Jerome Bruner - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Jerome Bruner

A short history of psychological
theories of learning

Learning remains an elusive topic, de-

spite the endless research lavished on it.
And what we mean by it, por supuesto, es
shaped by how we choose to study it.
Concentrate on how children master
their native language and you arrive at
a very different conception of learning
than had you researched how under-
graduates memorize nonsense syllables.
Does learning to ½nger a Bach cello so-
nata tap the same learning processes as
learning to trace your way through a
½nger maze? Is all learning alike, re-
ducible to a common set of principles?
Two learning tasks are said to be alike

if mastering one makes mastering the
other easier–the so-called transfer cri-
terion. But what is transferred? Is it re-
sponses? Rules? Or do we simply learn
how to learn, as when with enough
practice we become exam-wise or tax-

Jerome Bruner, miembro de la Academia Americana-
mi desde 1954, is University Professor at New York
Universidad, where he teaches principally in the
School of Law. With George Miller he founded
Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies in the
early 1960s. He has published widely, his work
principally focusing on the interaction of mind
and culture. His latest book is “Making Stories:
Law, Literature, Life” (2002).

form-wise? How do we learn the lay of
the land? How do we learn to concen-
trate our attention?

And then there are questions about
differences in how learning occurs. Do
all species learn in the same way and do
the bright and the dull go about it in like
manner? And what about external in-
ducements, recompensas, and punishments?
Are all learning situations comparable?
I used to give the star performers of
the experiments I’d just completed to
my young daughter. These rats seemed
to develop a more open curiosity under
her magnanimous care. Qué, en efecto,
does domestication do to an animal’s
approach to learning? Were those in-
sights achieved by Wolfgang Koehler’s
pampered chimpanzees–their ½guring
out how to rake in an out-of-reach ba-
nana by putting two sticks together,
for instance–simply the result of the
leisurely tutelage they received on that
German island of Tenerife?1 It used
to be said, only half jokingly, that Yale
stimulus-response-reinforcement learn-
ing theory was different from more cog-
nitive California theory because Clark
Hull in New Haven taught his graduate
students that rats “should get on with

1 Wolfgang Koehler, The Mentality of Apes
(Nueva York: Harcourt Brace, 1926). This was
originally published in German in 1917.

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Jerome
Bruner
en
aprendiendo

él,” while Edward Tolman counseled his
at Berkeley that rats need time enough to
pause at the choice points in a maze.

And ½nally, do we learn for learning’s
beneficio, or must we be extrinsically moti-
vated to do so? Assuming the latter, el
Yerkes-Dodson law tells us that too
much or too little motivation reduces
aprendiendo. I checked that out once myself
and got a surprise. I found that very hun-
gry and just moderately hungry rats
learned to ½nd their way through a suc-
cession of pairs of doors. The correct
path through was marked redundantly
in two ways: follow a left-right-left-right
camino, or just choose the darker door at
each choice point. The hungry rats
learned only one of the two cues; el
moderately hungry rats learned both.
The less hungry rats had a more open
curiosity–like my daughter’s pets.

Given all this, it is natural enough that

scientists would want somehow to sim-
plify what we mean by ‘studying learn-
ing.’ And, por supuesto, the standard way of
doing that is to agree on some paradigm
that would make it possible to compare
resultados. That is exactly what happened at
the very start of learning research. Pero,
as often happens, rival paradigms came
into existence and, alas, esta investigación
soon became a war of would-be para-
digms. En efecto, the learning theory wars
that resulted came to dominate the psy-
chological research scene from the latter
nineteenth century until a decade after
World War II, with various ‘schools’
devising clever experiments to demon-
strate how well their paradigm worked,
or how poorly rival ones fared.

There were two competing paradigms

from the start, each with its variants.
The principal one, a child of its times,
was molecular associationism, a meta-
phoric extension of the atomism of
nineteenth-century physics. (As the quip

goes, psychology is forever subject to
physics envy.) The atomism of learning
theory embodies the notion that learn-
ing consists of the association of ideas,
memories, sensaciones, whatever; at its
heart is the conception of the associative
bond, the linkage that co-occurrence or
spatial proximity produces between two
sensations or ideas. While association-
ism is of ancient provenance, it had
more recent philosophical adherents
as well–not only Aristotle, but Locke,
berkeley, Hume, and pére et ½ls Mills.
En efecto, by the mid-nineteenth century,
philosopher-psychologist Johann Frie-
drich Herbart had proclaimed the asso-
ciative bond as the keystone of the new
psicología.

