Noam Chomsky's Poverty of the Stimulus Argument is one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and the mind. Though widely endorsed by linguists, the argument has met with much resistance in philosophy. Unfortunately, philosophical critics have often failed to fully appreciate the power of the argument. In this paper, we provide a systematic presentation of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument, clarifying its structure, content, and evidential base. We defend the (...) argument against a variety of philosophical criticisms, new and old, and argue that the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument continues to deserve its guiding role in the study of language and the mind. (shrink)

It is widely held that children’s linguistic input underdetermines the correct grammar, and that language learning must therefore be guided by innate linguistic constraints. Here, we show that a Bayesian model can learn a standard poverty‐of‐stimulus example, anaphoric one, from realistic input by relying on indirect evidence, without a linguistic constraint assumed to be necessary. Our demonstration does, however, assume other linguistic knowledge; thus, we reduce the problem of learning anaphoric one to that of learning this other knowledge. (...) We discuss whether this other knowledge may itself be acquired without linguistic constraints. (shrink)

Chomsky had been able to look into how various theses—representationalism, biological boundedness, domain specificity, innateness and universal grammar—may be used in explaining the acquisition and mastery of language. Chomsky was able to not only establish the inaccuracy of behaviorism through defending representationalism, but also initiate the development of a more mentalistic conception of both the learning of language and linguistic competence. Because other aspects of Chomsky's nativism are independent of each other, the falsity of behaviorism may be associated with the (...) truth of several other theories. To address this and other issues regarding Chomskyan nativism, the author presents three nonbehaviorist alternatives: 1) Weak nativism which merges innateness with domain specificity; 2) Enlightened empiricism which rejects innateness and accepts domain specificity; and 3) Putnamian empiricism which accepts innateness and rejects domain specificity. (shrink)

A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect “the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience” and that “might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge” (Chomsky, 1971). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various “poverty of stimulus” (POS) arguments (...) suggest that these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only if humans assume, a priori, that selectable grammars respect substantive constraints. Recently, several researchers have tried to rebut these POS arguments. In response, we illustrate why POS arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire. (shrink)

The most compelling evidence for Epstein et al.'s central thesis that adult second language acquisition is constrained by the innate cognitive structures that constrain native language acquisition would be evidence of poverty of the stimulus. Although there are studies that point to such evidence, Epstein et al.'s primary form of argumentation, targetlike performance by second-language acquiring adults, is much less convincing.

The article is dedicated to the popular argument among nativists, who use it against the empiricist approach. We analyze the strongest objection against the poverty of the stimulus argument which is the curry argument. As a result of the critical consideration of the poverty of the stimulus discussion, we conclude that the curry argument is quite sound.

One of the most influential arguments in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science is Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus. In this response to an essay by Chandra Sripada, I defend an analogous argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus. I argue that Sripada's criticism of moral nativism appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the learning target in moral cognition consists of a series of simple imperatives, such as "share your toys" or (...) "don't hit other children." In fact, the available evidence suggests that the moral competence of adults and even young children is considerably more complex and exhibits many characteristics of a well-developed legal code, including abstract theories of crime, tort, contract, and agency. Since the emergence of this knowledge cannot be explained by appeals to explicit instruction, or to any known processes of imitation, internalization, socialization and the like, there are grounds for concluding it may be innate. Simply put, to explain the development of intuitive jurisprudence in each individual, we must attribute unconscious knowledge and complex mental operations to her that go well beyond anything she has been taught. (shrink)

This chapter discusses some of the causal forces that enable young children to acquire language. It demonstrates that these causal forces are not readily apparent in the input that children experience. This discussion of the causal forces of language and the poverty of the stimulus focuses on just a fragment of human language. The chapter discusses four kinds of expressions. In English, these expressions are the words some, any, and or, and question words such as who and what. (...) Although these expressions appear to be unrelated, the chapter shows that they are all cut from the same cloth – they are governed by the same linguistic principles, which determine both their distributional properties and their meanings. Like any and or, linguists have proposed principles that amalgamate information‐seeking questions and their statement counterparts. The chapter describes the important role played by cross‐linguistic facts as a source of information about the deep forces that shape language. (shrink)

