Noam Chomsky
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Noam Chomsky
Chomsky.jpg
On a visit to Vancouver, British Columbia in 2004
Born December 7, 1928 (age 86)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Other names Avram Noam Chomsky
Alma mater University of Pennsylvania (B.A.) 1949, (M.A.) 1951, (Ph.D.) 1955
Era 20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Generative linguistics, Analytic philosophy
Institutions MIT (1955–present)
Main interests
Linguistics ·
Metalinguistics
Psychology
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of mind
Politics · Ethics
Notable ideas
[show]
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]
Website
chomsky.info
Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,[21][22] cognitive scientist, logician,[23][24][25] political commentator and anarcho-syndicalist activist. Sometimes described as the "father of modern linguistics",[26][27] Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy.[21] He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the "world's top public intellectual" in a 2005 poll.[28]
Born to a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from relatives in New York City. He later undertook studies in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his BA, MA, and PhD, while from 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows. In 1955 he began work at MIT, soon becoming a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his publications and lectures on the subject. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, the Chomsky–Schützenberger representation theorem, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger enumeration theorem. Chomsky also played a major role in the decline of behaviorism, and was especially critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.[29][30] In 1967 he gained public attention for his vocal opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, in part through his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, and came to be associated with the New Left while being arrested on multiple occasions for his anti-war activism. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also developed the propaganda model of media criticism with Edward S. Herman. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal public activism, for instance supporting the anti-Iraq War and Occupy movements.
Chomsky has been a highly influential academic figure throughout his career, and was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar between 1980 and 1992. He was also the eighth most cited scholar overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period.[31][32][33][34] His work has influenced fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, music theory and analysis, political science, programming language theory and psychology.[33][34][35][36][37] Chomsky continues to be well known as a political activist, and a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism, and the mainstream news media. Ideologically, he aligns himself with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.[38]
Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Rise to prominence
3 Linguistic theory
4 Political views
5 Debates
6 Personal life
7 Influence
8 Academic achievements, awards, and honors
9 Bibliography
10 See also
11 References
12 External links
Early life
Childhood: 1928–45
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia.[39] His father was the Ukrainian-born William "Zev" Chomsky, an Ashkenazi Jew who had fled to the United States in 1913 and his mother was Elsie Simonofsky. Having studied at Johns Hopkins University, his father went on to become school principal of the Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school, and in 1924 was appointed to the faculty at Gratz College in Philadelphia. Independently, William researched Medieval Hebrew, and would publish a series of books on the subject. William's wife, Elsie, was born in Belarus. They met at Mikveh Israel, where both taught Hebrew language classes.[40] Described as a "very warm, gentle, and engaging" individual, William placed a great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and independent in their thinking, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a view subsequently adopted by his son.[41]
"What motivated his [political] interests? A powerful curiosity, exposure to divergent opinions, and an unorthodox education have all been given as answers to this question. He was clearly struck by the obvious contradictions between his own readings and mainstream press reports. The measurement of the distance between the realities presented by these two sources, and the evaluation of why such a gap exists, remained a passion for Chomsky."
Biographer Robert F. Barsky, 1997.[42]
Noam was the Chomsky family's first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was born five years later. The brothers remained close, although David was more easy-going while Noam could be very competitive.[43] Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. Unlike her husband, Elsie spoke "ordinary New York English".[44] The brothers were raised in this Jewish environment, being taught Hebrew and regularly discussing the political theories of Zionism; the family were particularly influenced by the Left Zionist writings of Ahad Ha'am.[43] Being Jewish, Noam Chomsky faced anti-semitism as a child, particularly from the Irish and German communities living in Philadelphia; he recalls German "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis.[45][46]
Noam described his parents as "normal Roosevelt Democrats", having a centre-left position on the political spectrum, but he was exposed to far left politics through other members of the family, a number of whom were socialists involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.[47] He was influenced largely by his uncle who owned a newspaper stand in New York City where Jewish leftists came to debate the issues of the day.[46][48] Whenever visiting his relatives in New York City, Chomsky frequented left-wing and anarchist bookstores, voraciously reading political literature.[46][48] He later described his discovery of anarchism as a "lucky accident", allowing him to become critical of other radical left-wing ideologies, namely Marxism-Leninism.[49] Chomsky's primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, an independent institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue their own interests in a non-competitive atmosphere. It was here that he wrote his first article, aged 10, on the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.[50][51] Aged 12, he moved on to secondary education at Central High School, where he joined various clubs and societies but was troubled by the hierarchical and regimented method of teaching that they employed.[52]
University: 1945–55
Anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker (left) and English democratic socialist George Orwell (right) were both strong influences on the young Chomsky. Their work convinced him that an anarcho-syndicalist society was both possible and desirable.
Aged 16, in 1945 Chomsky embarked on a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where his primary interest was in learning Arabic. Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew.[53] Although dissatisfied with the university's strict structure, he was encouraged to continue by the Russian-born linguist Zellig Harris, who convinced Chomsky to major in the subject.[54] Chomsky's BA honor's thesis was titled "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", and revised it for his MA thesis, which he attained at Penn in 1951; it would subsequently be published as a book.[55][56] From 1951 to 1955 he was named to the Society of Fellows at Harvard University while undertaking his doctoral research.[57] Being highly critical of the established behaviourist currents in linguistics, in 1954 he presented his ideas at lectures given at the University of Chicago and Yale University.[58] In 1955 he was awarded his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania for a thesis setting out his ideas on transformational grammar; it would be published in 1975 as The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.[59]
In 1947, Chomsky entered into a romantic relationship with Carol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since they were toddlers. They were married in 1949,[60] and remained together until her death in 2008.[61] They considered moving to Israel, and in 1953 spent six weeks at the HaZore'a kibbutz; although enjoying himself, Chomsky was appalled by the Jewish nationalism and anti-Arab racism he encountered in the country, and the pro-Stalinist trend that he thought pervaded the kibbutz's leftist community.[62]
On visits to New York City, Chomsky frequented the office of Yiddish anarchist journal Freie Arbeiter Stimme, becoming enamored with the work of contributor Rudolf Rocker, whose work introduced him to the link between anarchism and classical liberalism.[63] Other political thinkers whose work Chomsky read included the anarchist Diego Abad de Santillán, democratic socialists George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Dwight Macdonald, and works by Marxists Karl Liebknecht, Karl Korsch, and Rosa Luxemburg.[64] His readings convinced him of the desirability of an anarcho-syndicalist society, and he became fascinated by the anarcho-syndicalist communes set up during the Spanish Civil War documented in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938).[65] He avidly read leftist journal Politics, remarking that it "answered to and developed" his interest in anarchism,[66] as well as the periodical Living Marxism, published by council communist Paul Mattick. Although rejecting its Marxist basis, Chomsky was heavily influenced by council communism, voraciously reading articles in Living Marxism written by Antonie Pannekoek.[67] He was greatly interested in the Marlenite ideas of the Leninist League, an anti-Stalinist Marxist-Leninist group, sharing their views that the Second World War was orchestrated by Western capitalists and the Soviet Union's "state capitalists" to crush Europe's proletariat.[68]
Early career: 1955–1966
In 1955, Chomsky obtained a job as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), spending half his time on a mechanical translation project and the other half teaching linguistics and philosophy.[69] He later described MIT as "a pretty free and open place, open to experimentation and without rigid requirements. It was just perfect for someone of my idiosyncratic interests and work."[70] In 1957 MIT promoted him to the position of associate professor, while from 1957–58 he was also employed by New York City's Columbia University as a visiting professor.[71] That same year, the Chomskys' first child was born,[72] and he published his first work on linguistics, Syntactic Structures, a book that radically opposed the dominant Harris-Bloomfield trend in the field. The response to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline.[73] Linguist John Lyons later asserted that it "revolutionized the scientific study of language."[74] From 1958–59 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study.[75]
In 1959 he attracted further attention for his review of B.F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior in the journal Language,[76] in which he argued that Skinner ignored the role of human creativity in linguistics.[77] Becoming an "established intellectual",[78] with his colleague Morris Halle, he founded the MIT's Graduate Program in linguistics, and in 1961 he was made professor of foreign language and linguistics, thereby gaining academic tenure.[79] He was appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 at Cambridge, Massachusetts; the event established him as the de facto spokesperson of American linguistics.[80] He continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout the decade, as Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1966), Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), and Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Linguistic Thought (1966).[81] Along with Halle, he also edited the Studies in Language Series of books for Harper and Row.[82] He continued to receive academic recognition and honors for his work, in 1966 visiting a variety of Californian institutions, first as the Linguistics Society of America Professor at the University of California, and then as the Beckman Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.[83] His Beckman lectures would be assembled and published as Language and Mind in 1968.[84]
Rise to prominence
Anti-Vietnam War activism: 1967–1975
"[I]t does not require very far-reaching, specialized knowledge to perceive that the United States was invading South Vietnam. And, in fact, to take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality [is] not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal scepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise."
