefully disrupt CIS’, 14 October 1969. (Vol.89 Issue 36)

Reports on the anti-war November Actions: 31 October and 4-6 November and 9 November 1969. (Vol.89 Issue 41-3)

'Noam Chomsky: a journey to North Vietnam', 5 May 1970. (Vol.90 Issue 23)

'Overkill', 15 September 1970 p5. (Vol.90 Issue 30)

'Krasner loses final appeal', 5 October 1971 p1,3,5. (Vol.90 Issue 37)

'Battering ram: the occupation of the president's office', 7 December p5 and 10 December p5 and 14 December 1971 p4. (Vol.91 Issue 53-5)

'MIT may be dangerous to the world', 28 April 1972 p5. (Vol.92 Issue 21)

'Riot police hit MIT campus', 12 May 1972. (Vol.92 Issue 25)

‘19 appeal trespass cases’, 4 August 1972 p1, 13. (Vol.92 Issue 28)

PHOTOS AND VIDEOS

• MIT Museum 1960s/1970s student activism photographs.

• MIT Center for International Studies: 'CIA origins' and 'Turbulent times'.

• An extract from Ricky Leacock's documentary, November Actions, on MIT's student protests in 1969:

• 'Vietnam – the American holocaust' documentary, 2008:

• TV debate between Noam Chomsky and William Buckley, 1969. – where Chomsky said, 'I assure you that I had nothing to do with keeping [Walt Rostow] out of MIT! I’d be delighted to have him back. He’s a great help to us when he’s around.' (Chomsky also threatened to organise protests if Rostow was refused a job at MIT. Barsky p140-1.)

• Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger and President Lyndon B Johnson in the White House:

Students staging a protest against research into nuclear and other weapons at MIT in 1969/1970. (Jon Kabat is facing the megaphone.)

• This sit-in appears to be in, or near, MIT’s Center for International Studies where academics were working with the US military on torture and assassination programmes in Vietnam. (Michael Albert, Remembering Tomorrow p99-101; The Tech, 14/10/69.)

• This photograph shows the moment that students broke down the door to the office of the president of MIT, Howard Johnson. The students were protesting against the expulsion of the anti-war student president, Michael Albert. After this incident, as one MIT professor said, 'the faculty came down with a giant iron fist' and three students ended up serving prison sentences. (The Tech, 14/12/71)

According to Chomsky, words such as 'book' and 'carburetor' are genetically determined

Chomsky claims that every child comes into the world knowing already what a house is. As it grows up and acquires its natal tongue, it just has to connect that concept with the locally appropriate sound:

‘There’s a fixed and quite rich structure of understanding associated with the concept “house” and that’s going to be cross-linguistic and it’s going to arise independently of any evidence because it’s just part of our nature.’[1]

If this applies to house, Chomsky reasons, it must apply in the same way to other concepts:

‘There is overwhelming reason to believe that concepts like, say, climb, chase, run, tree and book and so on are fundamentally fixed.’[2]

Note the inclusion of ‘book’ in this list. This is puzzling since no books existed during the palaeolithic age, when our species emerged and humans were everywhere hunter-gatherers.

Why does Chomsky make this strange claim? As so often, he denies that he is offering a hypothesis.[3] If it were a testable hypothesis, his astonished critics might be tempted to cite counter-evidence. Not believing in empirical tests or experiments, Chomsky argues instead from what he terms ‘conceptual necessity’. Lexical concepts, he observes, ‘have extremely complex properties when you look at them’. From this it follows ‘that they’ve got to basically be there and then they get kind of triggered and you find out what sounds are associated with them’.[4]

So much for climb, chase, run, tree and book. But Chomsky knew he could not restrict himself to an arbitrarily chosen list of words. Was ‘house’ natural, whereas ‘book’ was cultural and artificial? Where exactly should we draw the line? For his thesis to have any merit, it had to apply across the board. So what about, say, ‘carburettor’? Or ‘bureaucrat’? Or ‘quantum potential’?

When the philosopher Hilary Putnam realized what Chomsky was claiming, he could hardly conceal his astonishment. Such nonsense, he complained, had nothing to do with real genetics or biology. To have installed in our last common ancestor a complete stock of the words which future generations might need, observed Putnam, ‘evolution would have had to be able to anticipate all the contingencies of future physical and cultural environments. Obviously it didn’t and couldn’t do this.’[5]

But to everyone’s surprise, Chomsky did not flinch. Young children, he reaffirmed, acquire words so rapidly that learning cannot be what is really happening. He proposes instead that each child needs merely to discover which locally appropriate vocal label should be applied to a concept which is already in its mind.[6] After elaborating this idea with respect to relatively simple words such as ‘table’, Chomsky continued:

Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburetor and bureaucrat, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it … However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.[7]

‘Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the concept of a bicycle – he just never had occasion to use them!’, responded philosopher Daniel Dennett, adding that he and his colleagues find it hard not to burst out laughing at this point. Perhaps ‘Aristotle had an innate airplane concept’, Dennett continued, ‘but did he also have a concept of wide-bodied jumbo jet? What about the concept of an APEX fare Boston/London round trip?’[8]

Despite the hilarity, however, Chomsky has continued to defend the idea.

