piattelli-palmarini 1994 cognition

32
Cognition, 50 (1994) 315-346 OOlO-0277/94/$07.00 @ 1994 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Ever since language and learning: afterthoughts on the Piaget-Chomsky debate _ Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini* Dipartimento di Scienze Cognitive, Istituto San Raffaele, Via Olgettina 58, Milan0 20132, Italy Center for Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge MA 02139, USA Abstract The central arguments and counter-arguments presented by several participants during the debate between Piaget and Chomsky at the Royaumont Abbey in October 1975 are here reconstructed in a particularly concise chronological and “logical” sequence. Once the essential points of this important exchange are thus clearly laid out, it is easy to witness that recent developments in generative grammar, as well as new data on language acquisition, especially in the acquisition of pronouns by the congenitally deaf child, corroborate the “language specificity” thesis defended by Chomsky. By the same token these data and these new theoretical refinements refute the Piagetian hypothesis that language is constructed Correspondence to: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Dipartimento di Scienze Cognitive, Istituto San Raffaele, Via Olgettina 58. Milano, 20132, Italy. I am in debt to Thomas Roeper for his invitation to give a talk on the Piaget-Chomsky debate to the undergraduates in linguistics and psychology, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in April 1989. The idea of transforming it into a paper came from the good feedback I received during that talk, and from a suggestion by my friend and colleague Paul Horwich, a philosopher of science, who had attended. Steven Pinker reinforced that suggestion, assuming that such a paper could be of some use also to the undergraduates at MIT. Noam Chomsky carefully read the first draft, and made many useful suggestions in the letter from which I have quoted some passages here. Paul Horwich, Morris Halle and David Pesetsky also offered valuable comments and critiques. Jerry Fodor stressed the slack that has intervened in the meantime between his present position and Chomsky’s. inducing me to revise sections of the first draft (perhaps the revisions are not as extensive as he would have liked). The ideas expressed here owe a lot to a lot of people, and it shows. I wish to single out, however, my special indebtedness to Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Jacques Mehler, Jim Higgin- botham, Luigi Rizzi. Ken Wexler, Laura-Ann Petitto, Lila Gleitman, Steve Gould and Dick Lewontin. The work I have done during these years has been generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Kapor Family Foundation, the MIT Center for Cognitive Science, Olivetti Italy and the Cognitive Science Society. I am especially indebted to Eric Wanner for initial funding. SSDZ 0010-0277(93)00610-J

Upload: william-hale

Post on 21-Jan-2016

39 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

Cognition, 50 (1994) 315-346 OOlO-0277/94/$07.00 @ 1994 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Ever since language and learning: afterthoughts on the Piaget-Chomsky debate _

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini* Dipartimento di Scienze Cognitive, Istituto San Raffaele, Via Olgettina 58, Milan0 20132, Italy Center for Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge MA 02139, USA

Abstract

The central arguments and counter-arguments presented by several participants during the debate between Piaget and Chomsky at the Royaumont Abbey in October 1975 are here reconstructed in a particularly concise chronological and “logical” sequence. Once the essential points of this important exchange are thus clearly laid out, it is easy to witness that recent developments in generative grammar, as well as new data on language acquisition, especially in the acquisition of pronouns by the congenitally deaf child, corroborate the “language specificity” thesis defended by Chomsky. By the same token these data and these new theoretical refinements refute the Piagetian hypothesis that language is constructed

Correspondence to: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Dipartimento di Scienze Cognitive, Istituto San

Raffaele, Via Olgettina 58. Milano, 20132, Italy.

I am in debt to Thomas Roeper for his invitation to give a talk on the Piaget-Chomsky debate to

the undergraduates in linguistics and psychology, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in

April 1989. The idea of transforming it into a paper came from the good feedback I received during

that talk, and from a suggestion by my friend and colleague Paul Horwich, a philosopher of science, who had attended. Steven Pinker reinforced that suggestion, assuming that such a paper could be of

some use also to the undergraduates at MIT. Noam Chomsky carefully read the first draft, and made

many useful suggestions in the letter from which I have quoted some passages here. Paul Horwich,

Morris Halle and David Pesetsky also offered valuable comments and critiques. Jerry Fodor stressed

the slack that has intervened in the meantime between his present position and Chomsky’s. inducing

me to revise sections of the first draft (perhaps the revisions are not as extensive as he would have liked). The ideas expressed here owe a lot to a lot of people, and it shows. I wish to single out,

however, my special indebtedness to Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Jacques Mehler, Jim Higgin- botham, Luigi Rizzi. Ken Wexler, Laura-Ann Petitto, Lila Gleitman, Steve Gould and Dick

Lewontin. The work I have done during these years has been generously supported by the Alfred P.

Sloan Foundation, the Kapor Family Foundation, the MIT Center for Cognitive Science, Olivetti Italy and the Cognitive Science Society. I am especially indebted to Eric Wanner for initial funding.

SSDZ 0010-0277(93)00610-J

Page 2: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

316 M. Piattelli- Palmarini I Cognition 50 (I 004) 315-346

upon abstractions from sensorimotor schemata. Moreover, in the light of modern

evolutionary theory, Piaget’s basic assumptions on the biological roots of cogni-

tion, language and learning turn out to be unfounded. In hindsight. all this accrues

to the validity of Fodor’s seemingly “‘paradoxical” argument against “learning” as

a transition from “less” powerful to ‘mmore” powerful conceptual systems.

I. Introduction

This issue of Cognition offers a rare and most welcome invitation to rethink the

whole field in depth, and in perspective. A fresh reassessment of the important

Royaumont debate (October 1975) between Piaget and Chomsky may be of

interest in this context. After all, the book has by now been published in ten

languages, and it has been stated (Gardner, 1980) that the debate is “certainly a

strong contender. . as the initial milestone in the emergence of this field” (i.e.,

cognitive science). It is not for the co-organizer. with Jacques Monod. of that

meeting, or for the editor of the proceedings (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980) to say

how strong the contender is. It is a fact, however, that many of us have witnessed

over the years many impromptu re-enactments of arguments and counter-argu-

ments presented in that debate, and that if one still wants to raise today the same

kind of objections to the central ideas of generative grammar as Piaget, Cellerier.

Papert. Inhelder, and Putnam raised at the time, one cannot possibly do a better

job than the one they did. Moreover, the most effective counters to those

objections are still basically the same that Chomsky and Fodor offered at

Royaumont. That debate also foreshadowed, for reasons that I shall come back

to, much of the later debate on the foundations of connectionism (Pinker &

Mehler, 1988; Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988). What I will attempt to do here is support

the Chomsky-Fodor line with further evidence that has become available in the

meantime. In fact, as time goes by, it is increasingly clear that the pendulum is

presently swinging towards the innatist research program in linguistics presented

at Royaumont by Chomsky (and endorsed by Mehler with data on acquisition).

and away from even the basic, and allegedly most “innocent”, assumptions of the

constructivist Piagetian program. Lifting, at long last, the self-imposed neutrality I

considered it my duty to adopt while editing the book, I say here explicitly, and at

times forcefully, what I studiously avoided to say there and then. I also wish to

highlight some recent developments in linguistics and language acquisition that

bear clear consequences on the main issues raised during the debate.

2. The debates within the debate

In hindsight, it is important to realize that there were at least four distinct

Royaumont debates eventually collapsing into one, a bit like a swarm of virtual

Page 3: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 317

particles collapsing into a single visible track in modern high-energy laboratories:

the event that actually happened; the one which we, the organizers, thought

would happen; the one Jean Piaget hoped would happen, and the one that

Chomsky urged everyone not to let happen.

Let me digress for a moment and sketch also these other “virtual” debates.

Piaget assumed that he and Chomsky were bound to agree in all important

matters. It was his original wording that there had to be a “compromis” between

him and Chomsky. In fact, this term is recurrent throughout the debate. During

the preparatory phase, Piaget made it clear that it had been his long-standing

desire to meet with Chomsky at great length, and witness the “inevitable”

convergence of their respective views. As Piaget states in his “invitation” paper,’

he thought there were powerful reasons supporting his assumption. I will outline

these reasons in a simple sketch.

Reasons for the “compromise”

Piaget’s assessment of the main points of convergence between him and

Chomsky

- Anti-empiricism (in particular anti-behaviorism)

- Rationalism and uncompromising mentalism

- Constructivism and/or generativism (both assigning a central role to the

subject’s own internal activity)

- Emphasis on rules, principles and formal constraints

- Emphasis on logic and deductive algorithms

- Emphasis on actual experimentation (vs. armchair theorizing)

- A dynamic perspective (development and acquisition studied in real time,

with real children)

Piaget’s proposal was one of a “division of labour”, he being mostly concerned

with conceptual contents and semantics, Chomsky being (allegedly) mostly

concerned with content-independent rules of syntactic well-formedness across

different languages. Piaget considered that the potentially divisive issue of

innatism was, at bottom, a non-issue (or at least not a divisive one) because he

also agreed that there is a “fixed nucleus” (noyaux fixe) underlying all mental

activities, language included, and that this nucleus is accounted for by human

biology. The only issue, therefore was to assess the exact nature of this fixed

nucleus and the degree of its specificity.

The suggestion, voiced by CellCrier and Toulmin, was to consider two

“complementary” strategies: the Piagetian one, which consisted of a minimization

‘In Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piagef and Noam Chomsky (hereinafter

abbreviated as LL), pp. 23-24.

