On Sat, 01 Apr 2000 09:33:35 -0800 bill fancher <fancher at pacbell.net>
writes:
>
> >
> Chomsky's arguments against Skinner are typically part of day 1 in
> any
> Intoduction to Cognitive Psychology course, e.g. a quick search
> turns up
> <http://comp.uark.edu/~lampinen/LEC1.html>
>
> > generative grammar is a dead end
B.F. Skinner did BTW offer a belated reply to Chomsky in his autobiographical volume *A Matter of Consequences*. There he wrote:
"I first received a very different opinion in a fifty-five-page manuscript by a linguist whom I had never heard of named Noam Chomsky. The first pages were not reassuring. An early footnote reported a "prevailing note of skepticism with regard to the scope" of the experimental analysis of behavior. (I could not take that seriously when work in the field was rapidly expanding, a new journal had just been founded, and many practical suggestions were beginning to be made). My description of the causation of behavior was said to be "of a particularly simple nature." (Operant reinforcement was perhaps similar, but the contingencies of reinforcement were quite complex). I was said to regard "the contribution of the speaker [as] quite trivial and elementary." (As an initiation agent, yes. As a behaving organism, far from trivial). Linguists and psycholinguists dealt mostly with the effects of verbal behavior upon a listener. Their own responses to verbal stimuli - as in answering the such a question as "Is this sentence grammatical?" - were among their data. They were unprepared for an analysis of speaking. I was said to claim that precise prediction involved only the specification of "the few external factors that [I had] isolated experimentally with lower organisms." (I did not claim to be able to predict verbal behavior precisely. I was interpreting it, using terms and processes derived from work in which a fairly precise prediction was possible). I could not see how a review beginning that way could be of any value, and I stopped reading. A year later I received a thirty-two-page version reprinted from the journal Language. When I saw that it was the same review, I put it aside again."
"It soon began to receive far more attention than my book. Chomsky, along with anthropologists like Levi-Strauss, was looking for explanatory principles in the structure of behavior rather than in the conditions of which it was a function. The role of contingencies was assigned to intentions, ideas, meanings, and so on. Psycholinguists were taking the same line, following the development of more and more complex forms of behavior while playing little or no attention to the developing verbal environment."
". . . It was said that a behavioral interpretation of language could not explain the infinite number of sentences which a speaker could compose (given infinite time); a creative intelligence must be recognized. But the same thing could be said about natural selection and the creation of a potentially infinite number of species. The origin of behavior was comparable to the origin of species: variations, quite possibly random, were selected by their effects on an environment - in this case, on the verbal community."
Jim F.
> >
> .
>
> --
> bill
>
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