Behaviorism, empricism or rationalism?

It's been a while since I've had anything for this category, but while researching some of George Lakoff's writings on the web, I came across a gem of an exchange between Lakoff and Chomsky, dated 1973.

The setting: a layman's overview of what's going on in linguistics by John Searle, published in the New York Review of Books. It's a pretty good article, with all the important things explained in clear language and a minimum of Greek letters and trees. In the article, Searle largely endorses Chomsky's program, with the important caveat that Chomsky desperately needs to embrace Searle's pet research interests a theory of performance as well as competence. SC actually agrees with that, but Searle's transparency to anyone even slightly in the know is giggle-inducing. Ditto for his inability to miss smuggling in the Chinese Room, although he frames it in terms of a blast against semantic representations. (For readers not schooled in the sillier points of philosophy of language, this is an argument that runs like so: Place an English-speaking man in a room filled with tiles painted with Chinese characters and their English translations. Give him things written in Chinese to translate. The fact that he produces translations says nothing, according to Searle, about the man's ability to understand Chinese.)

In the course of the article, Searle introduces some comments about behaviorism, which Chomsky famously demolished in his review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. According to Searle, while Chomsky has scored a palpable hit for rationalists in the hoary old empiricist/rationalist debate over how we know things, his commitment to rationalism makes him afraid to examine real speech because that would mean acknowledging empiricism, from which it's just a hop, skip and a jump back to behaviorism.

This is almost self-evidently wrong -- whether or not we have mental states has little to do with whether or not we have a language-specific learning mechanism in our heads. George Lakoff wrote to the NYRB to make exactly that point, and then anticipated the cognitive science view that language learning is related to general cognition:

What Chomsky has shown is that either there is a specifically linguistic innate faculty or there is a general learning theory (not yet formulated) from which the acquisition of linguistic universals follows. The former may well turn out to be true, but in my opinion the latter would be a much more interesting conclusion. If I were a psychologist, I would be much more interested in seeing if there were connections between linguistic mechanisms and other cognitive mechanisms, than in simply making the assumption with the least possible interest, namely, that there are none.

Of course, as readers of this blog are well aware, Chomsky spent years defending the first alternative, and then inexplicably jumped to an even stronger form of the second one than its high priests believe in.

But Lakoff knows how to needle with the best of them, and so he took a few moments to debunk Chomsky's claims to be an heir to Descartes in the rudest terms possible, attributing his "Cartesian linguistics" to the work of a much older Spanish philosopher known as Sanctius.

The ploy worked perfectly, inducing Chomsky to write back a foaming letter with three distinct parts: 1) that Lakoff doesn't know what he's talking about, 2) that Chomsky had heard of Sanctius before, and 3) that he really, really is adamant about 1.

As historical documents, the trio linked above are quite interesting. Searle's article is a good introduction to early '70s syntactic theory, Lakoff's letter provides a good overview of names that anyone interested in linguistics should still be reading. And Chomsky's letter? Well, he gets credit for citing Robin Lakoff without any snide insinuations about their marriage. There's a bit of a darker truth behind them as well: 30 years later, we're still arguing a lot more of the same things than one might reasonably expect.

Comments

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It's the same relationship isn't? Rationalism is often contrasted with empiricism. Taken very broadly these views are not mutually exclusive, since a philosopher can write about these concepts... I think you should add some links to read about it, because your information isn't enough. 23jj

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