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Rationalism and empiricism?
Empiricist notion (the prevailing modern view) that language is essentially an adventitious construct, taught by "conditioning" (as would be maintained, for example, by Skinn…er or Quine) or by drill and explicit explanation (as was claimed by wittgenstein), or built up by elementary "data-processing" procedures (as modern linguistics typically maintains), but, in any event, relatively independent in its structure of any innate mental faculties. The rationalist approach holds that beyond the peripheral processing mechanisms, there are innate ideas and principles of various kinds that determine the form of the acquired knowledge in what may be a rather restricted and highly organized way. A condition for innate mechanisms to become activated is that appropriate stimulation be presented. (MORE)
