Honorio, Chester John C. November 26, 2013

Flores, Jann Camille G.

BSOT – II

Human Growth and Development / T 7:30 – 11:30 am

(Written Report in “Nativists, Empiricists and Interactionists”)

Nativist Theory (Nativism)

Nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to empiricism, the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs.

Noam Chomsky developed this theory in the 1960’s as the means to explain the deficiencies in the language development theories of the time, w/c are more based on environment and behavior. He also proposed Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a hypothetical module of the brain posited to account for children's innate predisposition for language acquisition.

Linguistic Competence

The unconscious knowledge of grammar that allows a speaker to use and understand a language. is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language. It is in contrast to the concept of Linguistic performance, the way the language system is used in communication.

Linguistic Performance

The ability to produce and comprehend sentences in a language.  a speaker's actual use of language in real situations; what the speaker actually says, including grammatical errors and other non-linguistic features such as hesitations and other disfluencies (contrasted with linguistic competence)

Surface structure

Generative grammar a representation of a string of words or morphemes as they occur in a sentence, together with labels and brackets that represent syntactic structure 

Deep structureWithin the theory, their deep structure is represented in the form of a hierarchical tree depicting the grammatical relationships between the various constituents that make up the sentence; linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures

Transformational grammar

Transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in the syntactic structures of phrase structure grammars (as opposed to dependency grammars). A theory of grammar that accounts for the constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures.

Empiricist Theory (Empiricism)

Empiricism is the theory that experience rather than reason is the source of knowledge, and in this sense it is opposed to rationalism. The word "empiricism" is derived from the Greek “empeiria”, the Latin translation of which is experientia, from which in turn we derive the word "experience." Aristotle conceived of experience as the as yet unorganized product of sense perception and memory; this is a common philosophical conception of the notion. Memory is required so that what is perceived may be retained in the mind. To say that we have learned something from experience is to say that we have come to know of it by the use of our senses. We have experience when we are sufficiently aware of what we have discovered in this way.

The weakest form of empiricism is the doctrine that the senses do provide us with "knowledge" in some sense of the word. This could be denied only by one who had so elevated a conception of knowledge that the senses cannot attain to it. Plato, for example, held at one stage that because of the changeability of the world of sense, sense knowledge lacks the certainty and infallibility that true knowledge must possess. Hence, knowledge cannot be

derived from the senses, but only from some other kind of awareness of what he called Forms. The most that sense perception could do would be to remind us of this genuine knowledge. This conception of knowledge demands an infallibility that sense perception cannot provide. Normally, we do not demand such high standards of knowledge, nor do we succumb to this kind of skepticism about sense perception. The commonsense view is that the senses do provide us with knowledge of some sort, and most people, when philosophizing, adopt this kind of empiricist view.

John Locke, one of the first of the British empiricists, postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception. Ideas may be either of sensation or of reflection upon those of sensation; there is no other source. Ideas are also classified as simple or complex, the latter being built up out of the former. The mind has a certain freedom in this process, which may lead to error.

George Berkeley, the second of the British empiricists, was to rid Locke's philosophy of those elements which were inconsistent with empiricism, al-though Berkeley's main aim was to produce a metaphysical view which would show the glory of God. According to this view, there is nothing which our understanding cannot grasp, and our perceptions can be regarded as a kind of divine language by which God speaks to us; for God is the cause of our perceptions. The esse of sensible things is percipi -- they consist in being perceived and they have no existence without the mind. There exist, therefore, only sensations or ideas and spirits which are their cause. God is the cause of our sensations, and we ourselves can be the cause of ideas of the imagination. The outcome of this was Berkeley's claim that there are no restrictions on the extent of our knowledge. We have knowledge of the existence of God and ourselves to the extent that we have notions of these spirits. We have knowledge of everything else, since the existence of everything else is a matter of its being perceived.

David Hume, in respect to relations between ideas Hume perhaps went back to Locke, but in other respects much of Hume's philosophy may be represented as an attempt to rid empiricism of the remaining excrescences of non-empiricist doctrine in Berkeley. As to the materials for knowledge, Hume tried to improve on his predecessors with attempts at greater precision. He distinguished first between impressions and ideas, the former being the con-tents of the mind in perception, the latter those in imagination,

etc. He further subdivided ideas into those of sense and those of reflection, and again, into those which are simple and those which are complex. Like Berkeley, he denied the existence of anything behind impressions, and a cardinal point of his empiricism, to which he returned again and again, was that every simple idea is a copy of a corresponding impression. The understanding is therefore limited to these mental contents. Moreover, he stated that true knowledge of scientific laws is based upon cause and effect relationship. Also, human beings have no actual knowledge of physical substances, but impressions only of the qualities of substances, not of the substances themselves, their essences.

Interaction Theory (Interactionist)

IT is an approach to questions about social cognition, or how one understands other people that focus on bodily behaviors and environmental contexts rather than on mental processes. IT argues against two other contemporary approaches to social cognition (or what is sometimes called ‘theory of mind’), namely theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST). Interactionists differ from structuralists because they don't see people as controlled by society, and believe people actually can make a difference to society.

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)

According to Mead, we respond to the world by attaching meanings or symbols to those things that are significant to us.

Max Weber (1864-1920)

Meanings arise from interaction and can to some extent be changed. Although we have internalized other people's expectations through socialization, there is always some scope for free will and choice in how we perform our roles. These conflicts with structuralist theories which see individuals as puppets passively respond to the system's needs.

Howard Becker (1928-present)

Best known interactionist theory, Labelling Theory. First stage is the definition of the situation.

Erving Goffman (1922-1982)

Interaction is a performance where we seek to convince our 'audience' that we are what we claim to be 

Methodology

Different perspectives often favour a particular methodology. Interactionists prefer qualitative methods such as participation observation, unstructured interviews and the analysis of documents such as diaries. This is because qualitative data is said to produce valid data and allow the researcher to interpret people's meanings by Verstehen - putting oneself in the others place. This can be valuable when studying groups of which the researcher has little or no personal knowledge, because it allows them to develop hypotheses in the course of gathering the data.