This paradigm found further, if indi-
recto, support in the newly burgeoning
brain physiology of those times. As the
nineteenth century entered its last quar-
ter, the older phrenology of the days of
Gall and Spurzheim was reformulated in
terms of newly discovered cortically lo-
calized ‘centers’ in the cerebral cortex,
each dedicated to a particular function.
Perhaps the most compelling localiza-
tion study was the one conducted in 1870
by the German physiologists Fritsch and
Hitzig. In their study, electrical stimula-
tion of different spots in the medial-
lateral cortex produced particular, bastante
½nite motor responses: stimulating one
spot produced flexion of a monkey’s
forearm, another would turn his eyes
upward, still another would turn them
downward.2 If the brain were organized
in this localized punctate way, psicópata-
gists asked, why not the mind as well?
One needs to remember that the pre-
vailing philosophical view among those

2 The classic article was Gustav Fritsch and
Eduard Hitzig, “Ueber die elektrische Errig-
barkheit des Grosshirns,” Archiv der Anatomie
und Physiologie (1870): 300–332.

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scholars was psychophysical parallelism,
which held that mind and brain move
along parallel tracks.

Their critics, sin embargo, championed
another model–that of molar con½gura-
tionism. This paradigm took as its major
premise that mind and brain alike oper-
ate as integral systems controlling the
functioning of component parts. Like its
rival, it too rested its case on brain phys-
iology, for there was already plenty of
evidence that overall cortical processes
controlled localized centers–the neural
‘mass action’ holism represented by the
renowned Pierre Flourens.

The brain’s mass action was analogous
to the phenomenology of everyday life–
that ordinary experience transcends its
bits and pieces. The ‘urban scene,’ after
todo, is more than just a collection of taxis,
buildings, pedestrians; its properties as a
whole shape the elements that make it
arriba. Gestalt psychology was, por supuesto,
the most direct expression of this view,
and it had much to say about how learn-
ing was a matter of overall organization
rather than of local associative linkages.

Consider now the rise of the associa-

tionist paradigm. That closing quarter
of the nineteenth century was a time of
many new studies of learning–mostly
concerned with the memorization of
lists of words or pairs of words to be as-
sociated. But it was the nonsense syllable
principally that gave associative bonding
its scienti½c flavor. Hermann Ebbing-
haus used nonsense syllables in order to
rule out past experience and ‘meaning’
in explanations of learning. Ebbing-
haus’s 1885 Ueber das Gedaechtnis is a te-
dious account of learning lists of non-
sense syllables (with Ebbinghaus him-
self as the subject of most of the experi-
mentos). His ½ndings–for example, eso
nonsense syllables in the middle of the
list are more slowly learned than ones at

the beginning or end–are easily repro-
ducible.3

But the associative bond, even be-
tween nonsense syllables, soon came to
seem mentalistic, too fragile to suit the
scienti½c taste of the times. So by the
turn of the century it was replaced by
Pavlov’s more scienti½cally solid ‘condi-
tioned reflex.’ Pavlov’s paradigm physi-
calized associationism, turning its con-
tent into something more measurable
while preserving its associative form in-
tact. All his paradigm required was link-
ing and relinking stimuli and responses:
a salivary reflex, once produced by food,
was now evoked by a bell signaling the
coming of food. Pavlov’s Nobel Prize in
physiology seemed to clinch the triumph
of physicalism. But Pavlov himself was
not altogether pleased, as we’ll see later.
Now turn to con½gurationism, cual
had no shortage of psychologists to sup-
port it, dubious as many were of associa-
tionism’s abstractness and its remote-
ness from ordinary experience. Con½g-
urationism had the support of brain re-
search as well, with the holistic neurolo-
gy of the indomitable Flourens still very
much in vogue. Also in those ½n de siècle
times there was a rising tide of interest
in how language and culture shaped
mente, with ½gures like Emile Durkheim
and Max Weber in the neighboring dis-
cipline of sociology urging that culture–
not just individual encounters with the
world of physical nature–also forms
mente.

