Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher and political writer, born in Philadelphia in 1928, who is often called the father of modern linguistics. He taught at MIT from 1955, where he is now Institute Professor Emeritus, and he is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona. His books include Syntactic Structures and, with Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent.
Brian Rose interviewed Chomsky once on London Real, in a conversation first broadcast in June 2020 and re-released in April 2022. They talked about freedom of speech in the digital era, the First Amendment, self-censorship, the power of governments and private companies, and language as the thing that makes us human.
The interview is listed below with a short summary, along with the ideas he is best known for.
How to Protect Your Freedom of Speech (first broadcast June 2020). His only London Real interview: Chomsky on free speech, censorship and self-censorship, and what language tells us about being human.
The interview centres on free speech at a time when much public conversation takes place on platforms run by private companies. Chomsky discussed the First Amendment, whether free speech protections should be extended, and whether people censor themselves more today.
Speaking in 2020, Chomsky said people should always honour and fight for their rights. He also talked about the protests of that summer and the political awareness he saw developing from them.
Brian Rose put to him the idea, associated with Elon Musk, that language is a low-bandwidth, archaic technology. Chomsky, whose life’s work is the study of language, discussed why he sees language as central to human thought and to what separates humans from other species.
Outside London Real, Chomsky is best known in politics for Manufacturing Consent, written with Edward S. Herman. In it they argue that mainstream news is shaped by a set of filters, such as ownership and advertising, that narrow what gets reported, even where there is no official censorship.
In linguistics, Chomsky argues that the capacity for language is innate and that all human languages share an underlying structure. His work on transformational grammar and the Chomsky hierarchy influenced linguistics, psychology, philosophy and computer science.
Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher and political writer, born in Philadelphia in 1928. He taught at MIT from 1955 and is often called the father of modern linguistics. He has also written widely on US foreign policy, the media and power.
He talked with Brian Rose about freedom of speech in the digital era, the First Amendment, self-censorship, the changing roles of governments and private companies, the protests of 2020, and why language is central to being human.
Once. The interview was first broadcast in June 2020 and London Real re-released the same conversation in April 2022 under the same title.
There is one interview: How to Protect Your Freedom of Speech, first broadcast in June 2020. It runs for about 46 minutes.
Manufacturing Consent, written by Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in 1988, sets out their propaganda model of the news media. They argue that ownership, advertising, reliance on official sources and other filters shape what mainstream outlets report.
His 1957 book Syntactic Structures and his later work on generative grammar changed how linguists study language. He argues that humans are born with a capacity for language and that all languages share a common underlying structure.
Official site: chomsky.info
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