Chomsky on the Vietnam War.[85]
1967 marked Chomsky's entry into the public debate on the United States' foreign policy.[86] In February he published an influential essay in The New York Review of Books titled The Responsibility of Intellectuals, in which he criticized the country's involvement in the Vietnam War.[84][87] He expanded on his argument to produce his first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins, which was published in 1969 and soon established him at the forefront of American dissent.[88] In 1971 he gave the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lectures in Cambridge, which were published as Problems of Knowledge and Freedom later that year, while other political books at the time included At War with Asia (1970) and For Reasons of State (1973).[89] Coming to be associated with the American New Left movement,[90] he nevertheless thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, and preferred the company of activists to intellectuals.[91] Although he had initially arisen to attention for his political views in The New York Review of Books, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was virtually ignored by the mainstream press.[92]
Along with his writings, Chomsky also became actively involved in left-wing activism. Refusing to pay half his taxes, in 1967 he publicly supported students who refused the draft, and was arrested for being part of an anti-war teach-in outside the Pentagon.[93] During this time Chomsky founded the anti-war collective RESIST along with Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald.[93] Supporting the student protest movement, he gave many lectures to student activist groups, though questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests.[94] Along with colleague Louis Kampf, he also began running undergraduate courses on politics at MIT, independent of the conservative-dominated political science department.[95] His public talks often generated considerable controversy, particularly when he criticized actions of the Israeli government and military.[96] His political views came under attack from right-wing and centrist figures, the most prominent of whom was Alan Dershowitz; Chomsky considered Dershowitz "a complete liar" and accused him of actively misrepresenting his position on issues.[97] As a result of his anti-war activism, Chomsky was arrested on multiple occasions, and U.S. President Richard Nixon included him on his Enemies' List.[98] He was aware of the potential repercussions of his activism, and so his wife began training to become an academic in order to support the family in the event of Chomsky's unemployment or imprisonment.[99]
Although under some pressure to do so, MIT refused to fire him due to his influential standing in the field of linguistics.[100] His work in this area continued to gain international recognition: in 1967 the University of London awarded him an honorary D. Litt while the University of Chicago gave him an honorary D.H.L.[101] In 1970, Loyola University and Swarthmore College also awarded him honorary D.H.L.'s, as did Bard College in 1971, Delhi University in 1972, and the University of Massachusetts in 1973.[102] In 1974 he became a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.[103] Chomsky continued to write on the subject, publishing Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972).[100] In 1971 he carried out a televised interview with French philosopher Michel Foucault on Dutch television; he largely agreed with Foucault's ideas, but was critical of post-modernism and French philosophy generally, lambasting France as having "a highly parochial and remarkably illiterate culture."[104]
Work on the media: 1976–1989
[icon] This section requires expansion with: information on Manufacturing Consent and other significant publications from this period. (September 2013)
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky's publications expanded and clarified his earlier work, addressing his critics and updating his grammatical theory.[105]
In 1979, Chomsky and Herman published the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights, in which they compared U.S. media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. They argued that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored the East Timorian situation while focusing on that in Cambodia, a U.S. enemy.[106] The following year, Steven Lukas authored an article for the Times Higher Education Supplement accusing Chomsky of betraying his anarchist ideals and acting as an apologist for Cambodian leader Pol Pot. Although Laura J. Summers and Robin Woodsworth Carlsen replied to the article, arguing that Lukas completely misunderstood Chomsky and Herman's work, Chomsky himself did not. The controversy damaged his reputation.[107] Chomsky maintained that his critics printed lies about him to discredit his reputation.[108]
Although Chomsky had long publicly criticised Nazism and totalitarianism more generally, his commitment to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely characterised as Holocaust denial. Chomsky's plea for the historian's freedom of speech would be published as the preface to Faurisson's 1980 book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire.[109] Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson.[110] France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier himself, and refused to publish his rebuttals to their accusations.[111] The Faurrison Affair had a lasting, damaging effect on Chomsky's career;[110] Werner Cohn's Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers contained numerous falsified claims.[112]
Increased political activism: 1990–present
[icon] This section requires expansion with: information on Hegemony or Survival and other important publications of this period, as well as his support for the anti-Iraq War and Occupy movements, and his retirement from full time teaching. (September 2013)
In the 1990s, Chomsky embraced political activism to a greater degree than before.[113]
Chomsky at the World Social Forum (Porto Alegre) in 2003
His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy.[114][115] Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy.[116] He has often received undercover police protection at MIT and when speaking on the Middle East, although he has refused uniformed police protection.[117] The Electronic Intifada website claims that the Anti-Defamation League "spied on" Chomsky's appearances, and quotes Chomsky as being unsurprised at that discovery or the use of what Chomsky claims is "fantasy material" provided to Alan Dershowitz for debating him. Amused, Chomsky compares the ADL's reports to FBI files.[118]
Chomsky resides in Lexington, Massachusetts, and travels, giving lectures on politics and linguistics.
Linguistic theory
The basis to Chomsky's linguistic theory is that the principles underlying the structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and hence genetically transmitted.[119] He therefore argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of socio-cultural difference.[120] In this he opposes the radical behaviourist psychology of B.F. Skinner, instead arguing that human language is unlike modes of communication used by any other animal species.[121]
Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his Syntactic Structures, a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar.[122] This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.
Perhaps his most influential and time-tested contribution to the field is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar, although it is also related to Cartesian approach[123] and rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.
Chomsky has argued that linguistic structures are at least partly innate, and that they reflect a "universal grammar]" (UG) that underlies and can account for all human grammatical systems (in general known as Mentalism (philosophy)).[124] Chomsky based his argument on observations about human language acquisition. For example, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever the relevant capacity the human has that the cat lacks as the language acquisition device (LAD), and he suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to determine what the LAD is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that would result from these constraints are often termed "universal grammar" or UG.[125][126]
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates[127] and Michael Tomasello[128] argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories, and instead advocate emergentist or connectionist theories, explaining language with a number of general processing mechanisms in the brain that interact with the extensive and complex social environment in which language is used and learned.
Generative grammar
Different grammatical deep structures of a sentence
Time flies 1.svg Time flies 2.svg Time flies 3.svg Time flies 4.svg
Main article: Generative grammar
The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages.[129] The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed universal grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.
Chomsky's theories have been immensely influential within linguistics, but they have also received criticism. One recurring criticism of the Chomskyan variety of generative grammar is that it is Anglocentric and Eurocentric, and that often linguists working in this tradition have a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on a very small sample of languages, sometimes just one. Initially, the Eurocentrism was exhibited in an overemphasis on the study of English. However, hundreds of different languages have now received at least some attention within Chomskyan linguistic analyses.[130][131][132][133][134] In spite of the diversity of languages that have been characterized by UG derivations, critics continue to argue that the formalisms within Chomskyan linguistics are Anglocentric and misrepresent the properties of languages that are structurally different from English.[135][136][137] Thus, Chomsky's approach has been criticized as a form of linguistic imperialism.[138] In addition, Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized on general methodological grounds. Some psychologists and psycholinguists,[who?] though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. Other critics (see language learning) have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.
