Marc Estrin

Arnold’s private interview was originally preceded by his taking a few of the great man’s linguistics classes at MIT. Language, after all, is one of the chief themes of the book. But again, recording the class itself, though interesting, seemed a diversion developing Arnold‘s story. But if you ever wanted to know what a Chomsky class is like, here is an episode, researched from student notes and books on Chomsky.

CHOMSKY’S CLASS

Noam Chomsky was was Job’s whirlwind of political activism. He spawned it -- as faculty advisor for several student groups at both MIT and Harvard. He invited ostracism and dismissal by public calls for universities involved in war efforts to establish “Departments of Death.” He courted prison by actively organizing support for war resisters, and for refusing to pay half his taxes. He was giving many political talks a day, getting arrested for civil disobedience, going to meetings about resistance of all kinds, teaching his classes, supervising doctoral candidates, and doing linguistics-shattering research. He was a living archive of the world press, searchable and full-text. “I subscribe to everything,” he mentioned to his class. “I have no time to get to the library.” In 1969, at the age of 41, he was a tenured professor of Foreign Language and Linguistics at one of the most prestigious institutions of the land. Unlike many leftists of his generation, Chomsky had never flirted with Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, or Maoism, never embraced movements or organizations later revealed as totalitarian or oppressive. He was an anarchist of the Age of Enlightenment, laboring mightly in the deep conviction that authentic information made publicly available would lead to universal freedom. Thus, he was everywhere shunned by the media. Arnold felt privileged to hear his heresies.

Though he had three other courses -- French, Black Literature, and Sociology -- his experience with Chomsky dominated the fall semester, not with elation, but with frustration: he who had come to pray remained, if not quite to scoff, at least to be profoundly disappointed at the limits arbitrarily imposed. He wasn’t expecting firebrand agitation; there was enough of that on his own campus, and when Chomsky put up a firewall between his linguistic work and his politics, Arnold felt relieved that there would be more time for matters semantic. He knew, he thought, why he was there.

The opening class was exciting. The first thing Arnold noticed in the large lecture hall 26-100 (unlike Harvard’s Wadsworths and Emersons, MIT’s buildings are named after numbers), was a poster about participatory democracy:

I participate

Thou participatest

He participates

We participate

You participate

They profit.

Good, he thought. Perfect transition. A detergent molecule with one end in language, the other in politics. This will be rich. 

Chomsky entered to foot-stomping and applause, and took his place at the lecturn. As usual, he carried no notes. To situate his course in the history of philosophy -- itself a signficant move in a linguistics class -- he enunciated three core problems concerning knowledge:

-- Plato’s Problem: How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief, personal and limited, are able to know as much as they do know?

-- Orwell’s Problem: How is it that human beings know so little given the vast amount of information to which they have access?

-- Descartes’ Problem: How can we account for the many “mysteries for humans,” or even determine what lies beyond epistemic bounds?

A force triangle, tensely restraining the human condition.

Language, he asserted, was the common thread through all three levels. He tantalizingly described the Turing Test: how might a blinded observer distinguish between a human and a machine submitting written answers to his questions? Contra Turing, he asserted that language, in its essential properties and the manner of its use, carries the only real criterion for determining that another organism is a being with a human mind, with a unique human capacity for free thought and self-expression, and an essential need for freedom from the constraints of repressive authority. A neat theorem, thought Arnold, still unproven. What would Turing think of Hal? But I’ll be patient.

Linguistics was the science of language, Chomsky said, and spoke of his personal contribution: the investigation of language as a springboard for the investigation of other problems of human nature. To proceed, he would ask three methodological questions:

1. What do we know when we are able to speak and understand a language?

2. How is this language acquired?

3. How do we use this knowledge?

It was the third question that interested Arnold most. 

To question one, the answer would be descriptive; the greater part of the course would consist of such descriptive material for the simple reason that it was only this aspect that was reasonably well understood. Together, the class would describe how particular languages assign mental representations to determine forms and meanings of linguistic expressions. Next, they would try to construct a theory of universal grammar, of the fixed and invariant principles that constitute the human language faculty.

The second question was not unimportant, Chomsky said, for humanity is marked by the capacity of even a young child to derive structural regularities and grammatical rules from the utterances of their parents and others, and then to make use of them in constructing utterances they have never heard before. Thus the process of language acquisition sets into motion that freedom-in-constraint which is the intuitive goal of intellectual and social structure. 

The third question of how people who have acquired a language put their knowledge to use in understanding and expression would be the focus of the class’ independent projects, while a potential fourth question -- What are the physical mechanisms involved in the representation, acquisition and the use of this knowledge? -- would be left to classes in neurophysiology. It would seem that Arnold would have little help with his particular interest -- at least from the lectern. 

He would strongly separate his politics from his linguistics. The word “Vietnam” would never be spoken in 26-100. There was a connection, but it was this and only this: “The study of language can provide some glimmerings of understanding of rule-governed behavior, and the possibilities for free and creative action within the framework of a system of rules that in part, at least, reflect intrinsic properties of human mental organization. Conceivably, we might in this manner develop a social science based on empirically well-founded propositions concerning human nature, and thus contribute to a humanistic social science that will serve as an instrument for social action. We might look forward to a day when theoretical inquiry like ours will provide a firm guide to the unending, often grim, but never hopeless, struggle for freedom and social justice in the face of an intolerable, antihuman, predatory capitalism. But not in this class. This class is about language. You will not hear the word capitalism again. Those of you who find this stricture suffocating should find something more to your taste. I’ll take any questions now.”

There were none. Chomsky did not over-interpret this overawed timidity. “If there are no questions, I’ll see you on Wednesday. We’ll talk more then.”

Arnold’s concerns about the course content were heightened by the second class. He suspected he had made a mistake in registering. “A deductive theory of the structure of human language that is at once sufficiently general to apply to all possible languages, and not so general that it would also be applicable to other systems of communication or anthing else that we should not wish to call languages” was interesting -- abstractly -- but would it tell him what he wanted to know? Possibly. If the inquiry was aimed at the deep mechanisms of the human mind, something useful might develop. He would not drop the course. Besides, the thrice-weekly jog along the river was bracing. 

Still, spending three classes on analysing “The man hit the ball” did not seem the best use of his time. Devising complex transformative strategies to yield “The ball may have been hit by the man” felt like barking up the wrong tree.. The question for Friday, October 10, 1969 was “Why is 'John was reading a book’ more natural than ‘A book was being read by John’”? Good question -- but not his. At mid-semester he made an appointment to sit down with Chomsky in his office.