G's response

Interesting thoughts you've left. Here are few points of clarification about "my position" vis a vis the Chomsky versus Skinner debate:
As you've tumbled, there is much more to this than meets the eye, but from an instructors perspective it's a great place to start and it provides a handy schematic narrative for understanding a dauntingly complex set of shifting ideas. Making it a struggle between the forces of good and evil is a seductive if overly hyperbolic approach. Eveeryone likes to take a position and of the two, these days, the Chomskian looks so much more resonable almost forty years later.
I'm sure that neither Skinner nor Chomsky managed to get it right, but that's how scientific inquiry goes: one reliable accepted wisdom is suddenlty the emperor without the clothes and now there's a new kid in town and everyone flocks to touch his mantle. That's pretty much how it was for Chomsky, even though his linguistics has fallen to the wayside somewhat and been undermined by new ideas.
Despite the problems with Chomsky (the insistence on making language a science as amenable to ineluctable laws as physics), his problems are not nearly as profound, intellectually as Skinner's. I think Vygotsky's work might be described as Skinner with more sense of "I" and the creative human impulse. Then there's MK Halliday, the English linguist single handedly creating modern functionalism (form always follows function).
Lingusistics was dominated until recently by very formalist approaches to language study. Of the two - Chomsky and Halliday - the latter offers much more to teachers because he provides 9by extension) insights into the purposes of language - the functions - which, from an educational standpoint, is a much more useful approach.
I'd like to bring Halliday's work more to the forefront of 5030 but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.
I also think you'd really enjoy this new book which captures the essence of everything that's going wrong for Chomsky's legacy these days: it's Christine Kenneally's book "The First Word". i can't remember the last time i enjoyed a linguistics book more. Also, for a brilliant peek into the history of Chomsky's hegemonic control of modern linguistics, read "The Linguistics Wars" by Randy Allen Harris. It gives you all the dope on who kicked whom and what all the original fuss was about. it turns out that Chomsky was a very jealous god indeed.

Chomsky - Skinner, I get it.

Well I finally got what G's been hammering at me on for a year, first last fall in my language/literacy/culture class and now this summer in language acquisition.

I couldn't figure out G's extreme posistion on Skinner. What it took was a reading of the history of psychology to put it all in perspective (Leahey), and then a reading of Chomsky's original review of Skinners Verbal Behavior.

I now get why it's such a big deal and how wrong Chomsky thought Skinner was in his extension of rat behavior to human behavior. Now I still think G sort of dismisses Skinner entirely, when it's really just Verbal Behavior where Skinner went over the top.

But in any case, I am now ready to stop demanding a fight whenever the subject comes up.

Thanks for bearing with me through the learning curve G.

Chomsky's paper can be found at http://cogprints.org/1148/0/chomsky.htm
BF Skinner's book is available from the B. F. Skinner foundation (and amazon.com)

I HAVEN'T ACTUALLY read Skinner yet! I've only read what people say about him, so I've ordered a copy of Verbal Behavior for summer reading.

I will note that this is still an open issue, I think it's possible that there is some truth in both Behaviorsim and Universal Grammar when both are understood in their proper spheres. See http://www.behavior.org/vb/index.cfm?page=http%3A//www.behavior.org/vb/verbal_behavior_catania.cfm by A. Charles Catania

"When we talk about what we do with words, we're likely to say that we try to communicate things with words: information or feelings or ideas or emotions or thoughts. But we do something even more fundamental with words. Words give us a very efficient way to influence the behavior of others."

"The distinction is important to the topic of verbal behavior because the science of verbal behavior, as part of behavior analysis, owes much to a 1957 book by B. F. Skinner called Verbal Behavior [now available from the B. F. Skinner Foundation.] A review of that book by the linguist Noam Chomsky appeared in 1959. The review was highly critical, and for many years it was assumed that Chomsky had demolished Skinner's position. One reason was that many behavior analysts who had read Chomsky's review concluded that Chomsky had missed the point of Skinner's book. It therefore took a while before some began to respond to Chomsky's arguments. Linguists usually still fail to appreciate the functional content of Skinner's preliminary account of verbal behavior and have typically ignored the growing body of experimental research that has expanded Skinner's early taxonomy and has broadly extended the account to novel aspects of verbal behavior. Linguists still concentrate much more on whether what is said is grammatical, and what it means for something to be grammatical, than on what effects the verbal behavior has (even when, as is often the case, it is not grammatical)."