Today there are many different branches of generative grammar. One can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, and combinatory categorial grammar as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.
Chomsky hierarchy
Main article: Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes/types,[139] or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in programming language,[140] compiler construction, and automata theory).[141] Indeed, there is an equivalence between the Chomsky language hierarchy and the different kinds of automata. Thus theorems about languages are often dealt with as either languages (grammars) or automata.
Political views
Main article: Political positions of Noam Chomsky
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Chomsky's political views have changed little since his childhood.[142] His ideological position revolves around "nourishing the libertarian and creative character of the human being",[142] and he has described his beliefs as "fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism."[143] He has praised libertarian socialism,[144] and has described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist.[145] He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union.[146] Chomsky is also a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society, which he describes as having the potential to "...carry us a long way towards unifying the many initiatives here and around the world and molding them into a powerful and effective force."[147][148] He advocates popular struggle for greater democracy.[149] He has stated his opposition to ruling elites, among them institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and GATT.[150]
Authority
Chomsky asserts that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate, and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example given by Chomsky of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic.[151] He contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace.[152]
Capitalism and socialism
"If you care about other people, that’s now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, but you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, that’s called “libertarian” for some wild reason. I mean, it’s actually highly authoritarian, but that doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing and undermining the public."
Chomsky on class war in the United States[153]
Chomsky is critical of both the American state capitalist system[154] and the authoritarian branches of socialism. He argues that libertarian socialist values are the proper extension of classical liberalism to an advanced industrial context,[155] and that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He views the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, as "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, while retaining their revolutionary character."[156]
United States foreign policy
Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive states and organizations such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet and argues that this results in massive human rights violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations — including secret aid the U.S. gave to the Contras in Nicaragua, an event he has been critical of — fits any standard description of terrorism,[157] including "official definitions in the US Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s."[158][159] Before its collapse, Chomsky also condemned Soviet imperialism; for example in 1986 during a question–answer session following a lecture he gave at Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua, when challenged about how he could "talk about North American imperialism and Russian imperialism in the same breath," Chomsky responded: "One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters."[160] Martha Nussbaum criticizes Chomsky for failing to condemn atrocities by leftist insurgents because "for some leftists … one should not criticize one's friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness."[161]
Free speech
Chomsky has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media, and opposes censorship. He has stated that "with regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards".[162] With reference to the United States diplomatic cables leak, Chomsky suggested that "perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government – Hillary Clinton, others – and also by the diplomatic service."[163] Chomsky refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeled him and prefers to counter libels through open letters in newspapers. One example of this approach is his response to an article by Emma Brockes in The Guardian at the end of October 2005, which alleged that he had denied the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.[164][165][166] At issue was Chomsky's attitude to the writings of journalist Diana Johnstone on the subject.[167] His complaint prompted The Guardian to publish an apologetic correction and to withdraw the article from the paper's website,[168] which remains available on his own website.[169] Nick Cohen has criticised Chomsky for frequently making overly critical statements about Western governments, especially the US, and for allegedly refusing to retract his speculations when facts become available that disprove them.[170]
Debates
Chomsky has been known to defend vigorously and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics (Linguistics Wars), and politics.[21] He has had notable debates with Jean Piaget,[171] Michel Foucault,[172] William F. Buckley, Jr.,[173] Christopher Hitchens,[174][175][176][177][178] George Lakoff,[179] Richard Perle,[180] Hilary Putnam,[181] Willard Van Orman Quine,[182][183] John Maynard Smith,[184] and Alan Dershowitz,[185] to name a few. The Guardian said of Chomsky's debating ability, "His boldness and clarity infuriates opponents—academe is crowded with critics who have made twerps of themselves taking him on."[186][187] In response to his speaking style being criticized as boring, Chomsky said, "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way. ... I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is. ... People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important."[188] "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."[189]
Personal life
Chomsky endeavors to keep his family life strictly separate from his political activism and career,[190] and considers himself "scrupulous at keeping my politics out of the classroom."[191] He is uninterested in appearances and the fame that his work has brought him.[192] He also has little interest in art and music, though he does enjoy reading non-fiction literature.[193]
Chomsky is known for his "dry, laconic wit", although he has attracted controversy for labeling established political and academic figures with terms like "corrupt", "fascist", and "fraudulent".[194] When asked if he is an atheist, Chomsky replied "What is it that I'm supposed to not believe in? Until you can answer that question I can't tell you whether I'm an atheist."[195]
Chomsky was married to Carol Doris Schatz (Chomsky) from 1949 until her death in 2008. They had 3 children together: Aviva, Diane and Harry.[196]
Influence
Chomsky's legacy is as both a "leader in the field" of linguistics and "a figure of enlightenment and inspiration" for political dissenters.[197] Linguist John Lyons remarked that within a few decades of publication, Chomskyan linguistics had become "the most dynamic and influential" school of thought in the field.[198] Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in various fields of study. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms[199] and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.[200]
Chomsky's work in linguistics has had implications for modern psychology.[36] Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.[citation needed] The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels Kaj Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel Lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".[201] Computer scientist Donald Knuth read Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and was influenced by it. "I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 ... Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!"[202]
Academic achievements, awards, and honors
In early 1969, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town,[203] in 2011, the Rickman Godlee Lecture at University College, London[204] many others.[205]
Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following:
Amherst College
Bard College
Central Connecticut State University
Columbia University
Georgetown University
Harvard University
Islamic University of Gaza
Loyola University Chicago
McGill University
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
National Tsing Hua University[206]
National University of Colombia
Peking University[207]
Rovira i Virgili University
Santo Domingo Institute of Technology
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Swarthmore College
University of Bologna
University of Buenos Aires
University of Calcutta
University of Cambridge
University of Chicago
University of Chile
University of Colorado[208]
University of Connecticut
University of Cyprus
University of Delhi
University of La Frontera
University of London
University of Maine
University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Pennsylvania
University of St. Andrews
University of Toronto
University of Western Ontario
Uppsala University
Villanova University
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others.[209] He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language" (in 1987 and 1989).[210]
He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Social Sciences.[211]
In 2005, Chomsky received an honorary fellowship from the Literary and Historical Society.[212] In 2007, Chomsky received The Uppsala University (Sweden) Honorary Doctor's degree in commemoration of Carolus Linnaeus.[213] In February 2008, he received the President's Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway.[214] Since 2009 he is an honorary member of IAPTI.[215]
In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany.[216] In April 2010, Chomsky became the third scholar to receive the University of Wisconsin's A.E. Havens Center's Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship.[217]
The Megachile chomskyi holotype
Chomsky has an Erdős number of four.[218]
Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls".[219] In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".[220]
Actor Viggo Mortensen with avant-garde guitarist Buckethead dedicated their 2006 album, called Pandemoniumfromamerica, to Chomsky.[221]
On January 22, 2010, a special honorary concert for Chomsky was given at Kresge Auditorium at MIT.[222][223] The concert, attended by Chomsky and dozens of his family and friends, featured music composed by Edward Manukyan and speeches by Chomsky's colleagues, including David Pesetsky of MIT and Gennaro Chierchia, head of the linguistics department at Harvard University.
