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<title>Decoding Chomsky</title>

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Decoding Chomsky

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</style><table class="infobox ib-book vcard"><caption class="infobox-title">Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics </caption><tbody><tr><td colspan="2" class="infobox-image"><div class="infobox-caption">Cover</div></td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label">Author</th><td class="infobox-data"><a href="Chris_Knight_(anthropologist)" title="Chris Knight (anthropologist)">Chris Knight</a></td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label">Language</th><td class="infobox-data">English</td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label">Subject</th><td class="infobox-data"><a href="Noam_Chomsky" title="Noam Chomsky">Noam Chomsky</a></td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label">Publisher</th><td class="infobox-data"><a href="Yale_University_Press" title="Yale University Press">Yale University Press</a></td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label"><div style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.2em; padding: .1em 0;">Publication date</div></th><td class="infobox-data">2016 (hardback); 2018 (paperback)</td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label">Publication place</th><td class="infobox-data">United Kingdom</td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label">Media type</th><td class="infobox-data">Print (<a href="Hardcover" title="Hardcover">Hardcover</a> and <a href="Paperback" title="Paperback">Paperback</a>)</td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label">Pages</th><td class="infobox-data">304</td></tr><tr><th scope="row" class="infobox-label"><a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a></th><td class="infobox-data"><style data-mw-deduplicate="TemplateStyles:r1238218222">

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</style><bdi>978-0300221466</bdi></td></tr></tbody></table>

Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics is a 2016 book by the anthropologist <a href="Chris_Knight_(anthropologist)" title="Chris Knight (anthropologist)">Chris Knight</a> on <a href="Noam_Chomsky" title="Noam Chomsky">Noam Chomsky</a>'s approach to politics and science. Knight admires Chomsky's politics, but argues that his linguistic theories were influenced in damaging ways by his immersion since the early 1950s in an intellectual culture heavily dominated by US military priorities, an immersion deepened when Chomsky secured employment in a Pentagon-funded electronics laboratory in the <a href="Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology" title="Massachusetts Institute of Technology">Massachusetts Institute of Technology</a>.<a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a>

In October 2016, Chomsky dismissed the book, telling <a href="The_New_York_Times" title="The New York Times">The New York Times</a> that it was based on a false assumption since, in fact, no military "work was being done on campus" during his time at MIT.<a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a> In a subsequent public comment, Chomsky on similar grounds denounced Knight's entire narrative as a "wreck ... complete nonsense throughout".<a href="#cite_note-auto-3">[3]</a> In contrast, a reviewer for the US Chronicle of Higher Education described Decoding Chomsky as perhaps "the most in-depth meditation on 'the Chomsky problem' ever published".<a href="#cite_note-4">[4]</a> In the UK, the <a href="New_Scientist" title="New Scientist">New Scientist</a> described Knight's account as "trenchant and compelling".<a href="#cite_note-5">[5]</a> The controversy continued in the <a href="London_Review_of_Books" title="London Review of Books">London Review of Books</a>, where the sociologist of science <a href="Hilary_Rose_(sociologist)" title="Hilary Rose (sociologist)">Hilary Rose</a> cited Decoding Chomsky approvingly, provoking Chomsky to denounce what he called "Knight's astonishing performance" in two subsequent letters.<a href="#cite_note-6">[6]</a> The debate around Decoding Chomsky then continued in <a href="Open_Democracy" class="mw-redirect" title="Open Democracy">Open Democracy</a>, with contributions from <a href="Frederick_Newmeyer" title="Frederick Newmeyer">Frederick Newmeyer</a>, Randy Allen Harris and others.<a href="#cite_note-7">[7]</a>

Since the book was published, Knight has published what he claims is evidence that Chomsky worked on a military sponsored "command and control" project for the <a href="MITRE_Corporation" class="mw-redirect" title="MITRE Corporation">MITRE Corporation</a> in the early 1960s.<a href="#cite_note-8">[8]</a>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="The_argument">The argument</h2></div>

Decoding Chomsky begins with Chomsky's claim that his political and scientific outputs have little connection with each other. For example, asked in 2006 whether his science and his politics are in any way related to one another, Chomsky replied that the connection is "almost non-existent ... There is a kind of loose, abstract connection in the background. But if you look for practical connections, they're non-existent."<a href="#cite_note-9">[9]</a>

Knight accepts that scientific research and political involvement are distinct kinds of activity serving very different purposes. But he claims that, in Chomsky's case, the conflicts intrinsic to his institutional situation forced him to drive an unusually deep and damaging wedge between his politics and his science.

