Language and Responsibility - Noam Chomsky

   1975; 192 pages.  New Author? : No.  Interviewer: Mitsou Ronat.  Genres : Linguistics; Interviews; Language.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

 

    Hey, let’s read a book about Linguistics, the study of Languages.  I know the difference between an etymologist and an entomologist, and do crossword puzzles, so how difficult can it be?

 

    And I’m not messing around with any third-rate vocabularian (yeah, that’s a real word; it’s just very uncommon); I’m going to read something by the grammar guru himself, Noam Chomsky.  He’s written more than 50 books about Linguistics over the course of 60+ years.  I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.

 

    Besides, how difficult can a study of languages be?  You just look up the history of a bunch of words, assemble them into a coherent system, and voila!  You’ve got yourself a book on linguistics, amiright?  Let’s open one of Chomsky’s books, Language and Responsibility, and see what jumps out at us.

 

    Omigosh!  What the heck is Syntactic Structure??

 

What’s To Like...

    Language and Responsibility is divided into nine sections, plus an introductory “Translator’s Note” (see the end of this review).  The sections are:

    01. Politics

    02. Linguistics and the Human Sciences

    03. A Philosophy of Language

    04. Empiricism and Rationalism

    05. The Birth of Generative Grammar

    06. Semantics

    07. The Extended Standard Theory

    08. Deep Structure

    09. Universal Grammar and Unresolved Questions

My favorite chapters are highlighted in blue.  Yours may vary.

 

    The book is mostly formatted as several interviews by Mitsou Ronat, posing questions to Noam Chomsky, but frankly, it felt scripted to me.  That’s okay though, the other book I’ve read of Chomsky’s, reviewed here, was in the same format, so maybe this is the style that Noam is most comfortable with.

 

      The vocabulary is challenging.  I struggled to understand terms such as Syntactic Structures, Phonological, Generative Grammar, Anaphoric Relations, Logical Form, Deep Structures, Generative Semantics, and Sociolinguistics, just to name a few.  To be fair though, my Spellchecker app took a look at that list, and said it was familiar with all of them.

 

    As you’d expect in a scholarly presentation, there are a bunch of footnotes.  The numerical ones reference the cited writings and can be ignored unless you want to find and read the original papers.  The alphabetic ones give further discussion of the topic, and/or the translating challenges encountered.  Those are definitely worth your time.

 

    I enjoyed learning the history of universities gradually adding Linguistics graduate classes to their curriculum.  Noam Chomsky apparently was a key catalyst in that endeavor.  The “Politics” chapter might seem to be off-topic, but it gives readers new to Noam Chomsky a glimpse at what to expect in his many books on that subject.  And it was fun to see just how much debate can be generated in trying to understand the “Deep” in the phrase “Deep Structures”.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 307 ratings and 28 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.81/5 based on 1,074 ratings and 60 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Noam Chomsky: These empiricist hypotheses have very little plausibility, in my opinion, it does not seem possible to account for the development of commonsense understanding of the physical and social world, or science, in terms of processes of induction, generalization, abstraction, and so on.  There is no such direct path from data that are given to intelligible theories.  (pg. 69)

 

    Noam Chomsky: Many structural languages and many philosophers—Quine, for example—claimed that grammar concepts must be defined on the basis of scientific notions.  For example, that the concept of phoneme must be defined in terms of synonymy . . .

    Mitsou Ronat:  Which means saying that r and l are different phonemes because ramp and lamp don’t have the same meaning . . .

    Noam Chomsky: Yes, that’s one example.  (pg. 136)

 

Kindle Details…

    Language and Responsibility is half of a two-book Kindle bundle titled On Language, which Amazon describes as “some of Noam Chomsky’s most informal and highly accessible work.”  I will read and review each book separately.  The e-book bundle costs $14.99 right now.  ANAICT Language and Responsibility is not available separately in e-book format, so the Ratings given above are for the bundle.

 

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.  (pg. 137)

   Needless to say, there aren’t any cusswords or R-rated stuff in Language and Responsibility.  There were a number of typos, mostly involving spacing or punctuation, but these looked like they occurred at the Publishing stage.

 

    I found the writing style somewhat vague.  Time and again Chomsky expresses his disagreement with tenets put forth by other linguists.  That’s okay, but he doesn’t provide any specifics, and, like most readers, I’m not familiar with the other linguists’ work and am not motivated to read their treatises just to confirm Chomsky’s critiques.

 

    But the big problem I had with the book was its rationales, and it is best exemplified by noting a phrase which occurs ten times in the text: “a priori”.  Which means, and I quote, “knowledge, reasoning, or assumptions formed independently of experience, observation, or experimentation. It relies on logic, deduction, and intuition to determine truths before investigating the facts”.

 

    In other words, conclusions are presented as valid without any examples or facts needed, as long as you can formulate a logical argument.  Noam Chomsky has a low regard for Empiricism.  See the first excerpt, above, for proof of this.  I’m a scientist by trade, which means I’m an empiricist, which means I have a high esteem of empiricism.

 

    Despite those drawbacks, I liked Language and Responsibility.  I’ve read and enjoyed several books about the history of the English language, but the truth is I know little or nothing about the mechanics of Linguistics.  I’m hoping I just picked the wrong Noam Chomsky book to start with, as I have two more sitting on my Kindle.

 

    6 Stars.  One last thing.  The book’s “Introduction” section notes that the text was subjected to two translations.  It started in English (1976), was translated into French (1977), and then for whatever reason was translated back into English (1979).  You’d think that means the text ended up back in its original form, but apparently that wasn’t the case.  Sheesh.

