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
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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
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
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.
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
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
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).
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.
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”.
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.
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
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.
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.
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;
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
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.)
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,
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.)
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.
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.
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