Has Chomsky's argument been refuted? A reply to Skinner, Cautilli, and Hantula.

Abstract

In a recent paper in this Journal, Skinner, Cautillli, & Hantula (2003) analyze various aspects of Nonstandard English, and they arrive at a number of interesting conclusions. However, although there is much to say about these conclusions, I will not deal with them here. Rather, I want to concentrate on section that deals with historical accounts of language studies and, in particular, on their criticism of Chomsky's views regarding verbal behavior. In their paper, Skinner et al. (2003) repeat usual behavior-analytic arguments against Chomsky. However, just as most behavior-analysts, they do not realize that these arguments fail to respond to essential component of Chomsky's claim. In addition, as long as behavior analysts have not refuted this component, it is very unlikely that a dialogue can be established between them and psycholinguists. I will therefore deal again with this issue, although I have already done so in past (see, e.g., Stemmer, 1987a, 1987b, 1990, 1994) Keywords: verbal behavior, Skinner Chomsky debate, psycholinguistics, functional analysis of language. CHOMSKY'S ARGUMENT What is Chomsky's argument? Let me give version that appears in his Aspects of Syntax (1965). This argument, which he has repeated in several places, is that behaviorists (Chomsky speaks of empiricists, but this is irrelevant here) cannot account for speaker's ability to produce and understand new sentences that not similar to those previously heard in any physically defined sense ... nor obtainable from them by any sort of generalization known to psychology and philosophy (1965, p. 58).(Similar statements can be found in, e.g., 1959, pp. 55-57; 1968, p. 30, pp. 51-53, p. 79; 1975, pp. 152-153, pp. 172-174). Nevertheless, children do produce and understand new sentences. Since Chomsky thinks that these behaviors are not based on generalizations from samples, he therefore speculates that humans are born with some kind of innate capacity to form verbal categories such as Noun or Subject. Moreover, a person's verbal behavior is supposed to derive from generalizations that are based on these categories. Behavior analysts (e.g., Mabry, 1993; Palmer, 1986), as well as philosophers (e.g., Goodman, 1967; Putnam, 1967) have usually dealt with speculative component of Chomsky's argument, with his Innateness Hypothesis. However, most of them have ignored essential component of his argument, namely, that a child's production of new sentences requires generalizations that are not known to psychology or philosophy. This also holds for Skinner et al. (2003). They deal with Innateness Hypothesis and they think that it assumes that the relationship between words and world is intrinsic, fixed and determined (p. 14). They then cite Palmer (1986) who shows that relationship between words and world does not have this character: ... within a language there is no relationship between sound of an utterance and its grammatical structure. Clearly, there is no physical property of stimulus that suffices to identify its part in speech. Nothing about word 'house' enables us to conclude that it is a noun, or that it might be a 'subject' (pp. 54-55). Palmer indeed proves that relationship between words and world is not intrinsic, fixed and determined. First, it is not clear whether Chomsky's hypothesis indeed requires a fixed relationship between words and world. But most importantly, Palmer does not deal here with essential part of Chomsky's argument, part that motivates Chomsky's speculative hypothesis. On contrary, Palmer's analysis seems to support claim that verbal behavior of children indeed requires generalizations that are not known to psychology. Consider for example plural endings. Children are able to produce plural endings of a very great number of verbal stimuli, such as 'house-houses', 'song-songs', 'idea-ideas', etc. …