64599002 piaget chomsky debate

8/13/2019 64599002 Piaget Chomsky Debate

1/34


2/34


3/34


4/34


5/34

M Piattel/i-Palmarini / Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 317

particles collapsing into a single visible track in modern high-energy laboratories:the event that actually happened; the one which we, the organizers, thoughtwould happen; the one Jean Piaget hoped would happen, and the one thatChomsky urged everyone not to let happen.

Let me digress for a moment and sketch also these other virtual debates.Piaget assumed that he and Chomsky were bound to agree in aH importantmatters. t was his original wording that there had to be a compromis betweenhim and Chomsky. In fact, this term is recurrent throughout the debate. Duringthe preparatory phase, Piaget made it clear that it had been his long-standingdesire to meet with Chomsky at great length, and witness the inevitableconvergence of their respective views. As Piaget states in his invitation paper /

he thought there were powerful reasons supporting his assumption. 1 will outlinethese reasons in a simple sketch.

Reasons for the compromise

Piaget's assessment of the main points of convergence between him andChomsky- Anti-empiricism (in particular anti-behaviorism)- Rationalism and uncompromising menta ism

- Constructivism and/or generativism (both assigning a central role to thesubject's own internal activity)

- Emphasis on rules, principIes and formal constraints- Emphasis on logic and deductive algorithms- Emphasis on actual experimentation vs. armchair theorizing)- A dynamic perspective (development and acquisition studied in real time,

with real children)

Piaget's proposal was one of a division of labour , he being mostly concernedwith conceptual contents and semantics, Chomsky being (allegedly) mostlyconcerned with content-independent rules of syntactic well-formedness acrossdifferent languages. Piaget considered that the potentiaHy divisive issue ofinnatism was, at bottom, a non-issue (or at least not a divisive one) because healso agreed that there is a fixed nucleus (noyaux fixe) underlying all mentalactivities, language included, and that this nucleus is accounted for by humanbiology. The only issue, therefore was to assess the exact nature of this fixednucleus and the degree of its specificity.

The suggestion, voiced by Cellrier and Toulmin, was to consider twocomplementary strategies: the Piagetian one, which consisted of a minimization

lIn Language and Learning: The Debate between lean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (hereinafterabbreviated as LL), pp. 23-24.


6/34

318 M. Piattelli-Palmarini / Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346

of the role of innate factors, and the Chomskian one, consisting of a maximizationof these factors - once more, a sort of division of labor.

t was interesting for a participants, and certainly unexpected to Piaget, to

witness that, during the debate proper, the constant focus of the discussions wason what Piaget considered perfectly obvious ( allant de soi ): the nature andorigin of this fixed nucleus . He was heading for severe criticism from themolecular biologists present at the debate (especially from Jacob and Changeux)concerning his views on the origins of the fixed nucleus. And he was heading formajor disagreements with Chomsky concerning the specificity of this nucleus.

It can be safely stated that, while Piaget hoped for a reconciliatory settlementwith the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) contingent about particularhypotheses and particular mechanisms concerning language and learning (and, inparticular, the learning of language), he found himself, unexpectedly, facinginsuperable disagreement about those very assumptions he hardly consideredworth discussing, and which he believed were the common starting point - moreon these in a momento

Piaget's imperception of these fundamental differences was, in essence,responsible for the vast gap between the debate he actually participated in, andthe virtual debate he expected to be able to mastermind. One had the impressionthat, to the very end, Piaget was still convinced he had been misunderstood by

Chomsky and Fodor. In Piaget's opinion, had they really understood his position,then it would have been unthinkable that the disagreement could still persisto Oneof Piaget's secrets was his deep reliance on the intuitive, unshakeable truth of hishypotheses directrices (guiding hypotheses). These were such that no reasonableperson could possibly reject them - not if he or she actua y understood what theymeant. One could single out the most fundamental of Piaget's assumptions(Piaget, 1974) in words that are not his own, but which may we reflect theessence of what he believed:

Piaget's guiding hypothesis (hypothese directrice)- Life is a coritinuum- Cognition is an aspect of life

therefore- Cognition is a continuum

This is a somewhat blunt rendition, but it is close enough to Piaget's coremessage. Sorne of his former collaborators in the Geneva group, in 1985,expressed basic agreement that this was a fair rendition of Piaget's hypothesedirectrice (as expressed, for instance in his 967 book Biologie et Connaissance)?

2Barbel Inhelder, personal communication.


7/34

M. Piattelli Palmarini I Cognition 5 (1994) 315-346 3 9

As any historian of medieval logic could testify, if literally taken this version is awell-known logical fallacy (compare with the following):

- New York is a major metropolis- Central Park is part of New York

therefore- Central Park is a major metropolis

Decidedly, one does not want to impute to Piaget and his co-workers assent to

a logical fallacy. Thus stated, it cannot pass as a fair reformulation. That wouldbe too devious. A better reformulation, one that passes the logical test, would bethe following:

A better heuristic version o Piaget s core hypothesis- Life is (basically) auto-organization and self-stabilization in the presence of

novelty- Cognition 'is one of life's signal devices to attain auto-organization and

self-stabilizationtherefore

- Cognition is best understood as auto-organization and self-stabilization in thepresence of novelty

This much seemed to Piaget to be untendentious and uncontroversial, but alsovery important. e declared, in fact, that this central hypothesis had guidedalmost everything he had done in psychology. In order better to understandwhere the force of the hypothesis lies, one must remember that he unreservedlyembraced other complementary hypotheses and. other strictly related assumptions. Here they are (again in a succinct and clear-cut reformulation):

Piaget s additional assumptions

I Auto organization and self-stabilization are not just empty metaphors, butdeep universal scientific principIes captured by precise logico-mathematicalschemes.

II There is a necessary, universal and invariable sequence of stepwisetransitions between qualitatively different, fixed stages of increasing selfstabilization.

III The logic of these stages is captured by a progressive hierarchy of


8/34

\ \ \ \ : \ \ l ~ \ \ ) \ \~ ~ \ N ~ ~ \ \o . ~ \ : ~ \ \ ~ \ \ \ ~ ,\ ~ 1 ~ \ ~\)\ o . ~ ~ \ 1 . o . \ : \ \ . \ \ \o . \ \ ~~ ~ \ \ ~ 1 . ~ T I . o . \ \ . \ ) \ \ .\ e o . ~

stage contains the previous one as a sub-set).V The necessary and invariant nature of these transitions cannot be captured

y the Darwinian process of random mutation plus selection.

Corollary

V Another theory of biological evolution is needed (Piaget's third way ,differing both from Darwin's and Lamarck's).

Piaget believed that there is a kind of evolution that is unique to man , andwhich grants the necessity of the mental maturational stages? These are what

they are, and could not be anything else; moreover they follow one another in astrict unalterable sequence. The random process of standard Darwinian evolutionis unable in principIe (not just as a temporary matter of fact, due to the presentstate of biology) to explain this strict logical necessity.

One the last two points the biologists, obviously, had their say, as we will seein a momento

Within this grand framework, it is use fuI to emphasize what were Piaget'sspecific assumptions concerning learning and language:

Piaget s crucial assumptions about learning

The transitions (between one stage and the next) are formally constrainedby logical necessity (fermeture logique) and actually, dynamically , takeplace through the subject's active effort to generalize, equilibrate, unify andsystematize a wide variety of different problem-solving activities.

The transition is epitomized by the acquisition of more powerful concepts

and schemes, which subsume as particular instances the concepts and schemesof the previous stage.

Piaget s crucial assumptions about language

The basic structure of language is continuous with, and is a generalizationabstraction from, various sensorimotor schemata.

The sensorimotor schemata are a developmental pre-condition for the

emergenceof

language, and also constitute the logical premise of linguistic

LL , p. 59.


9/34

M. Piatte/li-Palmarini / Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 321

structures (word order, the subject/verb/object construction, the agent/patient/instrument relation, and so on).

Conceptual links and semantic relations are the prime movers of languageacquisition. Syntax is derivative from (and a mirror of) these.

t was inevitable that Piaget should meet strong opposition on each of theseassumptions, on their alleged joint force and on the overall structure of hisargumento In a sense, the whole debate turned only on these assumptions, withPiaget growing increasingly impatient to pass onto more important and moretechnical matters, but failing to do so, on account of the insurmountable problemspresented by his core tenets. Chomsky and Fodor kept mercilessly shooting down

even the most obvious and the most innocent reformulations of the basicassumptions of the Piagetian scheme, notably in their many spirited exchangeswith Seymour Papert, who boldly undertook the task of systematically defendingPiaget against the onslaught.

