Blackwell Reference Online

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Noam Avram Chomsky, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. Since 1955 he has taught at MIT, where he currently holds the position of Institute Professor. Chomsky gained the attention of philosophers early on in his career by the introduction of mathematical/logical tools for the description of linguistic phenomena. In this respect his early work was influenced by figures such as Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine, both of whom are thanked in the introduction to his Syntactic Structures (1957) . Nevertheless, Chomsky's principal philosophical significance relates to his rejection of the approach to language and mind taken by Quine and many other analytic philosophers. Indeed, Chomsky has been a direct participant in several key philosophical debates in the last half century, taking issue with interlocutors such as Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, and John Searle on the nature of language and mind. In the view of many analytic philosophers, language is a social object that has been established by convention for purposes of communication. Chomsky's take is different: the conception of language as an external social object is unfruitful (if not incoherent), and the only plausible strategy for the empirical scientist is to view language, or rather, the language faculty, as a natural object that ... log in or subscribe to read full text