1. Olson G. and Faigley, L. 1991. Politics and composition: a conversation with Noam Chomsky. In Journal of Advanced Composition 11.1, pp 1-36.

2. Chomsky, N. 2000a. The Architecture of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 75.

3. Chomsky, N. 2000b. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 66.

4. Chomsky, The Architecture, p. 75.

5. Putnam, H. 1988. Representation and Reality. Cambridge MA: MIT., p. 15. Putnam is criticizing the ‘strong innateness hypothesis’ as presented by Chomsky’s colleague Jerry Fodor. Fodor, J. A. 1975. The Language of Thought. Scranton, PA: Crowell. Fodor’s position is equally Chomsky’s.

6. Chomsky, New Horizons, p. 61.

7. The same, pp. 64–66.

8. Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin, pp. 192-93; note 8.’

Chomsky's Students Recall their Time at the MITRE Corporation

Several of the linguists employed at the MITRE Corporation between 1963 and 1965 were kind enough to email their recollections to me in January and February 2018. I was particularly interested in how scientists whose passion was developing linguistic theory, not military technology, felt about working for the Air Force. My impression is that, for understandable moral and political reasons, they tend to play down the Air Force's stated mission to apply insights into language structure to military problems of weapons command-and-control.

Barbara Partee's reminiscences have been the most informative. She started by saying:

Chomsky got lots of funding for research and for supporting graduate students from the Air Force during the same period when a number of us, his graduate students, were working summers at the Air Force-funded MITRE Corporation. It was my understanding that our standard rationalization was that it was better for defense spending to be diverted to linguistic research than to be used for really military purposes. … The summers I worked at MITRE were 1963, 64, and 65. I think we had the most interaction with Chomsky there in 64, when we were working out a real grammar fragment of English; probably also in 1965, as we were further refining our grammar.

In her next email, Barbara recalled:

Chomsky definitely did come out and consult with us at least once, in either my second or third year there, probably third (and last), 1965, when we were trying to clean up our 'MITRE Grammar' which we had written in the summer of 64, and which the two programmers in Don's group, Joyce Friedman and Ted Haines, had worked on programming up over the winter, uncovering various bugs and indeterminacies in what we had written. I remember the term 'Chomsky-adjunction' was coined in our group for the particular proposal Chomsky gave us in discussion for how adjunction should work. …

Really it was in my first summer, 1963 (which I think was the first summer that any of us were there, but I'm not positive), that we had total freedom. Everybody could choose their own topic, as long as it could be related to the goal of eventually getting machines to process English sentences and do some question-answering on topics of potential interest to the Air Force.

I worked on tenses and adverbs, and produced my first LSA talk on the syntax of plain and counterfactual conditionals. But after that first summer, dear Don [Donald Walker, the head of the MITRE project] realized that he'd have to get us to work collectively on producing a grammar and a parser in order to convince the generals that it was valuable to hire us.…

I remember a meeting when Don invited in 'the generals' (I call them that – the guys from the [Air Force] – I have no idea of their actual ranks) to talk with us. We knew that Don's rationalization for hiring us (in reality he just wanted to support us) was that in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program. And I remember that in my little presentation I said something honest like that it would probably take 100 linguists 100 years to write a real grammar of English, but that we were happily working towards that goal, and Don had to hop up and talk very fast to recover from that statement.

On the issue of how they felt working for the military, Barbara explained:

I never sensed any discomfort with taking Air Force money, of which Chomsky had a great deal for supporting students at MIT. I had the impression that we all considered it something like benign pacifist sabotage.

She then recalled that she

had a shock … when outside of class one time some political topic came up and Noam said that he was an anarchist, I think, and said something about how awful he considered everything about the American government. … I was totally unready to listen to anything like that. It wasn't until the Vietnam War that I began to appreciate his politics, but I never did become comfortable with his manner of arguing, so totally disparaging of everything that ordinary middle-class people like our family believed. … But for the record, I never heard him say a political word in any linguistics class or linguistics lecture.

In another email, Barbara said:

When I told you about our story of the generals being underground during the war and the computers therefore needing to understand English, really I'm not sure that anybody believed it. If you look at all the ARPA (DARPA) projects funded over the years, lots of them are really basic research that might be somehow be valuable to the military but could be much more widely valuable. …

Jay Keyser, he, like Don Walker, was one of a number of people a little older than us graduate students who was a regular visitor to MIT, even with some temporary office space there. Sometime in the early 1960s, the AFROTC [Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps.] finally caught up with Jay, who had been managing to stay under the radar for some years, and he had to go serve as an Air Force officer (Lieutenant, I think) for a few years. While he was there, he persuaded them that his own research task should be to work on Old English metrics –[11]  I no longer remember his lovely story of how he convinced them that that would be in the national interest. And importantly for the rest of us, he persuaded them to let him choose a number of linguistic projects for funding. I went to UCLA in 1965, and in 1966, Robert Stockwell, Paul Schachter, and I got a big grant from the Air Force to write a big transformational grammar of English, synthesizing as nearly as possible everything that had been done in that framework since it began with Syntactic Structures in 1957.

