Indeed, from 1965, he threw himself into political activism, campaigning tirelessly against the Vietnam War.Īt one point, Chomsky considered resigning from MIT, which he said was “more than any other university associated with the activities of the Department of ‘Defense’.” But MIT had been always very supportive of his linguistic research, enabling him to become the most influential linguist of his generation. What we can say is that from then on, Chomsky never again worked directly on a military project. Barbara Partee hints that such uselessness may have been intentional – an instance of “benign subversion of the military-industrial complex.” Clearly, notions of that kind may have helped soothe her and her colleagues’ consciences. In the end, the Air Force never succeeded in making Chomsky’s theories work. According to her testimony, the head of the project, Donald Walker, convinced the military to hire Chomsky’s students on the basis that “in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.” She has confirmed to me that Chomsky was involved until at least 1965. One of Chomsky’s students working on this Air Force-sponsored project was Barbara Partee.
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Keyser illustrated his article with “aircraft”, “missile” and similar words plus sample sentences such as “The bomber the fighter attacked landed safely.” In a 1965 article, another Air Force officer, Jay Keyser, expressed his hope that the military’s artificial computer languages might be replaced by an English command and control language based on Chomsky’s ground-breaking theories. Much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop … languages for computer operations in military command and control systems. The military’s direct interest in Chomsky is recalled by former Air Force Colonel Anthony Debons, writing in 1971: But I have recently come across restricted-access documents which refer to Chomsky as a “consultant” to a project funded by the Air Force in order “to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control.” Modestly, Chomsky has always downplayed any moral dilemmas, suggesting that the military had no interest in his work. If Chomsky’s linguistics was being funded for this purpose, it seems all the more remarkable that Chomsky ended up publicly opposing the Vietnam War and denouncing the very military institutions that were sponsoring his research.
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“We sponsored linguistic research”, he explained, “in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.” Having referred to the military’s computerised systems of command and control, both for defense against nuclear missiles and for use in Vietnam, he complained about the difficulties of teaching computer languages to military personnel. Colonel Gaines of the US Air Force recalled why during an interview in 1971. The Pentagon showed a keen interested in linguistics during this period. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics. And I personally was right in the middle of it.
was about 90 per cent Pentagon funded at that time. As he himself says about MIT in the 1960s: And to do this we must begin with a paradoxical fact: Chomsky has spent his career in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in what was originally a military lab. Any attempt to understand Chomsky’s huge influence on modern thought must appreciate the connection between these two roles. Noam Chomsky is the world’s most prominent anti-militarist campaigner and, wearing a different hat, the acknowledged founder of modern scientific linguistics. Students protesting against military research at MIT in 1969.
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