Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Let's put all the comments I've posted here on the Fiona Cowie book together, to see if I managed to write a coherent review piecemeal. That'll be fun. I'll keep the transitional changes as slight as possible. --------- FIONA COWIE, WHAT'S WITHIN (1999) So I've bumbled on a discovery. I've discovered that a certain 18 year old book seems to be important to controversies that are in turn important to me. This is a contribution to the old debate between rationalism and empiricism. Cowie says that empiricism, with its blank-slate mind filled by experience (or, as behaviorists came to say, by conditioning) was regnant in the Anglo-American world in the late 1940s. This was the era of Skinner's rise to prominence. It was also an era when a lot of ideas seemed to have been discredited by the recent war, by having a Teutonic sound to them, and innate ideation was a casualty. Later, Chomsky and Fodor turned the tide: Chomsky as to language skills, Fodor...

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 expla...

Continuing yesterday's thought. Imagine somebody DID make an argument for an innate culinary faculty that enables our learning what is or isn't curry. This somebody would likely be making four mistakes: he'd probably be underestimating the amount of "negative evidence" around for an empirical inquiry into what is and isn't curry; and might be idealizing culinary learning as if it were instantaneous, whereas actual culinary learning is gradual and piecemeal; and is probabilistic, not a realm of certainties; and, finally, he may be assuming that there is an endpoint where we all agree about what is curry, whereas in fact there will always be room for disagreements.  The second of these sounds odd, and those not familiar with these debates might not know to what she is making reference. But Chomsky has said, in his KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE (1986), that in understanding language we can presume that the "order of presentation of data is irrelevant s...

Let's return to the Fiona Cowie book, we've been working through bit by bit. Today we move to the portion of the book that speaks specifically of Noam Chomsky, and of his influential arguments to the effect that, (a) all languages conform to the same structural principles, a 'universal grammar,' but that (b) growing children as they acquire their grasp of these languages, do not receive sufficient data from the outside world to allow us to see this universal grammar as learned, thus (c) we ought to see it as innate -- hardwired into our brains.  Further, the pertinent hard-wiring is specific to the linguistic domain.  Cow thinks this is misguided, and to show why, she invokes a culinary example of learning. She writes about curry, that dense use of spices and herbs associated with the Indian subcontinent. See pp. 211 - 17 of the book. Many humans, perhaps most, eventually learn to recognize curry as a type of cuisine. How do we learn about curry? Chomsky oft...