Other linguists working at MITRE agreed with much of Barbara's version of events. Arnold Zwicky added that it was 'colonels we had to impress, not generals' and that he also never heard Chomsky talk politics in his lectures. He also said:

 I too was astonished to discover these attitudes (but then became an anti-Vietnam protestor). But it's part of Noam's intense, passionate belief that any position he comes to is the only possible one and that those who believe otherwise are deluded or even evil. (recall the Skinner review.)

Arnold also said:

Believe it or not, Noam really was a consultant. [He] came to MITRE several times to look at the English grammar Barbara Hall (Partee) and I and our group were working on.

And that:

When Noam visited, he got a visitor's badge, which committed him to be under the care of a staff member at all times (and stay within the appropriate clearance-color lines on the floor.) I remember this because on at least one of his visits I was the responsible person, and I had to accompany him to the men's room. 'At all times' was meant quite literally.

Another MITRE linguist, Haj Ross, said:

I knew nothing about Noam’s political thinking, till I finally arrived at MIT in January 1964. … [I] was allowed to stay on at MIT in the fall of 1964, as a regular student, I had made it into Valhalla. … I remember, after Jack Kennedy had been shot, arriving at MIT, and going to a course taught by Noam, on politics, perhaps, walking back from building 23 to building 20, and asking Noam what he thought of President Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, which I was totally enamored of. I remember almost word for word what Noam said: he thought that Johnson’s administration was the largest collection of criminals that had ever infested the White House. I was speechless, I followed Noam’s course, became totally radicalized.

At MITRE I had never had the slightest hint about Noam’s radicalism. I was completely innocent, till that conversation in the halls of Building 20. I must also say that I never had any whiff of military work at MITRE. Maybe we had to wear badges, I have no recollection of that, but what we talked about had nothing at all to do with command and control or Air Force or anything similar. Our talk was about syntax and confusions about semantics.

Thomas Bever, told me:

I do not recall any time when [Chomsky] was cooperating with the Air Force on anything related to the US war effort anywhere. … From the viewpoint of the grad students who were [at MITRE], it was an interesting and well paid adventure. We were given total freedom.

Bruce Fraser recalled:

I don't remember much talk about the implications of the work, the talk was mostly about our various projects. … I do recall that Noam didn't talk with us much about what we were doing. We were graduate students just getting started. I know that he knew that MITRE was Air Force supported, but as I recall, he didn't have any problem with us working with the company. We were doing linguistics, it was the early 60s, and Vietnam was just heating up, as I remember the time.

And Jay Keyser said:

As for interesting discussions about the pros and cons of taking military funding, there just weren't any that I can remember. As I said in my book, MIT was the love child of the War Department. That's how the government supported higher education back then.

I had a lot of interesting conversations with Noam. But they were all about linguistics. If you get a copy of Mens et Mania out of the library, there is an account of my very first professional article and the role that Morris Halle and Noam played in guiding the writing of it.

MITRE adverts from MIT's The Tech and The Technology Review.

'If you're going to do defense research, you should do it as well as you can. At MIT we can do it very, very well.' Jerome Wiesner

[Photo: MIT’s Jerome Wiesner with Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara.]

Chomsky’s claim that ‘MIT itself doesn’t have war work’ echoes MIT’s official position.

This interesting Boston Globe article exposes MIT’s line in the 1980s that its war work was OK because it wasn’t ‘operational weapons’ work. Or as one anti-militarist campaigner says in the piece:

‘MIT seems to think it's OK to work on weapons as long as it doesn't involve the parts that goes bang … MIT is so deeply involved in work relating to weapons systems that they have to resort to some sort of sophistry to justify it.’

MIT Role in Research for Military Questioned; classified work is done at off-campus labs

Robert Levey, Boston Globe Newspaper Aug 7, 1983

As the expanding national military budget continues to push more defense work back onto college campuses, it is rekindling questions about the touchy relationship between basic science and military research.

Among the schools whose policies are being questioned is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which along with Johns Hopkins University accounts for almost half the Pentagon research being conducted by American universities.

The Defense Department now spends almost $800 million a year - up from $577 million two years ago - for both unclassified and secret military research, carried out either on campuses or facilties operated by universities under contract with the government.

In the struggle for new sources of revenue, educational institutions have found a windfall in the government's growing ardor for defense research. But this windfall also challenges each school's institutional conscience regarding what it deems appropriate as research activity.

At the University of Michigan, for instance, the board of regents struggled last month with a proposal to set up a review process for accepting any unclassified government research "a substantial purpose of which is to destroy or permanently incapacitate human beings."

The university already has such a policy covering secret research. By a 7-1 vote, the regents decided not to extend it to unclassified work, arguing it was unnecessary to add a review process to academic work already being done in the open.

MIT, on the other hand, presents the unusual case of an institution that refuses to do any classified research on its Cambridge campus, but accepts close to $200 million a year in government money for military-related research - much of it secret - conducted in Lexington at its Lincoln Laboratories.

Other universities avoid classified military research not so much because it poses a moral conflict as that it raises the issue of academic freedom. Harvard University, for instance, does not accept any secret research projects but emphasizes that the policy is strictly a matter of academic freedom, that it won't permit research to be done under its auspices if the results cannot be published.

