Chomsky (was Re: Zizek)

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou wrote:

> I think his defense of "pure" research, including that which had a
> direct military tie-in at MIT, is part and parcel of his free speech
> absolutism.

I've always wondered how a guy like Chomsky wound up at a place like
MIT. So i started reading some interviews with him and reviewing the
history of various threads of math and AI (Artificial Intelliegnce)
and computer science relevant to his and MIT's work at the time he was
hired.

its a pretty interesting story and ties in with this:

> It is based ultimately on a "market place of ideas" approach that I
> am highly leery of.

Chomsky has (or at least expresses) an IMHO distorted view of how he
wound up being given tenure track position at MIT:

    QUESTION: In your political work you studied the structure of
    power and the manufacturing of consent. Do you think the
    conclusions that you reached with respect to politics are
    applicable to the development of scientific paradigms and the
    dynamics established in academic fields? For example, in a recent
    book by Randy Harris, The Linguistic Wars, a picture is put forth
    that suggests the existence of analogous structures in the
    linguistic debates.

    CHOMSKY: Studies of human interactions in social and political
    systems reveal factors that surely enter into scientific work as
    well. Doubtless a close look at the world of scholarship and
    science will reveal all sorts of conniving, malice, pursuit of
    self-interest, attempts to establish a guild structure that
    protects interests and power, and so on. James Watson depicts his
    work with Francis Crick in such terms, and cocoon-like protective
    structures are quite common, and highly destructive, in the
    humanities and social sciences, surely. The history of modern
    linguistics reflects such factors. I think they are largely
    responsible for the fact that generative grammar has largely found
    its academic home outside institutions in which the humanities
    faculty wields extensive influence. Within generative grammar,
    fortunately, there has not been too much of this, at least in the
    parts I'm familiar with.

    I've experienced a good deal of this personally, for idiosyncratic
    reasons. I actually have no serious professional qualifications in
    any field that was identifiable 40 years ago -- which is why I am
    teaching at MIT, a scientific university, where no one cared much
    about credentials. I'm largely self-taught (including
    linguistics), and my work happens to have ranged fairly
    widely. Some years ago I did some work on mathematical theory of
    automata. At the time, I gave invited lectures in mathematics and
    engineering departments at major universities. No one believed
    that I was an accomplished professional mathematician, but no one
    cared either; people were interested in determining whether what I
    said was true or false, interesting or not, susceptible to
    improvement and further work or not.

    http://monkeyfist.com/ChomskyArchive/linguistics/language3_html

contrast now with this:

    In the 1950s, faced with the enormous task of gathering and
    analyzing written, photographic, and radar information about the
    enemy, the CIA and the NSA (National Security Agency) began to
    fund the first artificial intelligence projects. One of the
    earliest projects was a Program for Mechanical Translation,
    initiated in the early 1950s in the attempt to automate the
    monitoring of Soviet communications and media. [18] The work on
    mechanical translation was probably the major cause of many
    subsequent developments in modern linguistics, its move towards
    formalization; it can be discerned in Noam Chomsky's early theory
    which, by postulating the existence of language universals in the
    domain of grammar, implied that translation between arbitrary
    human languages could be automated. The same work on mechanical
    translation was also one of the catalysts in the development of
    the field of pattern recognition, the precursor to computer
    vision. Pattern recognition is concerned with automatically
    detecting and identifying predetermined patterns in the flow of
    information. A typical example is character recognition, the first
    stage in the process of automating translation. Pattern
    recognition was also used in the U.S. for the monitoring of Soviet
    radio and telephone communication. Instead of listening to every
    transmission, an operator would be alerted if computer picked up
    certain words in the conversation.

    http://www.manovich.net/EV/ev.pdf      pp. 138-139


so it doesn't suprise me he hides behind the "free market of ideas"
rather than applies his powerful intellect to the politics and history
behind his work.

hopefully i can write something up on this soon. for the record, i am
(or at least was) a big fan of his.

incidentally, MIT in 1999 signed an agreement with Microsoft for using
their software campus-wide in return for money and equipment.
market-place indeed.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40000-2003Aug24.html
  http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/i-campus/


les schaffer