"...People would like to think that there's somebody up there who knows what he's doing. Since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't even think about questions of vital importance. We hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let's hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we're not taking part in what's going on...
It is an important feature of the igeological system to impose on people the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues: they'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and to control international affairs...."
- Noam Chomsky

According to Noam Chomsky, the mechanism of language acquisition formulates from innate processes. This theory is evidenced by children who live in the same linguistic community without a plethora of different experiences who arrive at comparable grammars. Chomsky thus proposes that "all children share the same internal contraints which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to construct." (Chomsky, 1977, p.98) Since we live in a biological world, "there is no reason for supposing the mental world to be an exception." (Chomsky, 1977, p.94) And he believes that there is a critical age for learningn a language as is true for the overall development of the human body.

Chomsky's mechanism of language acquisition also links structural linguistics to empiricist thought: "These principles [of structuralism and empiricism] determine the type of grammars that are available in principles. They are associated with an evaluation procedure which, given possible grammars, selects the best one. The evaluation procedure is also part of the biological given. The acquisition of language thus is a process of selection of the best grammar compatible with the available data. If the principles can be made sufficiently restrictive, there will also be a kind of 'discovery procedure.' " (Chomsky, 1977, p.117)

Chomsky on Generative Grammar

Chomsky's beliefs about generative grammar are the factors which help differentiate his views from the structuralist theory; he believes that generative grammar must "render explicit the implicit knowledge of the speaker." (Chomsky, 1977, p.103) His model of generative grammar begins with an axiom and a set of well-defined rules to generate the desired word sequences. The following is an example of how Chomsky proposes individuals spontaneously comprehend that certain combinations of three words make sense whilst others do not:

"[T]he study of meaning and reference and of the use of language should be excluded from the field of linguistics. . . . [G]iven a lingustic theory, the concepts of grammer are constructed (so it seems) on the basis of primitive notions that are not semantic (where the grammar contains the phonology and syntax), but that the linguistic theory itself must be chosen so as to provide the best possible explanation of semantic phenomena, as well as others." (Chomsky, 1977, p.139)

"It seems that other cognitive systems -- in particular, our system of beliefs concerning things in the world and their behavior -- playan essential part in our judments of meaning and reference, in an extremely intricate manner, and it is not at all clear that much will remain if we try to separate the purely linguistic components of what in informal usage or even in technical discussion we call 'the meaning of lingustic expression.' " (Chomsky, 1977, p.142)

"He showed that surface structure played a much more important role in semantic interpretation that had been supposed; if so, then the Standard hypothesis, according to which it was the deep structure that completely determined this interpretation, is false." (Chomsky, 1977, p.151)

Chomsky on Behaviorism