Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism
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Barbara C Scholz
Abstract
This article is a reply to the foregoing responses to our “Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments” (Pullum and Scholz, this special volume, here-after EASPA). We first address certain philosophical themes that cut across all six responses. We correct the impression held by Lasnik and Uriagereka (L&U) and Crain and Pietroski (C&P) that EASPA owes the reader an alternative theory of language acquisition; we distinguish linguistic nativism from several alternatives, only one of them being anti-nativism as espoused by Sampson; we examine the claim of Thomas that there is an identifiable concept ‘poverty of the stimulus’ in the linguistics literature; we point out that Fodor and Crowther (F&C) appear to misunderstand certain mathematical learnability results; and we address a purported argument for nativism (quite distinct from the stimulus poverty argument we considered in EASPA) that is advanced independently by several respondents: F&C, L&U, and Legate and Yang (L&Y) – an argument based on the underdetermination of theory by evidence.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
- Development of the concept of “the poverty of the stimulus”
- Exploring the richness of the stimulus
- Understanding stimulus poverty arguments
- On the poverty of the challenge
- Empirical re-assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
- Why language acquisition is a snap
- Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
- Development of the concept of “the poverty of the stimulus”
- Exploring the richness of the stimulus
- Understanding stimulus poverty arguments
- On the poverty of the challenge
- Empirical re-assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
- Why language acquisition is a snap
- Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism
