Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media Page #2

reflects deep-seated features

of human creativity,

which separate human beings

from any other biological system we know.

Tonight, scientists talk to the animals.

But are they talking back?

The Journal with Barbara Frum

and Mary Lou Finlay.

Communicating with animals

is a serious scientific pursuit.

This is Nim Chimpsky.

Nim, jokingly named ater

the great linguist Noam Chomsky,

was the great hope of animal communication

in the 1970s.

For four years Pettito and others coached him

in sign language,

but in the end they decided it was a lost cause.

Nim could ask for things, but not much more.

I would have loved

to have a conversation with Nim

and understand how he looked at the universe.

He failed to communicate that information to

me, and we gave him every opportunity.

Noam Chomsky,

theorist of language and political activist,

has had an extraordinary career.

I can think of none like it in recent American

history and few anywhere any time.

He has literally transformed

the subject of linguistics.

He also has become one of the most consistent

critics of power politics in all its protean guises.

Scholar and propagandist, his two careers

apparently reinforce each other.

In 1957, he published his Syntactic Structures,

which began what has frequently been called

the Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics.

Like a latter-day Copernicus,

Chomsky proposed a radically new way

of looking at the theory of grammar.

Chomsky worked out the formal rules

of the universal grammar

which had generated the specific rules

of actual or natural languages.

The general approach I'm taking seems to me

rather simple minded and unsophisticated,

but, nevertheless, correct.

Later he came to argue that such systems

are innate features of human beings.

They belong to the characteristics

of the species

and have been, in effect, programmed

into the genetic equipment of the mind

like the machine language in a computer.

One needn't be interested in this question.

Of course, I am interested in it.

The interesting question from this point of view

is what is the nature of the initial state?

That is, what is human nature in this respect?

That in turn explains the...

...astonishing.

Try the next one.

Fa-cki-li-ty

- Facility.

- Facility.

That in turn explains the

astonishing facility children have

in learning the rules of natural language,

no matter how complicated, incredibly quickly,

from what are imperfect

and oten degenerate samples.

- Compli...

- Complicated.

It's a complicated word.

Do you know what "complicated" means?

It means it's complicated.

If in fact our minds were a blank slate

Rate this script:3.0 / 1 vote