Simon Baron-Cohen: Radical Behaviorism
The central idea of Radical Behaviorism—that all behavior can be explained as the result of learned associations between a stimulus and a response, reinforced or extinguished through reward and/or punishment—stems from the early 20th century psychologists B.F. Skinner (at Harvard) and John B. Watson (at John Hopkins). Radical Behaviorism came under public attack when Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (published in 1957) received a critical review by cognitivist-linguist Noam Chomsky in 1959 in the journal Language. One of Chomsky's scientific arguments was that no amount of exposure to language, and no amount of reward and reinforcement, was going to lead a dog to talk or understand language; whereas for a human infant, despite all the noise in different environments, language learning universally unfolds. This implies there is more to behavior than just learned associations. There are evolved neurocognitive mechanisms.
Notes:
Folksonomies: nature instinct nature vs nurture nurture
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This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress