Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is a linguist whose argument for an innate “language faculty” helped end behaviorism’s dominance in psychology.
Why?
Language acquisition is too fast and too systematic to be explained by reinforcement.
- His 1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior is the canonical marker of the Cognitive Revolution
- Generative grammar: a finite set of rules can produce infinite grammatical sentences
- Children don’t learn rules from scratch, they fill in parameters in a universal grammar