Recent challenges to Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry “indirect evidence” about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them. Indirect evidence is claimed to suffice for grammar acquisition, without need for innate knowledge. This article reports experiments based on those of, who demonstrated that a simple bigram language model can induce the correct form of auxiliary inversion in certain complex questions. This article investigates the nature of the (...) indirect evidence that supports this learning, and assesses how reliably it is available. Results confirm the original finding for one specific sentence type but show that the model's success is highly circumscribed. It performs poorly on inversion in related constructions in English and Dutch. Because other, more powerful statistical models have so far been shown to succeed only on the same limited subset of cases as the bigram model, it remains to be seen whether stimulus richness can be substantiated more generally. (shrink)

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses of child‐directed speech showing that there is indirect statistical information useful for correct auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives and that such information is sufficient for distinguishing between grammatical (...) and ungrammatical generalizations, even in the absence of direct evidence. We further show that there are simple learning devices, such as neural networks, capable of exploiting such statistical cues, producing a bias toward correct AUX questions when compared to their ungrammatical counterparts. The results suggest that the basic assumptions of the poverty of stimulus argument may need to be reappraised. (shrink)

My paper defends the use of the poverty of stimulus argument (POSA) for linguistic nativism against Cowie's (1999) counter-claim that it leaves empiricism untouched. I first present the linguistic POSA as arising from a reflection on the generality of the child's initial state in comparison with the specific complexity of its final state. I then show that Cowie misconstrues the POSA as a direct argument about the character of the pld. In this light, I first argue that the (...) data Cowie marshals about the pld does not begin to suggest that the POSA is unsound. Second, through a discussion of the so-called `auxiliary inversion rule', I show, by way of diagnosis, that Cowie misunderstands both the methodology of current linguistics and the complexity of the data it is obliged to explain. (shrink)

This paper is principally devoted to comparing and contrasting poverty of stimulus arguments for innate cognitive apparatus in relation to language and in relation to folk psychology. These days one is no longer allowed to use the term ‘innate’ without saying what one means by it. So I will begin by saying what I mean by ‘innate’. Sections 2 and 3 will discuss language and theory of mind, respectively. Along the way, I will also briefly discuss other arguments (...) for innate cognitive apparatus in these areas. (shrink)

A bedrock assumption made by cognitivist philosophers such as Noam Chomsky, and, more recently, Jerry Fodor and Steven Pinker is that the contexts within which children acquire a language inevitably exhibit a irremediable poverty of whatever stimuli are necessary to condition such acquisition and development. They argue that given this poverty, the basic rudiments of language must be innate; the task of the cognitivist is to theorize universal grammars, languages of thought, or language instincts to account for it. (...) My argument, however, is that this assumption is philosophically suspect in that it assumes an untenably Cartesian conception of "stimulus" which itself presupposes a rigid dualism of subject-user and context and hence confuses the underdetermination of stimulus for its lack. I argue that the former does in fact provide the necessary conditions for language acquisition. I then go on to develop a Wittgensteinian—Dennettian model within which underdetermination plays a key role. (shrink)

In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...) to bring about the former, but only by presupposing the very expressive powers Carey is claiming they explain. Analogies must be understood, and bootstrapping involves confirmation of hypotheses already expressible; otherwise they can't select among an infinitude of hypotheses compatible with the finite data the child has encountered, a fact rendered vivid by Goodman's ‘grue’ paradox and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. The problems have special application to minds, since there is no reason to expect a child's concepts to be ‘projectible’ or to correspond to mind-independent natural kinds. I conclude with an ecumenical view that concepts are reasonably regarded as both innate and often learned, and that what is learned can in fact increase what really concerns Carey, the functioning psychological expressive power of the child, even if it leaves untouched what concerns Fodor, the semantic expressive power. Less ecumenically: maybe Fodor (2008) miscast the debate, and the real issue that bothers people concerns not nativism, but an issue on which Carey and Fodor surprisingly agree, his conceptual Atomism, or the view that all mono-morphemic concepts are primitive and unanalyzable. The issue deserves further discussion independently of Mad-doggery. (shrink)

Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments have convinced many linguists and philosophers of language that a domain specific language acquisition device (LAD) is necessary to account for language learning. Here we review empirical evidence that casts doubt on the necessity of this domain specific device. We suggest that more attention needs to be paid to the early stages of language acquisition. Many seemingly innate language-related abilities have to be learned over the course of several months. Further, the language input (...) contains rich stochastic information that can be accessed by domain-general learning mechanisms. Computer simulation has shown how mechanisms that are not domain specific can exploit the information contained in language. We conclude that (i) Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments need to be conceptually clarified and (ii) more empirical research needs to be carried out before we can rule out that data driven general purpose mechanisms can account for language learning. (shrink)

According to a “selective” (as opposed to “instructive”) model of human language capacity, people come to know more than they experience. The discrepancy between experience and eventual capacity (the “poverty of the stimulus”) is bridged by genetically provided information. Hence any hypothesis about the linguistic genotype (or “Universal Grammar,” UG) has consequences for what experience is needed and what form people's mature capacities (or “grammars”) will take. This BBS target article discusses the “trigger experience,” that is, the experience (...) that actually affects a child's linguistic development. It is argued that this must be a subset of a child's total linguistic experience and hence that much of what a child hears has no consequence for the form of the eventual grammar. UG filters experience and provides an upper bound on what constitutes the triggering experience. This filtering effect can often be seen in the way linguistic capacity can change between generations. Children only need access to robust structures of minimal (“degree-0”) complexity. Everything can be learned from simple, unembedded “domains” (a grammatical concept involved in defining an expression's logical form). Children do not need access to more complex structures. (shrink)

In contrast to what others may commonly believe, reflecting on the poverty of the stimulus does not sustain or reinforce the notion of learning a language within nativism. Also, although initially opposed, there are a lot more explanatory resources to empiricism than it is given credit for, particularly on issues regarding the domain-neutral mechanism for learning. While the enlightened empiricist would believe that the mechanism for language learning is general in purpose and that the theory choices of learners (...) would be attributed to the knowledge about language that they have already obtained through experience, enlightened empiricism supports the nativist view that learning is restricted by task-specific knowledge and the constraints involved are not fixed. This chapter focuses on linguistics and examines how universal grammar is important in the processes involved in learning a language. (shrink)

The poor might always be with us but neither in ways that we imagine them nor in circumstances of their own choosing. Poverty (and its subject class, the poor) has been a persistent presence in the modern social sciences - both as ethical shadow and methodological stimulus. Throughout his self-described career as `professional storyteller of the contemporary human condition', Bauman's hermeneutical, dialectical and anthropological foci and modus operandi are impressively consistent, none more so than in his reflections on (...) the problem of poverty. An important stimulant to Bauman's ruminations on the new poor has been the work of Jeremy Seabrook and not only because Seabrook's primary foci have been the symbiotic and dialectical relationships in the production of poverty and wealth in his chronicles of the poor in contemporary capitalism, in Europe and Asia. Indeed, it is arguable that Seabrook's own vocation as freelance journalist is emblematic of the kind of sociology Bauman exhorts the salaried members of the academy to embrace for now. This article traces the lineaments of the biographical parallels, intellectual resonances and methodological (or at least epistemological) affinities shared between Seabrook and Bauman so as to tease out what a sociology of the new poor looks like in the hands of Bauman after Seabrook. (shrink)

The innate knowledge problem is a classical problem in philosophy, which has been known since the classical antiquity. Plato in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo formulated the doctrine of innate ideas and proposed an early version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, which is the most frequently used argument in innate knowledge debates. In the history of philosophy there was also an opposite view. This approach is often associated with J. Locke’s philosophy. Locke thought that all our (...) knowledge about the world is a product of the universal learning mechanisms whose functioning is based on perception. The question about the presence of innate ideas in the human mind still remains relevant. New findings in cognitive science and neurosciences and also some recent arguments from philosophers contribute to the contemporary discussion between the spokesmen of the rival approaches to this problem. The paper presents the investigation of one of the approaches to solving the problem of innate concepts, which is called a “concept nativism.” It highlights the outstanding characteristics of the concept nativism: (a) domain specificity position, (b) belief that domain-specific mechanisms of learning are innate and (c) belief that at least some concepts are innate. The article also proposes an analysis of notions “innateness” and “idea” which is important for understanding nativists’ approach to innate ideas theory. And finally, it describes the most popular nativists’ arguments: (a) references to empirical studies using the preferential looking technique, (b) the poverty of the stimulus argument and (c) the argument from animals. (shrink)

