Ive been saying Chomsky is wrong about the Language Instinct for about a decade. The short of my argument is that language isnt complex compared to everything else we have to learn, including vision. Whatever mechanism is used for learning vision is surely flexible enough to also handle language. Therefore postulating a special instinct or even organ for that is unnecessary overkill and possibly too costly for evolution. Behaviourism saw all learning as a matter of stimulus-response reinforcement, in much the same way that Pavlov’s dog could be trained to salivate on hearing a dinner bell. But as Chomsky pointed out, in a devastating 1959 review of Skinner’s claims, the fact that children don’t receive formal instruction in their mother tongue means that behaviourism can’t explain how they acquire competence in grammar. Chomsky concluded that children must come to the language-learning process already prepared in some way. If they are not explicitly taught how grammar works, and their native learning abilities are not up to the task of learning by observation alone, then, by process of elimination, their grammar smarts must be present at birth. Ill take Skinner over Chomsky any day. Skinner *must* be closer to the truth since Chomsky is so totally wrong.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 05:35:34 +0000
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