Volume 42, Number 5 · March 23, 1995
Green Ideas Sleeping Furiously
By Howard Gardner
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
by Steven Pinker
HarperCollins, 494 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science
by Annette Karmiloff-Smith
Bradford/MIT Press, 234 pp., $34.95
Acts of Meaning
by Jerome Bruner
Harvard University Press, 179 pp., $9.95 (paper)
As a rule, a book review in an obscure journal by an unknown scholar rarely attracts attention. Noam Chomsky's lengthy review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, published in the journal Language in 1959, is a striking exception. At the time Skinner was the most respected experimental psychologist in the world and the leader of the influential behaviorist movement. His comprehensive study of speech and language had been widely anticipated and was receiving respectful attention. In his book, Skinner attempted to demonstrate that the principles of learning which had emerged in decades of work with pigeons and rats could account fully for the oral and written statements produced by human beings.
Review, 6671 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |