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Beyond Contemporary Linguistics One reason the fruits of Chomsky's research did not even seem to belong to the field of linguistics was that Chomsky was still reading widely and finding some unexpected insights in the realm of, for example, philosophy: "Recall that in those days, one wasn't supposed to read anything before the late Carnap, and that was read only to refute. There were exceptions for Frege and Russell, but limited ones. And there had been guys named Hume and Locke, but one didn't read them, just quoted falsehoods one had learned in graduate school. For Harris, none of this had any interest either, as far as I know" (13 Dec. 1994). Discussing linguistics and philosophy in Chomsky's work, Otero names German-born philosopher Rudolf Carnap as "the best known representative of the group of logical positivists'"; he was to have "a direct and decisive influence on Chomsky's teachers," and was "the only non-American philosopher Chomsky read as a student" ("Chomsky and the Rationalist" 3). Carnap was deeply influenced by the work of Bertrand Russell, and made careful studies of Frege, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein, who were models for Chomsky, as well.

Wittgenstein Frege Chomsky, Cognitivism and Carnap

Just as his early readings in anarchism had led to revelations in the political domain, the readings Chomsky now undertook gave him a fresh perspective that his teacher Nelson Goodman considered to be "completely mad." When Goodman found out about Chomsky's work in the mid-1960s, he apparently ended their friendship, even though, as Chomsky says, they'd "been quite good friends until he learned about this, which he regarded somehow as a personal betrayal" (31 Mar. 1995).His thesis supervisor, Zellig Harris, considered this approach "a private hobby"; he "never paid the slightest attention to [it] and probably thought [it] was crazy" (13 Dec. 1994). The one person who did pay attention to this early work was the Israeli logician Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, a colleague of Carnap's and a good friend of Chomsky's from 1951 onwards. Bar-Hillel was possibly the only one to have read Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew closely at this time. He suggested changes that Chomsky integrated into the work. Writes Chomsky, "We had very different views on many things, even some controversy in print, but were always extremely close, even on politics." He further recalls that Bar-Hillel was "one of the first people in Israel to publicly speak up for the civil and human rights of Arabs and to oppose the creeping annexation after 1967." Interestingly, Bar-Hillel's work on this subject is rarely mentioned. Chomsky's explanation for this follows a by-now-familiar line: "He'd be well-known to activists in Israel (many of whom were his students, or influenced by him). But he was only a serious, intelligent, dedicated and honourable person with an important and influential role, not a `public intellectual,' so he is unknown. These are again the kinds of facts that never make it [into] intellectual history" (31 Mar. 1995).

Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague

Another professor at the University of Pennsylvania who read Chomsky's B.A. thesis when Chomsky was still an undergraduate was Henry Hoenigswald, "a very good scholar of historical linguistics who also knew the Indic tradition, and was a committed Harrisian structuralist, also knowledgeable in European structuralism" (31 Mar. 1995). Hoenigswald ­ and Harris, as well ­ likely knew that there existed another example of generative grammar (albeit a less detailed one than Chomsky's 1948 thesis work, and limited to the phonological level) that had preceded Chomsky's by roughly eight years. It was called "Menomini Morphophonemics," and was published by American linguist Leonard Bloomfield in the Czech Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague in 1939. It is remarkable, in Chomsky's view, that neither Hoenigswald nor Harris revealed the existence of this text to his student. "Menomini Morphophonemics" is an extraordinary text, completely inconsistent with Bloomfield's other writings about language and how research in the area should be done. This, Chomsky believes, was one of the reasons Bloomfield decided to publish it in Europe. Hoenigswald and Harris were very close to Bloomfield, and certainly knew his work. But neither of them mentioned to their only undergraduate student that he was rediscovering, more or less, what Bloomfield had just done eight years before. It's not surprising in Harris's case, because he didn't know what I was doing. But Hoenigswald read it, and must have recognized the similarities, back to classical India. I learned nothing of this until the 1960s, when Morris Halle found out about Bloomfield's work. (31 Mar. 1995)