Knight points out that Chomsky began his career working in an electronics laboratory whose primary technological mission he detested on moral and political grounds. Funded by the Pentagon, the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT was involved in contributing to the basic research required for hi-tech weapons systems.<a href="#cite_note-10">[10]</a> Suggesting that he was well aware of MIT's role at the time, Chomsky himself recalls: <style data-mw-deduplicate="TemplateStyles:r1244412712">

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</style><blockquote class="templatequote">There was extensive [military] research on the MIT campus. ... In fact, a good deal of the [nuclear] missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus and in laboratories run by the university.<a href="#cite_note-11">[11]</a></blockquote>

It was because of his anti-militarist conscience, Knight argues, that such research priorities were experienced by him as deeply troubling. By way of evidence, Knight cites <a href="George_Steiner" title="George Steiner">George Steiner</a> in a 1967 The New York Review of Books article, "Will Noam Chomsky announce that he will stop teaching at MIT or anywhere in this country so long as torture and napalm go on? ... Will he even resign from a university very largely implicated in the kind of 'strategic studies' he so rightly scorns?" Chomsky said, "I have given a good bit of thought to the specific suggestions that you put forth... leaving the country or resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with activities of the department of 'defense.' ... As to MIT, I think that its involvement in the war effort is tragic and indefensible."<a href="#cite_note-12">[12]</a>

Chomsky's situation at MIT, according to Knight, is summed up by Chomsky when he describes some of his colleagues this way:

<blockquote class="templatequote">It is appalling that a person can come through an MIT education and say the kinds of things that were quoted in the New York Times article on Sunday, November 9 [1969]... One student said, right along straight Nazi scientist lines: What I'm designing may one day be used to kill millions of people. I don't care. That's not my responsibility. I'm given an interesting technological problem and I get enjoyment out of solving it. You know perfectly well that we can name twenty faculty members who've said the same thing. ... This is an attitude that is very widely held and very widely expressed.<a href="#cite_note-13">[13]</a></blockquote>

In order to maintain his moral and political integrity, Knight argues, Chomsky resolved to limit his cooperation to pure linguistic theory of such an abstract kind that it could not conceivably have any military use.

With this aim in mind, Chomsky's already highly abstract theoretical modelling became so unusually abstract that not even language's practical function in social communication could be acknowledged or explored. One damaging consequence, according to Knight, was that scientific investigation of the ways in which real human beings use language became divorced from what quickly became the prevailing MIT school of formal linguistic theory.

Knight argues that the conflicting pressures Chomsky experienced had the effect of splitting his intellectual output in two, prompting him to ensure that any work he conducted for the military was purely theoretical—of no practical use to anyone—while his activism, being directed relentlessly against the military, was preserved free of any obvious connection with his science.

To an unprecedented extent, according to Knight, <a href="Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism" title="Mind–body dualism">mind in this way became divorced from body</a>, thought from action, and <a href="Basic_research" title="Basic research">knowledge</a> from its <a href="Applied_science" title="Applied science">practical applications</a>, these disconnects characterizing a philosophical paradigm which came to dominate much of intellectual life for half a century across the Western world.

