Noam Chomsky mural, Fairmount, Philadelphia, PA., June, 2011. Wikicommons/ Robert Moran. Some rights reserved.Chris Knight’s thought-provoking piece makes two independent assertions, though Knight sees them as crucially linked. The first is that the Pentagon had high hopes of applying the results of Chomsky’s theorizing for military purposes. The second is that Chomsky’s horror at the idea of serving the military in any way led him to develop a theory of language ‘so utterly abstract and other-worldly – so completely removed from any practical application – that no matter what insights he came up with, nothing could possibly be used to kill anyone’.
My opinion is that Knight is right on the mark in his first assertion and completely wrong in the second. Contemporary accounts and subsequent history bear out the deep interest of the military in language-related research. However, there is no evidence that Chomsky’s research program has been driven by a desire to devise a theory that is devoid of any potential military applications.
Military interest in linguistics goes back at least as far as the beginning of the Second World War. American linguists at the time were convinced, and were successful in convincing others, that their methods of analysis were directly applicable to the preparation of the language instruction manuals that the American forces would need.