Less than 4 percent of Harvard's $109 million in government- sponsored research comes from the Defense Department; the rest is in unclassified projects.

There are other seeming contradictions. Former MIT president Jerome Wiesner says that though he has long fought for slowing down the arms race, national security needs require that military research continue. "And if you're going to do defense research," Wiesner says, "you should do it as well as you can. At MIT we can do it very, very well."

MIT qualifies, along with an imposing list of the nation's most powerful private corporations, as one of the 100 top defense contractors in the country. And when examining the history of MIT's overall posture on defense research, its current status can appear confusing or even contradictory.

More than 10 years ago, in the intense emotional climate of the Vietnam war era, MIT severed its relationship with its Draper Laboratory because of campus concern that it was too intimately involved in the design, testing and production of nuclear missiles.

There was a consensus at MIT that though it should continue to use its research expertise in support of national defense, it was inappropriate for MIT to produce parts for nuclear missiles right on the campus.

As one MIT physicist recalls the issue: "Draper was actually fabricating parts for weapons systems that were being deployed. It was a factory. That's what people found most upsetting."

At the same time, there was a less heated campus protest about the secret defense research that was being conducted at Lincoln Laboratories, which is a leading radar research center wholly operated by MIT on contract with the US Air Force.

MIT resisted those pressures and decided to continue to run Lincoln Laboratories. But the MIT Corporation adopted a policy forbidding all secret research at its Cambridge campus, where its education program is based and undergraduates are taught. And it said it would do no work on "operational weapons systems" at either the Cambridge campus or Lincoln Laboratories.

MIT spokesman Robert Byers confirmed last week that those two policies are still in force and are even monitored by a seven- member standing committee of MIT faculty.

Under the Reagan Administration's large defense budget, the research business at Lincoln Laboratories has mushroomed to unprecedented levels in the past three years. MIT revenues from the government contract for the labs reached $155 million in fiscal 1982 and are headed toward an estimated $196 million in fiscal 1983, Byers said.

The enormous increase in the volume of research for the military, then, raises questions about what Lincoln Laboratories is doing for the money. Since at least one-fourth of the work is highly classified, there is no way to obtain detailed descriptions of the newest research there.

Even if available, it would be illegal to publish the information under various US laws protecting sensitive military information.

But some government documents recently obtained through a lawsuit and a Freedom of Information request initiated by the American Friends Service Committee national office in Philadelphia suggest the scope of some research at Lincoln involves mainstream war work that differs little from the kind being done at the Draper Lab 10 years ago.

This includes participation in Pershing missile tests, helping enhance performance of Precision Locator Strike System weapons and developing growth options for LANTIRN, the highly sophisticated nighttime infrared targeting system for firing Maverick air-to- surface missiles from E16 and A10 aircraft.

Furthermore, an article on nuclear weapons technology in the July 8 issue of the respected magazine "Science" states that as part of the sophisticated search for decoys to trick the Soviet Union into ignoring oncoming US missiles, Lincoln Laboratories scientists have "created a special aerosol, which reflects the earth's shine, thereby creating numerous false light impressions."

In essence, they have invented a product with but a single military use - to fool the enemy when US nuclear warheads are sent in their direction.

MIT officials maintain these kinds of research projects do not constitute "operational weapons work." But critics argue MIT is engaging in misleading semantics.

Thomas Conrad, the Friends Committee researcher for its NARMIC (National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex) project, said it had to sue the government after being refused listings of the unclassified contract information assembled by the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).

The Defense Department said it could not issue the documents to NARMIC because it included "data relating to manufacturing or using munitions of war." The court forced the department to release the requested material, Conrad said, but as of last Jan. 1, the DTIC contract listings have been returned to the category of classified information and the department does not have to turn them over now.

"MIT seems to think it's OK to work on weapons as long as it doesn't involve the parts that goes bang," Conrad said. "But modern weapons systems are just that . . . they are systems. They involve platforms, launchers, targeting and guidance devices, along with the warheads. If you're involved in any one of them, you're helping a weapon get to its target.

"And it's important to remember that these weapons are basically designed to snuff out lives.

"It stretches credulity for MIT to call this work acceptable, to be doing these things and saying it's all right because we don't do work on operational weapons.

"From looking at these documents, it seems to us that MIT is so deeply involved in work relating to weapons systems that they have to resort to some sort of sophistry to justify it."

Though Byers and others at MIT insist the character of the work at Lincoln Laboratories has not changed over the years, he said "that doesn't mean the work doesn't have military value."

He said the distinction made by MIT is that its researchers will not actually "build, manufacture or supply the government with a weapons system."

If Lincoln Lab scientists go to missile test ranges and work on improving guidance and targeting systems for nuclear weapons, that is regarded as appropriate research and development activity, not operational weapons work. "Now, you may not agree with our definition of operational weapons," Byers said.

Alan Oppenheim, a member of the MIT standing committee assigned to monitor research at Lincoln Laboratories, said some of the disagreement about the nature of MIT's involvement in weapons research could come from the way contracts are written.