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="Reception">Reception</h2></div>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading3"><h3 id="Negative">Negative</h3></div>

In <a href="Current_Affairs_(magazine)" title="Current Affairs (magazine)">Current Affairs</a>, <a href="Norbert_Hornstein" title="Norbert Hornstein">Norbert Hornstein</a> and <a href="Nathan_J._Robinson" title="Nathan J. Robinson">Nathan J. Robinson</a> dismiss the book as exhibiting a complete misunderstanding of Chomsky's linguistic theories and beliefs. They question the motives of Yale University Press, asking why Yale considered it appropriate to publish Knight's critique, which they say attacks Chomsky through political conjecture rather than addressing his linguistic ideas. Comparing Knight's Marxist criticism to a conservative criticism that was released in the same year by <a href="Tom_Wolfe" title="Tom Wolfe">Tom Wolfe</a>, they speculate that both were published with similar motivations – that Chomsky's criticisms were a threat to the power behind the publishers.<a href="#cite_note-currentaffairs.org-14">[14]</a>

In <a href="Moment_(magazine)" title="Moment (magazine)">Moment</a>, <a href="Robert_Barsky" title="Robert Barsky">Robert Barsky</a> wrote that, since Knight was never formally trained in Chomsky's conception of theoretical linguistics, he has no right to comment on whether it stands up as science. Decoding Chomsky, writes Barsky, offers no original insights, consisting only of "a weak rehash of critiques from naysayers to Chomsky's approach". While Barsky concedes that Chomsky did work in a military laboratory, he writes that this is not significant, since virtually all US scientists receive Pentagon funding one way or another..<a href="#cite_note-15">[15]</a>

Peter Stone wrote that Knight clearly hates Chomsky and "for that reason he wrote Decoding Chomsky – a nasty, mean-spirited, vitriolic, ideologically-driven hatchet job". Stone states that, although Knight aligns himself with the political Left, "the level of venom on display here exceeds that of all but the most unhinged of Chomsky’s detractors on the Right." He states that "Knight spares no opportunity to paint Chomsky’s every thought and deed in the blackest possible terms" and that: "Decoding Chomsky is not a critique of a body of work in linguistics; it is an attempt to demonise a man for his perceived political deviations, even though that man happens to be on the same side of the political spectrum as the man who is demonising him. Reading Decoding Chomsky taught me something about the mindset of the prosecutors in the Moscow Show Trials."<a href="#cite_note-16">[16]</a>

The linguist <a href="Frederick_Newmeyer" title="Frederick Newmeyer">Frederick Newmeyer</a> concedes that the Pentagon expected to be able to use Chomsky's findings for military purposes, but says that the idea that Chomsky promoted very abstract approaches to linguistics in order to prevent such military use is 'implausible, to put it mildly' and states that Knight's portrayal of Chomsky's attitude to the study of language as a system of social communication is "a gross oversimplification".<a href="#cite_note-17">[17]</a>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading3"><h3 id="Positive">Positive</h3></div>

Decoding Chomsky has been positively received by a wide range of scientists, intellectual historians and commentators including: <a href="Michael_Tomasello" title="Michael Tomasello">Michael Tomasello</a>, <a href="Daniel_Everett" title="Daniel Everett">Daniel Everett</a>, <a href="David_Hawkes_(professor_of_English)" title="David Hawkes (professor of English)">David Hawkes</a>, <a href="Luc_Steels" title="Luc Steels">Luc Steels</a>, <a href="Sarah_Blaffer_Hrdy" title="Sarah Blaffer Hrdy">Sarah Blaffer Hrdy</a> and <a href="Frederick_Newmeyer" title="Frederick Newmeyer">Frederick Newmeyer</a>.<a href="#cite_note-18">[18]</a> Reviewing the book in The Times Literary Supplement, Houman Barekat commended Knight for an "engaging and thought-provoking intellectual history".<a href="#cite_note-19">[19]</a> In The American Ethnologist, Sean O'Neill said of the book: "History comes alive via compelling narrative. ... Knight is indeed an impressive historian when it comes to recounting the gripping personal histories behind Chomsky's groundbreaking contributions to science and philosophy."<a href="#cite_note-20">[20]</a>