Natural language is full of patterns that appear to fit with general linguistic rules but are ungrammatical. There has been much debate over how children acquire these “linguistic restrictions,” and whether innate language knowledge is needed. Recently, it has been shown that restrictions in language can be learned asymptotically via probabilistic inference using the minimum description length (MDL) principle. Here, we extend the MDL approach to give a simple and practical methodology for estimating how much linguistic data are required to (...) learn a particular linguistic restriction. Our method provides a new research tool, allowing arguments about natural language learnability to be made explicit and quantified for the first time. We apply this method to a range of classic puzzles in language acquisition. We find some linguistic rules appear easily statistically learnable from language experience only, whereas others appear to require additional learning mechanisms (e.g., additional cues or innate constraints). (shrink)

Probabilistic methods are providing new explanatory approaches to fundamental cognitive science questions of how humans structure, process and acquire language. This review examines probabilistic models defined over traditional symbolic structures. Language comprehension and production involve probabilistic inference in such models; and acquisition involves choosing the best model, given innate constraints and linguistic and other input. Probabilistic models can account for the learning and processing of language, while maintaining the sophistication of symbolic models. A recent burgeoning of theoretical developments and online (...) corpus creation has enabled large models to be tested, revealing probabilistic constraints in processing, undermining acquisition arguments based on a perceived poverty of the stimulus, and suggesting fruitful links with probabilistic theories of categorization and ambiguity resolution in perception. (shrink)

While we realize that the empiricist interpretation of nativism may in fact be able to explain some of the central cases of both belief and concept acquisition, arguments from the poverty of the stimulus still assert how some acquisitions may not be obtained through merely making use of the general-purpose learning mechanisms brought on by empiricist thinking, and that we have to realize that the mind should contain other task-specific faculties for learning. This chapter looks into another form (...) of argument, what the author refers to as the “impossibility arguments,” to further establish the falsity of the empiricist approach. Such arguments rely greatly on the notion of self-undermining or disjointed mind–world interactions that would only support the notion of how everything in our minds is indeed innate. (shrink)

While Spelke provides powerful support for concept nativism, her focus on understanding concept nativism through six innate core knowledge systems is too confining. There is also no reason to suppose that thecurse of a compositional mindconstitutes a principled reason for positing less innate structure in explaining the origins of concepts. Any solution to such problems must take into account poverty of the stimulus considerations, which argue for postulating more innate structure, not less.

Evolutionary psychologists tend to view the mind as a large collection of evolved, functionally specialized mechanisms, or modules. Cosmides and Tooby (1994) have presented four arguments in favor of this model of the mind: the engineering argument, the error argument, the poverty of the stimulus argument, and combinatorial explosion. Fodor (2000) has discussed each of these four arguments and rejected them all. In the present paper, we present and discuss the arguments for and against the massive modularity hypothesis. (...) We conclude that Cosmides and Tooby's arguments have considerable force and are too easily dismissed by Fodor. (shrink)

It is an old and venerable idea in philosophy that morality is built into us, and this nativist view has seen a resurgence of late. Indeed, the prevailing systematic account of how we acquire complex moral representations is a nativist view inspired by arguments in Chomskyan linguistics. In this article, I review the leading argument for moral nativism – the poverty of the moral stimulus. I defend a systematic empiricist alternative that draws on the resources of statistical learning. (...) Such an empiricist account, I argue, promises to explain much of the complexity of people’s moral and other normative attitudes. (shrink)

A nativist moral psychology, modeled on the successes of theoretical linguistics, provides the best framework for explaining the acquisition of moral capacities and the diversity of moral judgment across the species. After a brief presentation of a poverty of the moral stimulus argument, this chapter sketches a view according to which a so-called Universal Moral Grammar provides a set of parameterizable principles whose specific values are set by the child's environment, resulting in the acquisition of a moral idiolect. (...) The principles and parameters approach predicts moral diversity, but does not entail moral relativism. (shrink)