The debate was not the one Piaget had anticipated, and it became clear toeveryone, except possibly to Piaget himself (see his Afterthoughts ),4 that nocompromise could possibly be found.

3 Another virtual debate: the one the organizers thought they were organizing

There was, as I said, another virtual debate, the one which the organizersmolecular biologists with a mere superficial acquaintance of cognitive psychologyand linguistics - believed they were organizing. t was closer to what Piaget had inmind than to the debate that actually too k place, because they too anticipatedsorne kind of convergence.

How could that be? How could we, the biologists in the group, believe for amoment that sorne form of compromise could be reached? The simple answer tothis, in retrospect, is: ignorance. What we thought we knew about the two systemswas simple and basic. I think I can faithfully reconstruct it in a few sentences:

What w the biologists) thought w knew

bout Piaget:

- There is a stepwise development of human thought, from infancy to

adulthood, through fixed, qualitatively different stages that are common toall cultures, though sorne cultures may fail to attain the top stages.

- Not everything that appears logical and necessarily true to us adults is so

4LL pp. 278-284.


10/34

322 M. Piatte/li Palmarini / Cognition 5 (1994) 315-346

judged by a child, and vice versa. Suitable experiments show where thedifferences lie.

- Constructivism, a variant of structuralism, is the best theoretical framework

to explain the precise patterns of cognitive development. Unlike behaviorism, constructivism stresses the active participation of the child and therole of logical deduction.

- Set theory and propositional ca1culus are (somehow) central components ofthe theory.

About Chomsky:

- There are linguistic universals, common to aH the different languages theworld overo

- These are not superficial, but constitute a "deep structure".t- This deep structure is innate, not learned, and is unique to our species.- Formallogic and species-specific computational rules are (somehow) involved

in determining deep syntactic structures.- Syntax is autonomous (independent of semantics and of generic conceptual

contents).- There are syntactic transformations (from active to passive, from declarative

to interrogative, etc.) that "preserve" the deep structure of related sentences. Semantics "links up" with syntax essentially at this deep leve .

- Behaviorism is bad, while innatism and mentalism are OK.- The expression "mind/brain" is OK. Linguistics and psychology are, at

bottom, part of biology.

The organizers, in fact, knew very little, but they liked what they knew, onboth sides. There was every reason (in our opinion) to expect that these twoschools of thought should find a compromise, and that this grand unified metatheory would fit well within modern molecular biology and the neurosciences.Both systems relied heavily on "deeper" structures, on universals, on preciselogico-mathematical schemes, on general biological assumptions. This was musicto a biologist's ears.

AH in aH it was assumed that the debate would catalyze a "natural" scientificmerger, one potentially rich in interesting convergences and compromises.

4. Chomsky's plea for an exchange, not adebate

Commenting on a previous version of the present paper, Chomsky has insistedthat he, for one, had always been adamant in not wanting a debate, but rather an

tThere was at the time sorne confusion among non-experts between the terms "deep structure"and "universal grammar".


11/34

M. Piattelli Palmarini / Cognition 5 (1994) 315-346 323

open and frank discussion, devoid of pre-determined positions and pre-setfrontiers: 1 am a little uneasy about presenting the whole thing as a 'Chomsky

Piaget debate'. That's not the way 1 understood it, at least, and 1 thought thatPiaget didn't either, though I may be wrong. As far as I understood, and the onlyway I would have even agreed to participate, there was a conference (not debate)on a range of controversial issues, which was opened by two papers, a paper byPiaget and my reaction to it, simply in order to put forward issues and to open thediscussion. 5

Chomsky then adds: Debates are an utterly irrational institution, whichshouldn't exist in a reasonable world. In a debate, the assumption is that eachparticipant has a position, and must keep to this position whatever eventuates inthe interchange. In a debate, it is an institutional impossibility (i.e., if ithappened, it would no longer be a debate) for one person to say to the other:that's a good argument, I will have to change my views accordingly. But the latteroption is the essence of any interchange among rational peopIe. So calling it adebate is wrong to start with and contributes to ways of thinking and behavingthat should be abandoned.

After pointing out that, as is to be expected in any ongoing scientific activity,his views are constantly changing and are not frozen into any immutable position,

Chomsky insists that neither he, nor Fodor, nor the enterprise of generativegrammar as a whole, are in any sense an institution, in the sense in which inEurope Marxism, Freudianism, and to sorne extent Piagetism, are institutions.The following also deserves to be quoted verbatim from his letter: There is,thank God, no 'Chomskyan' view of the world, or of psychology, or of language.Somehow, 1 think it should be made clear that as far as 1 was concerned at least, 1was participating by helping open the discussion, not representing a world view .

These excerpts from Chomsky's letter should make it very c1ear what hisattitude was. But it is well beyond anyone's powers now to un-debate that debate,partIy because it is the very subtitle of the book ( The debate between JeanPiaget and Noam Chomsky ), and partIy because the community at Iarge hasbe en referring to the event in exactIy those terms for almost two decades. So,after having made clear which kind of virtual non-debate Chomsky assumed oneshould have organized, let us finally return to what actually happened.

s. The real debate

From now on, Iet's faithfully attempt to reconstruct, from the publishedrecords, from the recorded tapes, and from the vivid memory of sorne of those

SWith Chomsky's permission, this, and the following, are verbatim quotes from a letter to M.Piattelli-Palmarini, dated May 8, 1989.


12/34

324 M Piattelli Palmarini / Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346

who were present, how all these imaginary, unlikely, virtual debates precipitatedinto the real one.

Chomsky's written reply to Piaget,6 made available a couple of months before

the debate, rightly stressed, among other things, the untenability of Piaget'sconception of evolution. Not until the first session of the debate proper hadanyone realized that Piaget was (Heaven forbid ) a Lamarckian. It was, however,already clear from his distributed "invitation" paper that he had a curious idea ofhow genes are assembled and of how evolution acts on gene assemblies. Chomskyclearly had got it right and Piaget had got it wrong. This was the first importantpoint in favor of Chomsky. Moreover, Chomsky stressed the need for specificity,while Piaget stressed the need for generality. The concrete linguistic examples

offered by Chomsky seemed indeed very, very remote from any generalizationof

sensorimotor schemata. Sorne participants already felt sympathetic to Chomsky'ssuggestion that one should not establish any dualism between body and mind, andthat one should approach the study of "mental organs" exactly in the way weapproach the study of the heart, the limbs, the kidneys, etc. Everything he saidmade perfect sense and the concrete linguistic examples (which Piaget and theothers never even began to attempt to de al with) made it vastIy implausible thatsyntactic rules could be accounted for in terms of sensorimotor schemata.Chomsky's arguments against learning by trial and error were compelling - verycompelling. One c1early saw the case for syntax, but one may still have failed tosee the far-reaching import of his arguments for learning in general. For this, theparticipants had to wait until Fodor made his big splash at the meeting. But let'sproceed in chronological order.

Most important, to sorne of the biologists, was the feeling, at first confused,but then more and more vivid, that the style of Chomsky's argumentation, hiswhole way of thinking, was so deeply germane to the one we were accustomed toin molecular biology. On the contrary, Piaget's biology sounded very much likethe old nineteenth-century biology; it was the return of a nightmare, with hisappeal to grand unifying theories, according to which life was "basically" this orthat, instead of being what it, in fact, is. Chomsky's call for specificity and hisreliance on concrete instances of language were infinitely more appealing. tbecame increasingly clear to the biologists at Royaumont that Chomsky was ourtrue confrere in biology and that the case for syntax (perhaps only for syntax) wasalready lost by Piaget.

As the debate unfolded, the participants were in for further surprises and much

more startling revelations. In order not to repeat needlessly what is already in fulllength in the book itself, let's recapitulate only the main turning points of thedebate.

LL , pp. 35-52.