Page 4: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

31x M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346

of the role of innate factors, and the Chomskian one, consisting of a maximization

of these factors-once more, a sort of division of labor.

It was interesting for all participants, and certainly unexpected to Piaget, to

witness that, during the debate proper, the constant focus of the discussions was

on what Piaget considered perfectly “obvious” (“allant de soi”): the nature and

origin of this “fixed nucleus”. He was heading for severe criticism from the

molecular biologists present at the debate (especially from Jacob and Changeux)

concerning his views on the origins of the fixed nucleus. And he was heading for

major disagreements with Chomsky concerning the specificity of this nucleus.

It can be safely stated that, while Piaget hoped for a reconciliatory settlement

with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) contingent about particular

hypotheses and particular mechanisms concerning language and learning (and, in

particular, the learning of language), he found himself, unexpectedly, facing

insuperable disagreement about those very assumptions he hardly considered

worth discussing, and which he believed were the common starting point - more

on these in a moment.

Piaget’s imperception of these fundamental differences was, in essence,

responsible for the vast gap between the debate he actually participated in, and

the virtual debate he expected to be able to mastermind. One had the impression

that, to the very end, Piaget was still convinced he had been misunderstood by

Chomsky and Fodor. In Piaget’s opinion, had they really understood his position,

then it would have been unthinkable that the disagreement could still persist. One

of Piaget’s secrets was his deep reliance on the intuitive, unshakeable truth of his

hypothbes directrices (guiding hypotheses). These were such that no reasonable

person could possibly reject them - not if he or she actually understood what they

meant. One could single out the most fundamental of Piaget’s assumptions

(Piaget. 1974) . m words that are not his own. but which may well reflect the

essence of what he believed:

Piuget’s guiding hypothesis (hypothbe directrice)

- Life is a continuum

-Cognition is an aspect of life

therefore

- Cognition is a continuum

This is a somewhat blunt rendition, but it is close enough to Piaget’s core

message. Some of his former collaborators in the Geneva group, in 1985,

expressed basic agreement that this was “a fair rendition” of Piaget’s hypothkse

directrice (as expressed, for instance in his 1967 book Biologie et Connuissunce).”

‘Bkbel Inhelder, personal communication

Page 5: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 319

As any historian of medieval logic could testify, if literally taken this version is a

well-known logical fallacy (compare with the following):

-New York is a major metropolis

-Central Park is part of New York

therefore

- Central Park is a major metropolis

Decidedly, one does not want to impute to Piaget and his co-workers assent to

a logical fallacy. Thus stated, it cannot pass as a “fair” reformulation. That would

be too devious. A better reformulation, one that passes the logical test, would be

the following:

A better heuristic version of Piaget’s core hypothesis - Life is (basically) auto-organization and self-stabilization in the presence of

novelty

- Cognition is one of life’s signal devices to attain auto-organization and

self-stabilization

therefore

- Cognition is best understood as auto-organization and self-stabilization in the

presence of novelty

This much seemed to Piaget to be untendentious and uncontroversial, but also

very important. He declared, in fact, that this central hypothesis had guided

almost everything he had done in psychology. In order better to understand

where the force of the hypothesis lies, one must remember that he unreservedly

embraced other complementary hypotheses and other strictly related assump-

tions. Here they are (again in a succinct and clear-cut reformulation):

Piaget’s additional assumptions

I Auto organization and self-stabilization are not just empty metaphors, but

deep universal scientific principles captured by precise logico-mathematical

schemes.

II There is a necessary, universal and invariable sequence of stepwise

transitions between qualitatively different, fixed stages of increasing self-

stabilization.

III The “logic” of these stages is captured by a progressive hierarchy of

Page 6: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

320 M. Piattrlli-Palmarini I Cognition .50 (I YY4) 31.5-346

inclusion between ascending levels of abstraction and generalization (each

stage contains the previous one as a sub-set).

IV The necessary and invariant nature of these transitions cannot be captured

by the Darwinian process of random mutation plus selection.

Corollury

V Another theory of biological evolution is needed (Piaget’s “third way”,

differing both from Darwin’s and Lamarck’s).

Piaget believed that there is a kind of evolution that is “unique to man”, and

which grants the “necessity” of the mental maturational stages.3 These are what

they are. and could not be anything else; moreover they follow one another in a

strict unalterable sequence. The random process of standard Darwinian evolution

is unable in principle (not just as a temporary matter of fact. due to the present

state of biology) to explain this strict “logical” necessity.

One the last two points the biologists. obviously. had their say, as we will see

in a moment.

Within this grand framework, it is useful to emphasize what were Piaget’s

specific assumptions concerning learning and language:

Piaget’s crucial assumptions about learning

The transitions (between one stage and the next) are formally constrained

by “logical necessity” (fermeture logique) and actually, “dynamically”, take

place through the subject’s active effort to generalize, equilibrate, unify and

systematize a wide variety of different problem-solving activities.

The transition is epitomized by the acquisition of more powerful concepts

and schemes, which subsume as particular instances the concepts and schemes

of the previous stage.

Piaget’s crucial assumptions about language

The basic structure of language is continuous with, and is a generalization-

abstraction from, various sensorimotor schemata.

The sensorimotor schemata are a developmental precondition for the

emergence of language, and also constitute the logical premise of linguistic

‘LL, p, SC).

Page 7: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 31.5-346 321

structures (word order, the subject/verb/object construction, the agent/pa-

tient/instrument relation, and so on).

Conceptual links and semantic relations are the prime movers of language

acquisition. Syntax is derivative from (and a “mirror” of) these.

It was inevitable that Piaget should meet strong opposition on each of these

assumptions, on their alleged joint force and on the overall structure of his

argument. In a sense, the whole debate turned only on these assumptions, with

Piaget growing increasingly impatient to pass onto more important and more

technical matters, but failing to do so, on account of the insurmountable problems

presented by his core tenets. Chomsky and Fodor kept mercilessly shooting down

even the most “obvious” and the most “innocent” reformulations of the basic

assumptions of the Piagetian scheme, notably in their many spirited exchanges

with Seymour Papert, who boldly undertook the task of systematically defending

Piaget against the onslaught.

The debate was not the one Piaget had anticipated, and it became clear to

everyone, except possibly to Piaget himself (see his “Afterthoughts”),4 that no

compromise could possibly be found.

3. Another virtual debate: the one the organizers thought they were organizing

There was, as I said, another virtual debate, the one which the organizers -

molecular biologists with a mere superficial acquaintance of cognitive psychology

and linguistics - believed they were organizing. It was closer to what Piaget had in

mind than to the debate that actually took place, because they too anticipated

some kind of convergence.

How could that be? How could we, the biologists in the group, believe for a

moment that some form of compromise could be reached? The simple answer to

this, in retrospect, is: ignorance. What we thought we knew about the two systems

was simple and basic. I think I can faithfully reconstruct it in a few sentences:

What we (the biologists) thought we knew

About Piaget:

-There is a stepwise development of human thought, from infancy to

adulthood, through fixed, qualitatively different stages that are common to

all cultures, though some cultures may fail to attain the top stages.

- Not everything that appears logical and necessarily true to us adults is so

‘LL, pp. 278-284.

Page 8: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

322 M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognitwn 50 (lYY4) 31.5-346

judged by a child, and vice versa. Suitable experiments show where the

differences lie.

- Constructivism, a variant of structuralism, is the best theoretical framework

to explain the precise patterns of cognitive development. Unlike be-

haviorism, constructivism stresses the active participation of the child and the

role of logical deduction.

- Set theory and propositional calculus are (somehow) central components of

the theory.

About Chomsky:

-There are linguistic universals, common to all the different languages the

world over.

- These are not superficial, but constitute a “deep structure”.+

-This deep structure is innate, not learned, and is unique to our species.

- Formal logic and species-specific computational rules are (somehow) involved

in determining deep syntactic structures.

- Syntax is autonomous (independent of semantics and of generic conceptual

contents).

- There are syntactic transformations (from active to passive, from declarative

to interrogative, etc.) that “preserve” the deep structure of related sen-

tences. Semantics “links up” with syntax essentially at this deep level.

- Behaviorism is bad, while innatism and mentalism are OK.

- The expression “mind/brain” is OK. Linguistics and psychology are, at

bottom, part of biology.

The organizers, in fact, knew very little, but they liked what they knew, on

both sides. There was every reason (in our opinion) to expect that these two

schools of thought should find a compromise, and that this grand unified meta-

theory would fit well within modern molecular biology and the neurosciences.

Both systems relied heavily on “deeper” structures, on universals, on precise

logico-mathematical schemes, on general biological assumptions. This was music

to a biologist’s ears.

All in all, it was assumed that the debate would catalyze a “natural” scientific

merger, one potentially rich in interesting convergences and compromises.

4. Chomsky’s plea for an exchange, not a “debate”

Commenting on a previous version of the present paper, Chomsky has insisted

that he, for one, had always been adamant in not wanting a debate, but rather an

‘There was at the time some confusion among non-experts between the terms “deep structure” and “universal grammar”.

