Source: Papert, S. (1980). Discussion. In M. Piattelli-Palmarini (Ed.), Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (pp. 138-139). Harvard University Press.
There are two proposals that have been made from the Geneva group presentations: one is Inhelder’s statement that some, but not all, of the properties of language use and structure derive from sensorimotor construction; I don’t dispute this statement in any way. The other proposal is that of Piaget, in which all of the properties of language use and structure derive from sensorimotor construction, or to put it in Piaget’s logically equivalent terms, “This innateness is not needed to ensure the formation and the stability of [the fixed] nucleus; sensorimotor intelligence is sufficient for that.” This second assertion seems false to me: I know of no reason to believe that the principles of sensorimotor construction or any other general developmental methods will suffice to account for all properties of the fixed nucleus. But one cannot deny that there are some properties of what people do in regard to language that relate to other aspects of their cognitive development. That is specifically why I have been interested in trying to find the properties of language structures and their use in the area of semantics (where there are a number) and in the area of syntax and phonology; precisely, I want to find those properties that cannot be plausibly related to other aspects of cognitive development, and I want to do this because I am interested in human nature.
Papert: I suppose that most of the examples that Inhelder gave could be evaded by the issues that were debated because of the green and white principle. But she did touch on some issues that overlap closely with the actual examples given by Chomsky in his paper. One of these is the importance in the sensorimotor area of schematization in terms of subjectaction. Such schematization makes Chomsky’s second type of rule (the structure-dependent one) logically simpler than the first type. The general process of assimilation of something into an existing scheme implies that a hypothesis formulated in terms of that scheme would be the simpler hypothesis. Similarly, even for the specified subject condition, if the rule is formulated in terms of an element of the schematization, for example the subject, that would be a more natural form of rule. One last very common example, which Inhelder did not mention directly: she showed once again how the subject, through schematization, is always dealing with a mentally present rather than physically present object, or dealing with the mentally present object as if it were physically present. This is a major theme of the development of sensorimotor intelligence, which directly elucidates some of the aspects of language that Chomsky finds so mysterious.
Fodor: Before this discussion goes off in too many different directions, one ought to distinguish the subject of a sentence from the person who utters it. If I say “Give the apple to me,” the implicit subject of the sentence is you, the direct object is apple, and I only come in as an indirect object. We must not get confused about the difference between “subject” in the sense of egocentrism and “subject” in a sense of subject of the sentence. Once we have made that distinction, there is simply no relation between a constraint definable over the subject of the sentence and an obsession of the child with himself.
Piattelli-Palmarini: It seems to me that the examples of language abilities connected with cognitive abilities reported by Inhelder have mainly to do with semantics-is there any evidence of other cognitive abilities linked with those formal universals of which Chomsky is speaking?
Inhelder: There are some rules of transformation which are also fundamental and which, from the viewpoint of the construction of the subject’s logic, can find their equivalent as rules but on the other hand, there are, of course, the semantic aspects, and in this respect, I think what is important is that the child discovers also the whole interplay of meanings, as early as the sensorimotor level.
Piattelli-Palmarini: But Chomsky’s rules are of another kind.
Chomsky: This topic interests me very much, and I have the feeling that if one were to look at those things one would also find aspects of semantic structure which cannot be accounted for in terms of sensorimotor intelligence, but which involve very specific modes of cognitive organization. I think there are such examples as soon as we begin to look, although I don’t think they are as striking as the syntactic examples (I have one in my paper, in fact, that has to do with semantic ambiguity). But even if we take something as “simple” as the notion of the integrity of an object (and that is a very complex notion), it was said in the past, for example by Russell,