First thing, please read the actual article by Norvig, it is excellent, http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html Second: I found it astou

First thing, please read the actual article by Norvig, it is excellent, http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html Second: I found it astounding that the article never mentions Skinner. Surely this article is trying to do to Chomsky what Chomsky did to Skinner in 1959 ("A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior", http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm ). Chomsky basically marked the beginning of modern era of cognitive psychology with that essay, displaing the previous paradigm of behaviorism. Norvig's article has similar form in some ways to that article, and similar goals (to argue for a new paradigm over an older one). As I was reading it, I was sure Norvig had that context in mind. So I was surprised to read > So how could Chomsky say that observations of language cannot be the subject-matter of linguistics? It seems to come from his viewpoint as a Platonist and a Rationalist and perhaps a bit of a Mystic Well, no, Chomksy explained very well why he opposed observations being the subject matter of linguistics in his 1959 essay. Skinner's behaviorism looked only at observations and experience, and did away entirely with internal mental states. That might seem bizarre to us today, and the reason is in large part the shift heralded by Chomsky's article from behavioral psychology to cognitive psychology. In the latter, the goal is to understand the internal processes that are involved in psychology (or specifically language). Statistical language models are not behaviorism. But they do share a lot with it, they are based primarily on raw empirical observations as opposed to deep models, so it is natural for Chomsky to oppose them on similar grounds (and not due to Platonism or Rationalism, although I suppose you can speculate that those motivated his 1959 essay too). Side note, we can speculate that if Skinner had today's computers and statistical modelling methods, the shift from behaviorism to cognitivism might never have happened, seeing as the statistical approach is so successful.