Decoding Chomsky

Noam Chomsky in 2017

Decoding Chomsky begins with Chomsky's claim that his political and scientific outputs have little connection with each other. For example, asked in 2006 whether his science and his politics are related, Chomsky replied that the connection is "almost non-existent ... There is a kind of loose, abstract connection in the background. But if you look for practical connections, they're non-existent."[8]

Knight accepts that scientific research and political involvement are distinct kinds of activity serving very different purposes. But he claims that, in Chomsky's case, the conflicts intrinsic to his institutional situation forced him to drive an unusually deep and damaging wedge between his politics and his science.

Knight points out that Chomsky began his career working in an electronics laboratory whose primary technological mission he detested on moral and political grounds. Funded by the Pentagon, the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT was involved in contributing to the basic research required for hi-tech weapons systems.[9] Suggesting that he was well aware of MIT's role at the time, Chomsky himself recalls:

"There was extensive [military] research on the MIT campus. ... In fact, a good deal of the [nuclear] missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus and in laboratories run by the university."[10]

It was because of his anti-militarist conscience, Knight argues, that such research priorities were experienced by him as deeply troubling. By way of evidence, Knight cites George Steiner in a 1967 The New York Review of Books article, "Will Noam Chomsky announce that he will stop teaching at MIT or anywhere in this country so long as torture and napalm go on? ... Will he even resign from a university very largely implicated in the kind of 'strategic studies' he so rightly scorns?" Chomsky said, "I have given a good bit of thought to the specific suggestions that you put forth... leaving the country or resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with activities of the department of 'defense.' ... As to MIT, I think that its involvement in the war effort is tragic and indefensible."[11]

Chomsky's situation at MIT, according to Knight, is summed up by Chomsky when he describes some of his colleagues this way: "It is appalling that a person can come through an MIT education and say the kinds of things that were quoted in the New York Times article on Sunday, November 9 [1969]... One student said, right along straight Nazi scientist lines: What I'm designing may one day be used to kill millions of people. I don't care. That's not my responsibility. I'm given an interesting technological problem and I get enjoyment out of solving it. You know perfectly well that we can name twenty faculty members who've said the same thing. ... This is an attitude that is very widely held and very widely expressed."[12]

In order to maintain his moral and political integrity, Knight argues, Chomsky resolved to limit his cooperation to pure linguistic theory of such an abstract kind that it could not conceivably have any military use.

With this aim in mind, Chomsky's theoretical modelling became so abstract that not even language's practical function in social communication could be acknowledged or explored. One damaging consequence, according to Knight, was that scientific investigation of the ways in which real human beings use language became divorced from what quickly became the prevailing MIT school of formal linguistic theory.

Knight argues that the conflicting pressures Chomsky experienced had the effect of splitting his intellectual output in two, prompting him to ensure that any work he conducted for the military was purely theoretical—of no practical use to anyone—while his activism, being directed relentlessly against the military, was preserved free of any obvious connection with his science.

To an unprecedented extent, according to Knight, mind in this way became divorced from body, thought from action, and knowledge from its practical applications, these disconnects characterizing a philosophical paradigm which came to dominate much of intellectual life for half a century across the Western world.

Decoding Chomsky has been both criticised and acclaimed by a wide variety of commentators.

Norbert Hornstein and Nathan J. Robinson dismiss the book as betraying a complete misunderstanding of Chomsky's linguistic theories and beliefs. They question the motives of Yale University Press, asking why Yale considered it appropriate to publish Knight's critique, which they say attacks Chomsky through political conjecture rather than addressing his linguistic or political ideas. Comparing Knight's Marxist criticism to a conservative criticism that was released in the same year by Tom Wolfe, they speculate that both were published with similar motivations - that Chomsky's criticisms were a threat to the power behind the publishers.(Current Affairs).[13]

Robert Barsky argues that since Knight was never formally trained in Chomsky's conception of theoretical linguistics, he has no right to comment on whether it stands up as science. Decoding Chomsky, claims Barsky, offers no original insights, consisting only of "a weak rehash of critiques from naysayers to Chomsky's approach". While Barsky concedes that Chomsky did work in a military laboratory, he argues that this cannot be significant since virtually all US scientists receive Pentagon funding one way or another. (Moment).[14]

Peter Stone claims that Knight hates Chomsky and "for that reason, he wrote Decoding Chomsky – a nasty, mean-spirited, vitriolic, ideologically-driven hatchet job". Stone states that, although Knight is on the Left, "the level of venom on display here exceeds that of all but the most unhinged of Chomsky’s detractors on the Right." He goes to state that "Knight spares no opportunity to paint Chomsky’s every thought and deed in the blackest possible terms" and that: "Decoding Chomsky is not a critique of a body of work in linguistics; it is an attempt to demonise a man for his perceived political deviations, even though that man happens to be on the same side of the political spectrum as the man who is demonising him. Reading Decoding Chomsky taught me something about the mindset of the prosecutors in the Moscow Show Trials."[15]

Decoding Chomsky has been positively received by various scientists and commentators including: Michael Tomasello, Daniel Everett, David Hawkes, Luc Steels, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Marek Kohn and Frederick Newmeyer.[16] The book has been positively reviewed in the following journals: Times Literary Supplement (October 2017), American Ethnologist (August 2017), The European Legacy (March 2018), Anarchist Studies (Autumn 2017) and Language and Cognition (September 2017).

SAGE system for nuclear war — MITRE's first command and control project.

In his book, Knight writes that the US military initially funded Chomsky's linguistics because they were interested in machine translation. Later their focus shifted and Knight cites Air Force Colonel Edmund Gaines’ statement that: "We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly."[17]

According to one of Chomsky's former students, Barbara Partee, the project leader's justification for sponsoring Chomsky's approach to linguistics was "that in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program."[18]

Chomsky made his most detailed response to Knight in the 2019 book, The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years. In this response, Chomsky dismissed Knight’s claims as a "vulgar exercise of defamation" and a "web of deceit and misinformation".[19]

Knight, in turn, responded to Chomsky citing more documents, including one that states that MITRE's work to support "US Air Force-supplied command and control systems ... involves the application of a logico-mathematical formulation of linguistic structure developed by Noam Chomsky." Knight cites other documents that he claims show that Chomsky's student, Lieutenant Samuel Jay Keyser, did apply Chomskyan theory to the control of military aircraft, including the B-58 nuclear-armed bomber.[20]

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• Science and Revolution – Chris Knight's website on his Chomsky research.