Introduction

Chomsky has radically changed the way that we think about language and the mind. As we have seen, he has shown that we have linguistic abilities whose intricate details go far beyond what a child experiences, and that the best explanation for these abilities is that our minds have considerable innate structure. This is a devastating blow against empiricism, the view that the mind is just a general-purpose learning device and the adult mind is therefore largely shaped by its environment. Chomsky's view is a modern version of rationalism, a position that had been espoused by many philosophers including Plato and Descartes, but which had largely fallen out of favor by the mid twentieth century.

More than fifty years of work inspired by Chomsky has reasserted a realistic, naturalistic view of the mind, against several anti-mentalistic views that were influential in philosophy and psychology. These include the claims that there are no mental states or events (eliminativism about the mental), that talk of mental events/states is only for the purposes of prediction with no claim to truth (instrumentalism about the mental), and that psychology should confine itself to the study of publicly observable behavior, in particular how actions can be understood as responses to conditioning by stimuli (behaviorism). As we saw in the last chapter, Chomsky contributed directly to the demise of behaviorism in psychology with his devastating review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior. In philosophy, the cognitive revolution that Chomsky set in motion, putting mental structures at the center of linguistics and psychology, has cast serious doubt on twentieth-century anti-mentalism, including the sophisticated behaviorism of Quine, and the claim of Wittgenstein and his followers that explanations of behavior in terms of internal mental states are somehow unnecessary.