The poverty of the stimulus (POTS) argument is a variant of the epistemological problem of the indeterminacy of data to theory that claims that grammar is unlearnable given the linguistic data available to children. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition. Inversely, the argument is usually construed as in favor of linguistic nativism because it leads to the conclusion that knowledge of some aspects of gr...
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The poverty of the stimulus (POTS) argument is a variant of the epistemological problem of the indeterminacy of data to theory that claims that grammar is unlearnable given the linguistic data available to children. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition. Inversely, the argument is usually construed as in favor of linguistic nativism because it leads to the conclusion that knowledge of some aspects of grammar must be innate. Nativists claim that humans are born with a specific representational adaptation for language that both funds and limits their competence to acquire specific types of natural languages over the course of their cognitive development and linguistic maturation. The basic idea informs the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and the Pythagoreans, pervades the work of the Cartesian linguists and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and surfaces again with the contemporary linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. The argument is now generally used to...
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