13/34

M. Piatte/li-Palmarini / Cognition 5 (1994) 315 346 325

5.1. The mishaps of phenocopies

Upon deeper probing into his rather peculiar idea of "phenocopy", Piagetindeed turned out to be a Lamarckian. He actually believed in some feedback,however devious and indirect, from individual experience to the genetic make-upof the species. The biologists were aghast Jacob made a marvelous job of politelyand respectfully setting the record straight on phenocopies, aided by Changeux 7

(Monod was not present, and maybe he would have been carried away by thediscussion, behaving slightly less courteously to Piaget than Jacob and Changeuxdid. Monod, haunted by the memory of the Lyssenko affair, always reacted toLamarckism by drawing his gun )

Well, believe it or not, Piaget was unruffled. He had the stamina to declarehimself tres surpris by the reactions of the biologists, and reject Jacob'srectifications, quoting a handful of pathetic heretics, obscure Lamarckian biologists who happened to agree with him. The alienation of Piaget from mainstreambiology was consummated there and then; patently, he did not know what he wastalking about. (The young molecular biologist Antoine Danchin undertook, afterthe meeting, the task of making this as evident as it had to be made).8

Subsequent exchanges with Cellrier and Inhelder showed that they had noalternative explanation to provide for the linguistic material brought in byChomsky. When they mentioned linguistic examples, these were of a very peculiargeneric kind, nowhere near the level of specificity of Chomsky's material. Theypleaded for an attenuation of the "innateness hypothesis", so as to open the wayto the desired compromise. But Chomsky's counter was characteristically uncompromising: first of all, the high specificity of the language organ, and,therefore its innateness, is not a hypothesis, it is a fact, and there is no way onemay even try to maximize or minimize the role of the innate components, becausethe task of science is to discover what this role actually is, not to pre-judge inadvance "how much of it" we are ready to countenance in our theories. Second, itis not true that Chomsky is only interested in syntax, he is interested in everyscientifically approachable aspect of language, semantics and conceptual systemsincluded. These too have their specificity and there are also numerous and crucialaspects of semantics that owe nothing to sensorimotor schemata, or to genericlogical necessity - no division of labor along these lines, and again no compro m-ise.

The salient moments of this point in the debate can be summarized as follows:

7LL pp. 61-64.8LL pp. 356-360.


14/34

326 M. Piatte/li-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346

Counters t Piaget from the biologists

Jacob's counter:

- Autoregulation is made only by structures which are there already and whichregulate minor variations within a heavily pre-determined range of possibles.

- Regulation cannot precede the constitution of genetically determined regulatory structures.

- (Gentle reminder) Individual experience cannot be incorporated into thegenes.

Piaget simply did not see the devastating effect of Jacob's counters on hisprivate and idiosyncratic conception of evolution by means of autoregulation.Cellrier was visibly embarrassed by Piaget's anti-Darwinism and tried, I thinkunsuccessfully, to disentangle the personal attitudes of Piaget in matters ofbiological evolution from the objective implications of the Darwinian theory forpsychology proper. 9

5.2. The mishaps o precursors

During the next session, when Monod was also present, carne another majorcounter, on which Fodor quickly and aptly capitalized:

Monod's counter 10

f sensorimotor schemata are crucial for language development, then childrenwho are severely handicapped in motor control (quadriplegics, for instance)should be unable to develop language, but this is not the case.

- Inhelder's answer: Very Httle movement is needed, even just moving the

eyes.- Monod's and Fodor's punch-line: Then what is needed is a triggering

experience and not bon fide structured precursor .

Once again, it was the impression of several participants that the weight of thiscounter was not properly registered by the Piagetians. Yet the Monod-Fodorargument was impeccable, and its conclusion inevitable. One thing is a triggeringinput, quite another a structured precursor that has to be assimilated as such, and

9LL , pp. 70-72.lOLL p. 140.


15/34

M. Piattel/i-Palmarini / Cognition 5 (1994) 315 346 327

on the basis of which a higher structure is actually built. A trigger need not beisomorphic with, and not even analogous to, the structure it sets in motion.

Admitting that this precursor can be just anything you pie ase (just moving youreyes once) is tantamount to admitting that it is nothing more than a releasingfactor , in accordance with the innatist model of growth and maturation andagainst the literal notion of learning. Papert, for instance, went on at great lengthin offering the virtues of indirect , implicit learning and of the search for

primitives . These, he insisted, and only these, can be said to be innate, not thehighly specific structures proposed by Chomsky. These clearly are derived frommore fundamental, simpler primitives. For this illusion, Fodor had a radical cureup his sleeve, as we will see in a momento (Healthy correctives to Papert's, andPiaget's notion of implicit learning in the specific domain of lexical acquisition areto be found in Atkins, Kegl, Levin, 1986; Berwick, 1985; Grimshaw, 1990;Jackendoff, 1983, 1990, 1992; Lederer, Gleitman Gleitman, 1989; Lightfoot,1989; Piatelli-Palmarini, 1990a; Pinker, 1989.)

Before Fodor's cold shower a lot of the discussion turned, rather idly, aroundthe existence, in language, of components which are not specific to it, but are alsocommon to other mental activities and processes. Again, a division of labour wasproposed along these lines. Chomsky had no hesitation in admitting that there are

also language factors that. are common to other intelligent activities, but rightlyinsisted that there are many besides which are unique to language, and whichcannot be explained on the basis of general intelligence, sensorimotor schemes,communicative efficacy, the laws of logic, problem-solving, etc. These languagespecific traits, Chomsky insisted, are the most interesting ones, and those mostamenable to a serious scientific inquiry.

5.3. Chomsky s plea for specificity

Here is an essential summary of the line he defended:

Chomsky s argument for specifi city 12

The simplest and therefore (allegedly) most plausible rule for the formation ofinterrogatives

The man is here.Is the man here?

llLL, pp. 90-105.12LL pp. 39-43.


16/34


is the following (a structure-independent rule): Move 'is' to the front .But look at

The man who is tall is here.*Is the man who tall is here? (bad sentence, never occurring in the child'slanguage)Is the man who is tall here? (good sentence)

The simple rule is never even tried out by the child. Why?The correct rule, uniformly acquired by the child is not simple (in this

transparent and shallow sense of the word) and involves abstract, specificallylinguistic notions such as noun phrase .

Therefore it is not learned by trial and error and is not derivative onsensorimotor schemata. (What could the motor equivalent of a no un phraseconceivably be?)

This is, somewhat bluntly put, the core of the argumento If the process wereone of induction, of hypothesis formation and confirmation, we should expect tosee the simplest and least language-specific rules being tried out first. But this isnot what we observe.. More specific data on language acquisition in a variety oflanguages and dialects (Berwick Wexler, 1987; Chien Wexler, 1990; Guasti,1993; Jusczyk Bertoncini, 1988; Lightfoot, 1989; Manzini Wexler, 1987;Wexler, 1987; Wexler, 1990; Wexler Manzini, 1987) by now make the caseagainst learning syntax by induction truly definitive. We will come back to thispoint.

Chomsky s argument against any derivation o syntactic rules from genericconstraints 13

We like each other = each of us likes the othersWe expect each other to win = each of us expects the others to win

Near-synonymous expressions:

each other=

each the others

UT

We expect John to like each other

13LL, pp. 113-117.


17/34


is NOT well formed and is NOT synonymous with

Each of us expects John to like the others

WHY? There is no obvious logical or communication-theoretical explanation.(There aren't even non-obvious ones, at that).

The linguistic rule is of the following kind. In embedded structures of theform

X [ Y

where X and Y are explicit or understood components (names, pronouns,anaphoric elements etc.) no rule can apply to X and Y if the phrase betweenbrackets contains a subject distinct from Y

The nature of this rule is specifically linguistic: the rule has no conceivablesensorimotor counterpart, nor any justification in terms of general intelligence.

Further confirming evidence (just apply the rule):

The men heard stories about each other.*The men expect J ohn to like each other.Who did the men hear stories about?*Who did the men hear John's stories about?John seems to each of the men to like the others.*J ohn seems to the men to like each other.

Evidence from another language:

J'ai laiss Jean manger X.J'ai laiss manger X aJean.

