Noam Chomsky's Linguistic Philosophy: Syntactic Structures, Language and Mind
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- čas přidán 11. 06. 2024
- Noam Chomsky is known as one of the most influential academics in the 20th century. Yet, half of his academic story is brushed over. And in many ways, for decent reasons: his analysis of political economy and media relations has influenced left-thinkers for decades, but in consequence of this, his study of language and mental structures that support said language, has been brushed over. Here we explore Chomsky's linguistic philosophy, his influences in the philosophical canon, and how philosophy has shaped his linguistics.
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Timestamp:
Chomsky as an Intellectual: 0:00
Chomsky's Lingual Backdrop: 3:15
Merging Within Philosophy: 8:34
A Message: 14:26
This was great! Everyone loves to talk about Manufacturing Consent, which is great of course, but it seems very few discuss his linguistics. Hopefully this video will spur more curiosity and maybe other people will feel compelled to make more educational videos on Chomsky's linguistic works.
Thanks for all your hard work Ian!
Melody
Thanks for the kind words dude. Appreciate it, Melody.
If you like such subjects, check out my little video on basic a priori schemas of the mind: czcams.com/video/kJkmJ01yx1o/video.html
His linguistics "theories" also just happen to lay the groundwork for pushing their radical left agenda along.
Another wonderfully enlightening and absorbing video. For me, your summaries, analysis and style are up their with documentary filmmakers such as Adam Curtis. Thanks for helping us understand the ideas that shape epochs.
What a compliment. Thank you so much, friend.
Superb video. Clarity, concision, style.
Also, you did a very good thing in including critique of Chomsky throughout, instead of as a single section. Made for continuity and kept things balanced.
Thank you, friend.
The video essay "Why Koko Couldn't Talk (Sorry)" by "Soup Emporium" is worth watching. Chomsky is not saying that humans are some sort of ghoulish "innate behaviour" automatons. He is saying that language is something which in itself is complex enough to resist Chinese room style programming. You cannot teach a dog to speak English through floor buttons by training it with biscuits and pets, despite what TikTok might try to tell you. He differentiates between competence and performance.
Chomsky does have a lot of opinions on philosophy, such as Lacan (embarrassing nonsense), Wittgenstein (nice writing style, influential, but views on language make no sense at all), Nietzsche (intriguing but too time-consuming for him to study), Kierkegaard (very good literature).
I mean you can teach a dog to understand english in very very very basic terms because they still have similar language areas in their brains. Different morphology, similar function. Just because Chomsky was not a behaviorist, does not mean that all behaviorism does not work or exist. A lot of our language is specifically phonological(unless youre a big brain and can see every single word ever spoken in your head). It is true though that we have innate language capabilities, but that this could also be damaged and a person could lose their ability to differentiate language from non-language sounds. Also we can't forget the behavioral conditioning of dogs over thousands of years. If dogs did not understand some sort of human language or a language of some-sort, especially through behaviorist techniques, they would never respond to spoken words.
@@pichirisu You can teach a dog to respond to vocal commands. Calling that "English" is purely a distortion of terms. Technically, the words might be in English, but the dog is not using the English language. Dogs may have been bred, rather than evolved, to be more useful to us. But for working dogs whistling is often seen as more useful than any spoken language. You can train a guide dog to stop at the chemists every time it walks past, but you cannot train it to follow the command "take me to the chemists".
@@mattd8725 thanks for saying what i said
@@pichirisu You still stand by the statement that "dogs understand English" and don't see that I said anything different at all?
@@mattd8725 you obviously don’t understand what I’m saying. you’re free to keep going on though
Thanks so much for making this. Been waiting for a vid on Chomsky! (Also, love the new intro)
More than happy to provide. Glad to see you here.
Great video as always! Absolutely love this channel!
this is what i subscribe for
Happy you do, really glad you enjoyed.
great vid!! always a pleasure to watch
Thanks a ton, friend.
Excited to see it! 😁 The history and application of formal semantics is something I’ve been wrestling with for a while-‘d love to learn of some vantages where linguistics can be seen as overlapping with philosophy.
I'm so hyped for this. let's goooo
I've read his book titled, On Anarchism. It was a lovely book.
Great video man. May have already been mentioned but if you haven't seen "Is the man who is tall happy" by Michel Gondry, I'd highly recommend it. One of the few videos besides yours wherein someone takes the time to go over his philosophy. Also its beautifully animated.
