The MIT Press Podcast

Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work has since fallen into comparative obscurity. Moreover, his political research and activism – about which he was especially guarded throughout his lifetime – has received scant attention.In this meticulously-researched biography, Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism (MIT Press, 2011), Robert Barsky casts a great deal more light upon Harris’s story. Exploring his involvement in the Avukah student group in the 1930s and 40s, Barsky shows how Harris not only strove to advance the cause of socialist Zionism, but also shaped the destinies of several influential thinkers. He also traces the course of the revolutionary programme of linguistic enquiry that Harris laid out, inspired by the example of theoretical physics, and how this ongoing work came to be regarded as eccentric by practitioners of the dominant contemporary research trends.In this interview, we discuss the utopian ideals of socialist Zionism, and the influence of Harris upon Chomsky’s political thought. We look at the contradictory facets of Zellig Harris as an individual. And we consider whether rationality is an unreasonable assumption, when it comes to inter-personal dynamics.

In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the mind, in which thinking was theorized as the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Fodor argued that certain features of human thought required that any human-like computational cognitive system had to have a structured format analogous to the structure that sentences have in natural languages. That is, according to Fodor, we must think in a Language of Thought, sometimes also called Mentalese.Classical computationalism has always had its critics – most notably connectionist or neural-network models, which involve a more brain-like computing system consisting just of simple nodes and their connections, without any obvious internal structure at all. But since 1975 Fodor has argued that the computational model couldn’t explain key features and kinds of reasoning, like making plans for the future or making decisions quickly. And he has also argued against the idea that neuroscience had anything critical to do with understanding the mind. In short, Fodor himself helped undermine the dominance of the classical computational model that he played such an important role in founding.Professor Susan Schneider, a doctoral student of Fodor’s who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, hopes to revitalize the LOT model in her new book, The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction (MIT Press, 2011). Professor Schneider argues that LOT has suffered because it was underdeveloped in critical ways; in this interview, she talks about how the classical computational model can be modified to remain a vital contender in contemporary cognitive science.

Anyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and for his recent arrest by Chinese police. What has been less widely appreciated is Ai’s profound...

How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skepticism regarding our knowledge of the phenomenology of conscious experience. We don’t know if we dream in color or black and white, we don’t know whether tilted coins look elliptical or round, and we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abundant. Schwitzgebel’s position is based on close examination of historical philosophical texts and current psychological experiments that show radical variability in reports of experience that seem unlikely to reflect radical differences in the experiences themselves. In this wide-ranging interview, Schwitzgebel considers whether psychologist Edward Titchener was on to something with his training of expert introspectors, why current theories of the neural correlates of consciousness are question-begging, and how reports of conscious experiences may be grounded in analogies to familiar media.