The actual contracts between the Air Force and MIT specify, among other things, that Lincoln Laboratories shall conduct a strategic research program that "will embrace efforts related to ballistic missle offense and defense to include the management and operation of a test site and work in penetration technology."

It states that the tactical program at Lincoln "will include developments in surveillance of ground and air targets, strike and weapon guidance, tactical communications and countermeasures."

And though Lincoln isn't involved in regular production of weapons systems, the contract states part of its complex mission is to "produce, or have produced, initial models of Lab-developed equipment suitable for field demonstration and test by appropriate military services or agencies."

But Oppenheim suggested that "these contracts tend to sound more specific than the work really is. As the proposals move through the funding system, people do a lot of crafting to make a round peg fit in a square hole. We all know this goes on."

Oppenheim said it enhances the possibility of getting basic research sponsored if some practical applications that could result from the work are described. For better or worse, he added, "the Defense Department is our Ministry of Science."

Robert Levey, Boston Globe Newspaper Aug 7, 1983

John Deutch - Chomsky's friend in the Pentagon and the CIA

In December 1995, The New York Times reported that Noam Chomsky approved of the appointment of his fellow MIT academic, John Deutch, as head of the CIA. Until then, Deutch had been No.2 at the Pentagon. These are Chomsky's reported words:

'[Deutch] has more honesty and integrity than anyone I've ever met in academic life, or any other life. If somebody's got to be running the CIA, I'm glad it's him.'[1]

Similar support for Deutch was expressed during an interview published in 1996 in the book Class Warfare. Asked about Deutch, Chomsky replied:

'We were actually friends and got along fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human beings can disagree about. I liked him. We got along very well together. He's very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open, sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I found it fine. I had no problem with him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I'm told, who was supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT.'[2]

If many of Chomsky's MIT colleagues felt differently about Deutch, it was for understandable reasons given the man's long-standing role as a Pentagon adviser.

Deutch headed two Pentagon panels on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Along with Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, he was an influential advisor on President Reagan's Scowcroft commission, which in 1983 recommended the deployment of the MX missile.[3] Then, when the Cold War came to an end, he became anxious that the US military might turn away from nuclear weaponry by, for instance, removing tactical nuclear weapons from ships and submarines.[4]

MIT's student activists called Deutch the 'War Provost'. One said that his activities 'really changed the atmosphere at MIT'; he complained that Deutch's involvement made the university 'more militaristic'.[5] These activists evidently feared that if Deutch did become MIT President, as Chomsky wanted, then the whole university would become even more deeply involved in military research of the most barbaric kind.[6]

For more on this whole episode see these articles:

'Myth and Reality in Chemical Warfare', Chemical and Engineering News, February 1982. - The radical students at MIT accused Deutch of actively supporting the development of chemical weapons. In this article, Deutch confirms this by writing: 'There is no alternative to deploying a credible CW [Chemical Warfare] capability.'

'Military Provost', Science for the People, March/April 1988, p6. - This article summarises Deutch's deep involvement with nuclear, chemical, biological and fuel/air weapons.

Articles from MIT's official newspaper, The Tech:

'Examining John Deutch's Pentagon connections', The Tech, 27 May 1988 (Vol. 108 Issue 26)
- Deutch encouraged MIT to apply for 'army contracts for mycotoxin research'. His enthusiasm for biological warfare research led MIT Professor Vera Kistiakowsky to complain that 'he has no business being in the education business.'

‘Twenty years later, MIT still doing military research projects’, The Tech, 24 February 1989, (Vol. 109 Issue 6)
- Daniel Glenn explains how ‘MIT is currently engaged in several hundred research projects for the Department of Defense.' Unclassified on-campus research projects include "hardening of integrated circuits to withstand nuclear attack’'… "target identification using infrared radar" … "optical signal processing for' missile guidance" … "arctic military facilities"… "application of composite materials for Army helicopter blades’' … '’SDI space-based radar".’

'MIT research heavily dependent on defense department funding', The Tech, 28 February 1989 (Vol.109 Issue7)
- Daniel Glenn reports that 80 per cent of MIT's research funding comes from the Pentagon.

'Teach-in focuses on research and activism', The Tech, 7 March 1989 (Vol.109 Issue 9 p2, 16)
- An MIT nuclear engineering student reports that Deutch helped 'MIT secure $2.3 million dollars in defense department funding for chemical and biological weapons research.'

A fuel-air bomb.

Articles from MIT's activist newspaper, The Thistle:

'Who is John Deutch', The Thistle, (Vol.9 Issue7)
- We learn of Deutch's innovative work on 'fuel-air bombs, one of the most devastating non-nuclear weapons in existence'. It is reported that as well as being 'a long-term advocate of US nuclear weapons build-up, [Deutch] is also a strong supporter of biological weapons, and of using chemical and biological weapons together in order to increase their killing efficiency.'

'An open letter to [MIT] President Vest', The Thistle, (Vol.9 Issue7)
- MIT's Alternative News Collective writes that 'Deutch not only supported research into chemical/biological weapons, … he pressured junior faculty into performing this research on campus.' On the issue of the CIA, the Collective asks: 'How should MIT treat an Institute Professor who has just been chosen to lead a terrorist group? It is time that MIT fired John Deutch.'

