In Noam Chomsky's article “On the Nature, Use, and Acquisition of Language,” he discusses the study of language. Chomsky starts from a rationalist point of view on language acquisition. He believes that the initial state of the language faculty is an input-output system that takes data as input and produces knowledge of a language as output. Thus, Chomsky believes that the initial state of the language faculty is a language acquisition device that allows humans to be able to speak in a language. His theory is also known as universal grammar. Universal grammar is an innate set of principles and adjustable parameters common to all learnable natural languages. Since Chomsky is a rationalist, he believes that the language acquisition device is innate in all human beings, meaning that the device is something we are born with. After reading this article over and over, I think I am inclined to side with the rationalists, in that there is a language acquisition device that humans have innately. I decided to side with Chomsky and the rationalists because Chomsky had so much evidence to use to support his theory of the language acquisition device. He used a lot of compelling evidence to steer me away from being an empiricist. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Before Chomsky created his theory of language acquisition, the study of language was trying to integrate into the natural sciences. Linguistics was believed to be a part of human psychology and, by extension, a part of human biology. He then discusses an empirical assumption, in which there is a specific faculty of the mind/brain responsible for the acquisition and use of language. This faculty is unique only to humans and is common to all humans. This idea was developed during the cognitive revolution, which was about states of mind/brain that go into thinking, planning, perception, learning, and action. Chomsky rejects a behaviorist theory, which sought to establish a connection between stimulus situations, reinforcement and behavior because it did not consider states of the mind/brain. Mind/brain states are one of the most important parts of behavior and why people behave in certain ways. An animal with a mind/brain is in a certain state. The animal is shown new sensory input, which leads to a change in state. With the new state, the organism can perform certain actions that it could not perform in the previous state. But there is no direct relationship between the sensory inputs that led to a change in state and the actions performed by the organism. A child would not learn Spanish if he had never heard it before. If the child had an adequate amount of data, he would learn Spanish. However, there is no direct relationship between the data and what the child says. The effort to study the relationship between sensory data and behavior, without considering the mind/brain and its changes, is doomed to fail. Chomsky's main goal is for this article to discuss the device of language acquisition and universal grammar. He does it very well. The language faculty has an initial state that is genetically determined and unique to humans. The initial state can mature into a multitude of steady states, depending on the number of languages ​​available. To move from the initial state to a stable and mature state we rely mainly on datacollected in the early stages of life. If a child has only ever heard English spoken, he or she will not start speaking Spanish. Learning a language is something that happens to a child without him being aware of it. It's like puberty in that sense. Language is acquired from the initial state of the linguistic faculty which determines possible rules and methods of interaction. Language is acquired “through a process of selecting a system of rules of an appropriate type on the basis of direct evidence. Experience produces an inventory of rules, through the language acquisition device of the Faculty of Languages”. The device of language acquisition is also known as universal grammar. Universal grammar is an innate set of principles and adjustable parameters common to all learnable natural languages. Think about the phrase that John is too smart to expect anyone to catch him. This makes sense, even if it's a little unclear. However, John is too smart to expect anyone to cover up a nonsense sentence that cannot be understood. This is not known through training, but through the internal resources of the mind/brain, by the genetically determined constitution of the language factory. The initial state of the language faculty consists of a set of subsystems, or modules, each of which is based on some general principles. Think of a system as a complex network associated with an electrical panel that has a finite number of switches. A slight change in any of the switches could result in an infinite amount of linguistic expressions. A child's mind must determine how the switches are set, and simple data must be sufficient to determine the switch settings in order to acquire a language. Chomsky uses multiple examples to support some of his theories. He used the three mind/brain principles to advance his thesis on universal grammar. The three principles are the empty pronoun principle, the subject principle, and the inversion principle. John's example arises from these principles. This shows that, without training, people are able to understand whether a sentence is correct or nonsense. People do it innately, in all learnable languages. Another example Chomsky used was Socrates with the slave boy. Socrates asks the slave boy a series of questions, to demonstrate that the slave boy understands the truths of geometry without any prior experience. This helps Chomsky demonstrate that the mind/brain is, at the very least, capable of having some innate characteristics. However, I don't think this example helps or hurts Chomsky's thesis. This is because the questions Socrates asked the slave boy were very important and some might say they take something away from the experiment, which I think is true. Chomsky also used Descartes to help him advance his argument. Descartes rejected the idea that perception was a process in which the shape of something is imprinted on the brain. Descartes used the example of a blind man who can create a mental representation of a cube with a stick by touching certain points on the cube with the stick. However, the cube is not imprinted in the blind man's mind/brain. The mind uses its own resources and principles to create a mental representation of the cube. Descartes also used the example of the triangle. A person can be shown a triangle and perceive it as such, even though it is a much more complex figure, rather than a Euclidean triangle. This is because the Euclidean triangle is produced in our mind because the mechanism of the mind is based on the principles of Euclidean geometry and produces these figures as models of perception and learning. This is in contrast to the empiricism David Hume who.