Clashes With The Wallpaper

[St. Jerome in His Study - Henry V Steinwick]

Chomsky argued: "A typical example of stimulus control for Skinner would be the response to a piece of music with the utterance Mozart or to a painting with the response Dutch. These responses are asserted to be 'under the control of extremely subtle properties' of the physical object or event." But, Chomsky argued, what if we don't say "Dutch"? What if we say, "Clashes with the wallpaper, I thought you liked abstract work, Never saw it before, Tilted, Hanging too low, Beautiful, Hideous, Remember our camping trip last summer? or whatever else might come into our minds when looking at a picture"? People are not controlled by some unknown aspect of a painting, he said. Their response comes from inside them and is facilitated by the infinite creativity of language.
-Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language