His political tendencies toward socialism and anarchism are a result of what he calls "the radical Jewish community in New York." Since 1965 he has become one of the leading critics of U.S. foreign policy. He published a book of essays called American Power and the New Mandarins which is considered to be one of the most substantial arguments ever against American involvement in Vietnam.

Among his many accomplishments, he is most famous for his work on generative grammar, which developed from his interest in modern logic and mathematical foundations. As a result, he applied it to the description of natural languages.

Noam Avram Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. He attended the University of Pennsylvania where he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. In 1955, he received his Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania, however, most of the research leading to this degree was done at Harvard between 1951 and 1955. Since receiving his Ph. D., Chomsky has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he now holds the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics.

Question: What are the major debates in linguistics?

Noam Chomsky: Well, as in most sciences, especially the human sciences, almost every major question is open. So, for example, take two obvious questions. One is, how come there are any languages at all? The second question is, why are there apparently so many? These are pretty elementary questions, but they're sensible questions. Roughly, say one hundred thousand years ago, which is almost nothing in evolutionary time, the questions couldn't be raised, because there weren't any languages—maybe two hundred thousand, but roughly that area.

So it's a sensible question. One is the question, how did languages suddenly emerge in the evolutionary record, and it's pretty sudden by an evolutionary framework, the amount of time involved. And then, how come they proliferated? How come there isn't just one? Well, there's steps towards answering that. There's progress, I think, my own view, I should say is pretty idiosyncratic, it's not widely held. But I think we understand enough about the fundamental computational basis of language to see that—to develop kind of a plausible scenario for how there might have been a reasonably sudden emergence of the fundamental nature of language.

And also, of why the apparent diversity, is pretty superficial. So that if, say a Martian was looking at humans the way we look at, say frogs, the Martian might conclude that there's fundamentally one language with minor deviations. And I think we're moving towards an understanding of how that might be the case and it is pretty clear that it has to be the case. The time of development is much too shallow for fundamental changes to have taken place and we know of no fundamental changes.

So a child from a hunter-gatherer tribe, a Stone Age tribe, in, say the Amazon, brought to Cambridge and raised here, will go on and be a quantum physicist at MIT. There's no known differences in relevant cognitive capacities. So there's something fundamentally the same about all of us, and it's whatever emerged pretty recently and we have to work out the—to show that the enormous apparent variety, is a kind of superficial variation and also to explain how it might have suddenly appeared in the evolutionary record.

Recorded on: Aug 18, 2009