OK)

(bad)OK)

(bad)OK)

(bad)

(both OK)

These are apparentIy freely interchangeable constructions, but the symmetry isbroken in the next example:

J'ai tout laiss manger aJean.*J'ai tout laiss Jean manger. OK)(bad)

NB: Update. These phenomena have received much better and deeperexplanations in recent linguistic work, in terms of complete functional complexes (for a summary, see Giorgi Longobardi, 1991; Haegeman, 1991). Theoverall thrust of Chomsky's argument for specificity comes out further reinforced.


18/34

33 M. Piattelli-Palmarini / Cognition 50 (1994) 315 346

Conclusion:

These rules are tacitly known by the speaker, but they are neither learned

(by induction, problern-solving or trial-and-error), nor determined by sornegeneral necessity. General intelligence and sensorirnotor schernata cannot evenbegin to explain what is happening.

Chornsky's point failed to irnpress Piaget and the Piagetians. A lot of theircounter-argurnents turned on the possibility of explaining these facts in sorneother way . One could not fail, I think, to be irnpressed, there and then, by thefact that no other way was actually proposed, but that it aH turned around thesheer possibility that sorne other rule, at sorne other level, rnight explain aH of theabove. (Anthony Wilden even tried out Russellian logical types 4 to no avail.)Wisely, and unflinchingly, Chornsky kept replying that this rnight well be the case,but that he did not expect it to be the case. (In fact, rnany years have gone by,and these alternative explanations are still sorely rnissing - for a precise account,firrnly grounded in generative grarnrnar, but altogether charitable to the Piagetianviewpoint, see Jackendoff, 1992.)

And finally carne Fodor's jeu de massacre, one of the truly high points in thewhole debate.

5.4. Fodor s demise olle rning

His argurnent was not lirnited to language, but applicable to any theory oflearning by rneans of conceptual enrichment. He went squarely against the verycore of the Piagetian systern. Nobody, in the other carnp, reaHy understood hisargurnent at first (not even Putnarn, in his critique, written after the debate ,15 solet us try to sirnplify it drastically, still preserving its force:

Fodor s argument against learning y enrichment 6

The typical situation of belief fixation or learning :

s an exernplar is not an exernplar

14LL, pp. 117-121.15See his exchange with Fodor in Part o LL.

6LL , pp. 143-149 and the ensuing discussion. The argument had been developed in greater detailby Fodor in his 1976 essay The Language 1 Thought, Hassocks: Harvester. (Reprinted in 1979 byHarvard University Press.)


19/34

M. Piattel/i-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 331

Inductive hypothesis:

X is an exemplar if and only if X is Y

Target of the learning process (for example): come to the conc1usion that

y = miv = square and gray

(Alleged) stage 1: the subject has access, separately, to the conceptsquare , to the concept gray , but not to the conjunct square-and-gray .

(Alleged) stage 2: the subject constructs a tentative new concept Y, and triesit out on the experimental materials.

Y is not yet miv

Stage 3: the subject correctly comes to the conc1usion that Y must be:

miv square-and-gray

Fodor's argument: f this is the case, that is, if the language at stage 3 isreally more powerful than the language at stages 1 and 2, then this transitioncannot be the result of learning, it cannot come from induction.

Mini-proof:

At sorne point the subject must formulate the hypothesis that Y is true of(applies to, is satisfied by) all and only those things which are mivs, that is,

which are square and gray. But this cannot happen unless the subject has theconcept miv.Unless Y is to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from miv (fromI

being square and gray ), we have no idea whatsoever of what Y could be.Therefore: the language of stage 1 is not weaker (less powerful, more

limited) than the language of stage 3. You always start with a language which isat least as powerful as any language which you can acquire.

Where do all these concepts come from?

Fodor's three hypotheses:

a) they are innate(b) God whispers them to you on Tuesdays


20/34

332 M. Piattelli Palmarini / Cognition 5 (1994) 315-346

e) you acquire them by falling on your head

Dismissing hypothesis (b), the only plausible eonclusion is that they areinnate (and/or arise for totally endogenous reasons, due - for instanee - to astepwise brain maturation. This latter is just a slightly less faney version ofhypothesis (e).

The audienee was really impressed, Monod most of aH. There was a distinctflavor of paradox in Fodor's position and he did not try to bide this faet. Thewhole argument sounds paradoxieal, yet it is perfeetly eompelling. Fodor, to hisown regret, cited, just as one concrete, indubitable, patented, example of alogieal system whieh is more powerful than another, the case of propositionallogic (a provably weaker system) versus first-order quantifieational logie (aprovably stronger system which eontains the former as a sub-system). This createda lot of misunderstanding and endless diseussions about the history of thediscipline o logie. Fodor's thesis remained essentially unehallenged (in the book,it will be Hilary Putnam to aeeept the challenge, but that was after the debate).

In the aftermath of Fodor's onslaught on induetion and learning, most o theensuing debate revolved, on the one hand, around plain misunderstandings of hisand Chomsky's position (leading to clarifications and reformulations) and on the

other, around a rather idle insistence that their position appears vastly implausibleand even paradoxical. This apparent implausibility was. never denied by Fodorand Chomsky, but with the crucial proviso that the appearance of paradox persistsonly if we maintain the traditional assumptions of the domain. Their main point,however, was to subvert these very assumptions, not to maintain them.

I surmise that, then as well as now, those who have eoncluded that the debatewas won by Piaget did so sol ely on the grounds that the theses defended by Piagetsounded intuitively very plausible, while the theses presented on the other sidesounded preposterous. It does not seem to oecur to them that, in science, even

preposterous hypotheses often turn out to be true (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1986,1989). .

5.5. Sequels t the debate

After the debate, Putnam, at least, took the trouble of explaining why thesetheses sound preposterous, and made an attempt to construct an attenuatedversion of what he thought was right in Chomsky's and Fodor's positions (evensuggesting that they come closer than they believe to Piaget's).17 This line of

17LL, p. 300.


21/34


resistance against strong innatism and meaning atomism in the domain of lexicalconceptual semantics has been vastly expanded in subsequent philosophical worksby Putnam, Fodor, Dennett, Millikan, Loar, Burge and others. I must leave itout, for reasons of space. I must also leave out the interesting sequels elicited byKripke's essay on Wittgenstein (Kripke, 1982) revamping a special brand ofskepticism about the notion of following a rule , which have met interestingrejoinders by Chomsky (1986), Horwich (1984), and others.

The whole recent debate on connectionism has revamped several of theanti-specificity theses already present in Piaget (the most explicit link between thetheses of connectionism and the Piaget-Chomsky debate has been made, in thedomain of lexical-conceptual learning, by Ray Jackendoff (1992). Connectionistarchitectures are, in fact, a concrete embodiment of the idea of order-fromnoise . t the time of the debate Piaget could only summon in defense of the

order-from-noise paradigm the physicochemical theories of Prigogine and hisschool, and sorne rather confused speculations by Heinz von Foerster (1960). Hadhe lived long enough to see present-day connectionism, I am persuaded that hewould have endorsed it wholeheartedly. In fact, an implicit alliance betweenPiagetism and connectionism is amply consummated (Elman, 1989). This is notthe place and time to re-examine the controversy on connectionism (Pinker

Mehler, 1988), but I wish to stress that many of the recent polemics do find theirroots, ante litteram, in the Royaumont debate.

6. What happened ever since in Iinguistics and language acquisition

In the rest of this paper, I will briefiy present a number of further developments which support the positions defended by Chomsky and Fodor. nd I willdo it precisely by showing that their theses, preposterous as they may haveseemed, are presently the only plausible explanation for a variety of factsconcerning language, language acquisition and cognitive development. The swingof the pendulum in their favor has not only continued, but has gained furthermomentum.

6.1. The new turn in linguistic theory

From October 975 to the present day, the brand of linguistic theory calledgenerative grammar has undergone an unprecedented growth. As a conse

quence of previous partial success (and, of course, past errors), Chomsky andothers have developed the so-called government-and-binding theory(Chomsky, 1981, with important antecedents in work published in 979 and 1980)(Chomsky, 1980), and more recently the minimalist framework (Chomsky,


22/34

334 M. Piattelli Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346

1993). Referred to also as the principIes and parameters approach (GiorgiLongobardi, 1991; Haegeman, 1991; Lasnik Uriagereka, 1988; Rizzi, 1990; vanRiemsdijk & Williams, 1986), the turn of the 1980s has been a revolution within

the revolution, bringing both genuinely novel features and extensions to thepicture presented by Chomsky at Royaumont. The line of argument developedorally at Royaumont, and then sharpened in the written proceedings, has not onlybeen preserved in the new theory, but even made more radical.