Page 9: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 323

open and frank discussion, devoid of pre-determined positions and pre-set

frontiers: “I am a little uneasy about presenting the whole thing as a ‘Chomsky-

Piaget debate’. That’s not the way I understood it, at least, and I thought that

Piaget didn’t either, though I may be wrong. As far as I understood, and the only

way I would have even agreed to participate, there was a conference (not debate)

on a range of controversial issues, which was opened by two papers, a paper by

Piaget and my reaction to it, simply in order to put forward issues and to open the

discussion.“5

Chomsky then adds: “Debates are an utterly irrational institution, which

shouldn’t exist in a reasonable world. In a debate, the assumption is that each

participant has a position, and must keep to this position whatever eventuates in

the interchange. In a debate, it is an institutional impossibility (i.e., if it

happened, it would no longer be a debate) for one person to say to the other:

that’s a good argument, I will have to change my views accordingly. But the latter

option is the essence of any interchange among rational people. So calling it a

debate is wrong to start with and contributes to ways of thinking and behaving

that should be abandoned.”

After pointing out that, as is to be expected in any ongoing scientific activity,

his views are constantly changing and are not frozen into any immutable position,

Chomsky insists that neither he, nor Fodor, nor the enterprise of generative

grammar as a whole, are in any sense an institution, in the sense in which in

Europe Marxism, Freudianism, and to some extent Piagetism, are institutions.

The following also deserves to be quoted verbatim from his letter: “There is,

thank God, no ‘Chomskyan’ view of the world, or of psychology, or of language.

Somehow, I think it should be made clear that as far as I was concerned at least, I

was participating by helping open the discussion, not representing a world view”.

These excerpts from Chomsky’s letter should make it very clear what his

attitude was. But it is well beyond anyone’s powers now to un-debate that debate,

partly because it is the very subtitle of the book (“The debate between Jean

Piaget and Noam Chomsky”), and partly because the community at large has

been referring to the event in exactly those terms for almost two decades. So,

after having made clear which kind of virtual non-debate Chomsky assumed one

should have organized, let us finally return to what actually happened.

5. The real debate

From now on, let’s faithfully attempt to reconstruct, from the published

records, from the recorded tapes, and from the vivid memory of some of those

‘With Chomsky’s permission, this, and the following, are verbatim quotes from a letter to M. Piattelli-Palmarini, dated May 8, 1989.

Page 10: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

323 M, Pia~telli-Palmarini I Cognition SO ( 1994) 3 IS.346

who were present, how all these imaginary, unlikely, virtual debates precipitated

into the real one.

Chomsky’s written reply to Piaget,’ made available a couple of months before

the debate. rightly stressed, among other things, the untenability of Piaget’s

conception of evolution. Not until the first session of the debate proper had

anyone realized that Piaget was (Heaven forbid!) a Lamarckian. It was, however.

already clear from his distributed “invitation” paper that he had a curious idea of

how genes are assembled and of how evolution acts on gene assemblies. Chomsky

clearly had got it right and Piaget had got it wrong. This was the first important

point in favor of Chomsky. Moreover, Chomsky stressed the need for specificity,

while Piaget stressed the need for generality. The concrete linguistic examples

offered by Chomsky seemed indeed very, very remote from any generalization of

sensorimotor schemata. Some participants already felt sympathetic to Chomsky’s

suggestion that one should not establish any dualism between body and mind, and

that one should approach the study of “mental organs” exactly in the way we

approach the study of the heart, the limbs, the kidneys, etc. Everything he said

made perfect sense and the concrete linguistic examples (which Piaget and the

others never even began to attempt to deal with) made it vastly implausible that

syntactic rules could be accounted for in terms of sensorimotor schemata.

Chomsky’s arguments against learning by trial and error were compelling - very

compelling. One clearly saw the case for syntax, but one may still have failed to

see the far-reaching import of his arguments for learning in general. For this. the

participants had to wait until Fodor made his big splash at the meeting. But let’s

proceed in chronological order.

Most important, to some of the biologists. was the feeling. at first confused,

but then more and more vivid, that the style of Chomsky’s argumentation, his

whole way of thinking, was so deeply germane to the one we were accustomed to

in molecular biology. On the contrary, Piaget’s biology sounded very much like

the old nineteenth-century biology; it was the return of a nightmare, with his

appeal to grand unifying theories. according to which life was “basically” this or

that, instead of being what it, in fact. is. Chomsky’s call for specificity and his

reliance on concrete instances of language were infinitely more appealing. It

became increasingly clear to the biologists at Royaumont that Chomsky was our

true cotzfrPre in biology and that the case for syntax (perhaps Ott/y for syntax) was

already lost by Piaget.

As the debate unfolded. the participants were in for further surprises and much

more startling revelations. In order not to rcpcat needlessly what is already in full

length in the book itself, let’s recapitulate only the main turning points of the

debate.

“LL. pp. T-52

Page 11: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 325

5.1. The mishaps of “phenocopies”

Upon deeper probing into his rather peculiar idea of “phenocopy”, Piaget

indeed turned out to be a Lamarckian. He actually believed in some feedback,

however devious and indirect, from individual experience to the genetic make-up

of the species. The biologists were aghast! Jacob made a marvelous job of politely

and respectfully setting the record straight on phenocopies, aided by Changeux’

(Monod was not present, and maybe he would have been carried away by the

discussion, behaving slightly less courteously to Piaget than Jacob and Changeux

did. Monod, haunted by the memory of the Lyssenko affair, always reacted to

Lamarckism by drawing his gun!)

Well, believe it or not, Piaget was unruffled. He had the stamina to declare

himself “tr& surpris” by the reactions of the biologists, and reject Jacob’s

rectifications, quoting a handful of pathetic heretics, obscure Lamarckian biolog-

ists who happened to agree with him. The alienation of Piaget from mainstream

biology was consummated there and then; patently, he did not know what he was

talking about. (The young molecular biologist Antoine Danchin undertook, after

the meeting, the task of making this as evident as it had to be made).X

Subsequent exchanges with CellCrier and Inhelder showed that they had no

alternative explanation to provide for the linguistic material brought in by

Chomsky. When they mentioned linguistic examples, these were of a very peculiar

generic kind, nowhere near the level of specificity of Chomsky’s material. They

pleaded for an attenuation of the “innateness hypothesis”, so as to open the way

to the desired compromise. But Chomsky’s counter was characteristically un-

compromising: first of all, the high specificity of the language organ, and,

therefore its innateness, is not a hypothesis, it is a fact, and there is no way one

may even try to maximize or minimize the role of the innate components, because

the task of science is to discover what this role actually is, not to pre-judge in

advance “how much of it” we are ready to countenance in our theories. Second, it

is not true that Chomsky is only interested in syntax, he is interested in every

scientifically approachable aspect of language, semantics and conceptual systems

included. These too have their specificity and there are also numerous and crucial

aspects of semantics that owe nothing to sensorimotor schemata, or to generic

logical necessity - no division of labor along these lines, and again no comprom-

ise _

The salient moments of this point in the debate can be summarized as follows:

‘LL, pp. 61-64. “LL, pp. 356-360.

Page 12: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

326 M. Piattelli-Palmarini / Cognition SO (1944) 315-346

Counters to Piaget from the biologists

Jacob’s counter:

- Autoregulation is made only by structures which are there already and which

regulate minor variations within a heavily pre-determined range of possibles.

- Regulation cannot precede the constitution of genetically determined regula-

tory structures.

- (Gentle reminder) Individual experience cannot be incorporated into the

genes.

Piaget simply did not see the devastating effect of Jacob’s counters on his

private and idiosyncratic conception of evolution by means of autoregulation.

Cellerier was visibly embarrassed by Piaget’s anti-Darwinism and tried, I think

unsuccessfully, to disentangle the personal attitudes of Piaget in matters of

biological evolution from the objective implications of the Darwinian theory for

psychology proper.’

5.2. The mishaps of “precursors”

During the next session, when Monod was also present, came another major

counter, on which Fodor quickly and aptly capitalized:

Monod’s counter “’ _ If sensorimotor schemata are crucial for language development, then children

who are severely handicapped in motor control (quadriplegics, for instance)

should be unable to develop language, but this is not the case.

- Znhelder’s answer: Very little movement is needed, even just moving the

eyes.

- Monod’s and Fodor’s punch-line: Then what is needed is a triggering

experience and not a bona fide structured “precursor”.

Once again, it was the impression of several participants that the weight of this

counter was not properly registered by the Piagetians. Yet the Monod-Fodor

argument was impeccable, and its conclusion inevitable. One thing is a triggering

input, quite another a structured precursor that has to be assimilated as such, and

‘LL, pp. 70-72 “‘LL. p. 140.

Page 13: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 327

on the basis of which a higher structure is actually built. A trigger need not be

“isomorphic” with, and not even analogous to, the structure it sets in motion.

Admitting that this precursor can be just anything you please (just moving your

eyes once) is tantamount to admitting that it is nothing more than a “releasing

factor”, in accordance with the innatist model of growth and maturation and

against the literal notion of learning. Papert, for instance, went on at great length

in offering the virtues of “indirect”, “implicit” learning and of the search for

“primitives”. These, he insisted, and only these, can be said to be innate, not the

highly specific structures proposed by Chomsky. These “clearly” are derived from

more fundamental, simpler primitives.” For this illusion, Fodor had a radical cure

up his sleeve, as we will see in a moment. (Healthy correctives to Papert’s, and

Piaget’s notion of implicit learning in the specific domain of lexical acquisition are

to be found in Atkins, Kegl, & Levin, 1986; Berwick, 1985; Grimshaw, 1990;

Jackendoff, 1983, 1990, 1992; Lederer, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1989; Lightfoot,

1989; Piatelli-Palmarini, 1990a; Pinker, 1989.)