3 Ebbinghaus’s 1885 classic is available in Eng-
lish only in brief, but representative excerpts
may be found in Wayne Dennis, Readings in
the History of Psychology (Nueva York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1948), 304–313. Curiosamente
suficiente, Ebbinghaus’s original monograph was
published in its entirety in English translation
en 1913 by Teachers College, Columbia Univer-
sity–very much in keeping with the then dom-
inant emphasis on rote learning in American
education. It has long been out of print.

Psicológico
theories of
aprendiendo

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Jerome
Bruner
en
aprendiendo

Gestalt theory was the prime exemplar

of the con½gurationist trend in those
early years, though it hit its full stride
only after World War I. Its credo was
that all systems–physical, biological,
and mental–have the intrinsic character
of controlling the local elements that
compose them. Field theory in physics
was its model, and its proclaimed maxim
was “The whole is greater than the sum
of its parts,” which the Gestaltists pro-
ceeded to con½rm with a steady stream
of clever studies on human perception.
The Koehler chimpanzee studies on Ten-
erife were intended to make the same
point where learning was concerned:
There was no way in which those chim-
panzees could turn a pair of sticks into a
reaching tool by the simple ‘association’
of elements. It took an act of insight to
hazlo, a way of con½guring the whole sit-
uation.

Koehler had a deep belief in the ubiq-
uitousness of con½gurationism in all of
naturaleza. He launched one of his ½rst ma-
jor attacks on associationism by arguing
the insuf½ciency of atomism, in a book
bearing the forbidding, if telltale, título
Ueber die physische Gestalten im ruhe und im
stationaren Zustanden (On physical con-
½gurations at rest and in stationary
estados). If atomism was insuf½cient even
in physics, Koehler asked, how could it
serve as a paradigm for psychology?4
He applied a phenomenon in visual per-
ception to make an analogy that would
drive home his point: When two nearby
points of light are briefly flashed one af-
ter the other, the eye perceives pure ap-

4 For Koehler’s philosophical allegiances, ver
Mary Henle, ed., The Selected Papers of Wolfgang
Koehler (Nueva York: Liveright, 1971). Tal vez
the best and most accessible account of Gestalt
psychology’s empirical accomplishments
(mostly before Hitler’s rise to power) is Kurt
Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (Nuevo
york: Harcourt Brace, 1935).

parent movement, not the light points
moving. The whole, entonces, is indeed dif-
ferent from a sum of its parts.

Now as it happens, Pavlov himself
came to advocate a kind of linguistic
con½gurationism. How does the condi-
tioned response square with an ordered
phenomenon such as language? Hace
language change how stimuli are inter-
preted, how a conditioned stimulus is
substituted for an unconditioned one in
the case of human beings? Troubled by
such issues in his later years, Pavlov pro-
posed a Second Signal System whose
stimuli were not raw physical inputs, pero
language imbedded in codes and cate-
gories. Thus linguistic synonymy influ-
enced stimulus substitution in ordinary
conditioning.

Some say that Pavlov was driven to
his new views by communist ideologues
with prematurely Gramscian leanings,
but in fact his Second Signal System was
quite in keeping with the European tra-
dition of human studies, Geisteswissen-
schaft, rather than with Naturwissenschaft
–a well-revered tradition among the
Russian intelligentsia. Still, structural-
ism was virtually the hallmark of the
lively Russian literary and linguistic
scene of Pavlov’s day, and the Second
Signal System was certainly, to some de-
gree, a response to that scene. I recall fly-
ing to Moscow from Paris in the 1960s
with the celebrated Russian emigré lin-
guist Roman Jakobson. He laughed when
I told him about Pavlov’s later turn and
about the accusation that he had knuck-
led under to the nomenklatura. "No, No,
Jerry, communist ideologues weren’t
needed, just being Russian was enough.
And being a Russian intellectual besides!
Not even Pavlov could live with the idea
that language makes no difference, eso
people learn like dogs!"