The question of whether biologists should continue to use the Linnaean hierarchy has been a hotly debated issue. Invented before the introduction of evolutionary theory, Linnaeus's system of classifying organisms is based on outdated theoretical assumptions, and is thought to be unable to provide accurate biological classifications. Marc Ereshefsky argues that biologists should abandon the Linnaean system and adopt an alternative that is more in line with evolutionary theory. He traces the evolution of the Linnaean hierarchy from its introduction to (...) the present. He illustrates how the continued use of this system hampers our ability to classify the organic world, and then goes on to make specific recommendations for a post-Linnaean method of classification. Accessible to a wide range of readers by providing introductory chapters to the philosophy of classification and the taxonomy of biology, the book will interest both scholars and students of biology and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Historically, the dispute between empiricists and nativists in philosophy and cognitive science has concerned human and animal minds (Margolis and Laurence in Philos Stud: An Int J Philos Anal Tradit 165(2): 693-718, 2013, Ritchie in Synthese 199(Suppl 1): 159–176, 2021, Colombo in Synthese 195: 4817–4838, 2018). But recent progress has highlighted how empiricist and nativist concerns arise in the construction of artificial systems (Buckner in From deep learning to rational machines: What the history of philosophy can teach us about the (...) future of artificial intelligence. Oxford University Press.). This paper uses nativism and empiricism to address questions about the nature of artificial intelligence and its trajectory. It begins by defining the nativism/empiricism debate in terms of the generality of a system. Nativist systems have initial states with domain-specific features; empiricist systems have initial states with only domain-general features. With the debate framed in this way, it then explores a variety of arguments for nativism and empiricism in AI. These arguments revolve around two different questions which must be distinguished: whether nativism the only possible approach to developing human-level AI (HLAI); and whether nativism is the most practical approach to developing HLAI. On the first question, it argues that nativism is quite clearly not the only possible approach to developing HLAI, as is sometimes suggested. It argues that existing arguments for the necessity of nativism are unconvincing, because they analogize from poverty of the stimulus arguments about humans, while AIs often have access to much more data than humans. Then it argues that the case of evolution gives us a compelling argument against nativism. On the second, practical question, the paper argues that there is a tradeoff between the advantages of encoding innate machinery directly, and the advantages of evolving or learning it. However, as the past decade has shown, empiricism is a much more viable path to greater capability levels, given the ‘bitter lesson’ (Sutton in _Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction_. MIT press.) that encoding the ‘correct’ knowledge in AI systems is perennially outperformed by more empiricist methods that leverage large-scale data and computation. (shrink)

This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism–empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most promising framework for the scientific study of the mind. Our case on behalf of nativism has four (...) parts. (1) We characterize nativism’s core commitments relative to the contemporary debate between empiricists and nativists, (2) we present the positive case for nativism in terms of two central nativist arguments (the poverty of the stimulus argument and the argument from animals), (3) we respond to a number of influential objections to nativist theories, and (4) we explain the nativist approach to the conceptual system. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the most prominent and familiar features of Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations generate a powerful argument for the thesis that most of our concepts are innate, an argument that echoes a Chomskyan poverty of the stimulus argument. This argument has a significance over and above what it tells us about Wittgenstein’s implicit commitments. For, it puts considerable pressure on widely held contemporary views of concept learning, such as the view that we learn concepts (...) by constructing prototypes. This should lead us to abandon our general default hostility to concept nativism and be much more sceptical of claims made on behalf of learning theories. (shrink)

In the last few years, nativist, modular views of moral cognition have been influential. This paper shares the view that normative cognition develops robustly, and is probably an adaptation. But it develops an alternative view of the developmental basis of moral cognition, based on the idea that adults scaffold moral development by organising the learning environment of the next generation. In addition, I argue that the modular nativist picture has no plausible account of the role of explicit moral judgement, and (...) that no persuasive version of the ‘poverty of the stimulus' applies to moral cognition. (shrink)

Along with the increasing popularity of connectionist language models has come a number of provocative suggestions about the challenge these models present to Chomsky's arguments for nativism. The aim of this paper is to assess these claims. We begin by reconstructing Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus and arguing that it is best understood as three related arguments, with increasingly strong conclusions. Next, we provide a brief introduction to connectionism and give a quick survey of recent (...) efforts to develop networks that model various aspects of human linguistic behavior. Finally, we explore the implications of this research for Chomsky's arguments. Our claim is that the relation between connectionism and Chomsky's views on innate knowledge is more complicated than many have assumed, and that even if these models enjoy considerable success the threat they pose for linguistic nativism is small. (shrink)