'Institute Professor John Deutch heads CIA: What next?', The Thistle, (Vol.9 Issue7)
- 'What is the nature of MIT? Is it a "neutral" educational institution, or is it just another piece of the Pentagon-CIA-Weapons Manufacturers establishment, that has had - and continues to have - a negative impact on most of the world?'

An MX missile.

Extract from a letter to Chris Knight by Daniel Glenn, a former MIT student activist and author of some of the above articles:

I was not aware of Chomsky's support of John Deutch and do find it surprising.

As part of my activism at MIT, I was part of a protest at my 1989 graduation ceremony in which we protested the hypocrisy of the administration and faculty for wearing black arm bands in support of the student movement at Tiananmen Square. The administration had banned the distribution of the student newspapers for the first time in MIT's history, because we were publishing information about the interlocking directorships of John Deutch and other MIT administration officials and its connection to their support of military expenditures.

We smuggled copies of The Thistle into the graduation ceremony under our robes that detailed those connections. And four students, including myself, unfurled banners on the stage and shook John Deutch's hand with a banner in the other that read: 'MIT War Research Kills'. The banners were in the style of the Tiananmen Square student banners. ... We did feel vindicated in our concerns about the direct line from MIT's research funding and faculty connection's to the military when John Deutch was appointed as Deputy Secretary of Defense and then CIA Director.

... I did take Noam Chomsky's course on activism and society, and we did engage with him on a number of occasions about our political efforts with the university, and his presence at the university is one of the reasons I was willing to go to MIT. I thought that if he could be there, then I could learn from that institution in spite of its deeply troubling connections to the technology of warfare. I was surprised to learn that he was limited by the politics of academia to teaching within his primary subject area of linguistics, in spite of being such an esteemed intellectual in political science. The course we took from him was not an official course in the university.

I am a great admirer of Noam Chomsky, and would not want to disparage him in any way. I do find this particular issue interesting and somewhat troubling, but I do imagine that he had to make compromises of many kinds over his decades as a resident radical in an institution so entrenched in the military-industrial complex; and he its most profound and substantive critic.

Notes

1. The New York Times article (10/12/1995) also said that Deutch was reforming the CIA by reviewing its paid informants across the world so they could 'identify the crooks and the fingernail-pullers, to weigh the information they provided against their records, and to sack them if they failed the test.' The article, in other words, implied that Deutch was OK with CIA 'nail-pullers' as long as they provided useful information.

2. N.Chomsky, Class Warfare, Interviews with David Barsamian, p135-6.

3. The Washington Post, 9/12/77; New York Times, 29/3/86; B.Scowcroft, Report of the President's Commission on Strategic Forces, 1983.

4. The Washington Post, 12/3/83 and 26/12/86 and 3/12/87; Technology Review, Vol. 95 (February 1992).

5. 'MIT students allege defense conflict', UPI, 2/6/89; The Tech, 27/5/88 and 24/1/90 and 2/3/90, p7.

6. It seems highly unlikely that Chomsky really wanted more military research at MIT. As he said, his attitude was more that 'whether [a university is] being directly funded by the CIA or in some other fashion seems to me a marginal question.' Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics p. 130.

Chomsky's Supervisors at MIT, Professor Wiesner and General McCormack

Jerome Wiesner was the laboratory director who first sought out Noam Chomsky, recruited him to MIT and in this way decisively influenced his career. In this article, Wiesner summarises his own military career. It is followed by a photo from Los Alamos showing another important figure at MIT, General James McCormack.

PROF. WIESNER EXPLAINS

A TRIBUNE editorial [June 1], entitled "Professor Wiesner’s Dream World," questioned my ability to be objective on the issue of anti-ballistic missile deployment. You kindly concede my technical competence in the matter but state to at my advice regarding the current ABM controversy is suspect because of my "naive and credulous trust in the peaceful pretensions of the Russians."

The information you provide, including quotes from my writings, hardly presents an accurate or complete picture of my involvement with national security affairs thru the years, or supports the contention that I base my arms limitation proposals primarily on trust.

Because an important aspect of your argument was my opposition to certain weapon systems, I would like to amplify the record you printed. In 1951 I was a member of the group that developed plans for a continental air defense system and then persuaded the department of defense to build it.

In 1953, as a member of the Von Neumann committee, I helped get the United States ballistic missile program established in the face of strong opposition from the civilian and military leaders of the air force and department of defense

In 1954 I helped invent and promote the distant early warning [DEW] line which provided essential warning against bomber attacks for both strategic air command and the air defense command. I was also a proponent of the Polaris missile system, the ballistic missile early warning system, and the satellite reconnaissance systems.

In 1957 I worked on the Gaither panel, and in 1958 when President Eisenhower asked the President's science advisory committee to study the technical aspects of the then current arms limitation proposals in including the nuclear test ban treaty, I participated in those efforts. These two experiences convinced me that safe alternatives to the arms race were both vitally necessary and possible.

