page_title: Decoding Chomsky
hierarchical_section_title: Decoding Chomsky
caption_attribution_description: English: Chris Knight in 2016
context_page_description: Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics is a 2016 book by the linguistic anthropologist Chris Knight on Noam Chomsky's approach to science and politics. 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 he secured employment in a Pentagon-funded electronics laboratory in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  In October 2016, Chomsky dismissed the book, telling The New York Times that it was based on a false assumption since, in fact, no military "work was being done on campus" during his time at MIT. In a subsequent public comment, Chomsky on similar grounds denounced Knight's entire narrative as a "wreck ... complete nonsense throughout". 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". In the UK, the New Scientist described Knight's account as "trenchant and compelling".
context_section_description: Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics is a 2016 book by the linguistic anthropologist Chris Knight on Noam Chomsky's approach to science and politics. 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 he secured employment in a Pentagon-funded electronics laboratory in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  In October 2016, Chomsky dismissed the book, telling The New York Times that it was based on a false assumption since, in fact, no military "work was being done on campus" during his time at MIT. In a subsequent public comment, Chomsky on similar grounds denounced Knight's entire narrative as a "wreck ... complete nonsense throughout". 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". In the UK, the New Scientist described Knight's account as "trenchant and compelling". The controversy continued in the London Review of Books, where the sociologist of science Hilary Rose cited Decoding Chomsky approvingly, provoking Chomsky to denounce what he called "Knight's astonishing performance" in two subsequent letters. The debate has continued in the pages of Open Democracy.
  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 MITRE Corporation in the early 1960s.
caption: Chris Knight in 2016
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