DEBATES BETWEEN W.V.O. QUINE AND N. CHOMSKY ON THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE AS A TRADITIONAL DISPUTE BETWEEN AN EMPIRICIST AND A RATIONALIST

Zasypkin Sergei N.

The purpose of this article is to study the arguments used by Quine and Chomsky in their correspondence polemic regarding the ideas set forth in the work "Word and Object". Quine tried to build a theory of language in a behaviorist manner, using concepts such as stimulus, reaction and reinforcement. He believed that language acquisition by children could be explained as a process of ontogenesis of reference. Chomsky, on the other hand, objected to behaviorism and showed its weak explanatory power in the theory of language, demonstrating the vulnerabilities of empiricism and behaviorism on new material, as well as a deviation from the requirements of strictness of definitions. Briefly, several arguments against Quine's position can be explicated. Firstly, the synonymous use of the concepts "language" and "theory", understood as a network of sentences associated with each other and with external stimuli, forces us to consider the linguistic predisposition itself as a network of sentences; secondly, the postulation of an innate pre-linguistic space of qualities makes the behaviorist scheme "stimulus-reaction-reinforcement" superfluous; thirdly, understanding the process of language acquisition on the principle of "stimulus-response", in turn, entails a number of difficulties in explaining the semantic richness of the language, as well as the impact on the process of assimilation of various physiological states, etc.

Keywords:language acquisition, stimulus meaning, observation sentences, behaviorism, pre-linguistic quality space, innate ideas, speech disposition, stimulus meaning, dogma of empiricism, indeterminacy of translation.