In June 2011, Chomsky was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, which cited his "...unfailing courage, critical analysis of power and promotion of human rights."[224]
In 2011, Chomsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".[225][226]
In 2013, a newly described species of bee was named after him: Megachile chomskyi.[227]
Bibliography
Main article: Noam Chomsky bibliography
Filmography
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Director: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick (1992)
Last Party 2000, Director: Rebecca Chaiklin and Donovan Leitch (2001)
Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, Director: John Junkerman (2002)
Distorted Morality – America's War On Terror?, Director: John Junkerman (2003)
Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause (TV), Director: Will Pascoe (2003)
The Corporation, Directors: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott; Writer: Joel Bakan (2003)
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, Directors: Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff (2004)
On Power, Dissent and Racism: A discussion with Noam Chomsky, Journalist: Nicolas Rossier; Producers: Eli Choukri, Baraka Productions (2004)
Lake of Fire, Director: Tony Kaye (2006)
American Feud: A History of Conservatives and Liberals, Director: Richard Hall (2008)
Chomsky & Cie, Director: Olivier Azam (out in 2008)
An Inconvenient Tax, Director: Christopher P. Marshall (out in 2009)
The Money Fix, Director: Alan Rosenblith (2009)
Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space, Director: Denis Delestrac (2010)
Article 12: Waking up in a surveillance society, Director: Juan Manuel Biaiñ (2010)
In 2012, Chomsky performed a deadpan cameo role in "MIT Gangnam Style", a parody of the "Gangnam Style" music video.[228] Also known informally as "Chomsky Style";[229] the video was described as the "Best Gangnam Style Parody Yet" by The Huffington Post[229] and it became a multi-million viewed "most popular" video on YouTube in its own right. (video link)[230]
Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Director: Michel Gondry (2013)
We Are Many, Director: Amir Amirani (2014)
See also
American philosophy
Axiom of categoricity
The Anti-Chomsky Reader
Judith Chomsky
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
English studies
Knowledge worker
List of American philosophers
List of important publications in computability
List of peace activists
BlackFlagSymbol.svgAnarchism portal Yellow flag waving.svgLiberalism portal ParseTree.svgLinguistics portal Phrenology1.jpgMind and Brain portal Psi2.svgPsychology portal Red flag II.svgSocialism portal
References
Footnotes
Jump up ^ Safty 1994.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky (September 22, 2011). Noam Chomsky on the Responsibility of Intellectuals: Redux. Ideas Matter. Event occurs at 09:23. Retrieved October 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Barsky, Robert F. "Chomsky and Bertrand Russell". Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Retrieved October 29, 2011.
Jump up ^ Chomsky, Noam (1996). Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian. London: Pluto Press. pp. 28–29. The real importance of Carey's work is that it's the first effort and until now the major effort to bring some of this to public attention. It's had a tremendous influence on the work I've done.
Jump up ^ Robert F. Barsky (1998). "3". Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. MIT Press. p. 106. ISBN 9780262522557.
Jump up ^ Wolfgang B. Sperlich (2006). Noam Chomsky. Reaktion Books. pp. 44–45. ISBN 9781861892690.
Jump up ^ Brent D. Slife (1993). Time and Psychological Explanation: The Spectacle of Spain's Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference. SUNY Press. p. 115. ISBN 9780791414699.
^ Jump up to: a b Carlos Peregrín Otero, ed. (1994). Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, Volumes 2-3. Taylor & Francis. p. 487. ISBN 9780415106948.
Jump up ^ "Noam Chomsky Reading List". Left Reference Guide. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky. "Personal influences, by Noam Chomsky (Excerpted from The Chomsky Reader)". Chomsky.info. Retrieved 2013-05-29.
Jump up ^ Hugh LaFollette, Ingmar Persson, ed. (2013). The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (2 ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781118514269.
Jump up ^ William D. Hart. Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture. Cambridge University Press. p. 116. ISBN 9780521778107.
Jump up ^ Stephen Prickett (2002). Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism Versus Irony, 1700-1999. Cambridge University Press. p. 234. ISBN 9780521009836.
Jump up ^ John R. Searle (June 29, 1972). "A Special Supplement: Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics". NYREV, Inc.
^ Jump up to: a b "Chomsky Amid the Philosophers". University of East Anglia. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
Jump up ^ Gould, S. J. (1981). "Official Transcript for Gould's deposition in McLean v. Arkansas". (Nov. 27).
Jump up ^ Knuth, Donald E. (2003). "Preface: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition". Selected Papers on Computer Languages. p. 1. ISBN 1575863820.
Jump up ^ Scott M. Fulton, III. "John W. Backus (1924 - 2007)". BetaNews, Inc.
Jump up ^ Aaron Swartz (May 15, 2006). "The Book That Changed My Life". Raw Thought. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
Jump up ^ Keller, Katherine (November 2, 2007). "Writer, Creator, Journalist, and Uppity Woman: Ann Nocenti". Sequential Tart.
^ Jump up to: a b c "Noam Chomsky", by Zoltán Gendler Szabó, in Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860–1960, ed. Ernest Lepore (2004). "Chomsky's intellectual life had been divided between his work in linguistics and his political activism, philosophy coming as a distant third. Nonetheless, his influence among analytic philosophers has been enormous because of three factors. First, Chomsky contributed substantially to a major methodological shift in the human sciences, turning away from the prevailing empiricism of the middle of the twentieth century: behaviorism in psychology, structuralism in linguistics and positivism in philosophy. Second, his groundbreaking books on syntax (Chomsky (1957, 1965)) laid a conceptual foundation for a new, cognitivist approach to linguistics and provided philosophers with a new framework for thinking about human language and the mind. And finally, he has persistently defended his views against all takers, engaging in important debates with many of the major figures in analytic philosophy..."
Jump up ^ The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1999), "Chomsky, Noam," Cambridge University Press, pg. 138. "Chomsky, Noam (born 1928), preeminent American linguist, philosopher, and political activist... Many of Chomsky's most significant contributions to philosophy, such as his influential rejection of behaviorism... stem from his elaborations and defenses of the above consequences..."
Jump up ^ Edwin D. Reilly (2003). Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 43–44. ISBN 9781573565219. In 1956, the logician Noam Chomsky showed that there are only four basically different forms Church-Turing thesis of grammar, which, in decreasing order of sophistication, he called grammars of Type 0, 1, 2, and 3.. Viewed July 15, 2012.
Jump up ^ H. L. Somers (2003). Sergei Nirenburg, H. L. Somers, Yorick Wilks, ed. Readings in Machine Translation. MIT Press. p. 68. ISBN 9780262140744. I think that this should be of sufficient interest to warrant some more detailed exhibition, especially since this insight is due to an important new, not to say revolutionary, view of the structure of language, recently outlined by the American linguist and logician Noam Chomsky [2], and could perhaps, in its turn and in due time, be turned into a new method of machine translation, which would be more complex than the known ones but also more effective.. Viewed July 15, 2012.
Jump up ^ Carlos Peregrín Otero, ed. (1994). Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, Volume 1; Volume 3. Taylor & Francis. pp. 14–15. ISBN 9780415106931. Chomsky is a professional linguist, a competent mathematical logician, and a trained methodologist with a keen critical sense and an uncanny ability to follow the most abstruse mathematical argument or, if necessary, to produce one himself.
Jump up ^ Fox, Margalit (December 5, 1998). "A Changed Noam Chomsky Simplifies". New York Times. Retrieved October 7, 2014. Mr. Chomsky...is the father of modern linguistics and remains the field's most influential practitioner.
Jump up ^ Thomas Tymoczko, Jim Henle, James M. Henle, Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic, Birkhäuser, 2000, p. 101.
Jump up ^ Duncan Campbell (2005-10-18). "Chomsky is voted world's top public intellectual | World news". The Guardian. Retrieved 2013-05-29.
Jump up ^ "Behaviorism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". Plato.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2014-07-11.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky (1971-12-30). "The Case Against B.F. Skinner, by Noam Chomsky". Chomsky.info. Retrieved 2014-07-11.
Jump up ^ "Noam Chomsky". Web.archive.org. May 28, 2010. Archived from the original on May 28, 2010. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "Chomsky is Citation Champ". MIT News Office. April 15, 1992. Retrieved September 3, 2007.
^ Jump up to: a b Hughes, Samuel (July–August 2001). "Speech!". The Pennsylvania Gazette. Retrieved September 3, 2007. According to a recent survey by the Institute for Scientific Information, only Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud are cited more often in academic journals than Chomsky, who edges out Hegel and Cicero.
^ Jump up to: a b Robinson, Paul (February 25, 1979). "The Chomsky Problem". The New York Times. Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today. He is also a disturbingly divided intellectual.
Jump up ^ Michael Sipser (1997). Introduction to the Theory of Computation. PWS Publishing. ISBN 0-534-94728-X.