Just to cite a few examples, sorne of the oldest and most central notions oftraditional grammars (subject, object, grammatical construction, phrase-structurerules, etc.) are now demoted to epiphenomena of much deeper and much moreabstract notions of generative grammar. The importance of the lexicon has grown

explosively, to the point that sorne linguists (certainly Chomsky himself, especially after 1992, in the minimalist framework ) now claim that acquiring thelexicon is almost all a child has to do, in order to acquire a language. Everythingelse is generated by a strictly invariant, language-specific computational system,and by the several output conditions arising at the many interfaces of thiscomputational system with other internal mental systems. Inevitably the innerstructure of each lexical item (particularly the inner structure of verbs, adverbsand adjectivals) has become much richer and much more abstract than it ever wasin the traditional grammars (Giorgi Longobardi, 1991; Grimshaw, 1990; Hale

Keyser, 1993; Higginbotham, 1983; Jackendoff, 1990; Keyser Roeper, 1992;Tenny, 1988). None of the highly abstract and tightly knit principIes andparameters of universal grammar, nor any of the specific rules of the coregrammar of a particular language, bear any resemblance whatsoever to derivations from non-linguistic principIes (even less from sensorimotor schemata). Theirrelevance of abstractions from motor schemata even in the development of signlanguages is particularly striking (a point to which 1 will return). The explorationof possible phonemes and syIlables by the congenitally deaf child, in the course of

babbling in the manual mode , shows a marked linguistic specificity in itsontogenesis, not a continuity with generic manual gesturing (Petitto Marentette, 1991). The case against any derivation of linguistic structures from nonlinguistic gestures, and or from the perception of generic movements, appearsclear-cut even for the most obvious candidates, naJ;nely time relations (Hornstein, 1990), agent/patient relations (Grimshaw, 1990; Pinker, 1989), aspectualsemantics (Tenny, 1988), the geometry of events (Pustejovsky, 1988), verbs ofmovement and change of possession (Jackendoff, 1983 1990, 1992), reference(Higginbotham, 1985, 1988), and even co-reference in sign languages (Kegl,1987).

The richness and depth of these recent developments as a whole is a proof thatthe program presented by Chomsky at Royaumont was sound and productive,while the very idea of a continuum between language and non-linguistic precursors was doomed. Many of the objections raised during that debate seem to


23/34

M Piattelli Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 335

me to be automatically voided by the tumultuous progress made in generativegrammar in the last 5 years or so. The extreme specificity of the languagesystem, indeed, is a fact, not just a working hypothesis, even less a heuristicaIlyconvenient postulation. Doubting that there are language-specific, innate compu

tational capacities today is a bit like being still dubious about the very existence ofmolecules, in spite of the awesome progre ss of molecular biology.There are, nonetheless, also particular data and particular developments that

seem to me to refute the most fundamental tenets of Piagetian psychology (therenever reaIly was, nor will there ever be, a Piagetian linguistics ). Limitations ofspace demand that 1 concentrate on these, and only these. 1 will do it briefiy, and1 will do it bluntly, because 1 think that these recent developments are bluntrefutations of the most central classical assumptions then entertained by thePiagetian school.

6.2. The knock down case o pronouns in the congenitally deaf child

First and foremost, 1 wiIl sketch a perfect case against the dependence oflanguage on motor schemes. t is based on a clear-cut, elegant and devastatingpiece of data from the acquisition of sign language by the congenitaIly deaf child.1 give special privilege to this case, because it looks a lot like those decisiveexperiments in physics and in biology which refute, by a single stroke, longentertained hypotheses. t is due to the psycholinguist Laura-Ann Petitto ofMcGill, probably the only researcher who has worked in depth both with chimpsand with congenitaIly deaf children. (By the way, if language indeed weresupervenient on motor schemata and on general intelligence, then chimps oughtto have language, which is clearly not the case, as definitely shown, after theRoyaumont debate, by Premack, Terrace, Bever, Seidenberg and by Petittoherself) (For reviews, see Premack, 1986; Roitblat, Bever, Terrace, 1984).

The counter case o pronouns in the congenitally deaf (Petitto, 1987)

f language were continuous with (prompted by, isomorphic with, supervenient on) motor schemata, then sign languages should show this causaldependency in a particularly clear and transparent way.

Within sign languages, the case of constructing personal pronouns (which

superficially loo k a lot like pointing) out of generic pointing ought to be evenmore transparento

t tums out that this is not the case. Data from the acquisition of pronounsin the congenitally deaf, in fact, show that:


24/34


(1) Non-linguistic pointing is present and widely used long before pronounsare used.

(2) Yet, pronouns appear suddenly (within a couple of weeks) and at exactlythe same age in the hearing and in the congenitally deaf child.

(3) In the few weeks preceding the appearance of linguistic pointing i.e. ,pronouns) in the congenitaHy deaf child, generic pointing temporarilydisappears.

( 4) Paradoxical as it may seem, the hearing child and the congenitally deafchild make the same mistakes in their initial use of pronouns ('me' to mean'you', 'you' to mean 'me', etc.)

NB: This means pointing at oneself to refer to someone else, and viceversa. This kind of mistake is uniquely linguistic (as demonstrated by the

exact parallelism with the hearing child) and never happens with genericpointing. f motor skills and general intelligence were involved at aH thenthese mistakes would be a disturbing symptom of deep-seated motortroubles and or of an intolerably low level of general intelligence (ofcourse, neither is the case).

(5) Another piece of conc1usive evidence (Petitto & Marentette, 1991) is theautonomy and the specificity of babbling in the ontogeny of sign languages.There is no hope any more of deriving from motor schemata even the formo f syHables in the manual mode, let alone the meaning of words and thestructure of the sentence. And, since there is such a c1ear discontinuityeven between generic gesturing and the basic elements of sign Ianguage,one can safely dismiss the alleged continuity between gestural schemataand the structure of the sentence in spoken languages.

In my oplDlon at least, this is precisely the way a scientific hypothesis isdefinitively refuted: you make it as c1ear as specific and as predictive as possible,then look for an ideal experirnent, one in which the phenomenon stands outunambiguously, in its purest form, then see whether the experirnent confirms orrefutes the hypothesis. The rest is idIe discussion on vague rnetaphors.

6.3. On the inexistence 1 horizontal stages

There are numerous other recent (and sorne not so recent) data which militate

powerfulIy against the very existence of Piaget's horizontal stages.Let us be reminded that a horizontal stage a a Piaget is one in which a conceptor a logical operation is either present or absent in toto; its presence or absence


25/34

M. Piattelli-Palmarini / Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 337

wiIl show up no matter which problem you present to the child, from mathematicsto gardening, from geometry to economics from language to moral judgement.WeIl, there are overwhelming reasons to believe that these horizontal capacitiessimply do not existo Every direct or indirect proof in favor of the modularity ofmind (Fodor, 1983; Garfield, 1987), of the content-drivenness of problem-solving,is ipso facto a disproof of the existence of horizontal stages. Let's see sorne of themost salient ones:

Evidence for the non-existence o Piaget's horizontal stages

Domain specificity (modularity) of problem-solving:

a) At a given age, the child who applies conservation to one kind of problem(involving volume and weight) do es not apply it to other kinds of problems(involving speed, temperature, concentration, etc.).

(b) The conservation of identity is qualitatively different for different conceptual kinds (animals, artifacts, nominal kinds, etc.) and the conceptualtransition to conservation of identity or kind takes place at different agesfor each of the different kinds.

(For reviews, see: Carey, 1985; Keil, 1979, 1986; Markman, 1989)

Typical Piagetian illogicalities can be elicited also in the adult: '

a) The power of what Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have calledtypicality, anchoring and ease of representation (Kahneman, Slovic,Tversky, 1982) has nothing to do with having versus not having aconcepto t has to do with the domain to which our intuitions of what is

typical apply. Cognitive strategies, and the underlying heuristics andbiases often do not generalize from one domain to the next, not even inthe adulto

(b) There would be no end to the succession of stages , well up to, andbeyond, the level of Nobel laureates (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1991, 1993).

c) Sorne of our intuitions about typicality are the opposite of what we shouldderive from actual experience (the signal case is offered by intuitions aboutprobability) .

