Abstract:A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the abandonment of behaviorism for cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a scientific borderland, muddy and much traveled. This essay relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of behaviorism. His antibehaviorism emerged only in the course of what became a systematic repudiation of the work of the Cornell linguist C. F. Hockett (1916Hockett ( -2000. In the name of the positivist Unity of Science movement, Hockett had synthesized an approach to grammar based on statistical communication theory; a behaviorist view of language acquisition in children as a process of association and analogy; and an interest in uncovering the Darwinian origins of language. In criticizing Hockett on grammar, Chomsky came to engage gradually and critically with the whole Hockettian synthesis. Situating Chomsky thus within his own disciplinary matrix suggests lessons for students of disciplinary politics generally and-famously with Chomsky-the place of political discipline within a scientific life.
W H Y A N T I B E H AV I O R I S M ? W H Y C H O M S K Y ' S ?Anyone inclined to organize the history of science around "revolutions" has long had to hand a tidy scheme for dividing up American psychology in the twentieth century. Before World War II there was the behaviorist revolution. After the war there was the cognitive revolution. Where the former banished the mind from the domain of psychological knowledge, the latter brought it back in. Each revolution's beginnings, moreover, have an emblem in a brilliant, boldly controversial call to arms: on the one side, John Watson's 1913 manifesto "Psychology as School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom; g.m.radick @leeds.ac.uk. This paper has benefited enormously from discussions at seminars and meetings in Leeds, Lancaster, Vancouver, Berlin, and Edinburgh and from the improving attention of a small army of learned readers and listeners, including Jonathan Hodge, Paul Strand, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Tammy Goss, John Joseph, Tania Munz, Randy Harris, Michael Gordin, Geoffrey Pullum, Steven Pinker, Ageliki Lefkaditou, Floris Cohen, and the Isis referees. It is a pleasure to thank them all for their muchappreciated generosities.Isis, volume 107, number 1.
