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Language and Learning The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky Edited by MASSIMO PIATTELLI-PALMARINI ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL London, Melbourne and Henley CONTENTS PREFACE Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini xiii FOREWORD Howard Gardner xix INTRODUCTION 1 Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: How Hard Is the "Hard Core" of a Scientific Program* PART I The Debate 1. OPENING THE DEBATE 23 Jean Piaget The Psychogenesis of Knowledge and Its Epistemological Significance Noam Chomsky On Cognitive Structures and Their Development: A Reply to Piaget 2. ABOUT THE FIXED NUCLEUS AND ITS INNATENESS 55 Jean Piaget Introductory Remarks Discussion by Frangois Jacob, Jean Piaget, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Stephen Toulmin, Noam Chomsky, Anthony Wilden Guy Cellerier Cognitive Strategies in Problem Solving Discussion by Noam Chomsky, Massimo Piattelli- Palmarini, Gregory Bateson, Antoine Danchin, Jerry Fodor, Dan Sperber, Guy Cellerier, Jean Piaget, Frangois Jacob, Scott Atran Guy Celterier Some Clarifications on Innatism and Constructivism 3. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND GENERAL DEVELOPMENTAL MECHANISMS 89 Seymour Papert The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Psychology Discussion by Noam Chomsky, Seymour Papert, Scott Atran ix χ / Contents 4. INITIAL STATES AND STEADY STATES 107 Noam Chomsky The Linguistic Approach Discussion by Anthony Wilden, Noam Chomsky, Seymour Papert, Dieter Dütting, David Premack, Dan Sperber 5. COGNITIVE SCHEMES AND THEIR POSSIBLE RELATIONS TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 131 Bärbel Inhelder Language and Knowledge in a Constructivist Framework Discussion by Noam Chomsky, Seymour Papert, Jerry Fodor, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Bärbel Inhelder, Jacques Monod 6. ON THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ACQUIRING "MORE POWERFUL" STRUCTURES 142 Jerry Fodor Fixation of Belief and Concept Acquisition Discussion by Seymour Papert, Jerry Fodor, Jean Piaget, Anthony Wilden, Dieter Dütting, Jacques Monod, Noam Chomsky, Scott Atran 7. LANGUAGE WITHIN COGNITION 163 Jean Piaget Schemes of Action and Language Learning Discussion by Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, Bärbel Inhelder, Jerry Fodor, Seymour Papert, Dan Sperber, David Premack, Jacques Monod, Stephen Toulmin 8. PROPERTIES OF THE NEURONAL NETWORK 184 Jean-Pierre Changeux Genetic Determinism and Epigenesis of the Neuronal Network: Is There a Biological Compromise between Chomsky and PiageU Discussion by Jean Piaget, Dieter Dütting, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Jacques Monod, Noam Chomsky 9. INTERSPECIES COMPARISONS OF COGNITIVE ABILITIES 203 David Premack Representational Capacity and Accessibility of Knowledge: The Case of Chimpanzees Discussion by Gregory Bateson, David Premack, Maurice Godelier, Seymour Papert, Scott Atran, Norbert Bischof, Anthony Wilden Contents I xi 10. PHYLOGENESIS AND COGNITION 231 Norbert Bischof Remarks on Lorenz and Piaget: How Can "Working Hypotheses" Be "Necessary"* Comments by Jean Piaget 11. COGNITION AND THE SEMIOTIC FUNCTION 244 Dan Sperber Remarks on the Lack of Positive Contributions from Anthropologists to the Problem of Innateness Discussion by Seymour Papert, Dan Sperber, Noam Chomsky, David Premack, Jerry Fodor 12. THE INDUCTIVIST FALLACY 255 Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor Statement of the Paradox Discussion by Thomas de Zengotita, Noam Chomsky, Gregory Bateson, David Premack, Seymour Papert, Jerry Fodor 13. AFTERTHOUGHTS AND CLARIFICATIONS 276 Stephen Toulmin Steering a Way between Constructivism and Innatism Jean Piaget Afterthoughts PART II Comments on the Debate 14. Hilary Putnam What Is Innate and Why: Comments on the Debate 287 15. Noam Chomsky Discussion of Putnam's Comments 310 16. Jerry Fodor Reply to Putnam 325 17. Hilary Putnam Comments on Chomsky's and Fodofs Replies 335 18. Jacques Mehler Psychology and Psycholinguistics: The Impact of Chomsky and Piaget 341 APPENDIX A 355 Antoine Danchin A Critical Note on the Use of the Term "Phenocopy" APPENDIX Β 361 Rene Thorn The Genesis of Representational Space according to Piaget Jean Piaget Reply to Thorn xii / Contents APPENDIX C 371 Jean Petitot Localist Hypothesis and Theory of Catastrophes: Note on the Debate NOTES 380 INDEX 399 Remarks on Lorenz and Piaget: How Can "Working Hypotheses" Be "Necessary"? Norbert Bischof In his paper, Piaget argues against the viewpoint of Konrad Lorenz, who holds that the categories of thinking have de­ veloped in the process of phylogenetic adaptation of the human species to its environment. Logically enough, Lorenz calls these categories "innate working hypotheses'' of the human cognitive system. Piaget, on his side, feels that the contingent and provi- sionary status of a "working hypothesis," born out of the hap­ hazard guesswork of mutation, contradicts the "necessary" char­ acter of our cognitive structures. I would like to argue in favor of the Lorenzian view. In par­ ticular, I intend to point out that the notions of "working hy­ pothesis" and "necessity," as used by Lorenz and Piaget, re­ spectively, are not at all contradictory. AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT Lorenz proceeds from an epistemological viewpoint which is shared by most other ethologists (and also, for instance, by Gestalt psychologists and logical empiricists such as Feigl) and which has been labeled "critical realism."