In many cases, there is no abstractive assimilation at all of objectiveexternal structures by the mind, and even les s so a mandatory, 10gicaIlydetermined one.

Many of the typical experiments a a Tversky and Kahneman replicate exactlythe qualitative results obtained by Piaget and his collaborators on children. The


26/34

338 M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346

simple secret is to change the domain. The typical experiment a la Piaget was toelicit from, say, a 5-year-old the judgement that there are more girls than childrenin a photograph, more roses than flowers in a bouquet, more cars than vehicles ina drawing, etc. The explanation was given by Piaget as: Lack of possession of theconcepts of set/ subset/ super-seto But the majority of highly educated adults judgethat there are more seven-letter words of the forro

i n g

(where each - stands for a letter whatsoever) than there are of the forro

They judge, just like the 5-year-old child, that the subset has more members thanthe super-seto These same educated adults will judge that there are more words ofEnglish which begin with an r than there are which have r in the third-to-thelast position (the reality is that there are vastly more words of the second kindthan of the first). Do they lack the concept of subset? No The correctexplanation has to do with our intuitions of what is most typical of a kind, andwhat we can easily represent mentally. The easier it is for us to mentally generatetypical members of the set, the larger the set appears to U o The same applies tothe child: it is easier to mentally generate typical instances of a simple set (boys,roses, flowers, etc.) than to generate instances of a disjunctive set (children = boysor girls; flowers = roses or carnations or ; vehicles cars or trucks or .What counts is familiarity with, ease of representation of, and typicality of, thestandard exemplar of a specific set, in a specific domain. There is no horizontallack of a certain concept everywhere. These heuristics and biases are neverhorizontal, but always vertical, domain-specific, in a word, modular.

6.4. Further counters from linguistics and from biology

Let me now come back to language proper, and to evolutionary biology. 1 willconclude with a drastic simplification of recent progress in these domains whichbears direct, and rather final, negative consequences for the core Piagetianhypotheses, as presented at Royaumont.

Recent developments in linguistic theory

(1 chose those which further exclude any continuity with sensorimotorschemata, and make language learning an empty metaphor.)


27/34

M. Piattel/i Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 339

- The essentials of syntactic structures are derived ( projected ) directly fromthe lexicon (and, of course, there are no motor equivalents to the lexicon).

- Rules are replaced by principIes and parameters. Most (maybe aH parame

ters have onIy two possibIe positions. Learning a given Ianguage meansacquiring the lexicon and (in the most recent minimalist framework(Chomsky, 1993), one should rather say thereby ) setting the correct valuesfor aH the parameters.

(Language acquisition is not an induction, but a selection: Lightfoot, 1989;Piattelli-Palmarini, 1989.)

- There are in every natural Ianguage (sign languages inc1uded) silent elements, phoneticaHy inexpressed partic1es called empty categories , andthese cannot be learned , because they are not part of the sensory, explicit,input to the Iearner.

(Language acquisition cannot be based on imitation, generalization andassimilation.)

- Linguistic principIes are highly specific, they bear o resemblance to generallaws of thought , and have no explanation in terms of communicative

efficacy.(Self-regulation, adaptation and pragmatic expediency expIain nothing at

all in this domain.)

(The best, yet still unconvincing, adaptationist reconstruction is to befound in Pinker Bloom, 1990, see also the peer commentaries to thatpaper.)

- The form of linguistic principIes is very specific, mostly stating what cannotbe done to highly abstract and uniquely linguistic elements, categories andconstructs (based on notions such as c-command, X-bar, PRO, projection ofa lexical head, trace of a nounphrase, specifier of an inflectional phrase,etc.).

The typical principIe of universal grammar sounds a bit like the following:

do whatever you please, but never do such-and-such to so-and-so.

(There is no hope, not even the dimmest one, of translating these entities,these principIes and these constraints into generic notions that apply tolanguage as a particular case . Nothing in motor control even remotelyresembles these kinds of notions.)

(For a c1ear, global presentation of this theory, see Haegeman, 1991. Forthe recent minimalist framework, see Chomsky, 1993; for the parametricapproach to language acquisition, see Lightfoot, 1989; Manzini Wexler,1987; Piattelli-Palmarini, 1989; Roeper Williams, 1987; Wexler, 1982;Wexler Manzini, 1987; and the vast literature cited in these works. For theexistence of empty categories in sign languages, see Kegl, 1986, 1987.)


28/34


Last, but not least, modern biology and evolutionary theory offer furtherand more radical reasons to refute Piaget's basic tenets about life and evolution:

Knock down arguments from modern evolutionary theory- No inheritable feedback is even remotely possible from individual experience

to the genes.- The metaphor of problem-solving as a driving force in evolution (in

particular in speciation; Schull, 1990) is wrong: each species creates its ownspecific problems (Lewontin, 1982, 1983, 1990b, Piattelli-Palmarini, 1989,1990b, 1990c).

- Novelty and complexification do not logically, nor even factually, imply an

enrichment , since they ofien arise as a consequence of impoverishmentand specialization. (The possibility of evolutionary complexification bymeans of impoverishment was first demonstrated in bacteria by BorisEphrussi; see Jacob, 1977, 1987.)

- Life is basically what it is: the old grand theories (auto-equilibration,minimization of disturbance, increasing autonomization, increasing adaptation, increasing order from noise, etc.) have never explained anything. tproved impossibIe to deduce biological structures and functions from firstprincipIes.

- Even the most transparent (one would have said) instances of adaptationsof organs-cum-behaviors to environmental conditions are sometimes fallacious. (Ten different elaborate kinds of mouthpiece organs for cutting,crunching, searing and syphoning have evolved in insects one hundredmillion years before there were any flowers on earth (Labandeira &Sepkoski, 1993). Until very recently (July 1993) these organs had universallyand obviousIy been judged to offer examples of exquisite and fine-tunedselective adaptations to the environment and to the mode-of-life of their

bearers.)- Biological evolution is not (at Ieast not aIways) gradualistic (EIdredge &

Gould, 1972; Gould, 1984; Gould & Eldredge, 1977, 1993; Gould &Lewontin, 1984; Gould & Vrba, 1982) and do es not (at Ieast not aIways)proceed through a stepwise combinatorial enrichment out of pre-existingmore primitive structures. The brain, for one, did not evolve by piling upnew structures on top of oIder units (Changeux, Heidmann, & Patte, 1984;EdeIman, 1987).

- Selection out of a vast innate repertoire is the only mechanism of growth,acquisition and complexification which we can scientifically understand(Pi attelli-Palmarini, 1986, 1989, 1990a). (The theory of, and data on,language acquisition in the principles-and-parameters framework confirmthe success of selective theories n the domain of linguistics - s rightlyforeshadowed by Chomsky, Fodor, and Mehler at Royaumont.)


29/34


7. Conclusion

I may seem to have be en saying rather harsh things about Piaget and hisschool. This was not my intention. I think there are overwhelming reasons toconclude that his approach was fundamentally wrong, but this is no judgement onhis personal merits. t took a great mind to draw such a vast and coherent picture,one that is still attractive to many developmental psychologists the world over,one that appeared as deep, novel and important to many researchers in a varietyof fields, from the philosophy of science to anthropology, from ethics tosociology, from mathematics to feminist studies. He certainly introduced, orrather reintroduced, into psychology a much-welcome rationalistic and antiempiricist stance, combined with an unerring tlair for experimentation. I am toldby the best present-day experimentalists in cognitive development that, even if hisinterpretations of the data are of ten wrong, the reproducibility of his original datais always next to perfecto In hindsight, and judging from a different theoreticalframe, we see that often he did not perform the next inevitable check, or thedecisive counter-experiment, but he never erred in what he actually did, or intelling what he actually found. Much of present-day experimentation on thechild's cognitive development stems, directly or indirectly, from his classicexperiments and those of his collaborators.

Piaget was truly a universal thinker, with an insatiable curiosity for facts andtheories well beyond his profession. He had an encyclopaedic mind, and was,alas, one of the last global intellectuals. Most of aH he brought to perfection, andelaborated down to the most minute details, a theory which was intuitively veryappealing. This, as I have endeavored to show, was his strong point, and also hisgreat weakness. The very basic intuitions, to which Piaget brought order anddepth, and between which he established unprecedented systematic interconnections, have tumed out to be wrong, misleading, or empty. They were, indeed,prima facie very plausible - no one would want to deny that - but often in sciencethe implausible must triumph over the plausible, if the truth lies on the si de of theimplausible.

