In several recent publications (Sampson [1978], [1980a]) Geoffrey Sampson has argued that an essentially Popperian language acquisition device could learn language much as a human child does. The device Sampson envisions would freely (or perhaps randomly) generate hypotheses about the grammar the child seeks to learn, and test these hypotheses against the data available to the child. If the data are incompatible with an hypothesis, the hypothesis is rejected and another one tried. If any hypothesis does not conflict with the (...) data, it is retained for further testing. Sampson's language acquisition device exhibits a Popperian proclivity for strong, simple hypotheses, but when it sets out on its acquisition task it has no a priori information about the nature of the grammar it seeks to acquire. If Sampson is right, then there is no need to postulate rationalist learning mechanisms of the sort advocated by Noam Chomsky (in Chomsky [1975] and many other publications) to account for the child's ability to learn language. However, it is my view that Sampson's argument is fatally flawed. He has not shown that a Popperian learning mechanism could duplicate the child's feat. Indeed, I think it can be shown that Sampson's Popperian learner could not possibly match the language learning achievement of the normal child, save by miraculous accident. (shrink)

In this brief space I want to describe how Chomsky's analysis of "psychological reality" departs from what I think is a fairly standard construal of the idea. This familiar formulation arises from distinguishing between someone's following a rule and someone's acting in conformity with a rule. The former idea, but not the latter, involves the idea that the person has some mental representation of the rule that plays a certain causal role in determining behavior. Although there may be many grammatical (...) rules to which a person's verbal behavior (ignoring slips of the tongue and other performance interferences) conforms, only some of those rules have psychological reality; these are the ones that are internalized in thought and play some appropriate causal role. (shrink)

The book from which these sections are excerpted is concerned with the prospects for assimilating the study of human intelligence and its products to the natural sciences through the investigation of cognitive structures, understood as systems of rules and representations that can be regarded as “mental organs.” These mental structui′es serve as the vehicles for the exercise of various capacities. They develop in the mind on the basis of an innate endowment that permits the growth of rich and highly articulated (...) structures along an intrinsically determined course under the triggering and partially shaping effect of experience, which fixes parameters in an intricate system of predetermined form. It is argued that the mind is modular in character, with a diversity of cognitive structures, each with its specific properties arid principles. Knowledge of language, of the behavior of objects, and much else crucially involves these mental structures, and is thus not characterizable in terms of capacities, dispositions, or practical abilities, nor is it necessarily grounded in experience in the standard sense of this term.Various types of knowledge and modes of knowledge acquisition are discussed in these terms. Some of the properties of the language faculty are investigated. The basic cognitive relation is “knowing a grammar”; knowledge of language is derivative and, correspondingly, raises further problems. Language as commonly understood is not a unitary phenomenon but involves a number of interacting systems: the “computational” system of grammar, which provides the representations of sound and meaning that permit a rich range of expressive potential, is distinct from a conceptual system with its own properties; knowledge of language must be distinguished from knowledge of how to use a language; and the various systems that enter into the knowledge and use of language must be further analyzed into their specific subcomponents. (shrink)