Noam Chomsky on Steven Pinker (and vice versa)

The relationship between Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker has been one of the more interesting relationships between two contemporary scientists and philosophers and recent history. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and cognitive scientist, and Chomsky, an MIT linguistic and analytic philosopher, have spent many decades crossing the same paths both literally and metaphorically. In an interview with Nathan Robinson, which we’ve had cause to mention before, summarized his views on Steven Pinker about as succinctly as one can.

“Well he did serious work in linguistics and experimental psychology. He’s an intelligent person. He’s a friend. Frankly I don’t think much of his recent books.” 

Speaking of which, Chomsky was not the biggest fan of Pinker’s 2011 bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined which posits that humanity has consistently gotten less violent (among other things) over time. This runs right up against Chomsky’s brand of anarchism that posits that Government’s are typically the problem (as they are perpetually working for the wealthy whom politicians consistently need to appeal to). Chomsky rebuttals that it’s only when you have nation states that have large armies and open war, that death tolls mount up like they do in war.

Steven Pinker on Chomsky

Yet another heading that deserves its own novel Pinker, who never avoids a question, has been pressed to elucidate his opinions on Chomsky and has consistently given roughly the same response. The London Real podcast/web series ingeniously asked Steven Pinker to give a bio of Noam Chomsky in 2013 (before the issues we’re about to address) and the cognitive scientist said the following:

“Well he’s famous for two reasons. One of them is for political activism. He’s a very vociferous of American and British (the interview was for a London based show) foreign policy. He is a leftist but not marxist. He calls himself an Anarcho-syndicalist which is basically an anarchist of the left…he’s more of a communitarian anarchist…he has a huge following due to his prolific output in foreign policy, probably more than 100 books…”

However he would hint, both in the above passage and the one below, about his relationship to the heralded linguist and his scientific contributions:

“He (Chomsky) founded the modern approach to linguistics starting in the 1950s when he was just in his 20s. He revolutionized the field and polarized the field. Most people in linguistics are either rabidly in favor of his theories or determined to bring him down…but in linguistics he was the first to give linguistics a psychological spin.”

Chomsky Defends Pinker From Cancellation

We’ll end the first draft of this sure to be often updated article with a feel good bonding the two recently experienced together. In the Covid months of 2020, a group of woke radicals attempted a full on assault to have Steven Pinker fired from his tenured position at Harvard citing his re-tweeting of a tweet made by long time conservative commentator David Brooks. Among the measures the mob took included an attempt to have students and high ranking faculty at Harvard and MIT sign a letter saying that Pinker should be removed. Chomsky refused and issued the following condemnation.

I saw it, and explained why I wouldn’t sign. It’s a group of students. It is indeed very much like what we were talking about, way out at the margin but meat for the right, which has always supported “cancel culture,” suppression of talks and publication, silent disruption of meetings, and much more, as long as it was directed against the left and is now pretending to be outraged as the wrong ox is gored.

Here Noam is simply arguing that “cancel culture” has always been a tool of the right and one that did damage to their “brand”—now realizing that it’s a negative they’ve been able to turn the table on liberals and leverage the tactic that they’ve long used to undermine free speech.