Before Fodor’s cold shower a lot of the discussion turned, rather idly, around

the existence, in language, of components which are not specific to it, but are also

common to other mental activities and processes. Again, a division of labour was

proposed along these lines. Chomsky had no hesitation in admitting that there are

also language factors that are common to other intelligent activities, but rightly

insisted that there are many besides which are unique to language, and which

cannot be explained on the basis of general intelligence, sensorimotor schemes,

communicative efficacy, the laws of logic, problem-solving, etc. These language-

specific traits, Chomsky insisted, are the most interesting ones, and those most

amenable to a serious scientific inquiry.

5.3. Chomsky’s plea for specificity

Here is an essential summary of the line he defended:

Chomsky’s argument for specificity’2

The simplest and therefore (allegedly) most plausible rule for the formation of

interrogatives

The man is here.

Is the man here?

“LL, pp. 90-105. lZLL, pp. 39-43.

Page 14: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

328 M. Piattelli-Palmarim I Cognition .W (1994) 315-346

is the following (a “structure-independent” rule): “Move ‘is’ to the front”.

But look at

The man who is tall is here.

“Is the man who tall is here? (bad sentence, never occurring in the child’s

language)

Is the man who is tall here? (good sentence)

The “simple” rule is never even tried out by the child. Why‘?

The correct rule, uniformly acquired by the child is not “simple” (in this

transparent and shallow sense of the word) and involves abstract. specifically

linguistic notions such as “noun phrase”.

Therefore it is not learned by trial and error and is not derivative on

sensorimotor schemata. (What could the motor equivalent of a noun phrase

conceivably be?)

This is, somewhat bluntly put. the core of the argument. If the process were

one of induction. of hypothesis formation and confirmation, we should expect to

see the simplest and least language-specific rules being tried out first. But this is

not what we observe. More specific data on language acquisition in a variety of

languages and dialects (Berwick & Wexler. 1987; Chien & Wexler. 1990; Guasti.

1993; Jusczyk & Bertoncini. 1988; Lightfoot, 1989; Manzini 8r Wexler, 1987;

Wexler, 1987; Wexler, 1990; Wcxler &r Manzini, 1987) by now make the case

against learning syntax by induction truly definitive. We will come back to this

point.

Chomsky’s argument against any derivation of syntactic rules from generic

constraints ‘j

We like each other = each of us likes the others

WC expect each other to win = each of us expects the others to win

Near-synonymous expressions:

“each other” = “each. the others”

BUT

*We expect John to like each other

‘ILL. pp. 113-117.

Page 15: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 329

is NOT well formed and is NOT synonymous with

Each of us expects John to like the others

WHY? There is no obvious logical or communication-theoretical explanation.

(There aren’t even non-obvious ones, at that).

The linguistic rule is of the following kind. In embedded structures of the

form

. . . X...[...Y...]

where X and Y are explicit or understood components (names, pronouns,

anaphoric elements etc.) no rule can apply to X and Y if the phrase between

brackets contains a subject distinct from Y.

The nature of this rule is specifically linguistic: the rule has no conceivable

sensorimotor counterpart, nor any justification in terms of general intelligence.

Further confirming evidence (just apply the rule):

The men heard stories about each other. (OK) *The men expect John to like each other.

Who did the men hear stories about?

*Who did the men hear John’s stories about?

John seems to each of the men to like the others.

*John seems to the men to like each other.

(bad)

(OK)

(bad)

(OK)

(bad)

Evidence from another language:

J’ai laisse Jean manger X.

J’ai laisse manger X a Jean. (both OK)

These are apparently freely interchangeable constructions, but the symmetry is

broken in the next example:

J’ai tout laisse manger a Jean.

*J’ai tout laisd Jean manger. (OK)

(bad)

NB: Update. These phenomena have received much better and deeper

explanations in recent linguistic work, in terms of “complete functional complex-

es” (for a summary, see Giorgi & Longobardi, 1991; Haegeman, 1991). The

overall thrust of Chomsky’s argument for specificity comes out further reinforced.

Page 16: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

330 M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition SO (1994) 315-346

Conclusion:

These rules are tacitly known by the speaker, but they are neither learned

(by induction, prcblem-solving or trial-and-error), nor determined by some

genera1 necessity. Genera1 intelligence and sensorimotor schemata cannot even

begin to explain what is happening.

Chomsky’s point failed to impress Piaget and the Piagetians. A lot of their

counter-arguments turned on the possibility of explaining these facts “in some

other way”. One could not fail, I think, to be impressed, there and then. by the

fact that no other way was actually proposed, but that it all turned around the

sheer possibility that some other rule, at some other level, might explain all of the

above. (Anthony Wilden even tried out Russellian logical typeslJ to no avail.)

Wisely, and unflinchingly, Chomsky kept replying that this might well be the case,

but that he did not expect it to be the case. (In fact, many years have gone by,

and these alternative explanations are still sorely missing - for a precise account,

firmly grounded in generative grammar, but altogether charitable to the Piagetian

viewpoint. see Jackendoff, 1992.)

And finally came Fodor’s jeu de massacre, one of the truly high points in the

whole debate.

5.4. Fodor’s demise of learning

His argument was not limited to language, but applicable to any theory of

learning by means of conceptual enrichment. He went squarely against the very

core of the Piagetian system. Nobody, in the other camp, really understood his

argument at first (not even Putnam, in his critique, written after the debate),15 so

let us try to simplify it drastically, still preserving its force:

Fodor’s argument against learning by enrichment”

The typical situation of belief fixation or “learning”:

is an exemplar is not an exemplar

I’LL. pp. 117~121. “See his exchange with Fodor in Part II of LL.

“LL. pp. 143-149 and the ensuing discussion. The argument had been developed in greater detail

by Fodor in his 1976 essay The Language of Thought, Hassocks: Harvester. (Reprinted in 1979 by

Harvard University Press.)

Page 17: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 331

Inductive hypothesis:

X is an exemplar if and only if X is Y

Target of the learning process (for example): come to the conclusion that

Y = miv = “square and gray”

(Alleged) stage 1: the subject has access, separately, to the concept

“square”, to the concept “gray”, but not to the conjunct “square-and-gray”.

(Alleged) stage 2: the subject constructs a tentative new concept Y, and tries

it out on the experimental materials.

Y is not yet “miv”

Stage 3: the subject correctly comes to the conclusion that Y must be:

“miv” = ” square-and-gray”

Fodor’s argument: If this is the case, that is, if the language at stage 3 is

really more powerful than the language at stages 1 and 2, then this transition

cannot be the result of learning, it cannot come from induction.

Mini-proof:

At some point the subject must formulate the hypothesis that Y is true of

(applies to, is satisfied by) all and only those things which are mivs, that is,

which are square and gray. But this cannot happen unless the subject has the

concept miv. Unless Y is to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from miv (from

“being square and gray”), we have no idea whatsoever of what Y could be.

Therefore: the language of stage 1 is not weaker (less powerful, more

limited) than the language of stage 3. You always start with a language which is

at least as powerful as any language which you can acquire.

Where do all these concepts come from?

Fodor’s three hypotheses:

(a) they are innate

(b) God whispers them to you on Tuesdays

Page 18: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

332 M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition SO (I 994) 315-346

(c) you acquire them by falling on your head

Dismissing hypothesis (b), the only plausible conclusion is that they are

innate (and/or arise for totally endogenous reasons, due - for instance - to a

stepwise brain maturation. This latter is just a slightly less fancy version of

hypothesis (c).

The audience was really impressed, Monod most of all. There was a distinct

flavor of paradox in Fodor’s position and he did not try to hide this fact. The

whole argument sounds paradoxical, yet it is perfectly compelling. Fodor, to his

own regret, cited, just as one concrete, indubitable, patented, example of a

logical system which is “more powerful” than another, the case of propositional

logic (a provably weaker system) versus first-order quantificational logic (a

provably stronger system which contains the former as a sub-system). This created

a lot of misunderstanding and endless discussions about the history of the

discipline of logic. Fodor’s thesis remained essentially unchallenged (in the book,

it will be Hilary Putnam to accept the challenge, but that was after the debate).

In the aftermath of Fodor’s onslaught on induction and learning, most of the

ensuing debate revolved, on the one hand, around plain misunderstandings of his

and Chomsky’s position (leading to clarifications and reformulations) and on the

other, around a rather idle insistence that their position appears vastly implausible

and even paradoxical. This apparent implausibility was never denied by Fodor

and Chomsky, but with the crucial proviso that the appearance of paradox persists

only if we maintain the traditional assumptions of the domain. Their main point,

however, was to subvert these very assumptions, not to maintain them.

I surmise that, then as well as now, those who have concluded that the debate

was won by Piaget did so solely on the grounds that the theses defended by Piaget

sounded intuitively very plausible, while the theses presented on the other side

sounded preposterous. It does not seem to occur to them that, in science, even

preposterous hypotheses often turn out to be true (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1986,

1989).