Small wonder that cultural theorists
like Vygotsky and Luria took over after

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Pavlov and that many of the post-
Pavlovian young studied Gestalt psy-
chology at the Institute of Psychology in
Berlin in the years after.5
The climax of the rivalry between asso-

ciationism and con½gurationism came
in America in the years before World
War I. Nourished by the imposing Ed-
ward Lee Thorndike of Teachers Col-
lege, Columbia University, the associa-
tive paradigm had flourished in the
United States. Thorndike had been a
postdoctoral student at one of the major
centers of associationism in Germany.
On his return to America (and Teachers
College) he popularized practice and
repetition as the routes to pro½cient
school learning: practice and repeat as
you would were you memorizing non-
sense syllables.6

But the associationist research pro-
gram soon changed in America under
the influence of Pavlov. j. B. watson, el
founder of American behaviorism, pop-
ularized Pavlov and gave his ½ndings an
American twist, by stressing how all
learning occurred through stimulus and
respuesta. I sometimes wonder whether
it was Watson’s oversimpli½cations that
eventually drove American association-
ist learning theorists to their zealous rig-
or in exploring Pavlov’s ideas. It was the
energy and determination of their re-
search that made America for half a cen-
tury the home of later Pavlovianism, a
half century dominated by the likes
of Walter Hunter, Clark Hull, Eduardo
Guthrie, B. F. Skinner, Kenneth Spence–

5 Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Leva-
puente, Masa.: con prensa, 1962); alejandro
Romanovich Luria, The Role of Speech in the Reg-
ulation of Normal and Abnormal Behavior (Nuevo
york: Liveright, 1961).

6 Eduardo L.. Thorndike’s classic is the three-
volume Educational Psychology, which appeared
in 1913–1914.

all distinguished, self-professed
stimulus-response learning theorists.

Their forte was the well-designed ani-
mal experiment: maze running, discrim-
ination learning, operant conditioning
à la Skinner box, and the like–mostly
with rats as subjects, but sometimes pi-
geons, and occasionally monkeys. Y-
dergraduates were used as well, pero
de nuevo, mostly in rote learning experi-
ments–in what was referred to in my
graduate student days at Harvard as
‘dustbowl empiricism.’ It was in these
days that Pavlov’s dog became a meta-
phor for American know-nothing anti-
intellectualism.

The burden of the behaviorists’ ½nd-
ings, taken collectively, was that repeti-
tion of a task, with suitable reinforce-
ment for completing each trial, im-
proved performance. There were sub-
tleties, to be sure–like the deleterious
effects of massing trials rather than
spacing them, creating interference by
setting positive and negative reinforce-
ment in a conflicting relationship, y
the like. But the overall outcome of the
trabajar, where ordinary everyday learning
was concerned, era, I believe, much as
I’ve stated it. I’ll return to this matter
más tarde.

Pero, as in Europe earlier, a contrarian
con½gurationism soon came into being.
Partly it was influenced by Gestalt theo-
rists, now in America and sparking the
opposition, but it had American roots as
Bueno, nourished particularly by Edward
Tolman, who was sympathetic to the
work of Koehler and was a close friend
of Kurt Lewin, a latter-day leader in the
Berlin Gestalt group. Tolman’s brother
Ricardo, además, was a distinguished
nuclear physicist and shielded him well
from old-fashioned atomistic notions–
y, en efecto, from physicalistic tempta-
ciones. Tolman, from the start, was a cog-
nitivist.

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aprendiendo

Tolman’s ½rst major book appeared
en 1932 and it quickly gained adherents
among the discontented, and there were
plenty of them. His students–notably
David Krech, but many others as well–
also joined the battle against associa-
tionism. By World War II, there was vir-
tually open conflict in America between
con½gurationist and associationist learn-
ing theorists–the ½rst holding that
learning is principally a task of organiz-
ing knowledge from the top down, el
second insisting that it is accreting it
from the bottom up. The con½guration-
istas, though still a minority, had been of-
½cially well received on the American
scene when they fled Hitler’s Europe.
Koehler was invited to deliver the Wil-
liam James Lectures at Harvard, y
Kurt Lewin became virtually a cult ½g-
ure in social psychology. The displaced
members of the old Gestalt group were
soon well placed in leading American
universidades. They made commonsense
phenomenology seem commonsense
rather than arcane, an achievement
given the hold of behaviorist American
psicología. Learning began to be under-
stood as grasping things in context, no
in bits.