^ Jump up to: a b "The Cognitive Science Millennium Project". Cogsci.umn.edu. Retrieved August 16, 2011.[dead link]
Jump up ^ Patel 2008, p. 240.
Jump up ^ Chomsky, Noam (2013). On Anarchism. New York: New Press. ISBN 978-1595589101.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xv; Barsky 1997, p. 9.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 9–10.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 11.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 30–31.
^ Jump up to: a b Barsky 1997, pp. 11–13.
Jump up ^ "The Life and Times of Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky interviewed by Amy Goodman". www.chomsky.info. Retrieved December 21, 2008.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 15.
^ Jump up to: a b c Kreisler 2002.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 14.
^ Jump up to: a b Barsky 1997, p. 23.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 17–19.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xv; Barsky 1997, pp. 15–17.
Jump up ^ Kreisler 2002, Chapter 1: Background
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xv; Barsky 1997, pp. 21–22.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, p. 47.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 48–51.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 51–52.
Jump up ^ Zoltán Gendler Szabó (2004). LePore, Ernest, ed. Noam Chomsky. Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860-1960.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xv; Barksy 1997, p. 79.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 81.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 83–85.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 13, 48, 51–52.
Jump up ^ Marquard, Bryan (December 20, 2008). "Carol Chomsky; at 78; Harvard language professor was wife of MIT linguist". Boston Globe. Retrieved December 20, 2008.[dead link]
Jump up ^ Barksy 1996, p. 82.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 24.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 24–25.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 26.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 34–35.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 36–40.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 43–44.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xv; Barksy 1997, pp. 86–87.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, p. 87.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xvi; Barsky 1997, p. 91.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 91.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 88–91.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. 1.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xvi; Barsky 1997, p. 84.
Jump up ^ Chomsky 1959.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. 6; Barksy 1997, pp. 96–99.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, p. 119.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 101–102, 119.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 102.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 103.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 104.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xvi; Barsky 1997, p. 120.
^ Jump up to: a b Barsky 1997, p. 122.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 114.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 120.
Jump up ^ Chomsky 1967.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xvii; Barsky 1997, pp. 122–123.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xvi–xvii; Barsky 1997, p. 163.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. 5; Barsky 1997, p. 123.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 134–135.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 162–163.
^ Jump up to: a b Lyons 1978, p. 5; Barsky 1997, pp. 127–129.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 121–122, 131.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 121.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 167, 170.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 170–171.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 124.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 123–124.
^ Jump up to: a b Barsky 1997, p. 143.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xv–xvi; Barsky 1997, p. 120.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. xv–xvi; Barsky 1997, p. 143.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 156.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 192–195.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 175.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 187.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 187–189.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 190.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 179–180.
^ Jump up to: a b Barsky 1997, p. 185.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 184.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, pp. 182–183.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 214.
Jump up ^ Flint, Anthony (November 19, 1995). "Divided Legacy". The Boston Globe. Retrieved September 4, 2007. Ask this intellectual radical why he is shunned by the mainstream, and he'll say that established powers have never been able to handle his brand of dissent.
Jump up ^ Barsky (1997), "Chapter 4". Retrieved September 4, 2007. Barsky quotes an excerpt of Edward Herman examining why "one of America's most well-known intellectuals and dissidents would be thus ignored and even ostracized by the mainstream press". For example, "Chomsky has never had an Op Ed column in the Washington Post, and his lone opinion piece in the New York Times was not an original contribution but rather excerpts from testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee". Since the September 11 attacks, however, Chomsky has contributed regularly to the New York Times Syndicate.
Jump up ^ Farndale, Nigel (July 6, 2010). "Noam Chomsky interview". The Telegraph. Retrieved October 14, 2012.
Jump up ^ Rabbani 2012.
Jump up ^ Winstanley, Asa (17 May 2013). "Secret files reveal Anti-Defamation League spied on Noam Chomsky". electronicintifada.net. Retrieved 17 May 2013.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. 4.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. 7.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. 6.
Jump up ^ Kordić, Snježana (1991). "Transformacijsko-generativni pristup jeziku u Sintaktičkim strukturama i Aspektima teorije sintakse Noama Chomskog" [Transformational-generative approach to language in Syntactic structures and Aspects of the theory of syntax of Noam Chomsky]. SOL: lingvistički časopis (in Serbo-Croatian) 6 (12–13): 103–112. ISSN 0352-8715. Archived from the original on September 2, 2012. Retrieved September 9, 2012.
Jump up ^ Barsky, Robert F. (1998). "Ch1. Introduction". Noam Chomsky:A Life of Dissent. MIT press. ISBN 0-262-02418-7. his Cartesian and rational approach to linguistic and political thinking
Jump up ^ Thornbury, Scott (2006). An A-Z of ELT (Methodology). Oxford: Macmillan Education. p. 130.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky. "The 'Chomskyan Era' (Excerpted from The Architecture of Language)". Chomsky.info. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Thornbury, Scott (2006). An A-Z of ELT (Methodology). Oxford: Macmillan Education. p. 234.
Jump up ^ Elman et al. 1996
Jump up ^ Tomasello 2003.
Jump up ^ Chomsky 1965.
Jump up ^ Huang, Cheng-Teh James (1982). "Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar". MIT PhD dissertation. Available online [1].
Jump up ^ Matthews, G.H. (1965). Hidatsa Syntax. Mouton.
Jump up ^ Platero, Paul Randolph (1978). "Missing noun phrases in Navajo". MIT PhD dissertation. Available online [2].
Jump up ^ Schütze, Carson T. (1993). "Towards a Minimalist Account of Quirky Case and Licensing in Icelandic". MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 19. Available online [3]
Jump up ^ Bhatt, Rajesh (1997). "Matching Effects and the Syntax-Morphology Interface: Evidence from Hindi Correlatives". MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 31. Available online [4].
Jump up ^ Evans & Levinson 2009, though see Lingua 120 (December 2010): 2651–2758.
Jump up ^ Everett 2008.
Jump up ^ Van Valin, R. (2000). "Linguistic diversity and theoretical assumptions". Chicago Linguistic Society Parasession Papers, 35, 373–391.
Jump up ^ Mühlhäusler, Peter (1996). Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. London: Routledge. pp. 330–1.
Jump up ^ Church, Kenneth (2007). "A Pendulum Swung too Far". Interaction of Linguistics and Computational Linguistics (Linguistic Issues in Language Technology) 6. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
Jump up ^ Knuth, Donald (2002). "Preface". Selected Papers on Computer Languages. Center for the Study of Language and Information. ISBN 978-1575863818.
Jump up ^ Davis, Martin; Weyuker, Elaine J.; Sigal, Ron (1994). Computability, complexity, and languages: fundamentals of theoretical computer science (2nd ed.). Boston: Academic Press, Harcourt, Brace. p. 327. ISBN 9780122063824.
^ Jump up to: a b Barksy 1997, p. 95.
Jump up ^ Chomsky 1996, p. 71.
Jump up ^ Chomsky, Noam, "Notes on Anarchism" [5] ... "Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment."
Jump up ^ Chomsky wrote the preface to an edition of Rudolf Rocker's book Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice. In it Chomsky wrote: "I felt at once, and still feel, that Rocker was pointing the way to a much better world, one that is within our grasp, one that may well be the only alternative to the 'universal catastrophe' towards which 'we are driving on under full sail'..." Book Citation: Rudolph Rocker. Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice. AK Press. p. ii. 2004.
Jump up ^ 'Industrial Workers of the World – IWW Biography Retrieved February 11, 2012
Jump up ^ International Organization for a Participatory Society – Interim Committee Retrieved March 31, 2012
Jump up ^ ZNet – Consider IOPS Retrieved April 3, 2012
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 209.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, p. 211.
