词条 | Decoding Chomsky |
释义 |
| name = Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics | image = File:Decoding Chomsky, book cover.jpg | caption = Cover | author = Chris Knight | country = United States | language = English | subject = Noam Chomsky | publisher = Yale University Press | pub_date = 2016 (hardback); 2018 (paperback) | media_type = Print (Hardcover and Paperback) | pages = 304 | isbn = 978-0300221466 }}Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics is a 2016 book by the left-wing activist and linguistic anthropologist Chris Knight on Noam Chomsky's approach to science and politics. Knight admires Chomsky's politics, but argues that his linguistic theories were influenced in damaging ways by his immersion since the early 1950s in an intellectual culture heavily dominated by US military priorities, an immersion deepened when he secured employment in a Pentagon-funded electronics laboratory in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] In October 2016, Chomsky dismissed the book, telling The New York Times that it was based on a false assumption since, in fact, no military "work was being done on campus" during his time at MIT.[2] In a subsequent public comment, Chomsky on similar grounds denounced Knight's entire narrative as a "wreck ... complete nonsense throughout".[3] In contrast, a reviewer for the US Chronicle of Higher Education described Decoding Chomsky as perhaps "the most in-depth meditation on 'the Chomsky problem' ever published".[4] In the UK, the New Scientist described Knight's account as "trenchant and compelling".[5] The controversy continued in the London Review of Books, where the sociologist of science Hilary Rose cited Decoding Chomsky approvingly, provoking Chomsky to denounce what he called "Knight's astonishing performance" in two subsequent letters.[6] The debate has continued in the pages of Open Democracy. Since the book was published, Knight has published evidence that Chomsky worked on a military sponsored "command and control" project for the MITRE Corporation in the early 1960s.[7] The argumentDecoding Chomsky begins with Chomsky's claim that his political and scientific outputs have little connection with each other. For example, asked in 2006 whether his science and his politics are related, Chomsky replied that the connection is "almost non-existent ... There is a kind of loose, abstract connection in the background. But if you look for practical connections, they're non-existent."[8]Knight accepts that scientific research and political involvement are distinct kinds of activity serving very different purposes. But he claims that, in Chomsky's case, the conflicts intrinsic to his institutional situation forced him to drive an unusually deep and damaging wedge between his politics and his science. Knight points out that Chomsky began his career working in an electronics laboratory whose primary technological mission he detested on moral and political grounds. Funded by the Pentagon, the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT was involved in contributing to the basic research required for hi-tech weapons systems.[9] Suggesting that he was well aware of MIT's role at the time, Chomsky himself recalls: {{quotation|"There was extensive [military] research on the MIT campus. ... In fact, a good deal of the [nuclear] missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus and in laboratories run by the university."[10]|}} It was because of his anti-militarist conscience, Knight argues, that such research priorities were experienced by him as deeply troubling. By way of evidence, Knight cites this correspondence from The New York Review of Books in 1967: {{quotation| George Steiner: "Will Noam Chomsky announce that he will stop teaching at MIT or anywhere in this country so long as torture and napalm go on? ... Will he even resign from a university very largely implicated in the kind of 'strategic studies' he so rightly scorns?"Noam Chomsky: "I have given a good bit of thought to the specific suggestions that you put forth... leaving the country or resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with activities of the department of 'defense.' ... As to MIT, I think that its involvement in the war effort is tragic and indefensible."[11]|}} Chomsky's situation at MIT, according to Knight, is summed up by Chomsky when he describes some of his colleagues this way: {{quotation| "It is appalling that a person can come through an MIT education and say the kinds of things that were quoted in the New York Times article on Sunday, November 9 [1969]... One student said, right along straight Nazi scientist lines: What I'm designing may one day be used to kill millions of people. I don't care. That's not my responsibility. I'm given an interesting technological problem and I get enjoyment out of solving it. You know perfectly well that we can name twenty faculty members who've said the same thing. ... This is an attitude that is very widely held and very widely expressed."[12]|}}Chomsky, then, apparently felt that a number of his colleagues were no better than Nazi scientists. In order to maintain his moral and political integrity, Knight argues, Chomsky resolved to limit his cooperation to pure linguistic theory of such an abstract kind that it could not conceivably have any military use. With this aim in mind, Chomsky's theoretical modelling became so abstract that not even language's practical function in social communication could be acknowledged or explored. One damaging consequence, according to Knight, was that scientific investigation of the ways in which real human beings use language became divorced from what quickly became the prevailing MIT school of formal linguistic theory. Knight argues that the conflicting pressures Chomsky experienced had the effect of splitting his intellectual output in two, prompting him to ensure that any work he conducted for the military was purely theoretical—of no practical use to anyone—while his activism, being directed relentlessly against the military, was preserved free of any obvious connection with his science. To an unprecedented extent, according to Knight, mind in this way became divorced from body, thought from action, and knowledge from its practical applications, these disconnects characterizing a philosophical paradigm which came to dominate much of intellectual life for half a century across the Western world. ReceptionDecoding Chomsky has been both criticised and acclaimed by wide variety of commentators. Negative
Positive
Further research on Chomsky at MITIn his book, Knight writes that the US military initially funded Chomsky's linguistics because they were interested in machine translation. Later their focus shifted and Knight cites Air Force Colonel Edmund Gaines’ statement that: "We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly."[24] In his book review, Robert Barsky poses the question not answered in Knight's book: "Machine Translation research is turned into a project dedicated to 'command and control systems'. Really? And how did Chomsky contribute to that MT project?" Since finishing Decoding Chomsky, Knight has produced documents indicating that between 1963 and 1965, Chomsky worked as a consultant on an Air Force project to establish English as an "operational language for command and control". Knight quotes several of Chomsky's students, who also worked on this project, confirming this consultancy work.
