Modern scientific revolution starting with Galileo essentially was aimed to construct a picture of the world that was mechanical. An idea that the world was a machine, big complicated machine, made out of things like levers and gears and so on, which essentially could be constructed.

I believe [New York Times’] editors probably feel that they bear a heavy burden in the sense that the New York Times creates History. [Sound of a narrator:] What happened years ago may have a bearing on what happens tomorrow. Millions of clippings are preserved in The Times library, all indexed for instant use. A priceless archive of events and the men who made them. That is: History is what appears in The New York Times archives. [Now back to Chomsky:] The place where people will go to find out what happened is New York Times, therefore it’s extremely important that History is going to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion. Now in whose interests is that History being so shaped? Well, I think that’s not very difficult to answer.

From the 1960s, there was some shift of attention among developmental psychologists from Chomsky’s generative model of Universal Grammar towards alternative explanations involving data-based investigation of children’s spontaneous speech. Interest continued in the developmental constructivism of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), whose theorizing about the capacities of pre-school children began in the 1920s. Piaget posited the existence of all-purpose cognitive skills switched on by regulatory and auto-regulatory mechanisms at each stage of the child’s development. Piaget and his Geneva School argued that the child passes through a series of uniform stages, always following the same sequential order.