Behaviourism

That speakers can make judgements concerning the grammaticality of sentences they have never heard reflects the creativity of the language system, which had been largely overlooked by the Descriptivists. Bloomfield, in particular, had been a strong advocate of behaviorism, which held abstractions such as the mind to be irrelevant in explaining the rational activities of human beings, whose behavior could be explained purely in terms of responses to environmental stimuli. Laboratory rats, for example, could be taught to depress a lever (response) to obtain food (stimulus) and, in similar vein, Bloomfield, in his almost obsessive concern to limit the field of linguistics to the strictly observable, viewed language in the same stimulus-response terms. He offers the example of Jack and Jill:

In behaviorist terms, the apple provides a stimulus, to which Jill’s speech is a response, which in turn serves a stimulus to Jack upon which he acts, bringing her the apple (reinforcement). But, as Chomsky pointed out in a devastating critique of leading behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, behaviorist notions of stimulus and response leave many questions unanswered. Firstly, the central concepts of stimulus, response and reinforcement as used in behaviorism appear well defined in the particular and artificial circumstances of laboratory rats in experimental conditions, but hopelessly ill defined or even circular in respect of normal human behavior.

Worse, the behaviorist model fails to account for the linguistic creativity we alluded to above. If the child’s ‘want milk’ is a response to feeling hungry, is reinforced by its mother and consequently stored as an effective utterance, how is it that children rapidly learn to use and understand sentences that they have never actually heard before? How is it, as Pinker puts it (2002: 21–2), that human beings are smarter than rats?