5.5. Sequels to the debate

After the debate, Putnam, at least, took the trouble of explaining why these

theses sound preposterous, and made an attempt to construct an attenuated

version of what he thought was right in Chomsky’s and Fodor’s positions (even

suggesting that they come closer than they believe to Piaget’s).17 This line of

Page 19: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 333

resistance against strong innatism and meaning atomism in the domain of lexical-

conceptual semantics has been vastly expanded in subsequent philosophical works

by Putnam, Fodor, Dennett, Millikan, Loar, Burge and others. I must leave it

out, for reasons of space. I must also leave out the interesting sequels elicited by

Kripke’s essay on Wittgenstein (Kripke, 1982) revamping a special brand of

skepticism about the notion of “following a rule”, which have met interesting

rejoinders by Chomsky (1986), Horwich (1984), and others.

The whole recent debate on connectionism has revamped several of the

anti-specificity theses already present in Piaget (the most explicit link between the

theses of connectionism and the Piaget-Chomsky debate has been made, in the

domain of lexical-conceptual learning, by Ray Jackendoff (1992). Connectionist

architectures are, in fact, a concrete embodiment of the idea of “order-from-

noise”. At the time of the debate Piaget could only summon in defense of the

“order-from-noise” paradigm the physicochemical theories of Prigogine and his

school, and some rather confused speculations by Heinz von Foerster (1960). Had

he lived long enough to see present-day connectionism, I am persuaded that he

would have endorsed it wholeheartedly. In fact, an implicit alliance between

Piagetism and connectionism is amply consummated (Elman, 1989). This is not

the place and time to re-examine the controversy on connectionism (Pinker &

Mehler, 1988), but I wish to stress that many of the recent polemics do find their

roots, ante litteram, in the Royaumont debate.

6. What happened ever since in linguistics and language acquisition

In the rest of this paper, I will briefly present a number of further develop-

ments which support the positions defended by Chomsky and Fodor. And I will

do it precisely by showing that their theses, preposterous as they may have

seemed, are presently the only plausible explanation for a variety of facts

concerning language, language acquisition and cognitive development. The swing

of the pendulum in their favor has not only continued, but has gained further

momentum.

6.1. The new turn in linguistic theory

From October 1975 to the present day, the brand of linguistic theory called

“generative grammar” has undergone an unprecedented growth. As a conse-

quence of previous partial success (and, of course, past errors), Chomsky and

others have developed the so-called “government-and-binding theory”

(Chomsky, 1981, with important antecedents in work published in 1979 and 1980)

(Chomsky, 1980), and more recently the “minimalist framework” (Chomsky,

Page 20: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

334 M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346

1993). Referred to also as the “principles and parameters” approach (Giorgi &

Longobardi, 1991; Haegeman, 1991; Lasnik & Uriagereka, 1988; Rizzi, 1990; van

Riemsdijk & Williams, 1986), the turn of the 1980s has been a revolution within

the revolution, bringing both genuinely novel features and extensions to the

picture presented by Chomsky at Royaumont. The line of argument developed

orally at Royaumont, and then sharpened in the written proceedings, has not only

been preserved in the new theory, but even made more radical.

Just to cite a few examples, some of the oldest and most central notions of

traditional grammars (subject, object, grammatical construction, phrase-structure

rules, etc.) are now demoted to epiphenomena of much deeper and much more

abstract notions of generative grammar. The importance of the lexicon has grown

explosively, to the point that some linguists (certainly Chomsky himself, especial-

ly after 1992, in the “minimalist framework”) now claim that acquiring the

lexicon is almost all a child has to do, in order to acquire a language. Everything

else is generated by a strictly invariant, language-specific computational system,

and by the several output conditions arising at the many interfaces of this

computational system with other internal mental systems. Inevitably the inner

structure of each lexical item (particularly the inner structure of verbs, adverbs

and adjectivals) has become much richer and much more abstract than it ever was

in the traditional grammars (Giorgi & Longobardi, 1991; Grimshaw, 1990; Hale

& Keyser, 1993; Higginbotham, 1983; Jackendoff, 1990; Keyser & Roeper, 1992;

Tenny, 1988). None of the highly abstract and tightly knit principles and

parameters of universal grammar, nor any of the specific rules of the “core

grammar” of a particular language, bear any resemblance whatsoever to deriva-

tions from non-linguistic principles (even less from sensorimotor schemata). The

irrelevance of abstractions from motor schemata even in the development of sign

languages is particularly striking (a point to which I will return). The exploration

of possible phonemes and syllables by the congenitally deaf child, in the course of

“babbling in the manual mode”, shows a marked linguistic specificity in its

ontogenesis, not a continuity with generic manual gesturing (Petitto & Marentet-

te, 1991). The case against any derivation of linguistic structures from non-

linguistic gestures, and/or from the perception of generic movements, appears

clear-cut even for the most “obvious” candidates. namely time relations (Horn-

stein, 1990), agent/patient relations (Grimshaw, 1990; Pinker, 1989), aspectual

semantics (Tenny, 1988), the geometry of events (Pustejovsky, 1988), verbs of

movement and change of possession (Jackendoff, 1983, 1990, 1992), reference

(Higginbotham, 1985, 1988), and even co-reference in sign languages (Keg],

1987).

The richness and depth of these recent developments as a whole is a proof that

the program presented by Chomsky at Royaumont was sound and productive,

while the very idea of a continuum between language and non-linguistic “pre-

cursors” was doomed. Many of the objections raised during that debate seem to

Page 21: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 335

me to be automatically voided by the tumultuous progress made in generative

grammar in the last 15 years or so. The extreme specificity of the language

system, indeed, is a fact, not just a working hypothesis, even less a heuristically

convenient postulation. Doubting that there are language-specific, innate compu-

tational capacities today is a bit like being still dubious about the very existence of

molecules, in spite of the awesome progress of molecular biology.

There are, nonetheless, also particular data and particular developments that

seem to me to refute the most fundamental tenets of Piagetian psychology (there

never really was, nor will there ever be, a “Piagetian linguistics”). Limitations of

space demand that I concentrate on these, and only these. I will do it briefly, and

I will do it bluntly, because I think that these recent developments are blunt

refutations of the most central “classical” assumptions then entertained by the

Piagetian school.

6.2. The knock-down case of pronouns in the congenitally deaf child

First and foremost, I will sketch a perfect case against the dependence of

language on motor schemes. It is based on a clear-cut, elegant and devastating

piece of data from the acquisition of sign language by the congenitally deaf child.

I give special privilege to this case, because it looks a lot like those decisive

experiments in physics and in biology which refute, by a single stroke, long-

entertained hypotheses. It is due to the psycholinguist Laura-Ann Petitto of

McGill, probably the only researcher who has worked in depth both with chimps

and with congenitally deaf children. (By the way, if language indeed were

supervenient on motor schemata and on general intelligence, then chimps ought

to have language, which is clearly not the case, as definitely shown, after the

Royaumont debate, by Premack, Terrace, Bever, Seidenberg and by Petitto

herself) (For reviews, see Premack, 1986; Roitblat, Bever, & Terrace, 1984).

The counter-case of pronouns in the congenitally deaf (Petitto, 1987)

If language were continuous with (prompted by, isomorphic with, super-

venient on) motor schemata, then sign languages should show this causal

dependency in a particularly clear and transparent way.

Within sign languages, the case of “constructing” personal pronouns (which

superficially look a lot like pointing) out of generic pointing ought to be even

more transparent.

It turns out that this is not the case. Data from the acquisition of pronouns

in the congenitally deaf, in fact, show that:

Page 22: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

336 M. Piattelli-Palmurini / Cognition 50 (1 WI) 31.5-.?ilh

(1) Non-linguistic pointing is present and widely used long before pronouns

are used.

(2) Yet, pronouns appear suddenly (within a couple of weeks) and at exactly

the same age in the hearing and in the congenitally deaf child.

(3) In the few weeks preceding the appearance of linguistic pointing (i.e.,

pronouns) in the congenitally deaf child, generic pointing temporarily

disappears.

(4) Paradoxical as it may seem, the hearing child and the congenitally deaf

child make the same mistakes in their initial use of pronouns (‘me’ to mean

‘you’, ‘you’ to mean ‘me’, etc.)

NB: This means “pointing” at oneself to refer to someone else, and vice

versa. This kind of mistake is uniquely linguistic (as demonstrated by the

exact parallelism with the hearing child) and never happens with generic

pointing. If motor skills and general intelligence were involved at all, then

these mistakes would be a disturbing symptom of deep-seated motor

troubles and/or of an intolerably low level of “general intelligence” (of

course, neither is the case).

(5) Another piece of conclusive evidence (Petitto & Marentette, 1991) is the

autonomy and the specificity of babbling in the ontogeny of sign languages.

There is no hope any more of deriving from motor schemata even the form

of syllables in the manual mode, let alone the meaning of words and the

structure of the sentence. And, since there is such a clear discontinuity

even between generic gesturing and the basic elements of sign language,

one can safely dismiss the alleged continuity between gestural schemata

and the structure of the sentence in spoken languages.

In my opinion at least. this is precisely the way a scientific hypothesis is

definitively refuted: you make it as clear, as specific and as predictive as possible,

then look for an ideal experiment, one in which the phenomenon stands out

unambiguously, in its purest form, then see whether the experiment confirms or

refutes the hypothesis. The rest is idle discussion on vague metaphors.

6.3. On the inexistence of horizontal stages

There are numerous other recent (and some not so recent) data which militate

powerfully against the very existence of Piaget’s horizontal stages.

