Chomsky -- put up or blah blah

[Curtiss Leung]

Scott's hit his posting limit for today -- but I
haven't and so I present, lightly edited, some more of
his thought-provoking and, I think, sound objections
to some specifics of Chomsky's positions which he was
good enough to send me off list:


> ...As non-Chomskyan as I am, I still
> agree with inateness - the poverty of stimulus
> argument is hard to counter - and I'm even willing
> to live with an effectively infinite productive
> capacity for language.  I just don't think that's
> enough to justify generative grammar.  For example,
> lexicalist theories allow for the same infinite
> linguistic creativity, without having to mess with
> formal generative descriptions.
> 
> However, even though I disagree with behaviourism
> even more than with Chomsky, infinite creative
> capacity is not, a priori, evidence against
> behaviourism.  We learn to do math, for example, in
> a basically behaviourist manner, and we can solve an
> infinte number of different math problems once we've
> mastered it.
> 
> Scott Martens

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