{ "item_title" : "Noam Chomsky", "item_author" : [" Josh Graham "], "item_description" : "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. The sentence means nothing - yet say it aloud beside the same five words in reverse, and only one of them is still a sentence. You know which one. You could not say how you know. Noam Chomsky spent seventy years on that question.His answer was that human beings come equipped with a capacity for language that belongs to their biology. He made the claim as a young man with few publications, trained in linguistics, philosophy and mathematics rather than psychology, and within a decade both linguistics and psychology were arguing on his terms. His review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior was still being answered in print eleven years later. The psychologist George Miller dated the beginning of cognitive science to a single day in September 1956 on which Chomsky was one of the speakers. And students of computing still learn his classification of grammars as the Chomsky hierarchy.Then came a second career, which for much of the world became the better known of the two. He refused to pay half his income tax in protest at the Vietnam War, was arrested at the Pentagon, and appeared on the list of political opponents drawn up in Richard Nixon's White House. With Edward S. Herman he wrote an account of how news media come to serve powerful interests without anyone having to give them orders.Neither career is simple to admire, and this book does not pretend otherwise. It sets his ideas beside the evidence that tested them: researchers who watched how children actually learn, fieldwork on a language of the Brazilian Amazon, and machines that learned fluent English from text alone. It sets his political writing beside the charges it drew over Cambodia, Bosnia and a Holocaust denier's freedom to publish. And it reports the released documents about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein as far as the records go, and no further.This is a gateway book: a few hours' reading that carries you from a nonsense sentence to the argument still running in nurseries and data centres today. It closes with a timeline, a glossary of his terms, discussion questions and a guided reading list, so you can go further wherever you want to.Inside: The nonsense sentence that proves you know more than you can sayA Hebrew scholar's house, a Deweyite school, and a boy who travelled alone to New York's anarchist bookshopsZellig Harris, a manuscript that waited twenty years for a publisher, and a job Chomsky told his employer made no senseUniversal grammar and the poverty of the stimulus: why children know more than they were taughtDeep structure, principles and parameters, Merge - and why he kept dismantling his own machineryThe Skinner review: what it achieved, and what it has been credited with that it never didVietnam, the Nixon list, and a televised argument with Michel Foucault about human natureManufacturing Consent and the propaganda model: what it predicted, and what it did notThe critics in their strongest form: how children actually learn, the Pirahdispute, and the machines that writeCambodia, Faurisson, Srebrenica and the Epstein files: what the documents establish, and what is still openFour questions to carry into a world of fluent machines and managed news Beneath the arguments lies the thing he pointed at. Every day, in every community on earth, small children produce sentences no one has said to them, and the adults around them understand without noticing that anything remarkable has happened. You did it yourself, before you were old enough to remember it.Part of Pioneers of Human Behaviour - gateway books on the minds that shaped us.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/817/798/9798177984032_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "12.99", "online_price" : "12.99", "our_price" : "12.99", "club_price" : "12.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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