Chomsky published a review to Skinner’s book in 1959 on the limitations of applying behaviorism to humans, and brought out the Chomskyan revolution with his own interpretations on the intricate mental states during response and language acquisition.
In his review, Chomsky simply says that Skinner’s concepts apply well to animals but not to humans in both literal and theoretical terms. Chomsky aims at developing a scientific way to understand language, because metaphors are not sophisticated enough to explain the internal states. Firstly, Chomsky emphasizes the creativity of language because it varies limitlessly. This contradicts Skinner’s perspective on linguistic behavior that highlights the lack of control over our response caused by the stimulus, aka the reinforcement history. Chomsky also believes in unlimited variations of responses and that stimulus can’t be independently identified. Only the response and mental states of the subjects can predict the stimulus. Chomsky argues against Skinner that response strength cannot measured by emission, energy level, speed, and repetition, because response can have different characteristics but the same meaning. For example, to show excitement, one can be speechless, or murmuring, or gasping. The final argument of Chomsky is language acquisition of babies. He believes that babies learn their mother tongues by picking up information as they grow and learn more than what they hear. Chomsky brings out his perspective on language acquisition: grammar allows us to develop language skills naturally rather than learn every single sentence by reinforcement, and this innate ability that we have is related to our internal psychological structures.
To refute, Skinner could say that one stimulus potentially represents many stimuli within. For example, a painting can have many stimuli for a person to exert a response according to that one stimulus that provoked it. Since Skinner’s behaviorism theory does not focus on the detail (e.g. Pigeon doesn’t have to choose which letter of “PECK” to peck on), it doesn’t matter whether or not we know which stimulus in an object actually caused the response as long as we know what object caused a response. To response to Chomsky about response strength measurement, Skinner could say that there are different sets of possible responses with different characteristics that correspond to the same emotion. Different characteristics of behavior can have the same meaning overall. For example, one set of characteristics to show excitement can be “exclaiming, aggressive body movement, wide eyed”, another set would be “standing still, murmuring repetitively”. Responses are still measured by the four aspects that Skinner previously suggested, just in a more sophisticated manner. To Chomsky’s language acquisition of baby argument, Skinner could say that although babies acquire language as they are reinforced by their mothers’ appraisals, adults and adolescence acquire second language by repetition and reinforcement; hence we have “English” or “German” homework from school to help us acquire the language faster and more thoroughly. Furthermore, it can be observed that people do better academically when they are awarded with presents and good grades, which provide motivation for continuing the same behavior.
In conclusion, it is fair to say that Skinner did not bring behaviorism to a dead end. Sometimes one can be overwhelmed with the success of inventing a theory, and forgets to address many potential problems within. Chomsky has good arguments; however, behaviorism is still proven by numerous animal experiments, and there is a possibility for the co-existence of these two completely opposite theories.