3. the capacity for making inductive generalizations on the basis of observed associations.

<consider Hume's account of how we acquire the concept of causation>

Kant-style Rationalist:

Mind must also have

Innate 'categories' that are a precondition for having the sorts of sense-experiences we do.

Can't generate the concept of Causality unless we already regard the events as having causal properties.

(Similarly with Time).

Distinguish (linguistic) Competence vs. Performance

<sort of hard to make this distinction really clear….>

(stuff with outside interference and stuff with internal faults)

(within internal faults, distinguish transient flaws from more permanent flaws)

Competence is supposed to be the person's acquaintance with a set of rules such that, if the rules are applied in ideal circumstances, the person will produce only grammatical sentences, and interpret any sentence properly.

The output of the LAD is the internalization of this set of rules.

So somehow this internalization is tacit, unconscious, competence-level.

Some might wish this "unconscious knowledge" to be assimilated to

"knowing how"…= having abilities to speak/understand

vs.

"knowing that"…= having (conscious?) declarative

understanding

(lots of opportunities to rag on about this stuff….Check out the IMMENSE literature on this notion and its related concepts)

"Empiricism" holds:

The LAD operates essentially by principles of inductive generalization, which associates observable features of utterances with one another and with other relevant sensory information to obtain an internalization of the rules of a linguistic description.

Note that the operative issue is that the very same faculties do the work in language acquisition as work in any other arena of learning.

Chomsky said:

Knowledge of language cannot arise by application

of step-by-step inductive operations (segmentation,

classification, substitution procedures, 'analogy',

association, conditioning, and so on) of any sort that

have been developed within linguistics, psychology,

or philosophy.

He gives two categories of reasons for his belief in innateness:

1. There is a set of empirical considerations which are incompatible with the Empiricist hypothesis.

2. The nature of the rules internalized is such that, even in principle, they cannot have been internalized through the procedures postulated by Empiricists alone.

"Empirical considerations"

a. Compared with the number of sentences that a child can produce or interpret with ease, the number of seconds in a lifetime is ridiculously small. The available input data is only a minute sample of the linguistic material that has been thoroughly mastered, as indicated by actual performance.

b. The input is also highly "degenerate". Most of the sentences a child hears are ungrammatical. If language rules were acquired solely by inductive generalization, we expect the child's competence to be infected with the mistakes s/he has heard.

c. Mastery of language, unlike mastery in intellectual fields whose subject-matter is entirely learned, is not radically affected by intelligence or environment.

(More "empirical considerations")

d. Unlike purely learned abilities, linguistic competence is largely independent of degree of motivation.

e. Despite differences in languages, all known languages contain many basic similarities ("linguistic universals"). Although it is easy to imagine a language that does not contain such a similarity, and despite the fact that differences in environment, culture, child-rearing methods, etc., there are no such actual languages.

None of this first category of evidence is really conclusive: you might dispute some of the evidence and you might dispute the conclusions generated from the evidence.

e.g., is it really so clear that the majority of sentences heard are ungrammatical?

e.g., maybe the reason all languages are so similar is that they all arose from one common past language.

Still, if we compare talking with walking (an innate ability) and with writing (a learned ability), it seems more like the former than like the latter…

Chomsky has, throughout his career but especially in his early years, argued that the nature of the rules learned could not have been achieved by "empiricist's" methods

In these early years, the version of transformational grammar that Chomsky proposed contained a "deep structure"…

The "deep structure" of a given sentence might contain constituents that were not "observable" in the "surface structure" of the sentence…

And hence these features could not be learned by the "Empiricist's methodology"

Here's the sort of example that Chomsky used:

Every competent speaker knows that 'John is easy to please' can be paraphrased as 'It is easy to please John', or as 'Pleasing John is easy'

Every competent speaker knows that 'John is eager to please' cannot be paraphrased as '*It is eager to please John', or as '*Pleasing John is eager'

But so far as all the observable evidence goes, the structure of 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' are identical.

Therefore, speakers cannot learn the relevant differences between the two sentences merely by "empirical observation"

Chomsky also used arguments concerning "linguistic universals"…and in fact his early fame was in large measure due to this.

He argued that natural languages were not regular languages (i.e., were not generated by linear grammars and were not generated by finite state automata)

He furthermore argued that natural languages were not context-free languages (i.e., were not generated by context-free grammars and were not generated by pushdown stack automata)

The basis of this claim was that they all required "structure dependent transformational rules", and this was beyond the power of context-free grammars.

(The idea was that the LAD had to induce transformational rules, and you couldn't do that merely on the basis of "empiricist learning methodology")

1. Challenges to the accuracy of the empirical evidence. (Maybe child spends LOTS of time on language learning)

2. Maybe data doesn't yield "innateness" conclusion. (Common ancestral language)

3. Maybe Chomskean linguistics is wrong. (Lots of competitor theories are on the market)

4. Conceptual objections to innate knowledge. (Didn't Locke refute the intelligibility of innate ideas? Is Chomsky really right about "empiricist" learning/induction? Is Chomsky really talking about 'innate ideas' in anything like the classical way?)