Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

within a phrase marker. The recursion of such a grammar is also responsible for its
ability to use finite resources (a finite number of building blocks and a finite number
of rewrite rules) to produce a potentially infinite variety of expressions, as in the
sentences of a language, each of which is represented by its own phrase marker.
3.4 Behaviourism, Language, and Recursion
Behaviourism viewed language as merely being observable behaviour whose development
and elicitation was controlled by external stimuli:
A speaker possesses a verbal repertoire in the sense that responses of various forms
appear in his behavior from time to time in relation to identifiable conditions. A
repertoire, as a collection of verbal operants, describes the potential behavior of a
speaker. To ask where a verbal operant is when a response is not in the course of
being emitted is like asking where one’s knee-jerk is when the physician is not tapping
the patellar tendon. (Skinner, 1957, p. 21)
Skinner’s (1957) treatment of language as verbal behaviour explicitly rejected the
Cartesian notion that language expressed ideas or meanings. To Skinner, explanations
of language that appealed to such unobservable internal states were necessarily
unscientific:
It is the function of an explanatory fiction to allay curiosity and to bring inquiry
to an end. The doctrine of ideas has had this effect by appearing to assign important
problems of verbal behavior to a psychology of ideas. The problems have then
seemed to pass beyond the range of the techniques of the student of language, or to
have become too obscure to make further study profitable. (Skinner, 1957, p. 7)
Modern linguistics has explicitly rejected the behaviourist approach, arguing
that behaviourism cannot account for the rich regularities that govern language
(Chomsky, 1959b).
The composition and production of an utterance is not strictly a matter of stringing
together a sequence of responses under the control of outside stimulation and
intraverbal association, and that the syntactic organization of an utterance is not
something directly represented in any simple way in the physical structure of the
utterance itself. (Chomsky, 1959b, p. 55)
Modern linguistics has advanced beyond behaviourist theories of verbal behaviour
by adopting a particularly technical form of logicism. Linguists assume that verbal
behaviour is the result of sophisticated symbol manipulation: an internal generative
grammar.
By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and
well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every
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