"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." The sentence means nothing, yet say it aloud beside the same five words in reverse and one of them is still a sentence. Noam Chomsky spent his working life asking what that knowledge is, and how children everywhere come to have it within a few years of birth.His answer was that human beings come equipped with a capacity for language that belongs to their biology. He made the claim as a young man with few publications, trained in linguistics, philosophy and mathematics rather than psychology, and within a decade both linguistics and psychology were arguing on his terms. His review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior was still being answered in print eleven years later. The psychologist George Miller dated the beginning of cognitive science to a single day in September 1956 on which Chomsky was one of the speakers. And students of computing still learn his classification of grammars as the Chomsky hierarchy.Then came a second career, which for much of the world became the better known of the two. He refused to pay half his income tax in protest at the Vietnam War, was arrested at the Pentagon, and appeared on the list of political opponents drawn up in Richard Nixon's White House. With Edward S. Herman he wrote an account of how news media come to serve powerful interests without anyone having to give them orders.Neither career is simple to admire, and this book does not pretend otherwise. It sets his ideas beside the evidence that tested them: researchers who watched how children actually learn, fieldwork on a language of the Brazilian Amazon, and machines that learned fluent English from text alone. It sets his political writing beside the charges it drew over Cambodia, Bosnia and a Holocaust denier's freedom to publish. And it reports the released documents about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein as far as the records go, and no further.Beneath the arguments lies the thing he pointed at. Every day, in every community on earth, small children produce sentences that no one has said to them, and the adults around them understand without noticing that anything remarkable has happened.Inside: The nonsense sentence that made his point, and the knowledge it exposesA Philadelphia house where both parents taught Hebrew, a Deweyite school, and a boy who travelled alone to New York for weekends among its anarchist bookshopsZellig Harris, a manuscript that waited twenty years for print, and a job Chomsky told his employer made no senseUniversal grammar and the poverty of the stimulus: why children seem to know more than the language around them could have taught themDeep structure, principles and parameters, and Merge, and why he kept taking his own machinery apartThe Skinner review: what it achieved, and what it has been credited with that it never didVietnam, the Nixon list, and a televised argument with Michel Foucault about human natureManufacturing Consent and the propaganda model: what it predicted, and what it did notThe critics, set against his replies: usage-based researchers who study how children learn, the Pirah? dispute, and the language modelsCambodia, Faurisson, Srebrenica and the Epstein files: what the documents establish, and what is still openFour questions to carry into a world of fluent machines and managed newsPart of Pioneers of Human Behaviour - gateway books on the minds that shaped us.
