Talk:Linguistics of Noam Chomsky

Mischaracterization of Skinner's Radical Behaviorism

Hi, I would make the edit but I am confused by how to add references here. The lead characterizes Skinner to have "viewed speech, thought, and all behavior as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments" in Wikivoice. Chomsky certainly did not agree with radical behaviorists, and probably believed this Wikivoice statement to be true (I can't find a concise quote from him but this is likely Chomsky's belief, or at least the belief of many Chomsky followers). However, Skinner DID NOT BELIEVE THIS. Nor do any significant number of modern radical behaviorists. This is clear from the Wikipedia page on radical behaviorism, and from these 3 well-cited sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755402/pdf/behavan00004-0023.pdf; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6701252/; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2223153/. He simply believed that the science of behavior ought to be focused on observable interactions, and that one could learn a lot from them. It is appropriate to include his disagreement with Skinner since it was so prominent, but Wikivoice should not be used for plainly untrue statements.

The present caricature of Skinner's beliefs also should not be presented neutrally as Chomsky's claim, because it is a description of a person's beliefs (Skinner) who has specifically rejected that he believed it, which makes the claim not just controversial but untrue here. Scienceturtle1 (talk) 01:20, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pending an editor who can insert citations, I'm removing just the description of behavioral science as it's uncited and in wikivoice and inconsistent with both sources above and the Wikipedia article about radical behaviorism. Scienceturtle1 (talk) 06:04, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Re-redirecting

I'm re-redirecting this page to Noam Chomsky. Most of the current text is adapted either from there, from universal grammar, or another related article, and some of it is pretty questionable. While one could make a case for an article about Chomsky's personal contributions to linguistics, I'm not sure we really need that, and even so, this is not that. Botterweg14 (talk) 00:09, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Un-redirecting

There is alot of information in this page that is not in main page. We cant have that all go away. La marts boys (talk) 8th oct 2024 — Preceding undated comment added 16:09, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As mentioned in my above comment, the text here does indeed appear to be carried over from other articles including Noam Chomsky, universal grammar and transformational grammar, so this article would be redundant at best. But more importantly, the current text is extremely low quality and fails to provide anything like an accurate summary of Chomsky's personal contributions to the field. Botterweg (talk) 01:44, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]