4. From Behaviourism to Cognitivism

History of theoretical development over the years of Behaviourism to the rise and growth of the cognitive enterprise has also brought out a significant change in the outlook of language and cognition. The rise of cognitivism in psychology and linguistics had successfully established itself by the 1970s (or earlier) as a successor to behaviourism; this has been characterized as a Kuhnian scientific revolution.^[1] The emerging cognitivism offered its own paradigm and proposed to construe psychological phenomena and research strategies, which sought to distinguish it from behaviourism. This change emerged as part of a broader cognitive revolution that not only transformed a number of disciplines such as cognitive and developmental psychology, biology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and parts of anthropology, philosophy, and neuroscience, but also led to an active inter-disciplinary research cluster known as cognitive science.

For the behaviourists, all mental states, including all intelligent and cognitive capacities, were considered to be understood as input–output relations between stimuli from the environment and external bodily behaviour and dispositions to such behaviour. While behaviourists thus believed that they could explain and characterize thinking, reasoning, speaking, understanding, desiring, and so on, without an obvious reliance on the casual role of any internal mental states, the cognitivists rejected this and maintained that the sciences of the human mind cannot afford to avoid referring to internal psychological states and processes that seem to mediate between the stimuli form the environment and behaviour. The linguist such as Noam Chomsky and the linguist like George Miller were known to lead the increasing bandwagon of contributors to this shift (see Geirsson & Losonsky 1996).

Chomsky holds that our linguistic abilities are in part due to the fact that humans are born with the set of the universal grammar. Such a theoretical set seems to be applied once the child begins to produce and comprehend verbal behaviour. In a critical to B.F. Skiner’s behaviourist account of language in Verbal Behaviour, Chomsky argues that the behaviourists favoured the mechanisms of stimulus, response, and reinforcement which are not sufficient to explain verbal behavior. The poverty of stimulus argument is one of his important arguments. For Chomsky, what the child actually hears is too meager and inadequate to account for the verbal input that children would require in the Behaviouristic explanation. Reality is that children can produce and com-prehend ultimate novel sentences quite dissimilar from anything they have experienced earlier. In order to account for these and other phenomena, Chomsky postulates the hypothesis that the human brain has evolved to be capable of comprehending and producing language. More specific, the brain has evolved so that by nature, and not through learning, it encodes a finite set of rules that is capable of generating the syntactic structures human language can have.

Miller in his work Some Preliminaries to Psycholinguistics^[2] proposes that language is the prime example of rule-governed behaviour, and there are several types of rule to consider. According to him, we must not only consider syntactic rules for generating and grouping words in sentences, but also consider semantic rules for interpreting word combinations. In his sense, human language is a subtle and complex system; there are many aspects that, if not actually unique, are at least highly distinctive of the human species, and whose nature could scarcely be suspected, much less extrapolated from the analysis of non-verbal behaviour.

Taking such thoughts into consideration, Miller summarizes seven aspects of human language as follows:

i. Not all physical features of speech are significant for vocal communication, and not all significant features of speech have a physical representation.

ii. The meaning of an utterance should not be confused with its reference.

iii. The meaning of an utterance is not a linear sum of the meaning of the words that comprise it.

iv. The syntactic structure of a sentence imposes groupings that govern the interactions between the meanings of the words in that sentence.

v. There is no limit to the number of sentences or the number of meaning that can be expressed.

vi. A description of a language and a description of a language user must be kept distinct.

vii. There is a last biological component to the human capacity for articulate speech. (Geirsson & Losonsky 1996: 409-10)

Generally speaking, Chomsky and Miller ushered in a new way of understanding the mind on the grounds that the old theories could not account for verbal behaviour.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Thomas Kuhn who first used the term Paradigm shift (Scientific Revolution) in his (1962) book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science.

[2]:

George A. Miller. 1996. Some Preliminaries to Psycholinguistics. In Reading in Language and Mind, ed. Hermir Geirsson and Michael Losonsky, pp. 408. Blackwell Publishers.