Let us be reminded that a horizontal stage a la Piaget is one in which a concept

or a “logical operation” is either present or absent in toto; its presence or absence

Page 23: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 337

will show up no matter which problem you present to the child, from mathematics

to gardening, from geometry to economics from language to moral judgement.

Well, there are overwhelming reasons to believe that these horizontal capacities

simply do not exist. Every direct or indirect proof in favor of the modularity of

mind (Fodor, 1983; Garfield, 1987), of the content-drivenness of problem-solving,

is ipso facto a disproof of the existence of horizontal stages. Let’s see some of the

most salient ones:

Evidence for the non-existence of Piaget’s “horizontal” stages

Domain specificity (modularity) of problem-solving:

(4

(b)

At a given age, the child who applies conservation to one kind of problem

(involving volume and weight) does not apply it to other kinds of problems

(involving speed, temperature, concentration, etc.).

The conservation of identity is qualitatively different for different con-

ceptual kinds (animals, artifacts, nominal kinds, etc.) and the conceptual

transition to conservation of identity or kind takes place at different ages

for each of the different kinds.

(For reviews, see: Carey, 1985; Keil, 1979, 1986; Markman, 1989)

Typical Piagetian “illogicalities” can be elicited also in the adult:

(4

(b)

(4

The power of what Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have called

typicality, anchoring and ease of representation (Kahneman, Slavic, &

Tversky, 1982) has nothing to do with “having” versus “not having” a

concept. It has to do with the domain to which our intuitions of what is

“typical” apply. Cognitive strategies, and the underlying “heuristics and

biases” often do not generalize from one domain to the next, not even in

the adult.

There would be no end to the succession of “stages”, well up to, and

beyond, the level of Nobel laureates (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1991, 1993).

Some of our intuitions about typicality are the opposite of what we should

derive from actual experience (the signal case is offered by intuitions about

probability).

In many cases, there is no abstractive assimilation at all of objective

external structures by the mind, and even less so a mandatory, logically

determined one.

Many of the typical experiments a la Tversky and Kahneman replicate exactly

the qualitative results obtained by Piaget and his collaborators on children. The

Page 24: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

33x M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition SO (1994) 31.5-346

simple secret is to change the domain. The typical experiment a la Piaget was to

elicit from, say, a Syear-old the judgement that there are more girls than children

in a photograph, more roses than flowers in a bouquet, more cars than vehicles in

a drawing, etc. The explanation was given by Piaget as: Lack of possession of the

concepts of set/subset/super-set. But the majority of highly educated adults judge

that there are more seven-letter words of the form

----ing

(where each “-” stands for a letter whatsoever) than there are of the form

----i--

They judge, just like the Syear-old child, that the subset has more members than

the super-set. These same educated adults will judge that there are more words of

English which begin with an “r” than there are which have “r” in the third-to-the-

last position (the reality is that there are vastly more words of the second kind

than of the first). Do they lack the concept of subset? No! The correct

explanation has to do with our intuitions of what is most typical of a kind, and

what we can easily represent mentally. The easier it is for us to mentally generate

typical members of the set, the larger the set appears to us. The same applies to

the child: it is easier to mentally generate typical instances of a simple set (boys,

roses, flowers, etc.) than to generate instances of a disjunctive set (children = boys

or girls; flowers = roses or carnations or. . .; vehicles = cars or trucks or .).

What counts is familiarity with, ease of representation of, and typicality of, the

standard exemplar of a specific set, in a specific domain. There is no “horizontal”

lack of a certain concept everywhere. These “heuristics and biases” are never

horizontal, but always vertical, domain-specific, in a word, modular.

6.4. Further counters from linguistics and from biology

Let me now come back to language proper, and to evolutionary biology. I will

conclude with a drastic simplification of recent progress in these domains which

bears direct, and rather final, negative consequences for the core Piagetian

hypotheses, as presented at Royaumont.

Recent developments in linguistic theory

(I chose those which further exclude any continuity with sensorimotor

schemata, and make “language learning” an empty metaphor.)

Page 25: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 339

- The essentials of syntactic structures are derived (“projected”) directly from

the lexicon (and, of course, there are no motor “equivalents” to the lexicon). - Rules are replaced by principles and parameters. Most (maybe all) parame-

ters have only two possible positions. “Learning” a given language means

acquiring the lexicon and (in the most recent “minimalist framework”

(Chomsky, 1993), one should rather say “thereby”) setting the correct values

for all the parameters.

(Language acquisition is not an induction, but a selection: Lightfoot, 1989;

Piattelli-Palmarini, 1989.)

- There are in every natural language (sign languages included) silent ele-

ments, phonetically inexpressed particles called “empty categories”, and

these cannot be “learned”, because they are not part of the sensory, explicit,

input to the learner.

(Language acquisition cannot be based on imitation, generalization and

assimilation.) _ Linguistic principles are highly specific, they bear no resemblance to general

“laws of thought”, and have no explanation in terms of communicative

efficacy.

(Self-regulation, adaptation and pragmatic expediency explain nothing at

all in this domain.)

(The best, yet still unconvincing, adaptationist reconstruction is to be

found in Pinker & Bloom, 1990, see also the peer commentaries to that

paper.) -The form of linguistic principles is very specific, mostly stating what cannot

be done to highly abstract and uniquely linguistic elements, categories and

constructs (based on notions such as c-command, X-bar, PRO, projection of

a lexical head, trace of a nounphrase, specifier of an inflectional phrase,

etc.).

The typical principle of universal grammar sounds a bit like the following:

“do whatever you please, but never do such-and-such to so-and-so.”

(There is no hope, not even the dimmest one, of translating these entities,

these principles and these constraints into generic notions that apply to

language as a “particular case”. Nothing in motor control even remotely

resembles these kinds of notions.)

(For a clear, global presentation of this theory, see Haegeman, 1991. For

the recent minimalist framework, see Chomsky, 1993; for the parametric

approach to language acquisition, see Lightfoot, 1989; Manzini & Wexler,

1987; Piattelli-Palmarini, 1989; Roeper & Williams, 1987; Wexler, 1982;

Wexler & Manzini, 1987; and the vast literature cited in these works. For the

existence of “empty categories ” in sign languages, see Kegl, 1986, 1987.)

Page 26: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

Last, but not least, modern biology and evolutionary theory offer further

and more radical reasons to refute Piaget’s basic tenets about life and evolu-

tion:

Knock-down arguments from modern evolutionary theory

- No inheritable feedback is even remotely possible from individual experience

to the genes.

- The metaphor of “problem-solving” as a driving force in evolution (in

particular in speciation; Schull. 1990) 1s wrong: each species creates its own

specific problems (Lewontin. 1982, 1983, 1990b. Piattelli-Palmarini, 1989,

1990b, 1990~).

-Novelty and complexification do not logically, nor even factually, imply an

“enrichment”. since they often arise as a consequence of impoverishment

and specialization. (The possibility of evolutionary complexification by

means of impoverishment was first demonstrated in bacteria by Boris

Ephrussi; see Jacob, 1977, 1987.)

- Life is “basically” what it is: the old grand theories (auto-equilibration,

minimization of disturbance. increasing autonomization, increasing adapta-

tion, increasing order from noise, etc.) have never explained anything. It

proved impossible to deduce biological structures and functions from first

principles.

- Even the most transparent (one would have said) instances of “adaptations”

of organs-cum-behaviors to environmental conditions arc sometimes falla-

cious. (Ten different elaborate kinds of mouthpiece organs for cutting,

crunching, searing and syphoning have evolved in insects one hundred

million years before there were any flowers on earth (Labandeira &

Sepkoski, 1993). Until very recently (July 1993) these organs had universally

and “obviously” been judged to offer examples of exquisite and fine-tuned

selective adaptations to the environment and to the mode-of-life of their

bearers.) _ Biological evolution is not (at least not always) gradualistic (Eldredge &

Gould. 1972: Gould, 1984; Gould & Eldredge, 1977. 1993; Gould Br

Lewontin, 1984; Gould & Vrba, 1982) and does not (at least not always)

proceed through a stepwise combinatorial enrichment out of pre-existing

more “primitive” structures. The brain, for one, did not evolve by piling up

new structures “on top” of older units (Changeux. Heidmann, & Patte, 1984;

Edelman, 1987). _ Selection out of a vast innate repertoire is the only mechanism of growth,

acquisition and complexification which we can scientifically understand

(Piattelli-Palmarini, 1986. 1989, 19YOa). (The theory of. and data on,

language acquisition in the “principles-and-parameters” framework confirm

the success of selective theories in the domain of linguistics - as rightly

foreshadowed by Chomsky. Fodor. and Mchler at Royaumont.)

Page 27: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 341

7. Conclusion

I may seem to have been saying rather harsh things about Piaget and his

school. This was not my intention. I think there are overwhelming reasons to

conclude that his approach was fundamentally wrong, but this is no judgement on

his personal merits. It took a great mind to draw such a vast and coherent picture,

one that is still attractive to many developmental psychologists the world over,

one that appeared as deep, novel and important to many researchers in a variety

of fields, from the philosophy of science to anthropology, from ethics to

sociology, from mathematics to feminist studies. He certainly introduced, or

rather reintroduced, into psychology a much-welcome rationalistic and anti-

empiricist stance, combined with an unerring flair for experimentation. I am told

by the best present-day experimentalists in cognitive development that, even if his

interpretations of the data are often wrong, the reproducibility of his original data

is always next to perfect. In hindsight, and judging from a different theoretical

frame, we see that often he did not perform the next inevitable check, or the

decisive counter-experiment, but he never erred in what he actually did, or in

telling what he actually found. Much of present-day experimentation on the

child’s cognitive development stems, directly or indirectly, from his classic

experiments and those of his collaborators.