Keep up the amazing work!
wow man what an explanation
kudos to your effort
I like how you mentioned the fetishization of Chomsky by the online left. I almost feel bad for Chomsky because I think many people take advantage of him to promote their own content instead of having a genuine interview or conversation with him. I forgot about that cringe Bad Faith podcast where they just brought him on to argue nonsense.
Super unfortunate in my opinion. In many ways, it's the atmosphere of political content creation. The medium is the ultimate carrier of the message. I doubt these hosts really think twice.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most overrated public intellectuals in modern times. He’s like Gore Vidal but without the charisma. No one should feel bad for Chomsky, he’s viewed as godlike figure on the left. Of course I’m a conservative/libertarian so I think his politics are trash. As far as linguistics I’m not smart enough to understand them so I’m sure he’s a genius in his field.
@@jensgronning4436You’re a conservative so your opinions are literally irrelevant you uphold fascism
@@jensgronning4436while I tend towards the left wing, I think he's also a disgrace with his playing down of the genocide at srebrenica and by milosevic in general. He is much too nationalist and fascistic in this respect
@@kingeddiam2543he lives in Israel now. Imagine your disgust now.
Thank you, really enjoyed your educational videos, Love from Hong Kong.🙇🏻♂️
This is well done. I've got to check out this site.
Thank you, man!
Really nice video. I liked how you go into how revolutionary Chomsky’s proposals were. I get into a lot of conversations with people who critique Chomsky’s specific ideas about things like universal grammar as a way to discredit his linguistic accomplishments, ignoring the fact that everyone in the entire field works in a post-Chomskian paradigm in some sense. The critiques are often valid but it bugs me how often non linguists just learn those critiques as ammo to discredit the person
Very nice and accessible introduction!
This video was fascinating and does, in fact, illuminate a very obvious gap in the treatment of Noam Chomsky. “In my mind, this is partially why you find little content on Chomsky’s core work and the mechanistic, rationalist, and humanist philosophy behind it.” Personally, I think the reason is that Chomsky’s core work, positing a “Land Acquisition Device” and “Universal Grammar,” led precisely nowhere-it was basically a dead end for linguistics for the past 60 years.
That said, I’m not so sure that “Behaviorist Linguistics” _was_ the dominant paradigm of linguistics in, say, the 1950s when behaviorism was becoming ascendant in psychology, at least in the US. BF Skinner published his book _Verbal Behavior_ in 1957 and it was radical in its time for _being_ a behaviorist treatment of linguistics. Chomsky, for his part, wrote his scathing-and I would say “notorious”-critique of Skinner’s book, a critique replete with mistakes and a wholly unwarranted combativeness. (You can take a look at papers by MacCorquodale (1970) and Palmer (2006) detailing what, exactly, Chomsky got wrong in his critique.) And _no_ behaviorist-certainly not BF Skinner-would have denied that humans have an innate ability to learn language-by virtue of their evolutionary history and genetics, although a behaviorist would look to universal contingencies of reinforcement in explaining “universal grammar” (if there is such a thing), rather than some innate biological mechanism
Well done!
Well done! Excellent
You should look into the works of David Poeppel , Andrea Moro, Charles Reiss and Veno Volenec for a starter in neurobiological basis of Language. Universal Grammar, and the anatomy of the language-ready brain is very well established. You can't talk about Biolinguistics based only on Syntactic Structures. And your attempt to link Chomsky's science with his politics is completely inscrutable. I don't mean to be rude... but the last section was absolutely convoluted.
I remember the first time I actually heard Chomsky's big Linguistics theory, I was surprised. First, it opened my mind and expanded my ability to ask bigger questions about consciousness and what it means to be a human. But the main reason for my surprise was that I had only ever known him to be a political-type hero of every punk rocker I used to know.
I, too, wish more people were aware of this side of him. The study of Linguistics does not appear as an obvious subject to study for the young and curious of the world, but once you become aware of it, you wonder how come you didn't know to start with Linguistics when you set out on this quest to find out the truth? It is essential!!
