IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB134415153

The Unmaking of a Modern Synthesis: Noam Chomsky, Charles Hockett, and the Politics of Behaviorism, 1955–1965 (2016)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 107
Issue: 1
Pages: 49-73
Publication date: 2016
Language: English

DOI: 10.1086/686177

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/686177

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Behaviorism Psychology Behavioral sciences Science and politics Linguistics; philology Controversies and disputes 20th century Chomsky, Noam Hockett, Charles Francis (1916-2000)

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 (1916–2000). 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.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB134415153

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Cohen-Cole, Jamie; (2015)
The Politics of Psycholinguistics (/p/isis/citation/CBB001552040/)

Book Lemov, Rebecca; (2005)
World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (/p/isis/citation/CBB000741953/)

Thesis Panofsky, Aaron Leon; (2006)
Fielding Controversy: The Genesis and Structure of Behavior Genetics (/p/isis/citation/CBB001560772/)

Book Chris Knight; (2018)
Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (/p/isis/citation/CBB679627884/)

Article Collins, John; (2007)
Meta-Scientific Eliminativism: A Reconsideration of Chomsky's Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior (/p/isis/citation/CBB000831447/)

Article Rutherford, Alexandra; (2006)
The Social Control of Behavior Control: Behavior Modification, Individual Rights, and Research Ethics in America, 1971--1979 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000671028/)

Book Panofsky, Aaron; (2014)
Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422037/)

Article Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg; (2013)
My Road to History of Science (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420391/)

Chapter Lenci, Alessandro; Sandu, Gabriel; (2009)
Logic and Linguistics in the Twentieth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB001210357/)

Article Kertész, András; (2012)
The “Galilean Style in Science” and the Inconsistency of Linguistic Theorising (/p/isis/citation/CBB001252706/)

Book Noam Chomsky; Andrea Moro; (2022)
The Secrets of Words (/p/isis/citation/CBB085410471/)

Book Giosuè Baggio; (2022)
Neurolinguistics (/p/isis/citation/CBB647051163/)

Book Kibbee, Douglas A.; (2010)
Chomskyan (R)evolutions (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211554/)

Book Nicole C. Nelson; (2018)
Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders (/p/isis/citation/CBB444510423/)

Article Gunnell, John G.; (2013)
The Reconstitution of Political Theory: David Easton, Behavioralism, and the Long Road to System (/p/isis/citation/CBB001213779/)

Book Segal, Nancy L.; (2012)
Born Together--Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320238/)

Article Bottom, William P.; Kong, Dejun Tony; (2012)
“The Casual Cruelty of Our Prejudices”: On Walter Lippmann's Theory of Stereotype and Its “Obliteration” in Psychology and Social Science (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211212/)

Article Bouterse, Jeroen; Karstens, Bart; (2015)
A Diversity of Divisions: Tracing the History of the Demarcation between the Sciences and the Humanities (/p/isis/citation/CBB001551432/)

Article Kelle Dhein; (2023)
The cognitive map debate in insects: A historical perspective on what is at stake (/p/isis/citation/CBB595507323/)

Book Timothy Wientzen; (2021)
Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex (/p/isis/citation/CBB531268936/)