How The World Works - Noam Chomsky

   2011; 314 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Interviewer: David Barsamian.  Editor: Arthur Naiman.  Genres : Political Science; History; Democracy; Interviews.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

   The United States of America.  Land of the free, Home of the brave.  A shining example of a successful democracy, although some nitpickers will tell you that we’re technically a republic.

 

    We've been taught that our purpose in life is to show the rest of the world that they too can be as wonderful as we are.  With liberty for all, and the freedom to choose whatever leaders they think will best govern their nation.  Ok, brave new world, that has such a nation as the USA in it!

 

    But what if the stuff we were taught in our US History and High School Civics classes is a bunch of hooey?  What if we actually live in a country where a powerful few control the government and its policies, and what we think of as a free election is really just a choice between two candidates both of whom will do whatever those powerful few tell them to and the heck with the opinions of the rest of us?

 

    Nah, that’s silly.  That’s something only the wacko conspiracy nuts would dream up.  We’d surely know if we, “the 98%”, were being duped, right?

 

    Noam Chomsky begs to differ.  He says we’re being brainwashed.  And that we don’t have any idea of how the world works.

 

What’s To Like...

    How The World Works is a 2011 compilation of four of Noam Chomsky’s earlier “short political books”.  They are:

        What Uncle Sam Really Wants  (1992)

        The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many  (1993)

        Secrets, Lies and Democracy  (1994)

        The Common Good  (1998)

    The text of How The World Works is only 314 pages long, which gives you some idea of how short those four individual books are.

 

    Noam Chomsky identifies himself as an “anarcho-syndicalist” and a “libertarian-socialist”.  Wikipedia has pages for both those labels, the links are here and here.  I found his views to be a curious mix of both left-wing and right-wing radical politics.

 

    On one hand, he’s convinced the world is being run by the IMF (International Monetary Fund), which has been a far-right pet theme since way back in their "John Birch" era.  Chomsky also has low opinions of both John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, much preferring the politics of Ross Perot.  On the other hand, he’s a staunch supporter of labor unions, the working class, and the Third World, and is unabashedly anti-imperialist.  These are all left-leaning positions.

 

    The text is mostly taken from a series of interviews done in the 1990’s (plus several of essays, I gather), which were then edited, abridged, and clarified to make them more reader-friendly.  “Clarified” doesn’t mean “altered”; it means things like when the text reads “President Bush”, it gets changed to “[first] President Bush]”.  Some of the questions sound like Noam Chomsky penned them beforehand and gave them to the interviewer, but that’s okay.

 

    Some of the topics are unavoidably a bit outdated at times – things like Nicaragua, Chile, the Cold War.  Even "SNCC", an acronym that anyone under the age of 50 probably won’t recognize, gets a brief mention.  I was surprised to see that the PBS channel gets criticized by the author, but delighted to “meet” Amilcar Cabral, a Guinean anti-colonialist with (essentially) the same name as this blog’s writer.

 

    I didn’t agree with all of Noam Chomsky’s opinions, such as his take on the Gulf War precipitated by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.  He’s also very much anti-Israel when it comes to the issue of Palestine.  I am not pro-Israel either, but Chomsky’s view makes it a black-or-white issue, and the Middle East situation is certainly a lot more complex than that.

 

    Still, it was fun to fact-check him via Wikipedia, and without a doubt, this book will give any reader a lot to think about.  There are enough historical examples of the US allying with despots to quell freedom movements (Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua), to prove that the “American history” we are fed in school has been thoroughly whitewashed.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 604 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.15/5 based on 3,209 ratings and 274 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice.  The same is true of El Salvador.  But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars.

    There’s a reason for that.  The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example.  If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, “Why not us?”  (loc. 400)

 

    Statistics about things like the quality of life, infant mortality, life expectancy, etc. are usually broken down by race.  It always turns out that blacks have horrible statistics as compared with whites.

    But an interesting study was done by Vicente Navarro, a professor at Johns Hopkins who works on public health issues.  He decided to reanalyze the statistics, separating out the factors of race and class.  For example, he looked at white workers and black workers versus white executives and black executives.  He discovered that much of the difference between blacks and whites was actually a class difference.  If you look at poor white workers and white executives, the gap between them is enormous.  (loc. 2146)

 

The problem with real democracies is that they’re likely to fall prey to the heresy that government should respond to the needs of their own population, instead of those of US investors.  (loc. 370)

    There are some quibbles.  From least important to most:

 

    There’s a 20-page Index in the back of the e-book, which would be really handy if you wanted to revisit a topic and/or quote from the book.  Unfortunately, there are no page numbers listed, and no links, rendering it essentially useless.

 

    There’s a lot of repetition and overlap.  But that’s to be expected since How The World Works is really just a four earlier books by the author squashed together.  What Noam Chomsky has to say about, say, China in a 1992 interview is not going change much when he's asked about it in a 1993 interview.

 

    Similarly, there’s not a lot of actual facts and references to substantiate the author’s claims of skullduggery.  He’ll mention that he read some book at some point in the past, which supports the point he’s trying to make, but he provides no direct quotes from it.  However, since most of the text is from an interview he's giving, that’s not surprising.  I expect someone writing a book to back up his allegations with hard facts, but I don’t expect someone giving a speech or an interview to do so.

 

    Overall, How The World Works gave me lots to think about but not much documentation to support its controversial assertions.  Perhaps some of Noam Chomsky’s other political science books do.  He’s written and published about a hundred such tomes.

 

    7½ Stars.  Noam Chomsky has also written 50+ books on Linguistics, several of which reside on my Kindle.  I'm leaning towards tackling one of those next.