Two distinguished linguists on language, the history of science, misplaced euphoria, surprising facts, and potentially permanent mysteries.In The Secrets of Words, influential linguist Noam Chomsky and his longtime colleague Andrea Moro have a wide-ranging conversation, touching on such topics as language and linguistics, the history of science, and the relation between language and the brain. Moro draws Chomsky out on today’s misplaced euphoria about artificial intelligence (Chomsky sees “lots of hype and propaganda” coming from Silicon Valley), the study of the brain (Chomsky points out that findings from brain studies in the 1950s never made it into that era’s psychology), and language acquisition by children. Chomsky in turn invites Moro to describe his own experiments on language and the brain, and Moro does so, drawing a distinction between where questions (where in the brain language happens) and what questions (what actual information is passed from one neuron to another). Chom