Piaget was truly a “universal” thinker, with an insatiable curiosity for facts and

theories well beyond his profession. He had an encyclopaedic mind, and was,

alas, one of the last global intellectuals. Most of all, he brought to perfection, and

elaborated down to the most minute details, a theory which was intuitively very

appealing. This, as I have endeavored to show, was his strong point, and also his

great weakness. The very basic intuitions, to which Piaget brought order and

depth, and between which he established unprecedented systematic interconnec-

tions, have turned out to be wrong, misleading, or empty. They were, indeed,

prima facie very plausible - no one would want to deny that - but often in science

the implausible must triumph over the plausible, if the truth lies on the side of the

implausible.

This is what Piaget refused to accept, to the point that, in spite of his towering

intelligence, he could not understand the message brought to him by Chomsky

and Fodor at Royaumont. For the ideological reasons so well explained by

Chomsky at the Royaumont debate and elsewhere, in the domain of psychology

and linguistics (at odds with physics, chemistry and molecular biology) hypotheses

that appear, at first blush, preposterous are often simply assumed to be wrong,

without even listening to reason, proof or experiment. With these notes, I hope to

contribute just a little to the demise of this strange and irrational attitude in

cognitive science. Also in linguistics, in psychology and in cognitive science the

prima facie implausible can turn out to be true, or close enough to the truth. In fact, my main point here, as in previous articles (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1986, 1989,

1990a), is that it already has.

Page 28: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

342 M. Piattelli-Palmurini I Cognition SO (I 994) .?l.C-346

I wholeheartedly agree with what Chomsky said at the very end of the debate.

Little of what we hypothesize today will survive in the long run. Twenty or fifty

years from now we will probably have gained much deeper and much better

insights into these matters, and not much of present-day theorizing will still be

valid. But what is important is that we may look back and ascertain that those

hypotheses, those explanations, were at least on the right track, that they were of

the right kind. As I endeavored to show, at least this much is already happening

now, with respect to the debate.

In this sense and in this sense only, I have allowed myself the liberty of

speaking of “winners” and “losers”. The race is mostly still ahead of us, and all I

have offered here are arguments in favour of a certain choice for the kind of

competition still to come.

A final, very personal touch: I have fond memories of my conversations with

Jean Piaget. I was always impressed by his bonhomie, his wit, his eager search for

better understanding, his serene attitude towards life. He has run a long, difficult

race, and has left a highly talented multitude behind him. No one could have led

that race with greater aplomb, and no one ever will. It is no paradox, I believe, to

admire him for his great achievements, but also feel sorry for the path he insisted

on choosing. It was a bit painful, at least for some of us at Royaumont, to see him

lose an important confrontation, one which he had eagerly sought, without fully

realizing what was happening to him, and to his most cherished ideas, and why.

His search for a compromise was unsuccessful, simply because the compromise

was neither possible nor desirable.

I heard Gregory Bateson, after the meeting, define Piaget as a “lay saint”. He

was implying, I believe, that Chomsky and Fodor had fulfilled the ungracious role

of executioners. But it would be a paradox to admire Piaget as much as Bateson

did, and still wish he had been lulled by the false conclusion of a possible

compromise. Not even the saints appreciate such forms of inordinate devotion.

Bibliography

Atkins, B.T., Kegl, J.. & Levin, B. (1986). Explicit and implicit information in dictionaries. Lexicon

Project Working Paper No. 12. Cambridge, MA: Center for Cognitive Science. MIT. Berwick. R.C. (1985). The acquisifion of syntacfic knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Berwick. R.C., & Weinberg, A. (1985). The grammatical basis of linguistic performance: Language

asc and ucquisition. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Berwick. R.C., & Wexler, K. (1987). Parsing efficiency, binding, c-command and learnability. In B.

Lust (Ed.), Studies in fhe acquisilion of anaphora. Dordrecht: Reidel. Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Changeux, J.-P.. Heidmann, T., & Patte, P. (1984). Learning by selection. In P. Marler & H.S.

Terrace (Eds.), The biology of learning. New York: Springer-Verlag. Chien, Y.-C., & Wexler. K. (1990). Children’s knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evidence

for the modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition, I, 225295.

Chomsky. N. (1980). On binding. Linguistic Inquiry. Il. l-46.

Page 29: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 343

Chomsky. N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding (the Pisa lectures). Dordrecht: Foris. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. New York: Praeger.

Chomsky, N. (1989). Some notes on economy of derivation and representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT,

Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Working Paper no. 1.

Chomsky, N. (1993). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In K. Hale & S.J. Keyser (Eds.),

The view from building 20: Essays in honor of S. Bromberger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dennett, D.C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining behavior: Reasons in a world of causes. Cambridge, MA: Bradford

Books/MIT Press.

Edelman, G.M. (1987). Neural Darwinism: The theory of neuronal group selection. New York: Basic Books.

Eldredge, N., & Gould, S.J. (1972). Punctuated equilibria, an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In

T.J.M. Schopf (Ed.), Models in paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman. Elman, J.L. (1989). Representation and structure in connectionist models. In Center for Research in

Language Technical Report 8903. La Jolla, CA: University of California, San Diego.

Fodor, J.A. (1975). The language of thought. New York: Crowell. Fodor, J.A. (1981). Representations: Philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science.

Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press. Fodor, J.A. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Fodor, J.A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Fodor, J.A., & Pylyshyn, Z. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. In

S. Pinker & J. Mehler (Eds.), Connections and symbols. Cambridge, MA, Bradford Books/

MIT Press.

Gardner, H. (1980). Cognition comes of age. In M. Piattelli-Palmarini (Ed.) Language and learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (pp. xix-xxxvi). Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

Garfield, J.L. (Ed.) (1987). Modularity in knowledge representation and natural-language understand- ing. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Giorgi, A., & Longobardi, G. (1991). The syntax of noun phrases: Configuration, parameters and empty categories. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Gould, S.J. (1984). Toward the vindication of punctuational change. In W.A. Berggren & J.A. Van

Couvering (Eds.), Catastrophes and earth history: The new uniformitarianism. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Gould, S.J., & Eldredge, N. (1977). Punctuated equilibria: the “tempo” and “mode” of evolution

reconsidered. Paleobiology, 3, 115-151.

Gould, S.J., & Eldredge, N. (1993). Punctuated equilibrium comes of age. Nature, 366, 223-227. Gould, S.J., & Lewontin, R.C. (1984). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A

critique of the adaptationist programme. In E. Sober (Ed.), Conceptual issues in evolutionary biology. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Gould, S.J., & Vrba, E.S. (1982). Exaptation: A missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology, 8, 4-15.

Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Guasti, M.-T. (1993). Verb syntax in Italian child grammar: Finite and nonfinite verbs. Paper presented

at the workshop on parametric language acquisition, Trieste Encounters in Cognitive Science,

SISSA, Trieste (Italy), July 1993. Haegeman. L. (1991). Introduction to government and binding theory. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge,

MA: Blackwell.

Hale. L., & Keyser, S.J. (1987). A view from the middle. Lexicon Project Working Papers no. 10, Center for Cognitive Science, MIT.

Hale, K., & Keyser, S.J. (1993). On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic

relations. In K. Hale & S.J. Keyser (Eds.), The view from building 20: Essays in honor of S. Bromberger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Higginbotham, J.T. (1983). Logical form, binding and nominals. Linguistic Inquiry, 14, 395-420. Higginbotham, J.T. (1985). On semantics. Linguistic Inquiry, 16, 547-593.

Page 30: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

344 M. Pia~felli-Pulmarini I Cognirion 511 (1994) .115-346

Higginbotham. J.T. (1986). Elucidations of meaning. Linguistics und Philosophy, 12, 365-517.

Higginbotham. J.T. (1088). Knowledge of reference. In A. George (Ed.), Reflections on Chornsky.

Oxford. Basil Blackwell.

Hornstein, N. (1990). As /ime goes by: The syntux offense. Cambridge. MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Horwich, P. (1984). Critical notice: Saul Kripke: Wittgenstein on rules and private language.

Philosophy of Science, 51, l63- I7 1. Jackendoff, R.S. (lYX3). Semaniics and cognifion. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Jackcndoff, R.S. (1990). Semuniic’ .v/ruc’ture.t. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jackendoff, R.S. (19Y2). Word meanings and what it would take to learn them: ReRcctions on the

Piaget-Chomsky debate. In R.S. Jackendoff (Ed.). Lan~uuges of the mind. Cambridge. MA:

Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Jncoh. F. (1970) Ln lo~ique dlc vivunt: Line hisloire de I’hPridirP. Paris: Gallimand. American Ed. Jacob. F. (1973). The logic of life: CI history of’ heredity. New York: Pantheon.

Jacob. F. (1977). Evolution and tinkering. Science, 19h. llhl-1166.

Jacob. F. (1087). La stutue infkrieure. Paris: Odile JacobiLe Seuil.

Jusczyk. P.W.. & Bertoncini. J. (1988). Viewing the development of speech perception as an innately

guided learning process. Language and Speech, 32, 217-238.

