Noam Chomsky Quotes About Evidence

• Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way. It followed international law and treaty obligations. It collected evidence, brought the evidence to the highest existing tribunal, the International Court of Justice, and received a verdict - which, of course, the U.S. dismissed with contempt.

  Noam Chomsky

  Law, Justice, Nicaragua

• Evolutionary theory has nothing to say, in general, as to whether cheating is more advantageous than cooperating. There are many circumstances in which the contrary would be true, and empirical evidence, though it exists, has little bearing on real situations.

  Noam Chomsky

  Cheating, Real, Would Be

  Source: libcom.org

• I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Common Experience, Able

  Source: chomsky.info

• Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

  Noam Chomsky

  Military, War, Support

• Very commonly I get queries. Somebody saw something of mine on YouTube and of course if there is a talk on YouTube, there aren't any footnotes - and they want to know why did you say this. Well if they bothered to look up something in print, they would've seen why I said that. If they ask for evidence, I just say well take a look and mention something they can read and that usually ends the conversation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Looks, Want, Saws

  Interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, chomsky.info. August 15, 2012.

• We [ with Edward Herman] believe that the empirical evidence we review there - and elsewhere, in a great deal of joint and separate work - lends substantial support to the conclusions; whether that is true is for others to judge.

  Noam Chomsky

  Believe, Judging, Support

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

• Anatomically modern humans are found up to 200,000 years ago; behaviourally modern humans appear very recently in evolutionary time, as far as evidence now exists, perhaps within a window of 50-100,000 years ago, a flick of an eye in evolutionary time.

  Noam Chomsky

  Eye, Years, Window

  Source: libcom.org

• Language would have evolved first as an internal object, a kind of "language of thought" (LOT), with externalisation (hence communication) an ancillary process. I can't review here the strong and growing evidence to support this conclusion, but I have elsewhere. There are ample reasons why having a LOT would confer selectional advantage: the person so endowed could plan, interpret, reflect, etc., in ways denied to others.

  Noam Chomsky

  Strong, Communication, Support

  Source: libcom.org

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