‘In historical composition’, said Samuel Johnson, ‘all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent’. Perhaps so, but even if the historian must appear dull and plodding next to his more profound and shimmering brethren, the philologists and – of course – the literary critics, still he must be granted at least one virtue in plenty and that virtue is scepticism. Especially nowadays. While not quite yet ready to surrender his province to the meta-historians , the historian continues diligently (...) to scrutinize his sources with such wary Pyrrhonism as he can muster. He is especially suspicious of those ancients whose intelligence and whose literary gifts he most admires, hence the unrelenting distrust of authors such as Cicero and Caesar – and recently even such paragons of accuracy as Polybius. Still, a few authors have earned our unconscious credence, it would seem, merely by dint of their artlessness; we simply do not respect them enough to doubt them. A case in point: Varro's De Re Rustica, a remarkable ensemble of three dialogues, a highly literary work, yet one whose obvious inadequacies have distracted readers from its attempts at literariness and consequently have led them to take its veracity for granted – even when it relates to items having little or nothing to do with agriculture. A brief passage in the third book of R.R. informs us, or rather seems to inform us, that what was perhaps republican Rome's most illustrious family, the Claudii Pulchri, was reduced to poverty in the seventies B.C. in the aftermath of the death of the consul of 79 – evidence that has been accepted widely by modern scholars. In this paper I hope to show that there is no good reason for believing Varro's Appius when he claims to have been pauperized by his father's death and, furthermore, that to do so is to fail to appreciate the artistry and wry humour with which Varro has composed Book Three. (shrink)

The importance for realism of the concept of truthlikeness was first stressed by Popper. Popper himself not only mapped out a program for defining truthlikeness (in terms of falsity content and truth content) but produced the first definitions within this program. These were shown to be inadequate. But the program lingered on, and the most recent attempt to revive it is that of Newton-Smith. His attempt is a failure, not because of some minor defect or technical flaw in his particular (...) account but rather because the program incorporates a fundamental flaw. However, realists need not despair. There already exists an entirely different program not subject to these criticisms. (shrink)

Fiona Cowie's book What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered offers an important critical assessment of nativist views of the mind. She provides an account of what nativism consists in, and discusses prominent nativist views of concept acquisition and language acquisition. In the latter case, she also offers an empiricist alternative to Chomskyan nativist accounts, and claims that the main arguments for an innate language faculty—one that embodies Universal Grammar—don't work. We provide an overview of her position, focusing mostly on her views about (...) natural language, and argue that she has underestimated the power the poverty of the stimulus argument and consequently has underestimated the advantages of nativist models of language acquisition. (shrink)

U knjizi "Ponovno promišljanje urođenosti" , koja izlaže konektivističko stajalište o razvoju, Jeffrey L. Elman et al. iznose nove pristupe i metode u procesu učenja uopće, s posebnim naglaskom na učenje jezika, odnosno materinskog jezika. Slijede najnoviji argumenti protiv Chomskyeve teze o urođenosti jezika koji, između ostalog, propituju sljedeće pretpostavke: 1. modularnost jezika; 2. kritično vrijeme za učenje jezika; 3. siromaštvo podražaja; 4. genetsku osnovu gramatike; 5. lokalizaciju jezika. Zaključak jest da su argumenti uvjerljivi te da postoji novi pogled na (...) urođenost jezika.In the book "Rethinking Innateness, a connectionist perspective on development" Jeffrey L. Elman et al. present new approaches and methods in the learning process in general, with special stress on the acquisition of language or mother tongue. Here are the most recent arguments against Chomskyan thesis about the innateness of language which questions, among other things, the following presuppositions: 1. language modularity; 2. critical period for the acquisition of language; 3. poverty of the stimulus; 4. genetical basis of grammar; 5. language localization. The conclusion is that the arguments are convincing and that there is a new way of looking at the innateness of language. (shrink)

Poverty -of-stimulus arguments have taken new ground recently, augmented by experimental findings from th e study of child language. In this paper, we briefly review two variants of the poverty-of-stimulus argument that have received empirical support from studies of child language; then we examine a third argument of this kind in more detail. The case under discussion involves the structural notion of c-command as it pertains to children’s interpretation of disjunction in the scope of negation.

