Recently, Chomsky and colleagues (Bolhuis, Tattersal, Chomsky, & Berwick, 2014) published an article entitled How Could Language Have Evolved? The chief irony of the title is that its authors ...

Humans are often thought to be the only animals capable of language. But it's difficult to prove a negative like this because we'll never definitively know the subjective interior monologues of other ...

Chomsky treats language as cognition, not communication. He says it enables us to think in unusually clear and powerful ways, planning ahead, comparing and evaluating our ideas and so on. But if so, ...

I prefer to keep to what is actually understood about evolutionary biology and not indulge in what evolutionary biologists dismiss as 'just-so' stories... stories we invent... 'maybe it happened this ...

FEW disciplines are so strongly associated with a single figure: Einstein in physics and Freud in psychology, perhaps. But Noam Chomsky is the man who revolutionised linguistics. Since he wrote ...

Noam Chomsky, the controversial author and professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been voted the world’s leading public intellectual from a list of 100 prominent ...

There is a common-sense view of language, which is held by Wittgenstein, Strawson Dummett, Searle, Putnam, Lewis, Wiggins, and others. According to this view a language consists of conventions, it is ...

“Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?” is subtitled “An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky” and it's animated -- verbally and visually. The verbal animation comes from filmmaker Michel Gondry, who made ...

The Pirahã are an “ordinary sort of folk,” says Philip Oltermann, a contributor to the British magazine. “They enjoy chatting and socializing,” as well as “a drink or two -- not unlike your average ...