Take Edward Tolman’s research as an
ejemplo. He taught that learning is like
mapmaking and that to learn is to organ-
ize things in the light of their utility for
achieving ends. In “Cognitive Maps in
Rats and Men,” his still renowned Re-
search Lecture to the Berkeley faculty in
1947, Tolman claimed that trial and error
is not so much acting out habits to dis-
cover which are effective, but rather a
looking back and forth to get the lay of
the land in order to construct a solution.
That is why he urged his graduate stu-
dents not to rush their rats through the
maze.7 He believed that our cognitive

7 Tolman’s most influential book was Purposive
Behavior in Animals and Men (Nueva York: Centu-

maps are not mirrors of the happen-
stance of our encounters with the world,
but a record of our strivings and what
has proved relevant to their outcome.
His views in this sense were basically
pragmatist, perhaps because of his years
of exposure as a psychology graduate
student to Harvard’s pragmatist philoso-
phers, particularly C. I. Luis, whom he
greatly admired. Following Tolman’s
dirigir, David Krech went to the extent of
proposing that learning is hypothesis
driven, not just passive registration.
Even rats, Krech tried to show, generate
hypotheses.8

It’s revealing to compare Tolman with
the leading, perhaps most radical associ-
ationist behaviorist of the same period,
B. F. Skinner. Skinner was surely as com-
pelling in defense of operant condition-
ing as Tolman was of cognitive map the-
ory. His central concept was the operant
response–an act not initially under the
direct control of some particular feature
of the immediate environment. An ex-
ample of an operant response is provid-
ed by a starting pigeon in a Skinner box
whose pecking of the button on the
box’s wall either produces or fails to pro-
duce a reinforcement (a grain of seed,
decir). Any reinforcement increases the
likelihood of the operant response
occurring again, the level of likelihood
depending upon whether the reinforce-
ment always follows the response or
does so only sometimes, and whether it
does so regularly (periodically) or irreg-

ry, 1932). His Berkeley lecture was later elab-
orated in his International Congress address,
“Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” Psychologi-
cal Review 55 (4) (1948): 189–208.

8 Krech’s bold study (written under his origi-
nal name) is I. Krechevsky, “‘Hypothesis’ ver-
sus ‘Chance’ in the Presolution Period in Dis-
crimination Learning,” University of California
Publications in Psychology 6 (1932): 27–44.

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ularly (aperiodically). Partial aperiodic
reforzamiento, Por ejemplo, evokes a
rather more persistent response than
one might expect, though Skinner would
scoff at interpreting such persistence as
hope springing eternal. Aprendiendo, en
Skinner’s austere terms, is under the sole
control of schedules of reinforcement:
reinforcement can only be positive; pun-
ishment does not affect learning. Y
that is about it. As Skinner would some-
times say, a bit ironically, aprendiendo
scarcely needs a theory.9

Not all behavioral associationists, a
be sure, shared Skinner’s disdain for the-
ory. Clark Hull at Yale, en efecto, elaborat-
ed his theory into a highly re½ned set of
axioms about what constitutes positive
and negative reinforcement, what makes
a conditioned stimulus generalize along
a certain gradient, how organisms an-
ticipate reinforcers, and the like–all in
rather exquisite and specialized detail.
His ½rst books–the 1943 Principles of Be-
havior and the more triumphally titled
1952 A Behavior System–bristle with ta-
bles and idealized learning curves and
with abstract formulae for relating those
½ndings to his central axioms–perhaps
a prophetic effort to devise a mathemati-
cal model of learning, the preoccupation
of computational psychologists a gener-
ation later.10
The conflicts between Hull and Skin-

ner, and between both of them and Tol-
hombre, were the last battles of the learning
theory wars. Learning theory in the clas-

9 B. F. Skinner, “Are Theories of Learning
Necessary?” Psychological Review 57 (1950):
193–216.

10 Clark L. Hull, Principles of Behavior (Nuevo
york: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1942) y un
Behavior System: An Introduction to Behavior The-
ory Concerning the Individual Organism (Nuevo
Haven, Conexión.: Prensa de la Universidad de Yale, 1952).

sic sense died around 1960–though
there are still Skinnerians who stalwart-
ly continue to publish operant ½ndings,
mostly for each other. I know of no more
Tolmanians or Hullians.11

It was the cognitive revolution that
brought down learning theory or, por-
haps, focused attention elsewhere. Después
1960, decir, stimulus-response learning
theory seemed quaintly stunted,
hemmed in by its own self-denial. Como para
more molar, cognitive learning theories,
many of their ideas were restated and
absorbed into general cognitive theories
such as Newell and Simon’s on problem
solving, or Bruner, Goodnow, and Aus-
tin’s on thinking, or Miller, Galanter,
and Pribram’s on planning.12 By the lat-
ter 1960s, learning was being translated
into the concepts of information pro-
cesando, with no compulsion to elevate
one kind of learning over another in
terms of its ‘basic’ properties. Certainly,
the old wars were over. And so, interés-
ingly, were the old rat labs and their
ubiquitous mazes.