* The basic assump­ tions of critical realism are the following: 1. There is a structured reality, the so-called "objective world," the structure of which remains the same whether or not there are organisms who perceive it correctly, or perceive it at all. 2. Organisms form a special subset of this "objective world." They are characterized by the fact that their behavior can be interpreted as "adaptive" in the sense of optimizing their chances of survival. 3. This adaptiveness defines a mapping relation: for every possible behavior of an organism, a set of environmental situa­ tions in which this behavior would be optimally adaptive can be * Editor's note: The debate between Putnam, Chomsky, and Fodor in Part II brings further clarification of the issue of "critical realism." Putnam is considered to be one of the most authoritative exponents of this school of thought. 233 234 / Language and Learning assumed to exist. Thus it can be stated that the behavior of an organism contains "information" about the features of the en­ vironment. This information refers to the intersection of all pos­ sible situations in which the given behavior would be optimally adaptive. 4. The concept of information is, in this context, not con­ fined to the mere syntactic meaning that it has in information theory. Rather, it can be interpreted semantically: we can speak of "true" or "false" information depending on whether a be­ havior is in fact adapted to the existing situation or not. This should be elucidated by a brief example. There is a set of in­ voluntary eye movements that are controlled by the vestibular organ, so-called "vestibular eye reflexes." Among other possibil­ ities, the human eye may, in a given situation, perform a steady rotation in the horizontal plane; in other situations, the eyeballs may be tilted to a given angle around their sagittal axes. If a human organism is subject to a lateral linear acceleration, the eyes will perform a reactive movement. However, this move­ ment does not consist of a lateral drift, which would allow the person to keep track of the environment passing by, but rather consists of a steady tilt around the optical axis. This response would only be adaptive in the context of a lateral body tilt; in this case it would help to maintain the stability of the retinal image. Thus we can describe the situation in terms of the or­ ganism having "misinterpreted" the lateral linear movement as a steady body tilt (actually, the lateral acceleration has inter­ fered with the pull of gravity to yield a deflection of the otoliths that is equivalent to and indistinguishable from a lateral body tilt). In this case, the "information" contained in the eye move­ ment about the spatial situation of the body is false: to be adap­ tive, the behavior would require a situation that does not exist in reality. 5. The subject of the experiment just described is not aware of his (involuntary) eye movements. But if he is asked about his subjective experience, he will indeed report the sensation of being laterally tilted. In other words, subjective experience cor­ responds to the "information" that the external observer assigns to the responses of the organism. Critical realism, now, gen­ erally postulates that our subjective experience (or our "phe­ nomenal world") can be understood as the "information" con­ tained in the totality of our behavioral states of readiness; that is, every subject's phenomenal world stands in a mapping rela­ tion to objective reality, corresponding to it more or less exactly, but by no means identical with it. Phylogenesis and Cognition I 235 In everyday life, we do not make this distinction. To my naive understanding, there is no other mysterious world beyond the world of my immediate experience: the object that emits light waves to my eyes, and the object that accordingly appears in front of my eyes, are taken to be one and the same, located in one and the same space. This everyday viewpoint is called "naive realism"; we get along with it very well outside our laboratories (due to the fact that the mapping apparatus is so in­ genious that it makes only a very few, minute errors). But even as scientists, we have to be very careful not to relapse into the naive view when the theoretical situation actually demands a more critical position. The critical-realistic dichotomy between objective world and subjective world is indispensable as soon as we want to deal theoretically with the concept of "false information," as for example, in the case of an optical illusion, or any kind of cogni­ tive error. In addition, the naive subject engaged in the struggles of everyday life has a vital interest in the veridicality of his cognitive structures. Far from being a mere issue of academic epistemology, success in the attempt to subjectively map objec­ tive reality in an adequate way does in fact determine the chances of survival. So what the subject vitally needs are cues in his phenomenal world that tell him when there is good reason to assume that the cognitive representation is correct.
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