Chomsky is a Cartesian follower. He even wrote a book about it called Cartesian linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. He’s thoroughly in that tradition. An essentialist dualist. It really doesn’t fit too well with most anarchist thought. He’s also got extremely anti-Darwinian views of evolution where he believes that the genetic and cognitive origin of language arose out of a single mutation around 90 000 years ago. One child was born which Chomsky calls Prometheus who was the first person ever with the biological capacity for language. Before that language was impossible and after that with the passing on of that specific genetic mutation language became possible. It’s a thoroughly insane hypothesis that is widely ridiculed but Chomsky so caught up in a dead tradition can’t possibly abandon it.
Lmao thats kinda funny
Chomsky has said in interviews that he does adopt a Cartesian angle, but he rejects the body mind dualism. He's actually more in line with Kant/British Neo-Platonists.
Very interesting video!
I would like to know more in depth how Chomsky's work in linguistics differ (or stand in opposition) to the semiotic theories applied in continental philosophy (starting with De Saussure and stretching atleast to Derrida/Baudrillard) .
I've heard his harsh words on the French philosophers but I've never seen an actual critique of their linguistic system, if there is one I would be very interested in reading it.
it takes guts to cover this subject , knowing so little about it . It will be something discussed in the century to come , but as are things going on in the intellectual field , I doubt all the implications will be understood until the next one . There is no contradiction between his linguistic theory and the subjectivity human organisations brings . One is innate and can develop any where any time based on our inate structure , the other is just more contingent , but always puts in power the same ideology of control that dominated all of human existence since human organisations arose .
I can't help but see parallels between LAD and Kant's idea of a priori
Yup. People like Kant have their claws in everything!
thanks!
I have made an introductory video for Noam's philosophy and his metaphilosophy here czcams.com/video/GGQ4KdT2k48/video.html . And for history of ideas that shaped Noam's linguistic theory can be found in this video by John Goldsmith czcams.com/video/toCcoApv62s/video.html
You should make a video on Althusser if you haven’t already.
Chomsky' first book " Syntactic Structure in 1957 He stated that Language is a mirror of mind Is it still applicable at the moment? I am from Imdonesia
It’s outdated but still very important
“This is not the beginning, for in the beginning was the word. The word has been in for a too-long time.”
Brion Gysin
Your channels awesome man, was wandering do you think the rest chopo and the leftist podcast scene have this problem with commodifying politics?
Appreciate that. But, yes. They are one of the larger examples in my mind. Even though it's not necessarily their fault nor intention. The medium (podcasts, CZcams, etc.) tend to relay the message quicker than the content itself. When you talk 'politics' and/or theory but constantly muddy it with comedy; the downside is that you are always traversing satire, cynicism with actual pertinent subject matter and it's hard for a lot of viewers to discern. Hence why you see their viewers represent every view (and aesthetic) to the exact degree.
The cold stream of Chomsky
Based
The answer lies within our epigenetic imprints.
Wow 🤓🤓🤓 💝😋
Language dealing with behavior, Language dealing with Biology I'd rather. It's nuanced I suppose, but it's the difference between a Warlord and Lord of War.. Language should not be an aforemention of that which will essentially define whatever science or para- science language entails.
Ammo for SAP class
Can you do one about the Chomsky-Foucault debate ?
Did a stream a few weeks back on it!
Chomsky’s worldview has always seemed very Kantian to me
That’s what hit me in that statement he made in the video’s intro. Then he threw this language propensity wrench in at the end. Almost like he’s borrowing Kant’s a prior cognitive structures then adding a wait, there’s more, language bonus.
By your own logic Chomsky himself cares more about the persona and not his intellectual work, no one forces him to participate in the online political discussion.
Algorithm
Почему я это слушаю? Wait ...not anymore.
Manufacturing consent was one of the most influential books for me in beginning my leftist journey.
"almost all within anti-intellectual contexts" cut to: close up of Useful Idiots logo
😎 Shade 😎
Yes.
Become more conscious than a philosopher and a psychologist by reading the book "Sacrosanct Intelligence".
What is that book? I can't find it.
not a noam stan but he had the last laugh virgil in a bunker somewhere lmao
Boop
Unfortunately the later half of Chomsky's career was that of a political persona under the veil of an accomplished intellectual. What could have been if he continued to develop his model of linguistics?
marxist with anarchist takes. I give it a month before you start to ditch marxism for some epic transcendental slayer anarchism. Just realize engels wouldve rather hung out with bakunin
More substance and less hype would have helped here.
Chomsky is overrated
You wasted my time.