Jump up ^ "Anarchism 101 with Noam Chomsky". Youtube.com. October 10, 2007. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "Conversation with Noam Chomsky, p. 2 of 5". Globetrotter.berkeley.edu. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Chris Steele (December 1, 2013). Noam Chomsky: America hates its poor. Salon. Retrieved December 13, 2014.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky "The State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival", chomsky.info, 7 April 2011
Jump up ^ "Government in the Future". 1970. Retrieved 9 April 2013. I think that the libertarian socialist concepts, and by that I mean a range of thinking that extends from left-wing Marxism through anarchism, I think that these are fundamentally correct and that they are the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society. In contrast, it seems to me that the ideology of state socialism, that is, what has become of Bolshevism, and of state capitalism, the modern welfare state, these of course are dominant in the industrial countries, in the industrial societies, but I believe that they are regressive and highly inadequate social theories, and that a large number of our really fundamental problems stem from a kind of incompatibility and inappropriateness of these social forms to a modern industrial society.
Jump up ^ Chomsky (1996), p. 77.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky (2001-10-18). "The New War Against Terror". Chomsky.info. Retrieved 2013-05-29.
Jump up ^ "Simple Truths, Hard Problems: Some thoughts on terror, justice, and self-defence*" (PDF). Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky. "International Terrorism: Image and Reality". Chomsky.info. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Chomsky, Noam (1987). On power and ideology: the Managua lectures. South End Press. p. 51. ISBN 978-0-89608-289-2. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Martha C. Nussbaum (Spring 2008). "Violence on the Left". Dissent.
Jump up ^ Chomsky, Noam; Pateman, Barry (2005). Chomsky on anarchism. AK Press. p. 167. ISBN 978-1-904859-20-8. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "WikiLeaks Cables Reveal "Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership"". Noam Chomsky website. Retrieved December 25, 2010.
Jump up ^ Brockes, Emma (October 31, 2005). "The Greatest Intellectual?, by Emma Brockes". Chomsky.info. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky (November 13, 2005). "Open Letter to The Guardian (ZNet)". Chomsky.info. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky (September 10, 1980). "Free speech in a Democracy, (Daily Camera)". Chomsky.info. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Ian Mayes "Open door", The Guardian, 12 December 2005
Jump up ^ "Corrections and clarifications". The Guardian. November 17, 2005. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
Jump up ^ Emma Brockes "The Greatest Intellectual?", The Guardian, 31 October 2005, as reproduced on the Chomsky.info website
Jump up ^ Nick Cohen (2007). What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way. Harper Collins. pp. 14, 155–62, 164–8, 170, 179–80, 258. ISBN 978-0-00-722969-7.
Jump up ^ Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, ed., Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Routledge, 1975.
Jump up ^ "The Chomsky–Foucault Debate: On Human Nature". Chomsky.info. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ William F. Buckley vs. Noam Chomsky, YouTube
Jump up ^ Christopher Hitchens, "Against Rationalization: Minority Report", The Nation, September 24, 2001
Jump up ^ Christopher Hitchens, "Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism", The Nation, 2001
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky, "Reply to Hitchens", The Nation, 2001
Jump up ^ Christopher Hitchens, "A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky", The Nation, 2001
Jump up ^ Noam Chomsky, "Reply to Hitchens' 'Rejoinder'", The Nation, 2001
Jump up ^ "The New York Review of Books, "Chomsky Replies", 1973 20;12". Nybooks.com. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Chomsky vs. Perle, YouTube
Jump up ^ Hilary Putnam, "Externalism: Its Motivation and Its Critics", Harvard University, 2007.
Jump up ^ KU Leuven, "An Epistemological Reading of the Debate between Quine and Chomsky"[dead link], October 2003.
Jump up ^ "The main reason I went" to Princeton, says Chomsky, was "to study with Quine [....] I took all his courses and got to know him pretty well, though we disagreed about almost everything."
Jump up ^ "Language and Evolution: Noam Chomsky, reply by John Maynard Smith". NYREV, Inc. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
Jump up ^ "Noam Chomsky v. Alan Dershowitz: A Debate on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict", Democracy Now!, December 23, 2005.
Jump up ^ Edwards, David (November 23, 2005) [1996]. "Smearing Chomsky – The Guardian Backs Down". Znet. Retrieved August 3, 2012.
Jump up ^ Edwards 1998, p. 88
Jump up ^ "Chomsky Rebel". Dvdverdict.com. May 16, 2005. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Chomsky, Noam. "False, False, False, and False: Noam Chomsky interviewed by Ray Suarez", January 20, 1999 Chomsky.info
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 158.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, p. 121.
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 116.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, pp. 206–207.
Jump up ^ Barksy 1997, p. 199.
Jump up ^ "2". Chomsky.info. March 1, 2006. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ New york times article on Carol Chomsky
Jump up ^ Barsky 1997, p. 191.
Jump up ^ Lyons 1978, p. 2.
Jump up ^ Sakharov, Alex (May 12, 2003). "Grammar". MathWorld. Retrieved September 4, 2007.
Jump up ^ "Lecture 6: Evolutionary Psychology, Problem Solving, and 'Machiavellian' Intelligence". School of Psychology. Massey University. 1996. Archived from the original on January 17, 2007. Retrieved September 4, 2007.
Jump up ^ Niels K. Jerne. "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 19 August 2013.
Jump up ^ Knuth, Donald (2003), Selected Papers on Computer Languages, CSLI Lecture Notes, Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information
Jump up ^ "Van Zyl Slabbert to present TB Davie Memorial Lecture". Uct.ac.za. October 13, 2003. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "UCL – Events Calendar – UCL Rickman Godlee Lecture 2011 with Noam Chomsky: Contours of global order: Domination, stability, security in a changing world". Events.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 2013-05-29.
Jump up ^ The Current Crisis in the Middle East: About the Lecture[dead link]. MIT World.
Jump up ^ "Noam Chomsky Lectured in Beijing". Chinatoday.com.cn. December 12, 2010. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "Welcome to Peking University". English.pku.edu.cn. August 13, 2010. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "CU Regents". Cu.edu. Retrieved August 16, 2011.[dead link]
Jump up ^ "Noam Chomsky, MIT Linguistics Program". Chomsky.info. December 7, 1928. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "Past Recipients of the NCTE Orwell Award" (PDF). Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts – Department of Social Sciences members Retrieved February 11, 2012
Jump up ^ "Interviews Polathicks/Society » Interview: Noam Chomsky Speaks Out On Education and Power". Soundtracksforthem. September 20, 2005. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "Uppsala University's Honorary Doctorates in Commemoration of Linnaeus". Uppsala University. February 13, 2007. Retrieved September 4, 2007.
Jump up ^ http://www.literaryanddebating.com/press/80-archbishop-desmond-tutu-to-speak-to-litndeb; excerpt:the Literary and Debating Society's President's Medal, the society's achievement award, [has] been won in the past by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Senator Mike Gravel, Congressman Bruce Morrison, journalist Fintan O'Toole and, playwright, Tom Murphy.
Jump up ^ "Noam Chomsky, honorary member of IAPTI". Aipti.org. Retrieved August 16, 2011.[dead link]
Jump up ^ "The 2010 Erich Fromm Prize to Noam Chomsky". International Erich Fromm Society. January 16, 2010. Retrieved April 5, 2010.
Jump up ^ "Author, activist Noam Chomsky to receive award". News.wisc.edu. March 29, 2010. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "Some Famous People with Finite Erdös Numbers". The Erdös Number Project. Oakland University. Retrieved September 18, 2011.
Jump up ^ "Chomsky named top intellectual: British poll". Breitbart.com. October 18, 2005. Retrieved September 4, 2007.[dead link]
Jump up ^ Cowley, Jason (May 22, 2006). "Heroes of Our Time". New Statesman. Retrieved September 4, 2007.[dead link]
Jump up ^ "Viggo Mortensen's Spoken Word & Music CDs". Viggo Fan Base.
Jump up ^ "Noam Chomsky Honorary Concert". Edwardmanukyan.com. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ Weininger, David (January 21, 2010). "Chomsky Tribute". Boston Globe. Retrieved March 16, 2010.
