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A Place of His Own
In the meantime, Chomsky's unconventional graduate education continued. Due to the efforts made on his behalf by Nelson Goodman and others, Chomsky was, in 1951, named to the Society of Fellows at Harvard. One might imagine that despite the intellectual promise such a position must have held for him, a person with Chomsky's social background and views on education would have experienced feelings of revulsion at the thought of entering such an institution. Chomsky does, in fact, relate a humorous anecdote about this: I grew up in a lower-middle class urban environment without any particular social graces, and when I went to Harvard as a graduate student in the early 1950s, in a special high-class research outfit that had all sorts of prestigious elite people, I discovered that a large part of the education was simply refinement, social graces, what kinds of clothes to wear, how to have polite conversation that isn't too serious, all the other things that an intellectual is supposed to do. I remember a couple of years later asking a distinguished English professor from Oxford, which was the model that this organization was attempting to imitate, how he thought that Harvard's imitation compared with Oxford's original. He thought for a while and he said that he thought it was the difference between genuine superficiality and phoney superficiality. We only had phoney superficiality, while they had genuine superficiality. This is a large part of what is called education. And it is teaching conformity to certain norms that keeps you from interfering with people in power and all sorts of other things. ("Creation")Upon arriving in Cambridge, Chomsky discovered which intellectual trends ruled the day, and the disquiet this discovery filled him with would later contribute to his critiques of behaviorism. He was, however, also very happy to learn that at Harvard he would be able, for the first time in his life, to devote himself entirely to study and research. The stipend that accompanied his position meant that he no longer had to support himself with nonacademic jobs. In the early 1950s, debate was raging over the breakthroughs that new technology was promising in the understanding of human behavior. Computers, electronics, acoustics, mathematical theories of communication and cybernetics were all in vogue, and researchers were busy exploiting them. Chomsky, a graduate student in his early twenties, was uneasy with this activity: "Some people, myself included, were rather concerned about these developments, in part for political reasons, at least as far as my motivations were concerned because this whole complex of ideas seemed linked to potentially quite dangerous political currents: manipulative, and connected with behaviorist concepts of human nature" (Language and Politics 44). He had no way of confirming his suspicions about this type of research. Instead, he began to pursue what he thought of as hobbies; these were, specifically, concerted attempts to rethink the nature of human language in ways that would refute behaviorist currents. Two years later, it dawned on him that this work was far more promising than the research being conducted in the academy. "[O]nly about 1953 did I realize that the hobby was on the right track, and the whole structuralist approach, including everything I had thought was the real stuff, was beside the point in fact, pretty worthless, to be honest" (13 Dec. 1994). On the heels of this realization (which occurred while he was en route to Europe by boat and "desperately seasic"'), the twenty-five-year-old Chomsky broke "almost entirely from the field as it existed" (3 Apr. 1995). It was a dramatic break, and one that he has never regretted. In some of his later work (Syntactic Structures and Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory), Chomsky even insists that linguists should abandon their hopeless quest for discovery procedures (that is, structural linguistics), "at least insofar," he has remarked in a letter, "as it [goes] beyond parts of phonology and ha[s] theoretical aspirations"; they should instead shoulder the "more modest task of finding evaluation procedures" (as he did for the first time in Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew). "The methods they were proposing could not possibly lead to evaluation procedures, a concept unknown to structural linguistics and remote in conception from it, at a very fundamental level; it assumes a realist rather than operationalist stand, for one thing. The `principles and parameters' approach did make it possible to reconstitute something like `discovery procedures,' but now in a framework so radically different that comparison is meaningless" (31 Mar. 1995). During this period, Chomsky not only deepened his commitment to linguistic studies but also continued to work in related fields. He was making contact with a great number of influential Cambridge-area teachers and students, including Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, Peter Elias, Anatol Holt, Eric Lenneberg, Israel Scheffler, W. V. O. Quine, and Roman Jakobson. Chomsky and Jakobson, one of the founders of the formalist approach to literary criticism, met at Harvard in 1951. Although they differed profoundly in approach (Chomsky says that Jakobson "hadn't the faintest interest or understanding of anything I was doing" [13 Dec. 1994], they became friends and remained so until Jakobson's death. Chomsky's closest friend was fellow student Morris Halle, at the time one of Jakobson's "main" students (and a researcher at the MIT electronics laboratory). Quine is frequently mentioned in discussions of Chomsky's philosophical work, because Chomsky eventually renounced Quine's dispositions on the acquisition of knowledge of language: [I]t took Chomsky several years to come to the realization that no inductive process ever proposed could lead from the kind of data that are available to the child to principles of the abstraction required in the theory of language, which can only mean that these principles are not determined by the data by anything resembling induction, a conclusion which is in sharp contrast with Quine's view that "the philosophy of inductive logic" is "in no way distinguishable from philosophy's main stem, the theory of knowledge," as he puts it in the opening lines of his Philosophy of Logic. (Otero, "Chomsky and the Rationalist" 4) |