A evolução humana é objeto de pesquisas comprometidas com diferentes agendas. Neste artigo discute-se cenários que concedem à psi-cologia de senso comum um papel central em tentativas de se retraçar tal evolução, colocando em relevo o que nos distinguiria de outras mentes animais: habilidades especiais para representar e, sobretudo, para inter-pretar. Essa perspectiva leva a sério a imagem – central a muito do que se faz em filosofia e nas ciências sociais – de que somos agentes constituí-dos em um ambiente (...) social e cultural. Estará em questão se essa imagem pode ser assimilada pela biologia evolutiva contemporânea, sem que esta abra mão dos seus pressupostos fundamentais e do seu arcabouço con-ceitual e teórico característico. Godfrey-Smith e Sterelny apostam nesse projeto, e se propõem a efetivar essa integração. Em contraste com cená-rios inatistas, que se apóiam em argumentos com base numa pobreza de es-tímulos, emerge daquele projeto um cenário no qual a evolução da mente humana interage com as nossas habilidades interpretativas. Estas habili-dades resultariam, por sua vez, de uma aprendizagem socialmente medi-ada, facilitada por um tipo particular de construção de nichos envolven-do mecanismos de herança não-genética.Human evolution is the subject of different kinds of research committed to different agenda. In this paper I will discuss various scenarios in which folk psychology plays a distinctive role in attempts to keep track of this evolution, making explicit what is distinctive about us, compared to other animal minds: special habilities for representation and, above all, for interpretation. This perspective takes seriously the image that we are agents constituted in a social and cultural environment, which is central to much of what is done in philosophy and the social sciences. I will discuss whether this image can be assimilated by contemporary evolutionary biology, without compromising its fundamental pressupositions and its characteristic conceptual and theoretical framework. Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny embrace this project and attempt to work out the details of this integration. Contrasting with nativist scenarios, which are grounded in poverty of the stimulus arguments, a scenario emerges from that project in which the evolution of the human mind interacts with our interpretative habilities. These habilities would be, in turn, the result of social learning, facilitated by a particular kind of niche construction involving non-genetic inheritance mechanisms. (shrink)

For more than 60 years, Chomsky has been an intellectual Colossus bestriding the worlds of language, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences, and focusing attention on the whole field and emphasizing the crucial importance of domains overlooked by the mainstream. One such area is the study of first‐language acquisition. This chapter considers “atypical acquisition” to cover two conceptually related situations. First, it covers a variety of cases where there is an obvious “poverty of the stimulus” in that children either (...) receive or perceive no linguistic input at the essential early stages referred to as critical periods. Second, it covers where there is rather the opposite situation. The chapter presents atypicality in language acquisition that stems from the learner's atypical neurological profile rather than environmental or input properties. It focuses on Developmental Language Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and the case of the polyglot‐savant Christopher to exemplify atypical acquisition. (shrink)

Although linguistic nativism has received the bulk of attention in contemporary innateness debates, moral nativism has perhaps an even deeper ancestry. If linguistic nativism is Cartesian, moral nativism is Platonic. Moral nativism has taken a backseat to linguistic nativism in contemporary discussions largely because Chomsky made a case for linguistic nativism characterized by unprecedented rigor. Hence it is not surprising that recent attempts to revive the thesis that we have innate moral knowledge have drawn on Chomsky’s framework. I’ll argue, however, (...) that the recent attempts to use Chomsky-style arguments in support of innate moral knowledge are uniformly unconvincing. The central argument in the Chomskian arsenal, of course, is the Poverty of the Stimulus (POS) argument. In section 1, I will set out the basic form of the POS argument and the conclusions about domain specificity and innate propositional knowledge that are supposed to follow. In section 2, I’ll distinguish 3 hypotheses about innateness and morality: rule nativism, moral principle nativism, and moral judgment nativism. In sections 3-5 I’ll then consider each of these hypotheses in turn. I’ll argue that while there is some reason to favor rule nativism, the arguments that moral principles and moral judgment derive from innate moral knowledge don’t work. The capacity for moral judgment is better explained by appeal to innate affective systems rather than innate moral knowledge. In the final section, I’ll suggest that the role of such affective mechanisms in structuring the mind complicates the standard picture about poverty of the stimulus arguments and nativism. For the affective mechanisms that influence cognitive structures can make contributions that are neither domain general nor domain specific. (shrink)