Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, published when he was not yet thirty, proposed that every human language is generated from a finite set of underlying grammatical rules capable of producing an infinite number of sentences, including ones no speaker has ever heard before — his own invented example, 'colorless green ideas sleep furiously,' was grammatically perfect and semantically absurd, built specifically to show that grammar and meaning are separable in ways older theories had blurred together. His devastating 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior argued that behaviorism, then the dominant scientific account of how children learn anything, could not begin to explain how a child exposed to a relatively small, messy, error-filled sample of adult speech nonetheless reconstructs, by roughly age five, a full and orderly grammar productive enough to generate sentences never modeled for them at all — a gap between impoverished evidence and rich linguistic competence he called the poverty of the stimulus, and took as decisive evidence for an innate, biologically built-in universal grammar shared by every human being regardless of which specific language they happen to acquire. He explicitly framed this position as a revival of the rationalist tradition of Descartes and the seventeenth-century view that some knowledge is inborn rather than assembled entirely from experience, even titling one of his books Cartesian Linguistics in open homage. Across six decades at MIT he remade linguistics into something closer to a branch of cognitive science and mathematics, while simultaneously building an entirely separate reputation, through books like Manufacturing Consent, as one of the most widely read critics of American foreign policy and media alive — two careers that friends and critics alike have long puzzled over how the same person sustained at once, and that he himself has always insisted are simply two applications of the same demand: look underneath the official story for the actual structure producing it.
Chomsky began what would become a six-decade career at MIT, remaking linguistics into a branch of cognitive science while building a parallel, entirely separate reputation as a leading critic of American foreign policy and media.
Words
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”