Kahneman, D., Slavic, P. & Tversky, A. (Eds.) (IYXZ). Judgment under uncertuin/y: Heuristics and

biases, Cambridge. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kegl. J. (19X6). Clitics in American Sign Language. In H. Borer (Ed.). Tire .s~ntux of pronominal

C‘litics. Syntax and Semantics Series. New York: Academic Press.

Kepl. J. (19X7). Corcfcrcncc relations in American Sign Language. In B. Lust (Ed.), The rtcq~ci.sition

of unuphoru. Vol. 2: Applying rhe constrminfn. Dordrecht: Rcidel.

Keil. F.C. ( 1979). Semuntic rend &ceprual development: At7 ontological per.~pec~~~‘e. Cambridge. MA:

Harvard University Press.

Keil, F.C. ( IYXh). The acquisition of natural kinds and artifact terms. In W. Dcmopoulos & A. Marras ( Eds.), Lunguqe lecrrning und concept ucyuisikm: Folmdufional issuev. Norwood. NJ: Ablex.

Keyser, S.J.. & Rocper. 1‘. (lY92). Rc: The abstract clitic. Linguisric Inquiry. 23. XYS125.

Klimn. E., & Bcllugi. U. (1979). The .sign.v of lunguc~ge. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.

Kripkc, S. (19X2). Wittgensfein on rules urld private languqe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard llniversity

Press.

Labandeira, C.C.. & Sepkoski. J.J. (1993). Insect diversity in the fossil record. ‘kience. Zhl. 310~313.

Lasnik. H., & Uriagereka. J. ( IYXX). A course in GB syr~tcrx: Lecrures o,z hir~ding und empry

crr/egor-icr. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press.

Lederer. A., Gleitman. H.. & Gleitman. L.R. (IYXY). Svnftrcric hoorstruppin~: Are rhe du/n for rr

deducrire. principle-driven Lzerh learning procedwr m?ailahle to childrerz? Paper presented at the

14th Annual Conference on Language Development, Boston University (October 1089).

Lewontin. R.C. (lY70). The units of selection. Annurrl ReL,iew of Ecohgy urd Sysfemaric~s. I, l-16.

Lcwontin. R.C. ( 1982). Organism and environment. In H. Plotkin (Ed.), Letrrning. developnwnt. und

culture. New York: Wiley.

Lewontin. R.C. (IYX.?). The organism as the subject and object of evolution. Scienrirr. I/h’. 6382. Now in Lcvins. R.. & Lewontin. R.C. (1985). The dialecfical hiologisf. Camhridge. MA:

Harvard University Pres\. Lcwontin. R.C. ( IYYOa). The evolution of cognition. In D.N. Oshcrson & E.E. Smith (Eds.). An

invircrtion 10 cognitive .ccience. Vol. 111: Thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lewontin. R.C. (lY9Ob). How much did the brain have to change for speech’! Commentary of (Pinker

bi Bloom 1990). Reltuvioral and Brain Sciences. 1.3. 740~741.

Lightfoot. D. ( IYXY). The child’s trigger experience: Degree-O learnability. ~ehuviorcr/ cmd Brrruz SciPrKr.s. II. 32 l-375.

Loar, B. (19X1). Mind cmd meaning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Prcsa.

Manzini. M.R.. & Wexler. K. (lYX7). Parameters, binding theory and learnability. Lin,quistic Inyuiry,

18. 413-344.

Markman. E.M. ( IYXY). Cafegorizutiotl cmd naming iti children: Problems of rnductiorr. Cambridge,

MA: Bradford Books/MIT Prcsa.

Page 31: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition 50 (1994) 315-346 345

McCloskey, M. (1983). Naive theories of motion. In D. Gentner & A.L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental models. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Mehler. J. (1990). Language at the initial state. In A.M. Galaburda (Ed.), From neurons to reading. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Mehler, J.. & Fox, R. (Eds.) (1985). Neonafe cognition: Beyond the blooming buzzing confusion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Mehler, J. et al. (1987). An investigation of young infants’ perceptual representation of speech

sounds. Comptes Rendus de I’Academie des Sciences, Paris, 303 III (IS), 637-640. Millikan, R.G. (1984). Language, thought, and other biological categories. Cambridge, MA: Bradford

Books/MIT Press.

Millikan, R.G. (1986). Thoughts without laws: Cognitive science with content. Philosophical Review, 95, 47-80.

Petitto, L.A. (1987). On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of

personal pronouns in American sign language. Cognition, 27, I-52. Petitto, L.A. (1988). “Language” in the pre-linguistic child. In F.S. Kessel (Eds.), The Development

of language and language researchers: Essays in honor of Roger Brown. Hillsdale, NJ:

Erlbaum.

Petitto, L.A., & Marentette, P.F. (1991) Babbling in the manual mode: Evidence for the ontogeny of

language. Science, 251, 1493-1496.

Piaget, J. (1974). Biology and knowledge, Chicago: Chicago University Press (translation of 1967,

Biologie et Connaissance, Paris: Gallimard).

Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (Ed.) (1980). Language and learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1986). The rise of selective theories: A case study and some lessons from

immunology. In W. Demopoulos & A. Marras (Eds.), Language Learning and Concept Acquisition: Foundational Issues. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1989). Evolution, selection and cognition: From “learning” to parameter

setting in biology and in the study of language. Cognition, 31, 1-44. Piattelli-Palmarini. M. (1YYOa). Selection semantique et selection naturelle: Le role causal du lexique.

Revue de Synthese, IV (1 - 2), 57-94.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1990b). Which came first, the egg-problem or the hen-solution? Commentary

of (Schull 1990). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 84-86. Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1990~). An ideological battle over modals and quantifiers: Commentary of

(Pinker & Bloom 1990). Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 13. 752-754. Piattclli-Palmarini. M. (1991). Probability blindness: Neither rational nor capricious. Bostonia.

March/April, 28-35.

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1993). L’illusione di sapere: Che cosa si nasconde dierro i nostri errori, Milan:

Mondadori [English translation in press for Wiley, New York].

Pinker, S. (1979). Formal models of language learning. Cognition, 7. 217-283. Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Pinker, S. (19811). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argumenr structure. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.

Pinker, S.. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707-784.

Pinker. S.. & Mehler, J. (Eds.) (1988). Connecfions and symbols. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Premack. D. (1986). Gavagai, or the future history of rhe animal language conboversy. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Pustejovsky, J. (1988). The geometry of events. In C. Tenny (Ed.), Srudies in Generative Approaches to Aspect. Lexicon Project Working Papers, no. 24. Cambridge. MA: MIT Center for Cognitive Science.

Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized minimaliry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Roeper, T.. & Williams. E. (Eds.) (1987). Parameter setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Page 32: Piattelli-Palmarini 1994 Cognition

346 M. Piattelli-Palmarini I Cognition -50 (1994) 315-346

Roitblat, H.L.. Bever. T.G.. & Terrace, H.S. (Eds.) (1984). Animal cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Schull. J. (1990). Are species intelligent’? Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 13, 63-108. Smith. E.E.. & Medin. D.L. (1981). Ccrtegories and concepts. Cambridge MA: Harvard University

Press.

Spelkc. E.S. (1985). Perception of unity. persistence. and identity: Thoughts on infants’ conception of

objects. In J. Mehler & R. Fox (Eds.). Neonate cognition: Beyond the blooming buzzing confusion Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Spelkc. E.S. (1988). Where perceiving ends and thinking begins: The apprehension of objects in

infancy. In A. Yonas (Ed.), Perceptual development in infancy: Minnesota symposium on child psychology (Vol. 20). Hillsdale. NJ: Erlbaum.

Stanley, S.M. (1975). A theory of evolution above the species level. Proceedings of the Nutional Academy of Sciences, USA. 72. 646-650.

Tanenhaus. M.K., Garnsey, S.M., & Boland, J. (1989). Combinatory lexical information and

language comprehension. In G. Altman (Ed.). Cognifive models of speech processing: Psycholinguistic curd computational perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tenny. C. (Ed.) (1988). Studies in generutive approaches to aspect. Lexicon Project Working Papers.

no. 24. Cambridge. MA: MIT Center for Cognitive Science.

van Riemsdijk. H.. & Williams. E. (lY86). Introduction to the theory of grcrmmur. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press.

von Foerstcr, H. (1060). On self-organizing systems and their environments. In M. Yovitz & S.E.

Cameron (Eds.), Self-organizing systems. Elmsford. NY: Pergamon.

Wanner. E.. & Gleitman, L.R. (1982). Language acquisition: The .state of the art. Cambridge. UK:

Cambridge University Press.

Wexler, K. (1982). A principle theory for language acquisition. In E. Wanner & L.R. Gleitman

(Eds.). Languuge ucquisition: The state of the art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press.

Wexler. K. (1987). On the nonconcrete relation between evidence and acquired language. In B. Lust

(Eds.), Studies in the acquisition of unaphora. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Wexler. K. (1990). On unparsablc input in language acquisition. In L. Frazier & J. de Villiers (Eds.),

Languuge processing and language acquisition. Dordrecht: KluweriAcademic Press.

Wexler. K.. & Culicover, P. (1980). Formul principles of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.

Wexler, K., & Manzini, M.R. (1087). Parameters and learnability in binding theory. In T. Roeper &

E. Williams (Eds.), Parameters setring. Dordrccht: Reidcl.