In his book, The Anarchist Imagination, political scientist <a href="Carl_Levy_(political_scientist)" title="Carl Levy (political scientist)">Carl Levy</a> commends Knight for documenting how Chomsky's notion of <a href="Universal_Grammar" class="mw-redirect" title="Universal Grammar">Universal Grammar</a> echoed ideas put forward earlier by <a href="Claude_Levi-Strauss" class="mw-redirect" title="Claude Levi-Strauss">Claude Levi-Strauss</a>, linguist <a href="Roman_Jakobson" title="Roman Jakobson">Roman Jakobson</a> and Jakobson's muse, the anarchist poet and Russian revolutionary visionary <a href="Velimir_Khlebnikov" title="Velimir Khlebnikov">Velimir Khlebnikov</a>.<a href="#cite_note-21">[21]</a>

The linguist <a href="Daniel_Everett" title="Daniel Everett">Daniel Everett</a> wrote that "Knight's exploration is unparalleled. No other study has provided such a full understanding of Chomsky's background, intellectual foibles, objectives, inconsistencies, and genius."<a href="#cite_note-22">[22]</a> The linguist Gary Lupyan wrote that Knight "makes a compelling case for the scientific vacuousness of [Chomsky’s linguistic] ideas."<a href="#cite_note-23">[23]</a> According to Bruce Nevin in The Brooklyn Rail, "Knight shows how Chomsky has acquiesced in – more than that, has participated in and abetted – a radical post-war transformation of the relation of science to society, legitimating one of the significant political achievements of the right, the pretense that science is apolitical."<a href="#cite_note-24">[24]</a>

The philosopher <a href="Thomas_Klikauer" title="Thomas Klikauer">Thomas Klikauer</a> wrote that Decoding Chomsky is "an insightful book and, one might say, a-pleasure-to-read kind of book."<a href="#cite_note-25">[25]</a> Another philosopher, <a href="Rupert_Read" title="Rupert Read">Rupert Read</a> described the book as "a brilliant, if slightly harsh, disquisition".<a href="#cite_note-26">[26]</a> In the Chronicle of Higher Education Tom Bartlett described the book as a "compelling read".<a href="#cite_note-27">[27]</a> In Anarchist Studies Peter Seyferth said the book "focuses on all the major phases of Chomsky's linguistic theories, their institutional preconditions and their ideological and political ramifications. And it is absolutely devastating."<a href="#cite_note-28">[28]</a>

<blockquote class="templatequote">“The overriding responsibility of the scientist who proposes a hypothesis or theory is to subject it to every imaginable experimental test that might disprove it, and if an idea cannot be tested, it has no more worth than the claims in an advertisement for toothpaste. Knight reviews how Chomsky’s proposals are notoriously inaccessible to empirical test and have become more so with each successive revision.” </blockquote><div class="templatequotecite">— Bruce Nevin. Understanding the Labyrinth: Noam Chomsky’s Science and Politics. Brooklyn Rail, July 8, 2015.</div>

<a href="David_Golumbia" title="David Golumbia">David Golumbia</a> has described himself as "a huge admirer of Decoding Chomsky" while Les Levidow described the book as "impressive". The linguist Randy Allen Harris praises the book as one which everyone interested in Chomsky should read, although he qualifies this by commenting "I don't think very much of its deliberate unusability theory" <a href="#cite_note-29">[29]</a> In defense of the author, however, Harris expresses his bemusement at Chomsky's "breathtaking" misreading of Knight's theory on this score. "Knight's whole argument", writes Harris, "depends on the premise that Chomsky 'was at all times refusing to collude' with the military", making it astonishing that "Chomsky seems to think that Knight slanderously accuses him of complicity with the U.S. military - that his active resistance to the war in Vietnam refutes Knight's position rather than, as it actually does, supports Knight's position."<a href="#cite_note-30">[30]</a> In line with Knight and also with his fellow expert in Chomskyan linguistics, Frederick Newmeyer, Harris acknowledges that:

<blockquote class="templatequote">"… the military investment in Chomskyan theory, whether at MIT or elsewhere, was expected to produce results for such military applications as encryption, machine translation, information retrieval, and command-and-control systems for jets and weapon delivery."<a href="#cite_note-31">[31]</a></blockquote>

