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Birth
Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 7 December 1928. "His parents were Hebrew scholars, and Chomsky and his younger brother were steeped in Jewish culture and tradition." “Noam Chomsky.” Biography, GoodTherapy, 7 June 2015, https://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/noam-chomsky.html. -
Plato's Problem
Plato perceived how humans knew what they knew, based upon their experience. Chomsky believed that Plato's Problem was that children can often times complete full complex sentences by the age of four, if not younger. Goettel Last Modified Date: February 01, Diane. “What Is Plato's Problem?” Info Bloom, 1 Feb. 2022, https://www.infobloom.com/what-is-platos-problem.htm. -
Solving Plato's Problem
Chomsky believed that kids had far more knowledge than what experience could account for at such a young age. Children would have not had the ability to pick up so much in terms of grammar and other subtleties such as verbal pauses, based on experience alone. McGilvray, James Alasdair. The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. Cambridge University Press, 2017. -
Father of Modern Linguistics
Most of language is not actually "taught" but instead picked up on based on immersion. There is not enough outside of greetings and good-byes that are repetitive enough to explain the language comprehension that children have at such a young age. https://youtu.be/E3U6MsdBalg Chomsky, Noam. “The Language Capacity: Architecture and Evolution.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 1, 2016, pp. 200–203., https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1078-6.