I had intended this review not specifically as a criticism of Skinner's speculations regarding language, but rather as a more general critique of behaviorist (I would now prefer to say "empiricist") speculation as to the nature of higher mental processes. My reason for discussing Skinner's book in such detail was that it was the most careful and thoroughgoing presentation of such speculations, an evaluation that I feel is still accurate. Therefore, if the conclusions I attempted to substantiate in the review (...) are correct, as I believe they are, then Skinner's work can be regarded as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of behaviorist assumptions. My personal view is that it is a definite merit, not a defect, of Skinner's work that it can be used for this purpose, and it was for this reason that I tried to deal with it fairly exhaustively. I do not see how his proposals can be improved upon, aside from occasional details and oversights, within the framework of the general assumptions that he accepts. I do not, in other words, see any way in which his proposals can be substantially improved within the general framework of behaviorist or neobehaviorist, or, more generally, empiricist ideas that has dominated much of modern linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. The conclusion that I hoped to establish in the review, by discussing these speculations in their most explicit and detailed form, was that the general point of view was largely mythology, and that its widespread acceptance is not the result of empirical support, persuasive reasoning, or the absence of a plausible alternative. (shrink)

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.

Are there really beliefs? Or are we learning (from neuroscience and psychology, presumably) that, strictly speaking, beliefs are figments of our imagination, items in a superceded ontology? Philosophers generally regard such ontological questions as admitting just two possible answers: either beliefs exist or they don't. There is no such state as quasi-existence; there are no stable doctrines of semi-realism. Beliefs must either be vindicated along with the viruses or banished along with the banshees. A bracing conviction prevails, then, to the (...) effect that when it comes to beliefs (and other mental items) one must be either a realist or an eliminative materialist. (shrink)

A Border Disputeintegrates the latest work in logic and semantics into a theory of language learning and presents six worked examples of how that theory revolutionizes cognitive psychology. Macnamara's thesis is set against the background of a fresh analysis of the psychologism debate of the 19th-century, which led to the current standoff between logic and psychology. The book presents psychologism through the writings of John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, and its rejection by Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl. It then (...) works out the general thesis that logic ideally presents a competence theory for part of human reasoning and explains how logical intuition is grounded in properties of the mind. The next six chapters present examples that illustrate the relevance of logic to psychology. These problems are all in the semantics of child language (the learning of proper names, personal pronouns, sortals or common nouns, quantifiers, and the truth-functional connectives) and reflect Macnamara's rich background in developmental psychology, particularly child language - a field, he points out, that embraces all of cognition. Technical problems raised by but not included in the examples in the main part of the text are dealt with in a separate chapter. The book concludes by describing laws in cognitive psychology, or the type of science made possible by Macnamara's new theory. John Macnamara is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, McGill University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Although debates continue, studies of cognition in infancy suggest that knowledge begins to emerge early in life and constitutes part of humans' innate endowment. Early-developing knowledge appears to be both domain-specific and task-specific, it appears to capture fundamental constraints on ecologically important classes of entities in the child's environment, and it appears to remain central to the commonsense knowledge systems of adults.

Experiments with young infants provide evidence for early-developing capacities to represent physical objects and to reason about object motion. Early physical reasoning accords with 2 constraints at the center of mature physical conceptions: continuity and solidity. It fails to accord with 2 constraints that may be peripheral to mature conceptions: gravity and inertia. These experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action and that development leads to the enrichment of conceptions around an unchanging core. The experiments challenge claims (...) that cognition develops on a foundation of perceptual or motor experience, that initial conceptions are inappropriate to the world, and that initial conceptions are abandoned or radically.. (shrink)