The Unmaking of a Modern Synthesis: Noam Chomsky, Charles Hockett, and the Politics of Behaviorism, 1955–1965

Abstract

Abstract:A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the abandonment of behaviorism for cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a scientific borderland, muddy and much traveled. This essay relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of behaviorism. His antibehaviorism emerged only in the course of what became a systematic repudiation of the work of the Cornell linguist C. F. Hockett (1916Hockett ( -2000. In the name of the positivist Unity of Science movement, Hockett had synthesized an approach to grammar based on statistical communication theory; a behaviorist view of language acquisition in children as a process of association and analogy; and an interest in uncovering the Darwinian origins of language. In criticizing Hockett on grammar, Chomsky came to engage gradually and critically with the whole Hockettian synthesis. Situating Chomsky thus within his own disciplinary matrix suggests lessons for students of disciplinary politics generally and-famously with Chomsky-the place of political discipline within a scientific life. W H Y A N T I B E H AV I O R I S M ? W H Y C H O M S K Y ' S ?Anyone inclined to organize the history of science around "revolutions" has long had to hand a tidy scheme for dividing up American psychology in the twentieth century. Before World War II there was the behaviorist revolution. After the war there was the cognitive revolution. Where the former banished the mind from the domain of psychological knowledge, the latter brought it back in. Each revolution's beginnings, moreover, have an emblem in a brilliant, boldly controversial call to arms: on the one side, John Watson's 1913 manifesto "Psychology as School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom; g.m.radick @leeds.ac.uk. This paper has benefited enormously from discussions at seminars and meetings in Leeds, Lancaster, Vancouver, Berlin, and Edinburgh and from the improving attention of a small army of learned readers and listeners, including Jonathan Hodge, Paul Strand, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Tammy Goss, John Joseph, Tania Munz, Randy Harris, Michael Gordin, Geoffrey Pullum, Steven Pinker, Ageliki Lefkaditou, Floris Cohen, and the Isis referees. It is a pleasure to thank them all for their muchappreciated generosities.Isis, volume 107, number 1.

Culture and Child Attachment Patterns: a Behavioral Systems Synthesis

“…How children come to behave in culture-consistent ways and what makes cultures stable are among the great mysteries of behavior science (Henrich & Tennie, 2017;Radick, 2016). The dilemma rises from the fact that before they could have been exposed to the contingencies that define the adult social world, children behave in ways that are consistent with the contingencies and values of the societies into which they are born (Strand & Downs, 2018).…”

lenguaje humano: ¿una estructura más un código o un sistema dinámico, multimodal y semióticamente heterogéneo?

“…En este ámbito, la utilidad de su modelo podría deberse a la desagregación de diferentes rasgos, cada uno de los cuales proporciona criterios que pueden operacionalizarse y ser testeados empíricamente (Hauser 1996;Wacewicz y Zywiczynsky 2015). En la misma época, en cambio, Chomsky rechazaba de plano la aplicabilidad de las explicaciones adaptacionistas para dar cuenta de la que consideraba una capacidad cualitativamente única y sin precursores, y descartaba la utilidad de los estudios comparados para el conocimiento del lenguaje (Radick, 2016). 9 Por otra parte, aunque Hockett mantuvo la tesis de que las diferencias tenían una importancia decisiva, mientras las similitudes sólo tenían un papel secundario, su modelo incluía algunos rasgos compartidos con otros sistemas comunicativos.…”

The Politics of Psycholinguistics

“…114–116). This paper had the effect of being an antibehaviorist critique because of the linkage of Markov processes and behaviorism through the work of linguist Charles Hockett (Radick, n.d.). Chomsky only sharpened his criticism of behaviorism when he wrote a review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior for the journal Language (Chomsky, ).…”

“…Such creativity involved a model of science based on the production of novel hypotheses more than the careful accumulation of empirical evidence. It was, then, a model of science that fit with the kind of rationalist epistemology advocated by Chomsky but not the empiricism called for by his opponents, from B. F. Skinner to Leonard Bloomfield and his follower Charles Hockett (Radick, n.d.). This perspective—that humans were scientists of a particular sort—was central to Chomsky's view of language (Chomsky, , , , , pp.…”

“…Gregory Radick (n.d.) points out that Chomsky's attack was also implicitly directed against the linguist Charles Hockett.…”