This is what Piaget refused to accept, to the point that, in spite of his toweringintelligence, he could not understand the message brought to him by Chomskyand Fodor at Royaumont. or the ideological reasons so well explained byChomsky at the Royaumont debate and elsewhere, in the domain of psychologyand linguistics (at odds with physics, chemistry and molecular biology) hypothesesthat appear, at first blush, preposterous are ofien simply assumed to be wrong,without even listening to reason, proof or experimento With these notes, I hope to

contribute just a little to the demise of this strange and irrational attitude incognitive science. AIso in linguistics, in psychology and in cognitive science theprima facie implausible can tum out to be true, or close enough to the truth. Infact, my main point here, as in previous articles (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1986, 1989,1990a), is that it already has.


30/34


I wholeheartedly agree with what Chomsky said at the very end of the debate.Little of what we hypothesize today will survive in the long runo Twenty or fiftyyears from now we will probably have gained much deeper and much betterinsights into these matters, and not much of present-day theorizing will still bevalido But what is important is that we may loo k back and ascertain that thosehypotheses, those explanations, were at least on the right track, that they were ofthe right kind. As 1 endeavored to show, at least this much is already happeningnow, with respect to the debate.

In this sense and in this sense only, 1 have allowed myself the liberty ofspeaking of winners and losers . The race is mostly still ahead of us, and all 1have offered here are arguments in favour of a certain choice for the kind ofcompetition still to come.

A final, very personal touch: 1 have fond memories of my conversations withJean Piaget. 1 was always impressed by his bonhomie his wit, his eager search forbetter understanding, his serene attitude towards life. He has run a long, difficultrace, and has left a highly talented multitude behind him. No one could have ledthat race with greater aplomb, and no one ever will. t is no paradox, 1 believe, toadmire him for his great achievements, but also feel sorry for the path he insistedon choosing. I t was a bit painful, at least for sorne of us at Royaumont, to see himlose an important confrontation, one which he had eagerly sought, without fully

realizing what was happening to him, and to his most cherished ideas, and why.His search for a compromise was unsuccessful, simply because the compromisewas neither possible nor desirable.

1 heard Gregory Bateson, after the meeting, define Piaget as a lay saint . Hewas implying, 1 believe, that Chomsky and Fodor had fulfilled the ungracious roleof executioners. But it would be a paradox to admire Piaget as much as Batesondid, and still wish he had been lulled by the false conclusion of a possiblecompromise. Not even the saints appreciate such forms of inordinate devotion.

ibliograpby

Atkins, B.T., Kegl, J. , Levin, B. (1986). Explicit and implicit information in dictionaries. LexiconProject Working Paper No. 12. Cambridge, MA: Center for Cognitive Science, MIT.

Berwick, R.C. (1985). The acquisition o syntactic knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Berwick, R.C. Weinberg, A (1985). The grammatical basis o linguistic performance: Language

use and acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Berwick, R.C., Wex1er K. (1987). Parsing efficiency, binding, c-command and leamability. In B.

Lust (Ed.), Studies in the acquisition o anaphora. Dordrecht: Reidel.Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Changeux, J.-P., Reidmann, T., Patte, P. (1984). Learning by selection. In P. Marler R.S.

Terrace (Eds.), The biology o learning. New York: Springer-Verlag.Chien, Y.-C., Wexler, K. (1990). Children's knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evidence

for the modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1, 225-295.Chomsky, N. (1980). On binding. Linguistic Inquiry 11, 1-46.


31/34


Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding the Pisa lectures). Dordrecht: Foris.Chomsky, N (1986). Knowledge o f language: Its nature, origin, and use. New York: Praeger.Chomsky, N (1989). Some notes on economy of derivation and representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT,

Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Working Paper no. 1

Chomsky, N (1993). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In K Hale S.J. Keyser (Eds.),The view from building 2 : Essays in honor of S Bromberger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dennett, D.C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining behavior: Reasons in a world of causes. Cambridge, MA: Bradford

Books/MIT Press.Edelman, G.M. (1987). Neural Darwinism: The theory of neuronal group selection. New York: Basic

Books.Eldredge, N., & Gould, S.J. (1972). Punctuated equilibria, an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In

T.J.M. Schopf (Ed.), Models in paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman.Elman, J.L. (1989). Representation and structure in connectionist models. In Center for Research in

Language Technical Report 8903. La Jolla, CA: University of California, San Diego.Fodor, J.A. (1975). The language.of thought. New York: Crowell.Fodor, J.A. (1981). Representations: Philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science.

Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Fodor, J.A. (1983). The modularity o f mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Fodor, J.A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Fodor, l.A. Pylyshyn, Z. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. In

S Pinker J. Mehler (Eds.), Connections and symbols. Cambridge, MA, Bradford ookslMIT Press.

Gardner, H. (1980). Cognition comes of age. In M Piattelli-Palmarini (Ed.) Language and learning:The debate between lean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (pp. xix-xxxvi). Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.Garfield, J.L. (Ed.) (1987). Modularity in knowledge representation and natural-Ianguage understand

ing. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Giorgi, A., Longobardi, G. (1991). The syntax of noun phrases: Configuration, parameters and

empty categories. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Gould, S.J. (1984). Toward the vindication of punctuational change. In W.A. Berggren J.A. Van

Couvering (Eds.), Catastrophes and earth history: The new uniformitarianism. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Gould, S.J., Eldredge, N (1977). Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolutionreconsidered. Paleobiology, 3, 115-151.

Gould, S.J., Eldredge, N (1993). Punctuated equilibrium comes of age. Nature, 366, 223-227.Gould, S.J., Lewontin, R.C. (1984). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A

critique of the adaptationist programme. In E. Sober (Ed.), Conceptual issues in evolutionarybiology. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Gould, S.J., Vrba, E.S. (1982). Exaptation: A missing term in the science of formo Paleobiology, 8,4-15.

Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Guasti, M.-T. (1993). Verb syntax in Italan child grammar: Finite and nonfinite verbs. Paper presented

at the workshop on parametric language acquisition, Trieste Encounters in Cognitive Science,SISSA, Trieste (Italy), July 1993

Haegeman, L (1991). Introduction to government and binding theory. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge,MA: Blackwell.

Hale, L., Keyser, S.J. (1987). A view from the middle. Lexicon Project Working Papers no. 10,Center for Cognitive Science, MIT.

Hale, K., Keyser, S.J. (1993). On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntacticrelations. In K Hale S.J. Keyser (Eds.), The view from building 2 : Essays in honor of SBromberger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Higginbotham, J.T. (1983). Logical form, binding and nominals. Linguistic Inquiry, 14, 395-420.Higginbotham, J.T. (1985). On semantics. Linguistic Inquiry, 16, 547-593.


32/34


Rigginbotham, J.T. (1986). Elucidations of meaning. Linguistics and Philosophy, 12,465-517.Rigginbotham, J.T. (1988). Knowledge of reference. In A. George (Ed.), Reftections on Chomsky.

Oxford, Basil Blackwell.Rornstein, N. (1990). s time goes by: The syntax of tense. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT

Press.Horwich, P. (1984). Critical notice: Saul Kripke: Wittgenstein on rules and private language.

Philosophy o f Science, 51, 163-171.Jackendoff, RS. (1983). Semantics and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Jackendoff, RS. (1990). Semantic structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Jackendoff, RS. (1992). Word meanings and what it would take to learn them: Retlections on the

Piaget-Chomsky debate. In RS. Jackendoff (Ed.) , Languages of the mind. Cambridge, MA:Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Jacob, F. (1970) La logique du vivant: Une histoire de l hrdit. Paris: Gallimand. American Ed.Jacob, F. (1973). The logic of life: a history of heredity. New York: Pantheon.

Jacob, F. (1977). Evolution and tinkering. Science, 196, 1161-1166.

Jacob, .F. (1987). La statue intrieure. Paris: Odile Jacob/Le Seuil.Jusczyk, P.W. Bertoncini, J. (1988). Viewing the development of speech perception as an innatelyguided learning process. Language and Speech, 31, 217-238.