Since then I have supported a number of schemes to stop the arms spiral that I thought were entirely safe, and the Pugwash proposal you treat with such sarcasm and call my “dream world” is one such.

You correctly described my limited deterrent proposal, but you misunderstood it. I proposed that the United States and the U.S.S.R. limit their missile forces by agreement to a level in the 200-500 missile range. I believed then and I still believe that such an agreement is in the interest of both nations.

Contrary to your interpretation, I have never proposed arms control arrangement in which United States security depended upon trust or upon a perception of the intentions of the Soviet Union leaders. A safe missile limitation agreement is a dream world that was accessible to the world in 1960, still is, and is well worth striving for.

One last point. You state that I have opposed the Minuteman III and Poseidon missiles. I have not, tho I am against the deployment of multiple warheads on them, for I don't believe that they are needed at this time and would, in my view, escalate the arms race.

JEROME B. WIESNER, Provost, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1969

Between 1955 and 1965 one of the more influential administrators at MIT was Air Force General James McCormack (in uniform standing next to Robert Oppenheimer).

Before coming to the university, General McCormack played a crucial role organising the US's post-war nuclear arsenal. He also worked on the hydrogen bomb, telling his political masters in Washington that 'if all of the theory turned out, you can have it any size up to the sun.'

When he became a Vice-President at MIT in 1958, General McCormack continued to supervise various research projects at the university including the Center for Communication Studies with which both Wiesner and Chomsky were involved.*

Here is the announcement in Technology Review, April 1966, of Chomsky's attainment of a named professorship:

The following article on more weapons development at MIT was nothing exceptional in the Technology Review in the 1960s. MIT's deep involvement with the US military continued into the 21st Century as shown by this piece of publicity:

 

* Hewlett, R.G. and F. Duncan. 1972. Atomic Shield: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Vol.2, 1947/1952. Washington: AEC, 65, 172, 408-9, 548; Rhodes, R. 1995. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, New York: Simon and Shuster, 379; The Tech, 4 October 1957, 1 and 21 October 1958, 2 and 20 October 1965, 1; Kay L. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code. California: Stanford University Press, 300-2.

Why Smash MIT? – 1969 article from 'The Old Mole'

 

LET'S SMASH MIT!

This article from the Cambridge, Massachusetts, radical student publication, The Old Mole, was written at the height of protests against Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s role in military research in November 1969. (From I.Wallerstein, University Crisis Reader vol.2 p240-3.)

MIT isn’t a center for scientific and social research to serve humanity. It’s a part of the US war machine. Into MIT flow over $100 million a year in Pentagon research and development funds, making it the tenth largest Defense Department R&D contractor in the country. MIT’s purpose is to provide research, consulting services and trained personnel for the US government and the major corporations – research, services, and personnel which enable them to maintain their control over the people of the world.

NAC’s (November Action Coalition’s) campaign was directed against MIT as an institution, against its central purpose. It focused, however, on seven specific projects which are illustrative of the worst kinds of projects the Institution carries out for imperialism. Last week’s actions are part of a continuing campaign to end these seven projects:
 

MIRV and Helicopter

MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles) and the Helicopter Stabilization Project: These projects are being done at the Instrumentation Laboratories, which are considered capable of the most sophisticated and reliable guidance work of any lab in the country. The MIRV is designed to give the US a first-strike capability: the capability of launching a nuclear attack without being destroyed in return. Each MIRV missile contains many warheads each of which can be aimed at a different target. While MIRV gives US imperialism fantastic world-wide power, the helicopter stabilization project is designed specifically for counter-insurgency projects like Vietnam. It’s goal is an all-weather guidance and stabilization system for helicopters, which would alleviate many of the present difficulties in establishing aim from rapid-fire machine-guns in helicopters in Vietnam, especially in bad weather.
 

ABM and MTI

ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) and MTI (Moving Target Indicator): these projects are being done at the Lincoln laboratories, established in 1951 ‘for the purpose of creating effective solutions to urgent national defense problems’ (MIT President’s Report 1968). ABM, like the MIRV, is intended to give the US a first-strike capability. And, as Senator Richard Russell has said, ‘The first country to deploy an effective ABM system . . . is going to control this world militarily.’ The MTI is a radar system that allows guerrillas moving through dense foliage to be detected three miles away by a helicopter travelling up to 200 miles per hour, in all weather, day or night. Test models are already in use in Vietnam.
 

Com-Com

Com-Com Project and International Communism Project: Both of these projects are being done at MIT’s Center for International Studies. The CIS was established in the early 1950s to deal with some of the ‘social science problems’ in the implementation of US foreign policy. It was funded by the CIA from its inception until 1966, when Director Max Millikan announced that ‘for practical and not moral reasons’ ties were officially cut. Millikan came to the center after a two–year stint as assistant director of the CIA.

The Com-Com Project is directed by Ithiel de Sola Pool. Pool is a political ‘scientist’ who has spent much time in Vietnam in the past few years as part of the DoD’s [Department of Defense’s] Chieu Hoi program (a program to induce Viet Cong defection). Com-Com is a program of technical and communications research in psychological warfare. Com-Com is a program of technical and communications research in psychological warfare.

