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Knowledge of Language

In his Aspects of the T/zeory ofSynrax (1%5) Noam Chomsky suggests that ‘it is historically accurate as well as heuristically valuable to distinguish. . . two very different approaches to the problem of acquisition of knowledge’, one characteristic of empiricism, the other of rationalism. ‘It is not, of course, necessary to assume that empiricist and rationalist views can always be sharply distinguished and that these currents cannot cross’. Chomsky takes the following to be the central difference between the rationalist and empiricist positions:‘. . . empiricist speculation has characteristically assumed that only the procedures and mechanisms for the acquisition of knowledge constitute an innate property of the mind’, whereas ‘rationalist speculation has assumed that the general form of a system of knowledge is fixed in advance as a disposition of the mind, and the function of experience is to cause this general schematic structure to be realized and more fully differentiated’ (pp. 51, 52). Cooper’s book, Knowledge of Language, is interesting in that it is the best survey to date of the empiricist critique of the ‘new rationalists’ (Chomsky, Katz, etc.) and their innateness claims. As Cooper says in his preface, ‘a suitable sub-title for this book could be “A critique of the presuppositions of current psycholinguistic theory” ’ (p. vii). Cooper, I shall argue, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of psycholinguistic theory. Specifically, he misunderstands the role of innateness considerations in current psycholinguistic theory. In defense of Cooper it might be pointed out that the theorists Cooper is criticizing have not written very clearly about the role of innateness considerations in psycholinguistics. However, if one is to offer an interesting critique of psycholinguistic theory, one must criticize the most plausible versions of the theory. With respect to the innateness claims made by the ‘new rationalists’, Cooper has not criticized their strongest arguments, and so, his critique of these innateness claims is not very telling. Cooper suggests that ‘two main arguments for innateness can be found among the “new rationalists”’ (p. 160): (1) The necessary condition argument. ‘. . .speakers could not have “internalized” the grammars of their languages unless some of their grammatical knowledge was innate’. (2) The argument from linguistic universals. ‘. . .only an innateness hypothesis can account for the existence of so-called “linguistic universals”’. About the necessary condition argument Cooper says that such an argument ‘is discredited to the extent that KLT is’ (p. la), so to see why Cooper rejects this argument we need to look at his arguments against KLT (the ‘knowledge of language thesis’).