Kahneman, D. Slovic, P. Tversky, A. (Eds.) (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics andbiases, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kegl, J. (1986). Clitics in American Sign Language. In R. Borer (Ed.), The syntax of pronominalClitics. Syntax and Semantics Series. New York: Academic Press.

Kegl, J. (1987). Coreference relations in American Sign Language. In B. Lust (Ed.), The acquisitiono f anaphora, Vol 2: Applying the constraints. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Keil, F.C. (1979). Semantic and conceptual development: n ontological perspective. Cambridge, MA:Rarvard University Press.

Keil, F.C. (1986). The acquisition of natural kinds and artifact terms. In W. Demopoulos A. Marras(Eds.), Language learning and concept acquisition: Foundational issues. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Keyser, S.J. , Roeper, T. (1992). Re: The abstract clitic. Linguistic Inquiry, 23, 89-125.Klima, E. Bellugi, U. (1979). The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Rarvard University Press.Kripke, S. (1982). Wittgenstein on rules and private language. Cambridge, MA: Rarvard University

Press.Labandeira, e.C. Sepkoski, J.J. (1993). Insect diversity in the fossil record. Science, 261,310-314.Lasnik, R. Uriagereka, J. (1988). A course in GB syntax: Lectures on binding and empty

categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Lederer, A. Gleitman, R. Gleitman, L.R (1989). Syntactic bootstrapping: re the data for a

deductive, principle-driven verb learning procedure available to children? Paper presented at the14th Annual Conference on Language Development, Boston University (October 1989).

Lewontin, RC. (1970). The units of selection. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 1, 1-16.Lewontin, R.C. (1982). Organism and environment. In R. Plotkin (Ed.), Learning, development, and

culture. New York: Wiley.Lewontin, R e . (1983). The organism as the subject and object of evolution. Scientia, 118, 63-82.

Now in Levins, R Lewontin, R.C. (1985). The dialectical biologist. Cambridge, MA:Rarvard University Press.

Lewontin, R e . (1990a). The evolution of cognition. In D.N. Osherson E.E. Smith (Eds.), ninvitation to cognitive science. Vol. lII: Thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lewontin, R.C. (1990b). Row much did the brain have to change for speech? Commentary of (Pinker

Bloom 1990). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 74O-74l.Lightfoot, D. (1989). The child s trigger experience: Degree-O learnability. Behavioral and BrainSciences, 12, 321-375.

Loar, B. (1981). Mind and meaning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Manzini, M.R. Wexler, K. (1987). Parameters, binding theory and learnability. Linguistic lnquiry,

18, 413-444.Markman, E.M. (1989). Categorization and naming in children: Problems of induction. Cambridge,

MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.


33/34


McCloskey, M. (1983). Naive theories of motion. In D. Gentner A.L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental

models. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Mehler, J. (1990). Language at the initial state. In A.M. Galaburda (Ed.), From neurons to reading.

Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.Mehler, J. , Fox, R (Eds.) (1985). Neonate cognition: Beyond the blooming buzzing confusion.

Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Mehler, J. et al. (1987). An investigation of young infants' perceptual representation of speech

sounds. Comptes Rendus e I Academie es Sciences, Paris, 303 III (15), 637-640.Millikan, RG. (1984). Language, thought, and other biological categories. Cambridge, MA: Bradford

Books/MIT Press.Millikan, RG. (1986). Thoughts without laws: Cognitive science with contento Philosophical Review,

95 47-80.

Petitto, L.A. (1987). On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition ofpersonal pronouns in American sign language. Cognition, 27, 1-52.

Petitto, L.A. (1988). Language in the pre-linguistic child. In F.S. Kessel (Eds.), The Developmento language and language researchers: Essays in honor o Roger Brown. Hillsdale, NJ:Erlbaum.

Petitto, L.A., Marentette, P.F. (1991) Babbling in the manual mode: Evidence for the ontogeny oflanguage. Science, 251, 1493-1496.

Piaget, J. (1974). Biology and knowledge, Chicago: Chicago University Press (translation of 1967,Biologie et Connaissance, Paris: Gallimard).

Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (Ed.) (1980). Language and learning: The debate between lean Piaget andNoam Chomsky. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1986). The rise of selective theories: A case study and sorne lessons from

immunology. In W. Demopoulos A. Marras (Eds.) , Language Learning and ConceptAcquisition: FoundationalIssues. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1989). Evolution, selection and cognition: From learning to parametersetting in biology and in the study of language. Cognition, 31, 1-44.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1990a). Slection smantique et slection naturelle: Le rOle causal du lexique.Revue e Synthese, W 1 - 2), 57-94.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1990b). Which carne first, the egg-problem or the hen-solution? Commentaryof (Schull 1990). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 84-86.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. 199Oc). An ideological battle over modals and quantifiers: Commentary of(Pinker Bloom 1990). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 752-754.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1991). Probability blindness: Neither rational nor capricious. Bostonia,March/April, 28-35.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1993). L illusione di sapere: Che cosa si nasconde dietro i nostri errori, Milan:Mondadori [English translation in press for Wiley, New York].

Pinker, S. (1979). Formal models of language learning. Cognition, 7, 217-283.Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition o argument structure. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.Pinker, S., Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain

Sciences, 13, 707-784.Pinker, S., Mehler, J. (Eds.) (1988). Connections and symbols. Cambridge, MA: Bradford

Books/MIT Press.

Premack, D. (1986). Gavagai, or the future history o the animallanguage controversy. Cambridge,MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Pustejovsky, J. (1988). The geometry of events. In C. Tenny (Ed.), Studies in Generative Approachesto Aspect. Lexicon Project Working Papers, no. 24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for CognitiveScience.

Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Roeper, T., Williams, E. (Eds.) (1987). Parameter setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.


34/34


Roitblat, H.L., Bever, T.O., Terrace, H.S. (Eds.) (1984). Animal cognition. Hillsdale, NJ:Erlbaum.

Schull, J. (1990). Are species intelligent? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 63-108.Smith, E.E., Medin, D.L. (1981). Categories and concepts. Cambridge MA: Harvard University

Press.Spelke, E.S. (1985). Perception of unity, persistence, and identity: Thoughts on infants conception of

objects. In J. Mehler R. Fox (Eds.), Neonate cognition: Beyond the blooming buzzingconfusion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Spelke, E.S. (1988). Where perceiving ends and thinking begins: The apprehension of objects ininfancy. In A. Yonas Ed.), Perceptual development in infancy: Minnesota symposium on childpsychology (Vol. 20). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Stanley, S.M. (1975). A theory of evolution above the species level. Proceedings 01 the NationalAcademy 01 Sciences USA 72, 646-650.

Tanenhaus, M.K., Garnsey, S.M., Boland, J. (1989). Combinatory lexical information andlanguage comprehension. In G. Altman Ed.), Cognitive models o f speech processing:

Psycholinguistic and computational perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Tenny, C. Ed.) (1988). Studies in generative approaches to aspecto Lexicon Project Working Papers,

no. 24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Cognitive Science.van Riemsdijk, H., Williams, E. (1986). Introduction to the theory 1 grammar. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.von Foerster, H. (1960). On self-organizing systems and their environments. In M. Yovitz S.E.

Cameron (Eds.), Sell-organizing systems. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon.Wanner, E., Gleitman, L.R. (1982). Language acquisition: The state of the arto Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press.Wexler, K. (1982). A principIe theory for language acquisition. In E. Wanner L.R. Gleitman

(Eds.), Language acquisition: The state 1 the arto Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press.Wexler, K. (1987). On the nonconcrete relat ion between evidence and acquired language. In B. Lust

(Eds.), Studies in the acquisition 01 anaphora. Dordrecht: Reidel.Wexler, K. (1990). On unparsable input in language acquisition. In L. Frazier J. de Villiers (Eds.),

Language processing and language acquisition. Dordrecht: Kluwer IAcademic Press.Wexler, K., Culicover, P. (1980). Formal principIes ollanguage acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.Wexler, K., Manzini, M.R. (1987). Parameters and learnability in binding theory. In T. Roeper

E. Williams (Eds.), Parameters setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.

64599002 piaget chomsky debate

Documents