Final Thoughts on Cowie

In recent weeks, I've given my reactions to Fiona Cowie's 1999 book, What's Within. Today I'll conclude that line of posts.

Cowie only briefly discusses Chomsky's famous reply to Skinner, and so far as I can tell her discussion accepts the idea that Skinner got outside of the range of his competence by writing VERBAL BEHAVIOR, and that Chomsky was right to rebuke him.

Her view on language development, then, is not "forget all this subsequent nonsense, go back to Skinnerian 'positive conditioning' as a model, and try again." Her view, rather is that if there is to be a tenable empiricism with regard to language it will have to be an "enlightened empiricism," a post-Skinnerian sort.

And she seems to hope such an enlightened empiricism will develop as a school of thought, though she does not explicitly align herself with it. If I understand her, she is saying that a minimalist nativism as to language ability may be necessary to explain the facts, though it will fall far short of Chomsky's maximalist nativism, or of Fodor's analogous views on conceptualization.

She has in mind a near future in which both Skinner and Chomsky are seen as unsustainable extremes as to the development of language, and in which the enlightened empiricists clash with the minimal nativists over a middle ground.

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