Noam Chomsky

American linguist whose generative grammar remade the study of language and helped launch cognitive sciencecognitive science, n.: The scientific study of how minds work — how we reason, use language, remember and see — combining psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence., and a leading critic of statistical approaches to language; he spent most of his career at MIT (Institute Professor emeritus since 2002) and later also taught at the University of Arizona. 'Syntactic Structures' (1957) proposed generative grammar, describing a language by explicit rules that generate all and only its sentences; his hierarchy of grammars (1956) by expressive power became a foundation of formal-language theory and programming-language design. His 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's 'Verbal Behavior' attacked behaviorismbehaviorism, n.: The view that the mind should be studied, or even defined, only through observable behavior rather than inner thoughts or feelings. It shapes debates about whether AI that acts intelligently really is intelligent., and he went on to argue that children's rapid language learning from limited data implies innate, universal grammatical knowledge (the argument from the poverty of the stimulus). He long dismissed probabilistic models of sentences, prompting a 2011 rebuttal from Peter NorvigPeter Norvig, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who co-wrote the standard AI textbook, led research at Google, and helped show that simple methods trained on huge amounts of data often beat clever hand-built ones., and in a 2023 New York Times essay with Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull he argued that systems such as ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom. are statistical pattern-matchers incapable of explanation or genuine understanding (see machine understandingmachine understanding, n.: Whether, and in what sense, an AI system grasps what words, situations or problems mean — rather than just producing answers that look as though it does.). He is also a prominent political commentator.