As I reflect on the transition period, I
think that it was the study of language
and particularly of language acquisition
that precipitated learning theory’s de-
cline. Language use and its acquisition
are too out of reach of piecemeal S-R
aprendiendo: efforts to bring them into the
fold soon become absurd, and linguists
have mostly dismissed them as such.

11 The most detailed and authoritative volume
on the classic learning theories is Ernest R. Hil-
gard, Theories of Learning, 2d ed. (Nueva York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956).

12 Alan Newell and Herbert A. Simón, Humano
Problem Solving (Englewood, NUEVA JERSEY.: Prentice Hall,
1972); Jerome Bruner, Jacqueline Goodnow,
and George A. austin, A Study of Thinking (Nuevo
york: wiley, 1956); George A. Molinero, Eugene
Galanter, and Karl Pribram, Plans and the Struc-
ture of Behavior (Nueva York: Holt, Rinehart, y
Winston, 1960).

Psicológico
theories of
aprendiendo

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Dédalo Invierno 2004

sounds than of foreign ones. And so it
does: French babies babble in French,
Spanish in Spanish, etc.. With such
experimentos, one tests in context, no en
a maze, and knows without extrapola-
tion whether the experiment has any
bearing on real learning by real people in
real life.

Shall we conclude, entonces, that three-
quarters of a century of warfare between
associationist and con½gurational learn-
ing theories taught us little or nothing
about the real nature of learning? Eso
would be a mistake.

Both Pavlov’s dogs and Koehler’s
chimpanzees did, En realidad, aprender, aunque
in different ways and in different cir-
cumstances. And we have ample reason
to suspect that neither of their approach-
es can be reduced to the other. En el
next turn of things perhaps we will ½g-
ure out how to put them together. But of
one thing at least I am quite convinced.
You cannot strip learning of its content,
nor study it in a ‘neutral’ context. Es
always situated, always related to some
ongoing enterprise. Perhaps there is no
such thing as ‘learning in general’–and
perhaps that is what we should learn
from Pavlov’s dogs, Koehler’s chimps,
and the disputes over learning that they
once symbolized.

Jerome
Bruner
en
aprendiendo

The contemporary linguistic assault on
associationist learning theory began
with Noam Chomsky’s gloves-off criti-
cal review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.13
But the mentalist, problem-solving em-
phasis it introduced has now expanded
beyond language as such. One now asks
whether cultural codes are learned in
some language-like way. Neither psy-
cholinguistics nor cultural psychologists
think of learning in the old-fashioned
learning-theory way.

I think it would be fair to say that,
under this new dispensation, more has
been learned during the last three de-
cades about language acquisition than
in any prior century–more, en efecto, than
in all of them combined. And it’s well to
remember that the flood of research that
made this possible was precipitated by
the linguist Chomsky, not by a learning
theorist.

The turn to language, además, tiene
shifted learning-related research away
from many of the older, arti½cial experi-
mental paradigms–mazes, paired-asso-
ciate word lists, nonsense syllables, y
the rest. Let me give an example: el
prediction that children must be so early
tuned to the structure of their native lan-
guage that they pick up its phonemic dis-
tinctions in parental talk even before
they learn to understand or talk the
language proper. It is a prediction that
grows out of linguistic and developmen-
tal theory. And you can test it in context
directly–by seeing whether childrens’
prelinguistic babbling has a higher fre-
quency of native-language phoneme

13 B. F. Skinner, Comportamiento verbal (Cambridge,
Masa.: Prensa de la Universidad de Harvard, 1947). Chom-
sky’s structuralist-mentalist views were ½rst
published in his Syntactic Structures (The Hague:
Moutón, 1957). His frontal attack on Skinner’s
Comportamiento verbal (in Language 35 [1959]: 26–34)
only two years later came as a rather unexpect-
ed, though scarcely a conceptual, surprise.

Dédalo Invierno 2004

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