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)."

It's easy to be objective about sex but not about love.

Twice now I've taken a class from G that starts with the pummeling of poor hapless BF Skinner and behaviorism vs Chomsky and Universal Grammar. It's not so much that I'm a fan of behaviorism as it is that I can't accept that all-in-all his work was nullified by The Event (Chomsky published semantics and syntax in response to BF's verbal behavior). One might say that BF's work was put in a new light, limits of application set, new context for interpreting what was observed etc. etc., but not nullified. So I find myself wanting to defend the poor fellow. I love G's classes, they make me think.

Much of the viewpoint of this Master's program, especially the more theoretical parts, seems to come from Bateson, the inspiration for Dr. Clarke’s books on Systems theory in education. So when I'm looking to gain perspective I try and go back to this source. I'm halfway plowing through Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) and I found a jewel that speaks to yesterday’s topic on SR vs UG. In 1969 Bateson published an imagined dialogue between Father and Daughter titled "Metalogue: What Is an Instinct?" I'll post some outtakes that speak to our subject: (SR is Stimulus-Response, shorthand for behaviorism)

D: Daddy, what is an instinct?
F: An instinct, my dear, is an explanatory principle.
D: But what does it explain?
F: Anything-almost anything at all. Anything you want it to explain.
D: Don't be silly. It doesn't explain gravity.
F: No. But that is because nobody wants "instinct" to explain gravity. If they did, it would explain it. We could simply say that the moon has an instinct whose strength varies inversely as the square of the distance...
D: But that's nonsense, Daddy.
F: Yes, surely. But is was you who mentioned "instinct", not I.
D: All right - but then what does explain gravity?
F: Nothing, my dear, because gravity is an explanatory principle.
D: Oh.

So there we are, Universal Grammar which humans have innately, one might say instinctively, is an explanatory principle.

S-R psychology is also addressed in this dialogue:

D: Could we do without the idea of "instinct"?
F: How would you explain things then?
D: Well, I'd just look at the little things. When something goes "pop", the dog jumps. When the ground is not under his feet, he wiggles. And so on.
F: You mean - all the imps but no god?

(imps and gods were introduced earlier as bottom up/top down)

D: Yes, something like that.
F: Well, there are scientists who try and talk that way, and it's becoming quite fashionable. They say it is more objective.
D: And is it?
F: Oh, yes.
D: What does "objective" mean?
F: Well, it means that you look very hard at those things which you choose to look at it.
D: So, inevitably, when the objective creature looks at animals, it splits things up and makes animals look like humans after their intellects have invaded their souls.
F: Exactly. It's a sort of inhuman anthropomorphism.
D: And that is why the objective people study all the little imps instead of the larger things?
F: Yes. It's called S-R psychology. It's easy to be objective about sex but not about love.
D: Daddy, we've talked about two ways of studying animals - the big instinct way and the S-R way, and neither seems very sound. What do we do now?
F: I DON"T KNOW. (Emphasis mine)
D: Didn't you say that the royal road to objectivity and consciousness is language and tools? What's the royal road to the other half?
F: Freud said dreams.
D: Oh.

Language and Literacy Acquisition I

I miss having a blog or thread for this class. The worst thing about having threaded discussions for classes is when you don't have anything to say, but you have to go through the motions so that the thread count is updated and you get credit.

The best thing about having threaded discussions is that one gets a chance to 'talk back' to the teacher and class without bogging down the whole class in a tangent that may not be generally useful.

This blog doesn't exactly make a threaded discussion but I still offer it up to folks who care to make use of the facility for discussions on the class topics.

Linguistics and Math

I'm taking a course in the linguistic analysis of english. It includes gammar. I haven't thought about grammar since 7th grade. I've found however a connection between math and linguistics.

I'm reading God Created the Integers by Stephen Hawking.

In the section on George Boole, his thesis that introduces what will become boolean logic and the foundation of digital computing is titled "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" and we find:

"It should be within the province of a general method in Logic to express the final relation among the elements of the conclusion by any admissible kind of proposistion, or in any selected order of terms. ... To a choice or selection in the order of the terms, we may refer whatsoever is dependent upon the appearance of particular elements in the subject or in the predicate, in the antecedent or in the consequent, of that proposition which forms the "conclusion".


Reading this after having refreshed myself on the meansing of subject, predicate, antecedent and consequent allows me to get more out of reading Boole. Math is not a universal language, there is a lot of linguistics that go with it and the studies of Math and linguistics are related.