The Interesting Part Is What Is Not Conscious: An Interview with Noam Chomsky

OK, it’s January the 23rd, we are at the MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This will be a 60 minute interview with Noam Chomsky on the sixty to sixty-five years of his work, and we will try to cover as many topics as possible. To start off with this, I should put this into a context. I first started to interview Noam Chomsky about this [i.e. the history of generative grammar] two and a half years ago, right here at the MIT, and inadvertently, this grew into a whole series, and today’s interview is meant to be the end of the series, but not, hopefully, the end of our talks. [Both laugh.] Well, as I see it, and that’s a central part of the research project on your work I’m working on, there are, among many others, several red threads that run through your work, and that would be, first, the quest for simplicity in scientific description, and as we will see, that has several aspects, then the question of abstractness, which we will see in comparison to what went on before and what you started to work with. A closely related question that came to the forefront later was locality, local relations in mental computations. Fourth, the question of biolinguistics, meaning that language can be, and is seen by you, as a biological object in the final analysis, and also, that would be the fifth point, everything you did has always been developed in close collaboration with other people. So it’s not, we are not simply talking about the work of Noam Chomsky, but it’s a collaborative effort. Starting in 1946, I remember from my previous interviews that that is actually the period when you got to know who would become your teacher later on, Zellig Harris. And one of the first things you did was to read the galleys for his best-known work, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Harris 1951). There is another anecdote that I just saw in the morning, when for the first time I saw that Barcelona—I think it was in Spain somewhere in November—talk,1 when you said that another motive, apart from meeting Harris, for going into linguistics, was that you discovered that the Bible, the first words of the Bible had been mistranslated. Can you—maybe that’s a good point to start.