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Who is Noam Chomsky
Born in 1928, Noam Chomsky is an extraordinarily well known American linguist, philosopher, and political activist. While he may be more well known for his work in linguistics and politics, he has also made some important contributions to science - especially in Cognitive Science and the fields that make it up. -
What is Cognitive Science?
Cognitive Science is a field involving Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Psychology to study the brain’s functions – especially with regards to decision making, language, learning, and perception. (Thagard, 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTThtJMTew8 -
Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures was Noam Chomsky’s first published book and focused on linguistics (specifically the structure and the development of languages.) However, its influence extended past linguistics and affected other fields that are studied in the realm Cognitive Science such as Computer Science with regards to how programming languages are structured and Psychology with regards to the debate of Nature versus Nurture (as seen during the Cognitive Revolution). -
Behavorism and the Cognitive Revolution
Behaviorism is a method of trying to understand human and animal actions that theorizes behavior is primarily a response to a situation or environment. The Cognitive Revolution (and Chomsky in his Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior) argued that the past experiences of the of the human or animal played a much more important role in determining behavior than previously believed.
