La percée épistémologique de 1957
Emergence du concept de savoir grammatical

Révisé le 12 novembre 2011

Noam Chomsky, "A review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior [1957]," Language 35 no. 1 (1957) : 26-58.

Repris dans Jerry A. Fodor & Jerrold J. Katz, Eds., The Structure of Language. Readings in the Philosophy of Language, Englewood Cliffs NJ : Prentice-Hall, 1964 : 547-578.

Traduit en français: «Un compte rendu du Comportement animal de B. F. Skinner», dans la revue Langages, n° 16, Décembre 1969, numéro thématique dirigé par Jacques Mehler, Psycholinguistique et grammaire générative, pp. 16-49. Le compte rendu de 1957 marque un tournant majeur: rupture définitive avec le béhaviorisme, et émergence du concept de savoir (grammatical). Les citations en anglais ci-dessous sont intégralement tirées de l'article de Pierre Jacob.

Lire l'introduction de J. Mehler, ainsi qu'un remarquable article du philosophe Pierre Jacob sur l'œuvre de Chomsky: Pierre Jacob, Chomsky, Cognitive Science, Naturalism and Internalism, qui est téléchargeable sur le site web de l'Institut Jean Nicod.

1 / Rupture définitive avec le béhaviorisme

Generative grammar "was also a major factor in the "cognitive revolution" of the early 1960's. It is, I think, fair to say that Chomsky's review of B.F. Skinner's (1957) book, Verbal Behavior, made a decisive contribution to the overthrow of the behaviorist methodology in psychology: Chomsky "killed" behaviorism in the sense in which Karl Popper (1974 : 69) claims credit for having killed logical positivism. Chomsky's major input to the cognitive revolution lies in his criticism of the behaviorist confusion between evidence and subject-matter :

I think that there is some significance in the ease and willingness with which modern thinking about man and society accepts the designation "behavioral science". No sane person has ever doubted that behavior provides much of the evidence for this study — all of the evidence, if we interpret "behavior" in a sufficiently loose sense. But the term "behavioral science" suggests a not-so-subtle shift of emphasis toward the evidence itself and away from the deeper underlying principles and abstract mental structures that might be illuminated by the evidence of behavior. It is as if natural science were to be designated "the science of meter readings". What in fact would we expect of natural science in a culture that was satisfied to accept this designation for its activities? (Chomsky, 1968, 1972: 65)

The advent of the cognitive revolution was in turn responsible for the shift away from the study of human behavior towards the study of internal mental states and processes that may or not give rise to observable behavior."

2 / Ce qu'implique la capacité de parler dans sa langue maternelle

"Ever since his earliest presentations of the task of a linguistic theory, Chomsky has noted that a person's ability to understand and produce sentences of her native tongue can give rise to three distinct basic questions:

(Q1) What is the system of knowledge that allows a native speaker to use and understand sentences of her language ?
(Q2) How did this knowledge arise in her mind ?
(Q3) How is it put to use in actual speech (both in production and in comprehension)?"

Autrement dit, en vertu de quel savoir le locuteur indigène parle-t-il sa langue maternelle, comment ce savoir est-il acquis et comment cette compétence est-elle mise en œuvre dans une performance?

3 / Invention du concept structuraliste de «savoir (grammatical)»

"I now turn my attention to the second concept of which I said earlier that question (Q1) made it central to generative linguistics, the concept of knowledge (of grammar). Ever since he reviewed Skinner's (1957) book, Chomsky has claimed that what allows a person to use and understand sentences of her language is her knowledge of the grammar of her language. He has forcefully (and I think convincingly) argued over the years that any construal of what allows a speaker to use and understand sentences of her language in terms of mere dispositions to verbal behavior is bound to fail. What is present in a speaker's mind is a cognitive structure, not a set of behavioral dispositions."

Dans le Programme de Chomsky, la théorie linguistique est d'abord une théorie de la structure cognitive: la faculté de langage, dont le comportement linguistique du locuteur n'est qu'une source d'observations parmi d'autres.