I think Chomsky’s blow to behaviorism is with his work on Universal Grammar which implies an innate language faculty. But I would say it’s one of the first blows, and not “final”.
It is hard to make it a final blow when Chomsky’s UG theory has serious problems. Such as the fact that it does not accurately reflect how genomic data are developed into organs, making the possibility of any sort of UG highly problematic; or the fact that human language is relatively recent to our species and developed after many human groups effectively stopped breeding with one another.
Behaviorism is fine insofar as it is materialistic, it is problematic in that it denies actual experiential facts. Certainly our behavior arises causally, but as John Searle has pointed out, consciousness and intentionality are a part of this causal manifestation. You can not simply pretend it away; if you want to explain human behavior mechanically you have to explain awareness and intentionality mechanically.
UG is not what he used to battle behaviorism. But the concept of a ‘poverty of stimulus’ wherein it is impossible to learn every utterance or for children to even remember explicit rules (to which most adults cannot even put into words). Like the elusive ‘behavioral rules’ which behaviorism relies on, most people cannot even really explain every objective rule for a language. For instance, no language has a number of rules which teachers can tell their students beforehand and then proceed name them off until they’ve successfully ‘learned the language’. This is not how children acquire languages. Nor how classrooms set up for teaching adults, either.
To mention Searle, his Chinese room experiment illustrates why sending unknown symbols to someone and having them alter the symbol based on the instructions they’ve been given isn’t really using language!
There is also fact that language and grammar tends to be almost 100 percent effective, whereas other learning varies widely.
Again, his theory would be falsified if, for instance, poor children somewhere in the world without access to education simply did not learn language at all; like many don’t learn algebra or physics. Or if somewhere there were people had communication systems similar to Searle’s Chinese rooms. The “UG” seems to say not what the genome presents, but what the genome seems not to encode: all these other possibilities which would not be evolutionarily feasible. And this limitation, a universal limitation, is what makes language definable.
For instance, no language has a number of rules which teachers can tell their students beforehand and then proceed name them off until they’ve successfully ‘learned the language’.
Which in no way deals with the problems UG faces, nor does it imply its existence. Kayaking has no list of rules you can learn beforehand, nor does swimming or using photoshop. What you can do is learn techniques and build associational bridges, with the help of some preexisting cognitive equipment; such as signal association and empathic learning.
The poverty of stimulus seems to suggest UG.
But UG is basically just a program or paradigm; not something that has resolved itself completely (though no science does this). And I do not think that, one way or another, behaviorism will return to linguistics. Since structuralism and the pre-UG paradigm left mental processes and psychology out completely. And that pre-UG period has passed, whether the current paradigm of UG, ‘minimalism’, pans out or not. The old way left nothing to study in terms of Language itself. There is also the sense in which this theory existed before Chomsky in philosophy and that this theory fuels philosophy’s involvement in linguistics. Which I think is important to making the field at all interesting.
I’d like know which books you have read on the subject of linguistics. For or against UG. Not as a challenge to your thinking or to your expertise on this subject. But I’d be curious to know what authors you are reading and if I have read them or not. And I’d be willing to read through other theories if there are books on this subject that have come out recently (or semi-recently). I don’t have much invested in it, since the details in this subject remain rather dry and technical, but so far it seems to me to be sound when all the evidence comes in. And many books on evolution now add this UG theory to their books as if it is fact. And not contrary. Not saying they are absolutely correct, but I also don’t see where it so obviously fails or doesn’t fit in.