Noam Chomsky — "If you want to achieve something, you build a structure. If you want to prevent …"
If you want to achieve something, you build a structure. If you want to prevent something, you mess it up.
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About Noam Chomsky (born 1928)
American linguist whose generative-grammar revolution (Syntactic Structures, 1957) reshaped linguistics, and whose Manufacturing Consent (1988, with Edward Herman) reshaped media criticism. Closely associated with Edward S. Herman (media-criticism co-author) and Howard Zinn (left historian peer and friend). For an intellectual contrast, see B.F. Skinner, Harvard behaviorist psychologist (1904-1990) — Chomsky's 1959 review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior is the most-cited demolition in 20th-century psychology — the moment behaviorism's dominance ended and the cognitive-science era began. Skinner's stimulus-response account of language and Chomsky's innate-faculty account are the cleanest 'environment vs nature' linguistic poles.
The standard scholarly entry points to Noam Chomsky's work: Robert F. Barsky (Vanderbilt, Chomsky biographer) — Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (1997); James McGilvray (McGill, philosophy of language) — The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (ed., 2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Noam Chomsky.