This is a partially examined life episode, it's 323, part two, we've been talking about

the work of Michael Tomasello, constructing a language, a usage-based theory of language

acquisition, and his article language is not an instinct.

I think there were two things we're going to get to more of his details of his theory

of language acquisition and how this relates to pragmatics, and also just, I think we can

still talk more about this overall difference in paradigm between the Chomsky and cognitive

science, pinkarian point of view, and what Tomasello is proposing, because it does line up very

well with the rationalist versus empiricists, seemingly, even though pinker certainly

says, oh yeah, I'm referring to lots of studies, we of course care what the data says,

but all these guys think that they're doing modern science, it may be, I don't know

about Chomsky himself, whether linguistics itself, it seems like it's kind of like mathematics

in being this sort of geek-oriented self-contained, like, being, so I'm so, this is so cool, the way

that he's definitely not on as much of the empiricals.

I think pinker even mentions that Chomsky sort of put together this formalist account

and pinker and some others are kind of the guys who go out and research and see if his

claims are true, because he's made several claims and given people things to experiment

on.

Like, the famous example Chomsky gives is the forming of a question, like in the, I guess

in English, something like, Jacob is happy today, and then you move the is to the front

is Jacob happy today, he sort of moved the auxiliary, he claims that if you have a phrase

that has a second auxiliary is, children will know which is to move to the front.

So they won't need any testing to figure out which auxiliary is to move, they'll just

...