Noam Chomsky, born 1928 in Philadelphia, PA, began what he –along with academia in general– considers Cognitive Revolution. This began throughout the 1950’s, when he dug into the psychological "markers" that behaviorists’ label as stimulus, response, and reinforcement. Chomsky states, after deliberation, that these ideas can be also employed to express much more complex behaviorisms; these only thus far, as he evaluted, have touched on a vague and therefore only a cursory or hasty regard at that. So he dug deeper…
The five focal ideas from Noam Chomsky’s cognitive revolution
Experimental psychologist Steven Pinker of Montreal, Canada, the author of several New York Time’s recognized best-sellers, narrows Chomsky’s Cognitive Revolution down to five key points:
1. The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback.
2. The mind cannot be a Blank Slate because blank slates don’t do anything.
3. An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind.
4. Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures.
5. The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts.
[MLA: Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate. Penguin. 2003. p. 31, 34, 36, 37, 39.]
In a nutshel, there are his main features of the Cognitive Revolution.
To learn more in concern to the Cognitive Revolution, follow any (or all) of these links:
1. Origins of the Cognitive Revolution in Linguistics, Psychology, Computer Science, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Sociology (Oct. 7, 1998):
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith/CogSciCourse/powerpoint/firstcognitiverevolution.ppt
2. B.F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky, Cognition, & Language Acquisition (Chomsky & The Cognitive Revolution):
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/cogrev_chomsky.htm
3. From Apr 29, 2007, here’s a "dot com" concerning Chomsky and the Cognitive Revolution:
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/04/thinking_feeling_and_the_cogni.php
Here are additional links to the biography of Noam Chomsky:
From Elizabeth Crabtree (May 1999), here’s in an unintimidating yet solid biography:
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/chomsky.htm
From the Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota, here is an excellent personal biography:
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/chomsky_noam.html
From a "Traveling Exhibit" with far too many contibutors to list, this one goes into "Chomsky’s criticism of U.S. governmental policies." Noam Chomsky / Americans Who Tell The Truth:
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Noam_Chomsky.html
From Robert F. Barsky of the MIT Press, this site is very comprehensive:
http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/
