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Early Life and Education
Avram Noam Chomsky was born to two, influential Hebrew Scholars in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Dec 7, 1928. Starting at the age of 2, Chomsky attended school at Oak Lane Country Day School. At the time, this school was an experimental program run by Temple University; heavily influenced by the idealism of philosopher John Dewey, the students were given a superior, "learning-by-doing" education.
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University of Pennsylvania
Noam Chomsky, age 16, began his studies in Mathematics, Philosophy and Linguistics. In just two years, Chomsky considered dropping out to pursue his intense political interests however, quickly redirected those interests back to his studies when he met, who would eventually become his mentor, Zellig S. Harris: one of the founders of American Structural Linguistics.
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"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
Just 2 years after earning his Ph.D. in Linguistics, Noam Chomsky published a revision of a series of lectures he'd given at MIT: Syntactic Structures. Chomsky spent majority of his tenure at MIT on a machine translation project, only to deem the work to be, "of no intellectual interest and was also pointless." The university then requested Chomsky and his colleague to redesign the linguistics degree program entirely.
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The Definitive Refutation of Behavorism
B.K. Skinner, a prominent empiricist in the late 50's, wrote a book acquainting the controlled variables in animal testing to human language prediction. Skinner's intent was to provide a way to control verbal behavior through observation and manipulation of the speaker's environment. Chomsky, after closely studying the book-- "Verbal Behavior--" and the research involved, not only found the conclusion unjustified but a gross and superficial application to human nature. -
"Plato's Problem"
Decades after its first appearance, "The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory" was officially published, entirely, in 1975. Chomsky provided the fundamental insight of philosophical rationalism that humans are born with a natural system that generates concept and combination (i.e. patterns). Children, for example, objectively appear to comprehend more than they have or can be taught. Chomsky proposed, in this light, that such knowledge must be innate.