The International Communism Project was originally funded by the CIA (now by the Ford Foundation) to provide analysis of intelligence information about radical and revolutionary movements throughout the world on the basis of public documents. (At least one of CIS’s two Old Mole subscriptions must go here.) The US intelligence apparatus would like an independent check and analysis of this information done outside the government, which the project has provided.

Project CAM (or, the Cambridge Project): This project, conceived by Pool, former ARPA (Advanced Projects Agency of the DoD) official J.C.R. Licklider, and ARPA official Bob Taylor, will receive $7.69 million from the DoD over the next five years. It is intended to develop general theory which will help solve those DoD and US Government problems which are considered ‘behavioral-science problems’. It will use existing data collections of such things as interviews with NLF [Vietnamese National Liberation Front] defectors and peasant attitudes. As Pool has stated, ‘[Some students] are under the impression that the Project will deal with counter-insurgency problems and peasant attitudes. These topics of research are nothing new. They have been going on all the time in various sectors of the community. These areas would be strengthened by the project . . . ’
 

Phony Conversion

In reaction to the demands that those seven projects be stopped and the planned November Actions around them, MIT President Howard Johnson and other members of the administration have attempted to make it seem as if the Lincoln and Instrumentation Labs are going to be ‘converted’. They replaced the I-Labs Director, C. Stark Draper (the guided missile expert) with Charles L. Miller, who is supposed to be interested ‘urban problems’. They announced a new research policy at the two Labs.

However, their ‘new’ research policy turns out to be very much like the old one. The labs will continue to do everything short of the final development of weapons systems. Thus, according to the ‘new’ criteria, the ABM, MTI, and the helicopter stabilization projects were all acceptable and even the initial research into MIRV would be permitted.

In either case, administrators have said that all projects will continue until completion. In addition, a memorandum from Miller to Johnson which was made public by the NAC on Oct. 28 showed that funds for any sort of ‘conversion’ are not forthcoming. Miller himself referred to ‘conversion’ (always in quotes in his memo) as a ‘misleading illusion’.

Velimir Khlebnikov

The VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV House Museum

WHO WAS VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV?

20th century history: Velimir Khlebnikov in Bolshevik Russia

Under construction: The Shukov radio tower, Moscow, 1920-1922.

The futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov had no direct influence on Noam Chomsky. Yet there is an indirect link. During Russia's revolutionary years, Khlebnikov entranced and inspired Roman Jakobson, whose formalist linguistics in turn made a deep impression on Chomsky when the two became friends in the United States some decades later. For more on Russian formalist roots, see Decoding Chomsky, Chapters 10 and 11.

THE RADIO OF THE FUTURE
by Velimir Khlebnikov (1921)

The Radio of the Future—the central tree of our consciousness—will inaugurate new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all mankind.

The main Radio station, that stronghold of steel, where clouds of wires cluster like strands of hair, will surely be protected by a sign with a skull and crossbones and the familiar word “Danger,” since the least disruption of Radio operations would produce a mental blackout over the entire country, a temporary loss of consciousness.

Radio is becoming the spiritual sun of the country, a great wizard and sorcerer.

Let us try to imagine Radio’s main station: in the air a spider’s web of lines, a storm cloud of lightning bolts, some subsiding, some flaring up anew, crisscrossing the buildings from one end to the other.  A bright blue ball of spherical lightning hanging in midair, guy wires stretched out at a slant.

Naum Gabo, Project for a Radio Station, 1921

From this point in Planet Earth, every day, like the flight of birds in springtime, a flock of news departs, news from the life of the spirit. 

In this stream of lightning birds the spirit will prevail over force, good council over threats.

The activities of artists who work with the pen and brush, the discoveries of artists who work with ideas (Mechnikov, Einstein) will instantly transport mankind to unknown shores.

Vladimir Tatlin (with pipe) before a wooden model of his tower, St. Petersburg, 1920.

Advice on day-to-day matters will alternate with lectures by those who dwell upon the snowy heights of the human spirit.  The crests of waves in the sea of human knowledge will roll across the entire country into each local Radio station, to be projected that very day as letters onto the dark pages of enormous books, higher than houses, than stand in the center of each town, slowly turning their own pages. […]

But what now follows?  Where has this great stream of sound come from, this inundation of the whole country in supernatural singing, in the sound of beating wings, this broad silver stream full of whistlings and clangor and marvelous mad bells surging from somewhere we are not, mingling with children’s voices singing and the sound of wings?

Over the center of every town these voices pour down, a silver shower of sound.  Amazing silver bells mixed with whistlings surge down from above.  Are these perhaps the voices of heaven, spirits flying low over the farmhouse roof?  No….

The Mussorgsky of the future is giving a coast-to-coast concert of his work, using the Radio apparatus to create a vast concert hall stretching from the Vladivostok to the Baltic, beneath the blue dome of the heavens.

On this one evening he bewitches the people, sharing with them the communion of his soul, and on the following day he is only an ordinary mortal again.  The artist has cast a spell over his land; he has given his country the singing of the sea and the whistling of the wind. The poorest house in the smallest town is filled with divine whistlings and the sweet delights of sound.

Source: The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, translated by Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 155-159.  

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