Framing the Innateness Hypothesis

Framing the Innateness Hypothesis

Perhaps the most traditional way of framing the innateness hypothesis would be in terms of an opposition between rationalism and empiricism. This is an opposition that is frequently encountered in philosophical debates over language acquisition, with the one side arguing that language acquisition is a phenomenon associated with the maturation of a language faculty or "organ," while the other side argues that language acquisition is instead a process of generalization from experience. Underlying these two positions are specific hypotheses regarding the resources the child brings to the task of acquiring language. The rationalist postulates the existence of innate ideas and/or principles, while the empiricist does not. Chomsky's position, as he consistently has acknowledged for decades, is rationalist. As he put it not long after Aspects appeared, his is a theory of " psychological a priori principles that bears a striking resemblance to the classical doctrine of innate ideas " (Searle 1977 p. 121). This general description is as valid for the current Government Binding (GB) theory as it was for the various Transformational-Generative (TG) programs of the 1960s and 1970s.

Does anything consequential follow from this opposition? I believe it does. Prima facie, of course, there is a significant difference between the assertion that there are innate ideas and principles and the assertion that there are not, and it is reasonable to expect that a research program based on either position would hypothesize explanatory agents, frame questions, and categorize evidence in a way that would differ significantly from the other.

Of perhaps more importance, however, is the fact that rationalist and e...

... middle of paper ...

...losophers.

Works Cited

Each link below leads to an appropriate citation in the common bibliography. This allows easy access to longer list of related reading for interested parties and begins to build a denser framework of hyper-links.

Arbib, Michael A., and Jane C. Hill. 1988 " Language Acquisition: Schemas Replace Universal Grammar." In Hawkins,, pp. 56-72.

Chomsky, Noam. Recent Contributions to the Theory of Innate Ideas: Summary of Oral Presentation. In Chomsky, Noam 1991 "Linguistics and Adjacent Fields: A Personal View" In Kasher, pp. 3-25.

Hawkins, John A. ed. 1988 Explaining Language Universals Blackwell, Oxford.

Jackendoff, Ray. Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation (MIT, 1995).

Kasher, Asa ed. The Chomskyan Turn (Blackwell, 1991).

Searle, John, ed. Philosophy of Language (Oxford University Press, 1977).