<a href="Sarah_Blaffer_Hrdy" title="Sarah Blaffer Hrdy">Sarah Blaffer Hrdy</a> is today widely regarded as one of greatest Darwinian thinkers since Darwin himself.<a href="#cite_note-32">[32]</a> In her most recent book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, she praises Knight for dismissing as 'a kind of madness' Chomsky's idea that language somehow emerged in our species suddenly and independently of previous Darwinian evolution. In defence of her conviction that selection pressures favoring 'other-regarding sensibilities in infants' must have preceded language's emergence, she recommends her own previous publications, a 2011 article by primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler 'and especially Chapter 22, Before Language, in Chris Knight's 2016 book Decoding Chomsky'.<a href="#cite_note-33">[33]</a>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="Further_research_on_Chomsky_at_MIT">Further research on Chomsky at MIT</h2></div>

In his book, Knight writes that the US military initially funded Chomsky's linguistics because they were interested in <a href="Machine_translation" title="Machine translation">machine translation</a>. Later their focus shifted and Knight cites Air Force Colonel Edmund Gaines’ statement that: "We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly."<a href="#cite_note-34">[34]</a>

From 1963, Chomsky worked as a consultant to the <a href="MITRE_Corporation" class="mw-redirect" title="MITRE Corporation">MITRE Corporation</a>, a military research institute set up by the US Air Force. According to one of Chomsky's former students, <a href="Barbara_Partee" class="mw-redirect" title="Barbara Partee">Barbara Partee</a>, MITRE's justification for sponsoring Chomsky's approach to linguistics was "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."<a href="#cite_note-35">[35]</a>

Chomsky made his most detailed response to Knight in the 2019 book, The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years. In this response, Chomsky dismissed Knight’s claims as a "vulgar exercise of defamation" and a "web of deceit and misinformation".<a href="#cite_note-36">[36]</a>

Knight, in turn, responded to Chomsky citing more documents, including one that states that MITRE's work to support "US Air Force-supplied command and control systems ... involves the application of a logico-mathematical formulation of linguistic structure developed by Noam Chomsky." Knight cites other documents that he claims show that Chomsky's student, Lieutenant <a href="Samuel_Jay_Keyser" title="Samuel Jay Keyser">Samuel Jay Keyser</a>, did apply Chomskyan theory to the control of military aircraft, including the <a href="B-58" class="mw-redirect" title="B-58">B-58</a> nuclear-armed bomber.<a href="#cite_note-37">[37]</a>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="References">References</h2></div>

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<li id="cite_note-1"><a href="#cite_ref-1">^</a> Letters, London Review of Books, July 13, 2017

</li>

<li id="cite_note-2"><a href="#cite_ref-2">^</a> Noam Chomsky and the Bicycle Theory. Sam Tanenhaus interviews Noam Chomsky. The New York Times, October 31, 2016

</li>

<li id="cite_note-auto-3"><a href="#cite_ref-auto_3-0">^</a> Sam Fenn interviews Chris Knight and Noam Chomsky responds. Chomsky's Carburetor. Cited Podcast. <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://citedpodcast.com/23-chomskys-carburetor/">http://citedpodcast.com/23-chomskys-carburetor/</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20171201034316/http://citedpodcast.com/23-chomskys-carburetor/">Archived</a> December 1, 2017, at the <a href="Wayback_Machine" title="Wayback Machine">Wayback Machine</a>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-4"><a href="#cite_ref-4">^</a> The Chomsky Puzzle. Piecing together a celebrity scientist, by Tom Bartlett. Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2016.

