rationalskepticism.org

Wezentrommel wrote:
Oh dear, this is a bit sad Mr. Samsa. I can't help thinking you have adopted a position that isn't going to help you in the long run.

I appreciate your concern but I'll be fine as I get my science information from accurate peer-reviewed sources, and not a) a glorified wikipedia site, and b) philosophers.

Wezentrommel wrote:When I look at discussions of Chomsky vs. Skinner, or for example the article about Behaviourism in the Stanford Encyclopedia, I find that the general opinion is that Chomsky was basically right about language, and Skinner was basically wrong, and that dealt a blow to Behaviourism from which it has never recovered.

Chomsky right about language? Do a quick google scholar search for "Language acquisition device" or "universal grammar" and see how relevant Chomsky is to the study of language. Conversely, keep in mind that every successful speech language therapy technique is based directly on Skinner's work and it is so successful that in most countries this approach is mandated by the government for autistic children. The bottom line is that Skinner has the evidence, Chomsky has nothing - in the world of language, Chomsky is a creationist.

But we'll have a look at what the Stanford Encyclopedia has to say:

"Chomsky has been one of behaviorism's most successful and damaging critics. In a review of Skinner's book on verbal behavior (see above), Chomsky (1959) charged that behaviorist models of language learning cannot explain various facts about language acquisition, such as the rapid acquisition of language by young children, which is sometimes referred to as the phenomenon of “lexical explosion.”

Oh that sounds terribly damaging to the behaviorist position! Too bad the author doesn't explain how it's inconsistent with behavioral theory. And keep in mind that behaviorism is an extension of evolutionary theory, so if something can't be understood by learning alone this isn't a problem as behaviorism doesn't state anything can be understood by learning alone.

A child's linguistic abilities appear to be radically underdetermined by the evidence of verbal behavior offered to the child in the short period in which he or she expresses those abilities. By the age of four or five (normal) children have an almost limitless capacity to understand and produce sentences which they have never heard before.

By the age of four or five they have also received more training in the area of language that they will ever receive in any other area of their lives.

Chomsky also argued that it seems just not to be true that language learning depends on the application of reinforcement. A child does not, as an English speaker in the presence of a house, utter “house” repeatedly in the presence of reinforcing elders.

And human evolution isn't true because there are still monkeys! What the fuck is this guy on about. Why would they have to repeatedly utter the word house in the presence of "reinforcing elders"? However, the first statement is clearly wrong. No language theorist, and I feel quite confident in being absolute here, claims that language does not depend on reinforcement contingencies at all. Such a position would be just plain stupid. The simple evidence for this is that children learn the language they are raised with - if the environment did not matter (i.e. reinforcement contingencies) then they should automatically acquire some base "genetic" language.

Language as such seems to be learned without, in a sense, being taught, and behaviorism doesn't offer an account of how this could be so.

Why would it need to offer an account of something that clearly isn't true? Anyone who thinks language is learned without being taught has obviously never had children, or are completely oblivious to the events of the world. Children undergo a massive amount of training in language, this is a simple fact that can't be avoided. Chomsky is in the position of needing to demonstrate that all this training is irrelevant.

Chomsky's own speculations about the psychological realities underlying language development included the hypothesis that the rules or principles underlying linguistic behavior are abstract (applying to all human languages) and innate (part of our native psychological endowment as human beings).

And we're still waiting for the evidence of this...

When put to the test of uttering a grammatical sentence, a person, for Chomsky, has a virtually infinite number of possible responses available, and the only way in which to understand this virtually infinite generative capacity is to suppose that a person possesses a powerful and abstract innate grammar (underlying whatever competence he or she may have in one or more particular natural languages).

Or we could use the behavioral theories which make the same prediction such as stimulus equivalence which demonstrates that complex emergent phenomena are created by simple reinforcement relations - all of which are theoretically infinite.

The problem to which Chomsky refers, which is the problem of behavioral competence and thus performance outstripping individual learning histories, seems to go beyond merely the issue of linguistic behavior in young children. It appears to be a fundamental fact about human beings that our behavior and behavioral capacities often surpass the limitations of individual reinforcement histories. Our history of reinforcement is often too impoverished to determine uniquely what we do or how we do it. Much learning, therefore, seems to require pre-existing or innate representational structures or principled constraints within which learning occurs.

Oh wow. So what this guy is saying is basically that for behaviorism to exist it needs to accept the fact that genetics play a role in shaping our behavior?.. That does sound like a reasonable position. Fortunately, Skinner and other behaviorists were pretty clear about this point stating that humans are the result of genetic and environmental factors (they also included 'culture' but I think that is more a subset of environment).

Anyway, you might like to read Kenneth MacCorquodale's On Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior where he starts out by apologising for the delayed response but explains that nobody could figure out who he was attacking. You see, Chomsky's review is based on one of the most absurd strawmen in academic history and at best he was attacking a form of behaviorism that Skinner had destroyed decades earlier, and at worst he had made up a completely absurd new field to label "behaviorism" and then attacked that. MacCorquodale basically concludes his piece by saying that we have strong evidence that Chomsky had probably never read Skinner's Verbal Behavior, nor any other of Skinner's books and most likely no work by any behaviorist.

That's simply how poor Chomsky's review was.

Wezentrommel wrote:I can see that behaviourism still has something to offer. The Stanford article states that "robust elements of behaviorism survive in both behavior therapy and laboratory-based animal learning theory" But it goes on to say "Elements, however, are elements. Behaviorism is no longer a dominating research program".

I'm not sure you are going to have a happy time here in the Linguistics forum until you come to terms with the above.

Oh, if the Stanford Encyclopedia says so then there is still hope for me yet!

The simple fact that many people miss (particularly philosophers I find, who have little to no idea about behaviorism) is that cognitive psychology didn't replace behaviorism, it is behaviorism. They both study the behavior, thoughts, cognitions, emotions, etc of humans and animals. They both use the same techniques, reach the same conclusions through the same methodological processes. The only difference is terminology. As explained by Roddy Roediger (a cognitive psychologist):

What Happened to Behaviorism wrote:Perhaps the most radical answer to the question I posed is that behaviorism is less discussed and debated today because it actually won the intellectual battle. In a very real sense, all psychologists today (at least those doing empirical research) are behaviorists. Even the most cognitively oriented experimentalists study behavior of some sort. They might study effects of variables of pushing buttons on computers, or filling out checklists, or making confidence ratings, or patterns of bloodflow, or recalling words by writing them on sheets of paper, but they almost always study objectively verifiable behavior. (And even subjective experiences, such as confidence ratings, can be replicated across people and across conditions). This step of studying objectively verifiable behavior represents a huge change from the work of many psychologists in 1904. Today the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience are highly behavioral (if one includes neural measures of behavior). True, there is nothing necessarily inherently interesting about pushing buttons on computers, but on the other hand, the basic laws of behavior in the animal lab were worked out on rats pushing levers and navigating runways, or pigeons pecking keys - not exactly riveting behaviors in their own right. In all these cases, the scientist's hope is to discover fundamentally interesting principles from simple, elegant experimental analyses.

(There are problems with parts of his article, but it is mostly a decently written piece).