Friday 11 December 2009

Concepts before experience?

For Chomsky (1988, p.191), the word is given to us ready-made “every child learns it perfectly right away”. Chomsky argues that this can only mean that human nature gives us that concept for free. For Chomsky, we have the concepts even before we have the experience "we simply learn the label that goes with the preexisting concept” (ibid. p. 191). Vygotsky (1986) research on concept development precisely shows that this platonic view of language is problematic. Conceptual development is a long transformative process where biological maturation is qualitatively transformed into cultural development when it meets communication through artifacts, i.e. language. (Negueruela, 2003, p. 75)

Bookmark and Share

No comments:

Post a Comment