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Noam Chomsky was born Avram Noam Chomsky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7th, 1928 (McGilvary, 2022). -
Chomsky attended an elementary school that allowed him to study at his own pace and develop his own interests (McGilvary, 2022).
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When Chomsky was just ten years old, he began writing editorials in the school newspaper. One of these editorials was over the Spanish Civil War and fascism in Europe. These became large topics for Chomsky (McGilvary, 2022). -
At thirteen, Chomsky started traveling to New York, alone, where he found yet another interest of his, reading. He would find many different books on different topics that allowed him to expand his knowledge. He also found a jewish community that helped him develop political thinking (McGilcary, 2022). -
Chomsky started college at the mere age of 16 years old at the University of Pennsylvania. At first he found nothing that piqued his interests, until he met Zellig Harris, a linguist who had similar political views to Chomsky. Chomsky studied under Harris as well as philosopher Nelson Goodman. -
Chomsky studied at Harvard where he developed his master's thesis his junior year. He based his thesis off of Harris and Goodman's ideas of linguistics and the philosophy of science (McGilvary, 2022).
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Chomsky received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in linguistics (McGilvary, 2022). -
Chomsky was offered a teaching position at MIT that required him to spend ample time on machine translation (McGilvary, 2022). -
Chomsky published a book title Syntactic Structures, which would lead MIT to ask Chomsky to help develop and linguistics program (McGilvary, 2022). -
Chomsky was made a professor at MIT (McGilvary, 2022). -
Chomsky was made Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics (McGilvary, 2022). -
Based on his studies he did while in elementary school, Chomsky developed "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" where Chomsky reviewed works by Gabriel Johnson and his views on the same time period of the Spanish Civil War and rise of fascism (McGilvary, 2022). -
The ideas Chomsky wrote his master's thesis on were published into "The Morphoponemics of Modern Hebrew" and "The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT)." The ideas written in these were rejected by Harris and Goodman since it went against their own theories. -
Chomsky challenged Goodman's idea that the child's mind at birth is a blank state to be developed at they grow. Chomsky states that the basics are there, which allows the child's mind to grow depending on the environment they are in (McGilvary, 2022). A great example of this is children who grow up in bilingual homes, they learn speech in both languages as they start talking. -
Chomsky also challenged Harris' theories that language studies are data studies. Chomsky states that language studies variable depending on each subject you study, and therefore cannot be studied as data (McGilvary, 2022). -
Chomsky goes on to develop his theories of linguistics, explaining that their creativity and problem solving skills develop from the moment they are able to speak. Given an example, mathematics, children may be able to solve a problem with little prompting, and with little background knowledge. Chomsky labels this as "Plato's problem" (McGilvary, 2022). -
Chomsky became Institute professor (McGilvary, 2022). -
Chomsky worked with many other linguists to develop his theories further. He developed his theory of principles and parameters. Principles are steadfast rules in all situations, where parameters vary depending on circumstance. Chomsky would continue to develop these theories until he was satisfied. Many of the theories Chomsky challenged were rejected by philosophers and linguists (McGilvary, 2022).
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Chomsky retired with his final status being professor emeritus (McGilvary, 2022). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br8n_3x6MDo