Illustration by Mackenzie Herring
On April 13, Lewis & Clark students huddled around their computer screens to listen to American linguist Noam Chomsky at a virtual event hosted by LC’s Psychology Club.
The event was relevant to psychology due to his work in the cognitive revolution. However, Chomsky is also known for criticizing U.S. foreign policy and neoliberalism, formulating his mass media propaganda model and contributing to many philosophical fields.
Psychology Club President Andrew Steinberg ’21 organized the event which consisted of an open-ended discussion and a live Q&A session. Steinberg’s ambition to find different opportunities for the Psychology Club during the COVID-19 pandemic led him to reach out to Chomsky.
“I am really trying to search for little nuggets of opportunity during these challenging times,” Steinberg said. “It ended up being an amazing opportunity because we have some awesome speakers that we would never have otherwise. I bet there’s no way someone like Chomsky would fly down to Portland to speak in person given how busy he is and that we don’t have any common connections.”
Since this was a Psychology Club-sponsored event, club leaders and psychology department faculty agreed that ideal questions would revolve around Chomsky’s work as a linguistics professor and cognitive scientist. However, attendees were not prohibited from asking questions about politics, social issues or anything else relevant to Chomsky’s work.
The event was open to all LC students and faculty. Many event attendees had prior knowledge about Chomsky and his work. Event attendee Ismael Jaramillo ’24, however, recently discovered Chomsky and was inspired by his political views.
“I saw the posters and then my friends told me to come,” Jaramillo said. “I thought it was weird that the Chom would speak at our school because he seemed too cool. I admired his politics mainly, and his power dynamics in our society.”
Roughly 100 people attended the hour-long event and asked Chomsky questions ranging from the rise of nationalism and its consequences to his views on spirituality and how to make change in the world. One attendee named Fernando asked Chomsky about social media’s proliferation and the fast-paced distribution of ideas and information and its impact on working-class and other popular movements.
“Let’s say you get your news from Facebook. What are you reading on Facebook?” Chomsky said. “Well, you are reading an edited version of what showed up in the national media. What shows up in the national media is often a framed, shaped version of what is actually happening in the world. You are getting a watered-down version of that with more editorial.”
In the realm of psychology, Chomsky is known for his role in the paradigm shift called the cognitive revolution. Its goal was to apply the scientific method to the study of human cognition and eventually paved the way for cognitive science. Chomsky’s main influence is linguistic universalism. This is the concept that there is a shared underlying grammar structure for all world languages hardwired in the human brain, which Chomsky calls universal grammar.
“The nature of cognitive science is shifting due to the acceleration of technology in the last few decades,” Steinberg said. “He has lots of contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence as well. A lot of really exciting, futuristic prospects are relevant to a lot of his research on linguistics.”
Besides politics, attendees had questions about Chomsky’s contributions to the field of computer science and its prospects for the future. He influenced the theory of formal languages and created the hierarchy of grammars, better known as the Chomsky hierarchy.
Another attendee asked Chomsky about how his research into human language acquisition informs his views on the future of AI and natural language processing.
Chomsky responded by addressing the two versions of AI: cognitive science and brute force. He made the argument that AI is used to accomplish some goal or task, also known as the achievement of AI. Chomsky said it is “as interesting as a bulldozer cleaning the street” and “that it teaches nothing about anything.”
Despite his fame and prestige, Steinburg views Chomsky as an accessible figure because he spends a lot of his time answering his email and hosting events. This makes him approachable to smaller institutions like LC, according to Steinberg, who was able to contact Chomsky via email.
“He doesn’t exclusively speak with massive institutions, which I thought how could I possibly not reach out and ask him. It felt like a perfect opportunity,” Steinberg said. “I have been such a big fan of his work for years and this is one of the most exciting things that I have never had the chance to do.”
Chomsky’s prominence is what excited Steinberg the most.
“The best part for me was seeing how genuinely stoked people were about the event,” Steinberg said. “Chomsky is one of the most cited scholars of all time, and was even the most cited scholar alive at one point in history.”
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