Noam Chomsky - On Cognitive Structures And Their Development - A Reply To Piaget.pdf

Chapter 49
On Cognitive Structures and Their Development :
A Reply to Piaget
Noam Chomsky
In his interesting remarkson the psychogenesisof knowledge and its epistemological
, Jean fonnulatesthree of view as to how is
significance Piaget" " " general"points " knowledge"
: , ( innatism ), and his own constructivism. He
acquired empiricism preformation " "
correctly characterizesmy views as, in his tenns, a variety of innatism. Specifically,
of human has led me to believe that a determined
investigation language ically "
, one of the human mind, a certain classof humanly
ponent" speci6es
accessiblegrammars . The child acquiresone of the grammars( actually, a system
of such grammars, but I will abstract to the simplest, ideal case) on the basis of the
limited evidence available to him. Within a given munity, children with
varying experience parable grammars, vastly underdetennined by the
availableevidence . We may think of a grammar, representedsomehow in the mind, as a
systemthat speci6esthe ic, syntactic, and semanticproperties of an infinite class
of sentences. The child knows the so determined the he
potential language " by grammar"
has . This is a of his intrinsic .
acquired grammar representation" " competence Inacquiring
language, the child also develops perfonnancesystems for putting this knowledge
to use (for example, production