Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article is a reply to the foregoing responses to our ìEmpirical 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 the-ory of language acquisition; we distinguish linguistic nativism from several al-ternatives, 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 stimulusí 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

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: