Article View: sci.cognitive
Article #501Re: Language versus concept
From: DKleinecke
Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:55
Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:55
33 lines
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3813 bytes
On Sep 6, 2:32 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote: > What do you think of Chomskysreviewofskinnersverbalbehavior? Does the > "refutation" by the person with a Q in his name hold any water? I agree with whoever said Chomsky hadn't read the book. I think he may have turned all the pages but his bile blinded him. I have never bothered to see how he was refuted by Q or anybody else. I see the controversy as religious. The question being free will. The idea that man has no free will is an old one but before the enlightenment there was no clear idea about what that meant. In the enlightenment good enough machines were being built that a philosopher could suggest that man was a machine. What Skinner did, and I think this is tremendous advance in philosophy, is to provide a plausible mechanism for this to be true. He may well have been wrong - but he cannot be proven wrong by anything uncovered yet. So Skinner set out to destroy the idea of free will, did an excellent job of it and felt happy with the outcome. For his own psychological and religious reasons he did not value "free will". To Chomsky this was offensive beyond all labels. Blasphemy would have been too weak a word. So Chomsky set out to destroy Skinner. After a life time of listening to Chomsky his arguments sound like cliches - back then they were new and striking. So Skinner was pretty much destroyed - except among a small band of true believers. I don't think this particular argument says much about linguistics or psychology. It is a religious dispute.
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