[Wittrs] Re: The mythical "chomskyan refutation of behaviorism"
- From: "gerardoprim" <gerardoprim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:22:00 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "jrstern" <jrstern@...> wrote:
>
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "gerardoprim" <gerardoprim@> wrote:
> >
> > What´s the "great argument" of Chomsky about behaviorism?
>
> The poverty of stimulus argument.
That´s an unsound argument. See Fiona Cowie´s book (What´s within) for an
extensive analysis.
I´ve mentioned some replies to the poverty of stimulus argument in my previous
message. The input is not impoverished at all. Instead, Chomsky rejects a
priori the richness of stimulus information, by assuming that only an "explicit
training" of the child would qualify as a "rich" stimulus. But the degree of
poverty or richness of stimulus must not be decided a priori: it should be
empirically studied. It´s clear that the richness of a particular stimular
situation is proportional to the perceptual capabilities of detection of each
the organism: the same stimular situation would be richer in information for an
organism with greater perceptual capabilities for extracting information than
for another organism with less capabilities. Today we have much evidence that
the human capabilities for detecting and learning stimulus relations is much
greater than what Chomsky thought, and yet those capabilities are general and
not specific of language learning (which makes them much more plausible from
the perspective of evolution theory). See for example the evidence of general
statistical learning mechanisms (Saffran, 1996; Maratsos, 1982). This allows
the child to learn from a huge amount of stimular information (e.g. the
statistical relations of adult utterances, the parent´s repetitions and
ampliations, the non-occurrence of expected utterances) without the need of an
"explicit training" by an adult. This is not just a behaviorist stance:
cognitive linguistics also acknowledged the richness of stimulus information
and the corresponding perceptual and learning capabilities.
Regards,
Gerardo.
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