Jump up ^ "Controversy dogs Chomsky as he accepts Sydney Peace Prize". Smh.com.au. June 2, 2011. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
Jump up ^ "AI's Hall of Fame". IEEE Intelligent Systems (IEEE Computer Society) 26 (4): 5–15. 2011. doi:10.1109/MIS.2011.64. edit
Jump up ^ "IEEE Computer Society Magazine Honors Artificial Intelligence Leaders". DigitalJournal.com. August 24, 2011. Retrieved September 18, 2011. Press release source: PRWeb (Vocus).
Jump up ^ Sheffield 2013, p.56.
Jump up ^ Webster, Stephen C. (October 28, 2012). "Noam Chomsky appears in MIT student's 'Gangnam Style' tribute". The Raw Story./
^ Jump up to: a b "MIT 'Chomsky Style' Best Gangnam Parody Yet? Noted Intellectual Steals The Wacky Show". The Huffington Post. 29 October 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2013.
Jump up ^ "MIT Gangnam Style (MIT 강남스타일)". YouTube. Retrieved 2012-11-04.
Bibliography
Barsky, Robert F. (1997). Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-02418-1.
Changeux, Jean-Pierre; Courrége, Philippe; Danchin, Antoine (1973). "A Theory of the Epigenesis of Neuronal Networks by Selective Stabilization of Synapses". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 70 (10): 2974–8. doi:10.1073/pnas.70.10.2974. PMC 427150. PMID 4517949.
Chomsky, Noam (1959). "Reviews: Verbal behavior by B. F. Skinner". Language 35 (1): 26–58. JSTOR 411334.
——— (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-53007-1.
——— (1996). Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order. London: Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-745-31106-7.
——— (1967). "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". The New York Review of Books 8 (3). Retrieved 22 August 2013.
——— (1996). Perspectives on Power. Montréal: Black Rose. ISBN 978-1-551-64048-8.
Edwards, David (1998). The Compassionate Revolution: Radical Politics and Buddhism. Totnes: Green Books. ISBN 978-1-870-09870-0.
Elman, Jeffery L.; Bates, Elizabeth A.; Johnson, Mark H.; Karmiloff-Smith, Annette; Parisi, Domenico; Plunkett, Kim (1996). Rethinking Innateness: Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-05052-4.
Evans, N.; Levinson, S. C. (2009). "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (5): 429–448. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999094X.
Everett, Daniel L. (2008). Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-375-42502-8.
Gardner, R. A.; Gardner, B. T. (1969). "Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee". Science 165 (3894): 664–672. doi:10.1126/science.165.3894.664. JSTOR 1727877. PMID 5793972.
Gardner, R. A.; Gardner, B. T.; Van Cantfort, Thomas E. (1989). Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-887-06965-9.
Kreisler, Harry (22 March 2002). "Activism, Anarchism, and Power: Conversation with Noam Chomsky". Conversations with History. Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley. Retrieved September 3, 2007.
Laurence, Stephen (2003). "Is Linguistics a Branch of Psychology?". In A. Barker, ed., Epistemology of Language (pp. 69–106). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lyons, John (1978). Noam Chomsky (revised edition). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-140-04370-9.
Miles, H. Lyn White (1990). "The cognitive foundations for reference in a signing orangutan". In Sue Taylor Parker and Kathleen Rita Gibson, eds., "Language" and intelligence in monkeys and apes: Comparative developmental perspectives (pp. 511–539). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-38028-7.
Nishida, T. (1968). "The social group of wild chimpanzees in the Mahali Mountains". Primates 9 (3): 167–224. doi:10.1007/BF01730971.
Patel, Aniruddh D. (2008). Music, Language, and the Brain. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-195-12375-3.
Patterson, Francine; Linden, Eugene (1981). The Education of Koko. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. ISBN 978-0-030-46101-9.
Plooij, F. X. (1978). "Some basic traits of language in wild chimpanzees?". In A. Lock, ed., Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language (pp. 111–131). London: Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-124-54050-7.
Poole, Geoffrey (2005). "Noam Chomsky". In Siobhan Chapman and Christopher Routledge, eds., Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (pp. 53–59). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-748-61757-9.
Posner, Richard A. (2003). Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Revised ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01246-2.
Premack, D. (1985). " 'Gavagai!' or the future history of the animal language controversy". Cognition 19 (3): 207–296. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(85)90036-8. PMID 4017517.
Rabbani, Mouin (2012). "Reflections on a Lifetime of Engagement with Zionism, the Palestine Question, and American Empire: An Interview with Noam Chomsky". Journal of Palestine Studies 41 (3): 92–120. doi:10.1525/jps.2012.XLI.3.92.
Safty, Adel (1994). "Letters". Journal of Palestine Studies 23 (4): 198–199. doi:10.1525/jps.1994.23.4.00p0019m. JSTOR 2538224.
Savage-Rumbaugh, S.; Rumbaugh, D. M.; McDonald, K. (1985). "Language learning in two species of apes". Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 9 (4): 653–665. doi:10.1016/0149-7634(85)90012-0.
Savage-Rumbaugh, S.; McDonald, K.; Sevcik, R. A.; Hopkins, W. D.; Rubert, E. (1986). "Spontaneous Symbol Acquisition and Communicative Use By Pygmy Chimpanzees (Pan paniscus)". Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115 (3): 211–235.
Sheffield, C. S. (2013). "A new species of Megachile Latreille subgenus Megachiloides (Hymenoptera, Megachilidae)". ZooKeys 283: 43–58. doi:10.3897/zookeys.283.4674.
Terrace, Herbert S. (1987). Nim: A Chimpanzee who Learned Sign Language. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-06341-8.
Tomasello, Michael (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01030-7.
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The Real News interviews with Chomsky: 2007-2010 (11 interviews) and June 2014 (3 interviews)
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A Brief History of Anarchism. Noam Chomsky, In These Times. January 9, 2014.
American Socrates. Interviewed by Chris Hedges for Truthdig, June 15, 2014. (video on The Real News)
Noam Chomsky calls US 'world's leading terrorist state' RT, November 5, 2014.
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wow that's fascinating tell me more
"Boring" redirects here. For other uses, see Boring (disambiguation).
"Tedium" redirects here. For the 2008 film, see Khastegi.
Page semi-protected
A souvenir seller appears bored as she waits for customers.
Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, and not interested in their surroundings. The first recorded use of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in 1852,[1] in which it appears six times, although the expression to be a bore had been used in print in the sense of "to be tiresome or dull" since 1768.[2] The French term for boredom, ennui, is sometimes used in English as well.
Contents [hide]
1 Psychology
2 Philosophy
3 Causes and effects
4 In popular culture
5 See also
6 References
Psychology
Boredom by Gaston de La Touche, 1893
Boredom has been defined by Cynthia D. Fisher in terms of its main central psychological processes: "an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest and difficulty concentrating on the current activity."[3] Mark Leary et al. describe boredom as "an affective experience associated with cognitive attentional processes."[4] In positive psychology, boredom is described as a response to a moderate challenge for which the subject has more than enough skill.[5]
There are three types of boredom, all of which involve problems of engagement of attention. These include times when we are prevented from engaging in wanted activity, when we are forced to engage in unwanted activity, or when we are simply unable for no apparent reason to maintain engagement in any activity or spectacle.[6] Boredom proneness is a tendency to experience boredom of all types. This is typically assessed by the Boredom Proneness Scale.[7] Recent research has found that boredom proneness is clearly and consistently associated with failures of attention.[8] Boredom and its proneness are both theoretically and empirically linked to depression and similar symptoms.[9][10][11] Nonetheless, boredom proneness has been found to be as strongly correlated with attentional lapses as with depression.[9] Although boredom is often viewed as a trivial and mild irritant, proneness to boredom has been linked to a very diverse range of possible psychological, physical, educational, and social problems.[12]
Philosophy
Boredom is a condition characterized by perception of one's environment as dull, tedious, and lacking in stimulation. This can result from leisure and a lack of aesthetic interests. Labor, however, and even art may be alienated and passive, or immersed in tedium. There is an inherent anxiety in boredom; people will expend considerable effort to prevent or remedy it, yet in many circumstances, it is accepted as suffering to be endured. Common passive ways to escape boredom are to sleep or to think creative thoughts (daydream). Typical active solutions consist in an intentional activity of some sort, often something new, as familiarity and repetition lead to the tedious.
