This conception of language has been advocated by post-Bloomfieldian linguists such as Charles Hockett (1958) and Robert Hall (1964). Hockett thinks it right to ignore 'habits of the latter kind in the study of language. Bloomfield himself is often credited with fathering the idea that language is behavior.
However, this view of the origins of the idea that language is behavior cannot be correct. There is an additional, rather obvious possibility to consider regarding the possible source(s) of the behavioral view of language espoused by American linguists: the general idea that language constitutes behavior, habit, or the like may have been adopted by linguists. of behavioral psychologists. To see this, Confused Customer, think back for a moment to the Bloomfieldian conception of language we have been parsing (Botha 1989b).
So the core of the post-worldphile view of language consists of a strictly mysterious kind of thing. First, the post-B100mfie1dian behavioral view of language lacks maturity in its ontological design.
Supping on Psychological Stuff
An operant must be distinguished from an 'activity', which is 'mainly concerned with the internal economy of the organism'. In short, verbal behavior consists of responses that are under the control of objectively identifiable stimuli. First, verbal behavior is not identical to vocal behavior. 1957:14) considers 'any movement capable of influencing.
Skinner (1957:7) notes that verbal behavior leaves behind 'records' or 'traces': the sound stream of spoken speech, the words on a page, the signals sent over a telephone or telegraph wire. He considers the belief that "speech has an independent existence apart from the behavior of the speaker" to be an "unfortunate" idea. Third, verbal behavior has no aspect that needs to be described or explained in terms of 'events that take place in the organism'.
Skinner (1957:5) therefore forbids any recourse to ideas, images, meaning, etc., in describing verbal behavior and in explaining the causality of specific verbal responses. This view of verbal behavior (or language) must therefore be sharply distinguished from the 'common-sensible' behavioral views of language that one uses.
Ripping Into Raw Reinforcement and the Rest
The basis of Skinner's failure to deal with the "innovative" aspect of linguistic behavior, according to Chomsky (1957:28), is the behaviorist belief that "the accurate prediction of verbal behavior involves only the specification of a few external factors" that he [i.e. Skinner] isolated experimentally with lower organisms'. In later work, Chomsky generalized his fundamental criticisms of Skinner's concept of verbal behavior to behaviorist concepts of language as a class. Third, Chomsky rejects Skinner's view of the acquisition of verbal behavior or, in short, the learning of language.
But Skinner's view of the learning of verbal behavior denies the possibility of a child making any contribution to language learning. Second, behaviorism is a philosophy of mind that makes certain assumptions about human nature and the workings of the mind. Chomsky's criticism of the behaviourist conception of language cannot be countered by simply saying that there are many.
First, proponents of a behaviorist conception of language have failed to clarify what they would accept as a refutation of their beliefs about the nature of language (behavior) -;' This, for example, prompted Marshall to ". The shortcoming [i.e., the inability to explain linguistic productivity] can be overcome, he [i.e., Salzinger] argues, by using the concept of a "responsive class."
Feeding on Philosophical Fare
Dishing Up Dispositions
Quine presents a number of views on language that can be collectively understood as a behaviorist view of language. And sentences can be learned in three ways, all of which are behavioristic: by "directly conditioning" an entire sentence to some sensory stimulation; by 'association' of sentences with other sentences; and with_. In any case, it remains clear that the child's early learning of a verbal response depends on the extent to which society reinforces the response in conjunction with the stimuli that merit the response, from society's perspective, and on the extent to which the society otherwise discourages this response.'
Chomsky finds the description of language as 'a complex of current tendencies towards verbal behavior' 'rather perverse'. On the one hand, Chomsky argues that Quine's varying use of the term 'dispositions' makes it difficult but impossible to determine what he means by 'disposition' and 'language'. 69 Therefore, 'disposition' in this context is, on Chomsky's view, an essentially empty concept. which point can have a definition of.
Underlying the 'dispositional' characterization of language, Chomsky suggests, is a typical behavioral confusion about what a person does or is likely to do and what he knows. Quine, on Chomsky's reading, therefore confuses performance with competence in characterizing language as a complex of dispositions to behave. The notion of "propensity to behave", which belongs to the realm of performance, is not suitable for defining the nature of language. by studying cognitive structures and their organization as normal scientific practice and intellectual curiosity would require.'.
According to Chomsky, the right way to exorcise the ghost in the machine is to determine the structure of the mind and its products. Since Quine's conception of language learning is essentially behaviourist, it has all the shortcomings discussed in par.2.2.2 above. learn sentences' to be 'almost unintelligible'. Suppose I describe a scene as rather like the view from my study window, except for the lake in the distance.
To say this would be as absurd as to suppose that I form this and other sentences of ordinary life by "analogical substitution," in any useful sense of that term.'. When we learn a language, we obviously do not 'learn sentences' or acquire a 'repertoire of behaviour' through training. which determine the form and meaning of many indefinite sentences. you don't want to pursue philosophical consistency at the risk of becoming epistemically weak, here's one. The final dietary directive you should pay attention to:. beware: fad diets are no longer helpful. than celebrating with cerebral sausages and cider.
Boiling It Down to the Basics
For physical monists, of course, the essence of language cannot consist of any kind of other things. Thus, given their nominalist stance on abstract concepts, behaviorists cannot locate the essence of language in any realm other than that of the observable. A conception of language dictated by philosophical doctrines must necessarily reflect the limitations of these doctrines.
Anti-metaphysicalism, materialism, nominalism and empiricism thus form the bare bones of the behaviorist conception of language. In this respect, the behaviourist conception of language is identical to the materialist one that Bloomfield put forward. A conception of language that is not closely linked to linguistic reality has the substance of fiction.
Let me illustrate the general point with the help of a final example, the Firthian concept of language. Halliday goes on to equate 'behavioural potential' in the case of language with 'meaningful potential'. Where do we turn next for a conception of language that even this most perfect chef of conception would consider kosher.
By, for example, Chomsky, who explicitly talks about 'a taxonomic-behaviourist view of the nature of language'. For the physicalist or materialist terms in which Bloomfield characterized the essence of language, see Botha 1989b:2-4. To say that Bloomfield's conception of language was materialist and not behaviourist is not to deny the existence of a principled connection between materialism and behaviourism.
Chomsky's theory of language acquisition will be discussed in some detail in a separate study dealing with his conception of language. This illustrates how difficult it is to determine what Wittgenstein's view of the nature of language really was. A theory of linguistic structure is the fundamental link between a perception of language and linguistic reality, but not the only one.
The connections needed for this take the form of theories of language change, language variation, language pathology, and so on. First, the way Wittgensteinians have interpreted the nature of language has influenced the linguistic ontology of many philosophers and linguists.