According to one of these former students, Barbara Partee, the project leader's justification for sponsoring Chomsky's approach to linguistics 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."[25] Knight's discoveries concerning Chomsky's early work have been discussed by various experts such as Randy Allen Harris, Frederick Newmeyer, and Wolfgang Sperlich at the Open Democracy website.[26] References1. ^Letters, London Review of Books, July 13, 2017 2. ^Noam Chomsky and the Bicycle Theory. Sam Tanenhaus interviews Noam Chomsky. The New York Times, October 31, 2016 3. ^Sam Fenn interviews Chris Knight and Noam Chomsky responds. Chomsky's Carburetor. Cited Podcast. http://citedpodcast.com/23-chomskys-carburetor/ 4. ^The Chomsky Puzzle. Piecing together a celebrity scientist, by Tom Bartlett. Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2016. 5. ^[https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230980-800-the-value-of-everything-getting-radical-about-research/New Scientist, November 2, 2016] 6. ^[https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n09/jackson-lears/mysterian Letters], London Review of Books, June 1; June 15; July 13, 2017 7. ^"When the Pentagon Looked to Chomsky's Linguistics for their Weapons Systems", 3 Quarks Daily, 12 March 2018. 8. ^Decoding Chomsky, p. 248, n. 20, citing Irish Times, January 21, 2006. 9. ^Decoding Chomsky, p. xi, citing 'Tri-Services Honor MIT Achievements in Military Electronics R&D', Army Research and Development News Magazine, Vol. 12 no.4, July-August 1971, p 68. 10. ^Decoding Chomsky, p. xiv, citing {{cite book|last1=Chomsky|first1=N.|title=Language and Politics|date=2004|publisher=AK Press|location=Edinburgh|isbn=1-902593-82-0|page=216|edition=Second}} 11. ^Abbreviated in Decoding Chomsky, p. 37; citing full text in The New York Review of Books, March 23, 1967 12. ^Abbreviated in Decoding Chomsky, p. xviii, citing full text in Chomsky, N. 2002. On Democracy and Education. Edited by C. P. Otero, p. 290. 13. ^{{cite web|url=https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/12/thousand-ways-to-misrepresent-noam-chomsky|title=1000 Ways To Misrepresent Noam Chomsky |work=Current Affairs}} 14. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.momentmag.com/book-review-decoding-chomsky/|title=Book Review // Decoding Chomsky |work=Moment Magazine |date=September 2016}} 15. ^{{cite web|url=https://philosophynow.org/issues/127/Decoding_Chomsky_by_Chris_Knight|title=Book Review // Decoding Chomsky |work=Philosophy Now|date=September 2018}} 16. ^{{cite web|url=http://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/a-review-of-decoding-chomsky-2016-by.html|title=A review of Decoding Chomsky (2016) by Chris Knight|publisher=wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.co.uk}} 17. ^D. L. Everett, Review of Chris Knight's 'Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics. Language and Cognition, September 2017, Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2017.15 18. ^1 2 3 4 5 {{Cite book|title=Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics|first=Chris|last=Knight|date=September 2, 2016|publisher=Yale University Press|via=Amazon|id= {{ASIN|0300221460|country=uk}}}} 19. ^{{cite web|url=http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2017/10/8/houman-barekats-review-in-the-times-literary-supplement|title=Review of Decoding Chomsky in the Times Literary Supplement |publisher=}} 20. ^1 2 3 4 5 {{cite web|url=https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2016/11/26/reviewers-comments-extracts|title=20+ reviews of Decoding Chomsky|publisher=}} 21. ^{{cite journal|url=https://www.academia.edu/34341876/Review_of_Decoding_Chomsky_Science_and_Revolutionary_Politics._Chris_Knight._New_Haven_CT_Yale_University_Press_2016._304_pp._American_Ethnologist_4_3_541-2|title=Review of Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics|journal=American Ethnologist|volume=4|issue=3|pages=541–542}} 22. ^http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/chomsky-decoded-by-chris-knight.html 23. ^http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2018/3/17/anarchist-studies-review-of-decoding-chomsky 24. ^Decoding Chomsky, pp. 53–72 and 16, citing Frederick Newmeyer, The Politics of Linguistics, Chicago 1986, pp. 85–6. 25. ^C. Knight, "When the Pentagon Looked to Chomsky's Linguistics for their Weapons Systems", 3 Quarks Daily, March 12, 2018 (citing Arnold Zwicky, [https://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/grammars-of-number-theory.pdf "Grammars of Number Theory: Some Examples"], Working Paper W-6671, MITRE Corp., 1963, Foreword, last page). In 1971, a former Air Force Colonel, Anthony Debons, wrote: "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." A. Debons, "Command and Control: Technology and Social Impact", in F. Alt and M. Rubinoff, Advances in Computers, Vol.11, 1971. New York/London 1971, p354. 26. ^'Links to Open Democracy debate on Chomsky' External links
5 : 2016 non-fiction books|Books about the politics of science|English-language books|Works about Noam Chomsky|Yale University Press books |
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