</li>

<li id="cite_note-5"><a href="#cite_ref-5">^</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230980-800-the-value-of-everything-getting-radical-about-research/">New Scientist, November 2, 2016</a>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-6"><a href="#cite_ref-6">^</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n09/jackson-lears/mysterian">Letters</a>, London Review of Books, June 1; June 15; July 13, 2017

</li>

<li id="cite_note-7"><a href="#cite_ref-7">^</a> <cite class="citation web cs1"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2018/6/18/chris-knight-frederick-newmeyer-and-randy-allen-harris-debate-decoding-chomsky-in-the-pages-of-open-democracy">"Fritz Newmeyer, Randy Allen Harris, Wolfgang Sperlich and others join the debate at Open Democracy"</a>. Open Democracy. 2018.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-8"><a href="#cite_ref-8">^</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/03/when-the-pentagon-looked-to-chomskys-linguistics-for-their-weapons-systems.html">"When the Pentagon Looked to Chomsky's Linguistics for their Weapons Systems"</a>, 3 Quarks Daily, 12 March 2018.

</li>

<li id="cite_note-9"><a href="#cite_ref-9">^</a> Decoding Chomsky, p. 248, n. 20, citing Irish Times, January 21, 2006.

</li>

<li id="cite_note-10"><a href="#cite_ref-10">^</a> Decoding Chomsky, p. xi, citing 'Tri-Services Honor MIT Achievements in Military Electronics R&D', Army Research and Development News Magazine, Vol. 12 no.4, July–August 1971, p 68.

</li>

<li id="cite_note-11"><a href="#cite_ref-11">^</a> Decoding Chomsky, p. xiv, citing <cite id="CITEREFChomsky2004" class="citation book cs1">Chomsky, N. (2004). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/languagepolitics00noam">Language and Politics</a> (Second ed.). Edinburgh: AK Press. p. <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.org/details/languagepolitics00noam/page/216">216</a>. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>1-902593-82-0</bdi>.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-12"><a href="#cite_ref-12">^</a> Abbreviated in Decoding Chomsky, p. 37; citing full text in The New York Review of Books, March 23, 1967

</li>

<li id="cite_note-13"><a href="#cite_ref-13">^</a> Abbreviated in Decoding Chomsky, p. xviii, citing full text in Chomsky, N. 2002. On Democracy and Education. Edited by C. P. Otero, p. 290.

</li>

<li id="cite_note-currentaffairs.org-14"><a href="#cite_ref-currentaffairs.org_14-0">^</a> <cite class="citation magazine cs1"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2016/12/thousand-ways-to-misrepresent-noam-chomsky">"1000 Ways To Misrepresent Noam Chomsky"</a>. Current Affairs.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-15"><a href="#cite_ref-15">^</a> <cite class="citation magazine cs1"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.momentmag.com/book-review-decoding-chomsky/">"Book Review // Decoding Chomsky"</a>. Moment Magazine. September 2016.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-16"><a href="#cite_ref-16">^</a> <cite class="citation web cs1"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/127/Decoding_Chomsky_by_Chris_Knight">"Book Review // Decoding Chomsky"</a>. Philosophy Now. September 2018.</cite>

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<li id="cite_note-17"><a href="#cite_ref-17">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFNewmeyer2018" class="citation web cs1">Newmeyer, Frederick (April 2018). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/chomsky-and-needless-controversy-over-internalist-and-military-approaches-to-la/">"Chomsky's linguistics and military funding: a non-issue"</a>. Open Democracy.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-18"><a href="#cite_ref-18">^</a> Chris Knight, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Chomsky-Science-Revolutionary-Politics/dp/0300221460">Decoding Chomsky ...</a>, Yale University Press, 2018, back page, first/second page

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<li id="cite_note-19"><a href="#cite_ref-19">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFBarekat2018" class="citation web cs1">Barekat, Houman (October 24, 2018). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2017/10/8/houman-barekats-review-in-the-times-literary-supplement">"Double agent - Some contradictions between linguistic and political philosophy"</a>.</cite>, Times Literary Supplement, October 2017

</li>

<li id="cite_note-20"><a href="#cite_ref-20">^</a> Sean O’Neill, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.academia.edu/34341876/Review_of_Decoding_Chomsky_Science_and_Revolutionary_Politics._Chris_Knight._New_Haven_CT_Yale_University_Press_2016._304_pp._American_Ethnologist_4_3_541-2">Review of Chris Knight's 'Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics.</a> The American Ethnologist, August 2017

</li>

<li id="cite_note-21"><a href="#cite_ref-21">^</a> Carl Levy, 2019. The Anarchist Imagination. London: Routledge, pp. 249-252.