1916 Rea Irvin illustration depicting a bore putting her audience to sleep
Boredom also plays a role in existentialist thought. In contexts where one is confined, spatially or otherwise, boredom may be met with various religious activities, not because religion would want to associate itself with tedium, but rather, partly because boredom may be taken as the essential human condition, to which God, wisdom, or morality are the ultimate answers. It is taken in this sense by virtually all existentialist philosophers as well as by Arthur Schopenhauer.
Martin Heidegger wrote about boredom in two texts available in English, in the 1929/30 semester lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and again in the essay What is Metaphysics? published in the same year. In the lecture, Heidegger included about 100 pages on boredom, probably the most extensive philosophical treatment ever of the subject. He focused on waiting at railway stations in particular as a major context of boredom.[13] Søren Kierkegaard remarks in Either/Or that "patience cannot be depicted" visually, since there is a sense that any immediate moment of life may be fundamentally tedious.
Blaise Pascal in the Pensées discusses the human condition in saying "we seek rest in a struggle against some obstacles. And when we have overcome these, rest proves unbearable because of the boredom it produces", and later states that "only an infinite and immutable object – that is, God himself – can fill this infinite abyss."[14]
Without stimulus or focus, the individual is confronted with nothingness, the meaninglessness of existence, and experiences existential anxiety. Heidegger states this idea as follows: "Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole."[15] Schopenhauer used the existence of boredom in an attempt to prove the vanity of human existence, stating, "...for if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfil and satisfy us."[16]
Erich Fromm and other thinkers of critical theory speak of boredom as a common psychological response to industrial society, where people are required to engage in alienated labor. According to Fromm, boredom is "perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today." For Fromm, the search for thrills and novelty that characterizes consumer culture are not solutions to boredom, but mere distractions from boredom which, he argues, continues unconsciously.[17] Above and beyond taste and character, the universal case of boredom consists in any instance of waiting, as Heidegger noted, such as in line, for someone else to arrive or finish a task, or while one is travelling somewhere. The automobile requires fast reflexes, making its operator busy and hence, perhaps for other reasons as well, making the ride more tedious despite being over sooner.
Causes and effects
The Princess Who Never Smiled by Viktor Vasnetsov
Although it has not been widely studied, research on boredom suggests that boredom is a major factor impacting diverse areas of a person's life. People ranked low on a boredom-proneness scale were found to have better performance in a wide variety of aspects of their lives, including career, education, and autonomy.[18] Boredom can be a symptom of clinical depression. Boredom can be a form of learned helplessness, a phenomenon closely related to depression. Some philosophies of parenting propose that if children are raised in an environment devoid of stimuli, and are not allowed or encouraged to interact with their environment, they will fail to develop the mental capacities to do so.
In a learning environment, a common cause of boredom is lack of understanding; for instance, if one is not following or connecting to the material in a class or lecture, it will usually seem boring. However, the opposite can also be true; something that is too easily understood, simple or transparent, can also be boring. Boredom is often inversely related to learning, and in school it may be a sign that a student is not challenged enough, or too challenged. An activity that is predictable to the students is likely to bore them.[19]
A 1989 study indicated that an individual's impression of boredom may be influenced by the individual's degree of attention, as a higher acoustic level of distraction from the environment correlated with higher reportings of boredom.[20]
Boredom has been studied as being related to drug abuse among teens.[21] Boredom has been proposed as a cause of pathological gambling behavior. A study found results consistent with the hypothesis that pathological gamblers seek stimulation to avoid states of boredom and depression.[22]
In popular culture
In Chapter 18 of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), the character Lord Henry Wotton says to a young Dorian Gray: "The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness." Procol Harum, John Sebastian, Iggy Pop, the Deftones, Buzzcocks, and Blink-182 have all written songs with boredom mentioned in the title. Other songs about boredom and activities people turn to when bored include Green Day's song "Longview", System of a Down's "Lonely Day", and Bloodhound Gang's "Mope". Douglas Adams depicted a robot named Marvin the Paranoid Android whose boredom appeared to be the defining trait of his existence in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The 1969 Vocational Guidance Counsellor sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus established a lasting stereotype of accountants as boring.[23] The Yellow Pages used to carry an entry under Boring, "See civil engineers" (referring to the "tunnelling" meaning), but this was changed in 1996 to "See sites exploration."[24]
See also
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Boredom
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Boredom.
Apathy
Boreout
Drab (color)
Dysthymia
Motivation
References
Jump up ^ Oxford Old English Dictionary
Jump up ^ "Online Etymology Dictionary". Etymonline.com. Retrieved 2013-12-06.
Jump up ^ Fisher 1993, p. 396
Jump up ^ Leary, M. R., Rogers, P. A., Canfield, R. W., Coe, C. (1986). "Boredom in interpersonal encounters: Antecedents and social implications". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (5): 968–975, p. 968. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.51.5.968.
Jump up ^ Csikszentmihalyi, M., Finding Flow, 1997
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Jump up ^ Farmer, R., Sundberg, N. D. (1986). "Boredom proneness: The development and correlates of a new scale". Journal of Personality Assessment 50 (1): 4–17. doi:10.1207/s15327752jpa5001_2. PMID 3723312.
Jump up ^ Fisher, C.D. (1993). "Boredom at work: A neglected concept". Human Relations 46 (3): 395–417. doi:10.1177/001872679304600305.
^ Jump up to: a b Carriere, J. S. A., Cheyne, J. A., Smilek, D. (September 2008). "Everyday Attention Lapses and Memory Failures: The Affective Consequences of Mindlessness" (PDF). Consciousness and Cognition 17 (3): 835–847. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2007.04.008. PMID 17574866.
Jump up ^ Sawin, D. A., Scerbo, M. W. (1995). "Effects of instruction type and boredom proneness in vigilance: Implications for boredom and workload". Human Factors 37 (4): 752–765. doi:10.1518/001872095778995616. PMID 8851777.
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Jump up ^ "Boredom: The Forgotten Factor in Fraud Prevention?". Durham University. Retrieved October 1, 2014.
Jump up ^ Martin Heidegger. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, pp. 78–164.
Jump up ^ Pascal, Blaise; Ariew, Roger (2005). Pensées. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co. ISBN 978-0-87220-717-2. Retrieved 2009-07-27.
Jump up ^ Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? (1929)
Jump up ^ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin Classics, ISBN 0-14-044227-8 (2004), p53 Full text available online: Google Books Search
Jump up ^ Erich Fromm, "Theory of Aggression" pg.7
Jump up ^ Watt, J. D., Vodanovich, S. J. (1999). "Boredom Proneness and Psychosocial Development". Journal of Psychology 133 (1): 149–155. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4679(200001)56:1<149::AID-JCLP14>3.0.CO;2-Y.
Jump up ^ Ed.gov – R.V. Small et al. Dimensions of Interest and Boredom in Instructional Situations, Proceedings of Selected Research and Development Presentations at the 1996 National Convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (18th, Indianapolis, IN), (1996)
Jump up ^ Damrad-Frye, R; Laird JD (1989). "The experience of boredom: the role of the self-perception of attention". J Personality Social Psych 57 (2): 315–20. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.57.2.315.
Jump up ^ Iso-Ahola, Seppo E.; Crowley, Edward D. (1991). "Adolescent Substance Abuse and Leisure Boredom". Journal of Leisure Research 23 (3): 260–71.
Jump up ^ Blaszczynski A, McConaghy N, Frankova A (August 1990). "Boredom proneness in pathological gambling". Psychol Rep 67 (1): 35–42. doi:10.2466/PR0.67.5.35-42. PMID 2236416.
Jump up ^ "Learn the elementary bits about business". Financial Times. 14 October 2008. Archived from the original on 2013-01-10.
Jump up ^ Exciting times for London civil engineers, Chicago Sun Times, 23 August 1996
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Emotions (list)
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Aesthetics
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Charles Dickens' Bleak House
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