</li>

<li id="cite_note-22"><a href="#cite_ref-22">^</a> Daniel Everett, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2017/10/19/dan-everetts-review-in-language-and-cognition">An anthropologist contemplates Chomsky</a> Language and Cognition, September 2017. <a href="Doi_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="Doi (identifier)">doi</a>:<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://doi.org/10.1017%2Flangcog.2017.15">10.1017/langcog.2017.15</a>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-23"><a href="#cite_ref-23">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFLupyan2018" class="citation web cs1">Lupyan, Gary (April 2018). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2017/12/22/decoding-chomsky-in-the-american-journal-of-psychology">"Understanding The Allure And Pitfalls Of Chomsky's Science"</a>. American Journal of Psychology.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-24"><a href="#cite_ref-24">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFNevin2016" class="citation web cs1">Nevin, Bruce (September 2016). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://brooklynrail.org/2016/09/field-notes/understanding-the-labyrinth-noam-chomskys-science-and-politics">"Understanding the Labyrinth: Noam Chomsky's Science and Politics"</a>. Brooklyn Rail.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-25"><a href="#cite_ref-25">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFKlikauer2018" class="citation web cs1">Klikauer, Thomas (2018). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2018/2/25/book-review-by-thomas-klikauer">"Chomsky: Between Science and Politics"</a>. The European Legacy.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-26"><a href="#cite_ref-26">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFRupert2017" class="citation web cs1">Rupert, Read (October 2017). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316864573">"Review: 'What Kind of Creatures Are We?' By Noam Chomsky and 'Decoding Chomsky' By Chris Knight"</a>. Philosophy.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-27"><a href="#cite_ref-27">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFBartlett2016" class="citation journal cs1">Bartlett, Tom (August 25, 2016). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-chomsky-puzzle/">"The Chomsky Puzzle - Piecing together a celebrity scientist"</a>. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved January 29, 2022.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-28"><a href="#cite_ref-28">^</a> <cite class="citation journal cs1"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/anarchiststudies/vol-25-issue-2/abstract-9332/">"Chris Knight, Decoding Chomsky. Science and Revolutionary Politics"</a>. Anarchist Studies. 25 (2). 2017.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-29"><a href="#cite_ref-29">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFGolumbia2018" class="citation web cs1">Golumbia, David (September 2018). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/chomskyan-revolution-and-politics-of-linguistics/">"The Chomskyan revolution and the politics of linguistics"</a>. Open Democracy.</cite> <cite id="CITEREFLevidow2018" class="citation web cs1">Levidow, Les (September 2018). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/chomsky-paradox-responsibility-of-intellectuals-revisited/">"The Chomsky paradox: the responsibility of intellectuals, revisited"</a>. Open Democracy.</cite> <cite id="CITEREFHarris2021" class="citation book cs1">Harris, Randy Allen (2021). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://books.google.com/books?id=x3o_EAAAQBAJ">The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure</a>. Oxford University Press. p. 454. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0199740338</bdi>.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-30"><a href="#cite_ref-30">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFHarris2021" class="citation book cs1">Harris, Randy Allen (2021). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://books.google.com/books?id=x3o_EAAAQBAJ">The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure</a>. Oxford University Press. p. 399-400. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0199740338</bdi>.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-31"><a href="#cite_ref-31">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFNewmeyer2018" class="citation web cs1">Newmeyer, Frederick (April 2018). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/chomsky-and-needless-controversy-over-internalist-and-military-approaches-to-la/">"Chomsky's linguistics and military funding: a non-issue"</a>. Open Democracy.</cite> <cite id="CITEREFHarris2021" class="citation book cs1">Harris, Randy Allen (2021). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://books.google.com/books?id=x3o_EAAAQBAJ&q=randy+chomsky+wars">The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure</a>. Oxford University Press. pp. 399, 426. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-0199740338</bdi>.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-32"><a href="#cite_ref-32">^</a> Angela Saini,Telegraph. <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691238777/father-time?srsltid=AfmBOop1UFDYBQySYASYhHmbEyG-gHNne9Ey7Cu7xOztC7p-bCBrtefm">https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691238777/father-time?srsltid=AfmBOop1UFDYBQySYASYhHmbEyG-gHNne9Ey7Cu7xOztC7p-bCBrtefm</a>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-33"><a href="#cite_ref-33">^</a> <cite id="CITEREFHrdy2024" class="citation book cs1">Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer (2024). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Iq_jEAAAQBAJ&q=Father+Time">Father TimeL A Natural History of Men and Babies</a>. Princeton University Press. pp. 204, 345n. <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>9780691238777</bdi>.</cite>

</li>

<li id="cite_note-34"><a href="#cite_ref-34">^</a> Decoding Chomsky, pp. 53–72 and 16, citing Frederick Newmeyer, The Politics of Linguistics, Chicago 1986, pp. 85–6.

</li>

<li id="cite_note-35"><a href="#cite_ref-35">^</a> C. Knight, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/03/when-the-pentagon-looked-to-chomskys-linguistics-for-their-weapons-systems.html">"When the Pentagon Looked to Chomsky's Linguistics for their Weapons Systems"</a>, 3 Quarks Daily, March 12, 2018 (citing Arnold Zwicky, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/grammars-of-number-theory.pdf">"Grammars of Number Theory: Some Examples"</a>, Working Paper W-6671, MITRE Corp., 1963, Foreword, last page). In 1971, a former Air Force Colonel, Anthony Debons, wrote: "much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues [has] direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop ... languages for computer operations in military command and control systems." A. Debons, "Command and Control: Technology and Social Impact", in F. Alt and M. Rubinoff, Advances in Computers, Vol.11, 1971. New York/London 1971, p354.

</li>

<li id="cite_note-36"><a href="#cite_ref-36">^</a> Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight and Neil Smith (eds), <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10080589/1/The-Responsibility-of-Intellectuals.pdf">The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years</a>, 'Open Access Book' (London: UCL Press, 2019).

</li>

<li id="cite_note-37"><a href="#cite_ref-37">^</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2019/3/30/my-response-to-chomskys-extraordinary-accusations-by-chris-knight">'My Response to Chomsky’s Extraordinary Accusations'</a>, scienceandrevolution.org, Chris Knight.

</li>

</ol></div></div>

<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="External_links">External links</h2></div>

<ul><li>Varn Vlog: Chris Knight on Chomsky's Linguistics and Its Limits. <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kn-6bKlgfI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kn-6bKlgfI</a></li>

<li>Knight, Chris (2023). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.tup.tsinghua.edu.cn/Wap/tsxqy.aspx?id=09043101">Decoding Chomsky (Chinese edn.) trans. Cheng Jun, Ma Junjun and Zhong Wanjuan. Tsinghua University Press.</a> <a href="ISBN_(identifier)" class="mw-redirect" title="ISBN (identifier)">ISBN</a> <bdi>978-7-302-63223-8</bdi></li>

<li><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://scienceandrevolution.org/">Science and Revolution</a> – Chris Knight's website on his Chomsky research.</li>

<li><cite class="citation journal cs1">Knight, Chris (2020). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348615725">"The Unknown Chomsky: When the Pentagon Used Chomsky's Linguistics for Weapons Research"</a>. <a href="Critique%3A_Journal_of_Socialist_Theory" title="Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory">Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory</a>. 48 (4): 661–676.</cite></li>

<li>Knight, Chris (2023). <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://aeon.co/essays/an-anthropologist-studies-the-warring-ideas-of-noam-chomsky">The Two Chomskys. The US military’s greatest critic worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought? AEON magazine.</a></li></ul></div><div><div class="zim-footer">

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