This isn’t a science forum. We, at least myself, know about epigenetics. Great big yawn anything to actually say? Anything to discuss?

It’s tiresome when you simply post links and continue to waffle, avoid direct questions, and all whilst proclaiming how other people have complimented you for simplifying complex ideas. Step up. I want more (or rather SOMETHING). I see hints yet when probed - several times - you’ve not answered. It’s boring, my sympathy is running low (stop playing the victim too ffs!)

Note: I listened to one of your podcasts, it wasn’t particularly good or in any way insightful. I do admire your ambition though - the podcast is aimed at people who arrive with empty minds and little to no knowledge of the subject matter. Also, drop the annoying ‘music’.

Epigenetic features have presented in many repeated experiments. There is nothing more extraordinary about these mice than about any other experiment (note: it works with ‘unpleasant odors’ not ANY odor - nothing surprising).

Barbara McClintock was ignored for decades before the mainstream scientific community came to heel.

I see the as relational antonyms because they’re relational antonyms. Many mistaken them for complimentary antonyms.

In phenomenological terms all ‘objects’, are objects, in the sense that they’re ‘intersubjective’.

I still don’t really understand what is being asked for. I get that there is some kind of stretching for some equivocation between ‘physicalism’ and ‘objectivism’ yet the terms ‘object’ and ‘subject’ are not necessarily just about that - nor primarily about that given that they have linguistic weight to them in terms of grammar and also in terms of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ (regarding reality and evidence). I mention this because scientifically speaking when we talk about being ‘objective’ we mean this in a ‘gradable’ way (gradable antonym) which does help to pull back the veil of of this false, yet convenient and useful, misappropriate antonym.

Have I slayed the dragon my quest? What page number do I turn to next?

Can you expand the question more please? Don’t know what you’re asking.

I think you’ll find plenty of continental philosophers haven’t taken the nominalist approach - maybe this is more about the general reluctance (historically speaking) in the US to avoid this?

The two that give a pretty good overview of his work include “Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious” (a must read for anyone seriously interested in Jung) and “Aion”.

Both can be pretty hard to digest. Other than that The Red Book is an interesting insight into how he came by his ideas - pointless to bother with it before reading “Archetypes ...” as it reads something like ‘Thus Spake ...’, which Jung did actually spend a great deal of time analyzing.

For a lighter approach (written for public) I’d opt for “Man and His Symbols” which consists of a selection of writers dealing with Jung’s work - selected by Jung. I’ve heard most people just read “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” but I‘ve never read it myself.

Warning: Some people find him easy to read and others find him hard to read. If you’re openminded (but not TOO openminded) he’s certainly worth a look.

Spamming the same posts across different threads isn’t necessary - use links to relevant post to avoid clutter.

It's not just about genetic coding anymore. — Mapping the Medium

Actually, it is. Epigenetics is about genes being ‘turned on/off’ and the cascade effects can lead to all kinds of things.

We’ve known for a long time that plants under different conditions grow differently, and that this affects the offspring. We know that cortisol levels in unborn children make them more prone to anxiety (more often than not). It’s complex, but it’s still just a matter of organisms readying themselves for life in biological genesis (there is a technical term, forgotten it ... ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’ - be careful with the term ‘inheritance’!).

You haven’t responded yet. Now you’re bailing from the thread? People are posting out of interest here so it wouldn’t hurt to answer the question. If the answer is too embarrassing or something PM me and I’ll keep it to myself.

To repeat, what do you mean by ‘consciousness existing beyond the individual mind’? Please note that the ‘collective unconscious’ is unconscious not ‘conscious’ - it is in this area that care is needed as the term ‘consciousness’ can often be mis/taken to mean ‘conscious awareness’.

Jung’s definition of this is often used by New Age types to promote woo woo, as I’m sure you’ve found, so take that on the chin and continue. I’m not interested enough to listen to your podcast yet - better things to listen to (so sell it by answer the repeated request).

Answer the question posed to you three times or leave then? This forum is most certainly full of opinionated people and a fair few who do doubt have certain ‘fixated’ views.

Be charitable. Just because Peirce believed in ‘god’ it doesn’t make his work redundant/nonsense. If you’re referring something else not on stated on this forum that’s different. I don’t see anything here to stringly suggest some kind of religious inclination on the part of the OP.

Consciousness extends beyond an individual brain. — Mapping the Medium

You’re going to have to do better than making such a statement and refusing to explain it. I’d be willing to look at your ideas if you could explain this. If it’s too much bother to answer on the third time of asking then I’ll assume you don’t have a reasonable answer.

I don’t disagree. I said that it is a mistake to follow guides with your first reading, but that in university time often doesn’t allow for this.

I’m assuming the OP is asking in general not looking for advice about how to get a degree in philosophy. There is a big difference.

It is AI driven. The rest is what I already said - preying on our human instincts to survive and avoid death.

Note: some organisms change their physiological structures under certain stresses. Maybe the same has been happening to us since we started messing with artificial lighting and diet.

Fear sells. If you fill content with mortal danger then we find it hard to ignore - we’re wired to both seek out and/or avoid dangers.

Just because media sources are ramping up the hype to compete in an ever narrowing market, it doesn’t mean humanity is in more danger of self-destruction than it was 100 or 1000 years ago. When the news outlets start saying “Everything is great!” That is a sign to start worrying.

But I’ll go along with the use of language being thought and that what does get externalised is a strange, inefficient or inaccurate, form of communication. — Brett

Gazzaniga, split brain patients. You’ll see the two hemispheres ‘communicating’ externally. The ‘thinking’ is externalised. What this means for non-split brain persons like ourselves is for you to ponder on. It seems very much like the same thing happens in us yet we’re not quite so aware of the ‘external’ interaction of the different cognitive capacities - likely because we’ve come to see our ‘thinking’ as internal rather than as being a partially external means of thinking.

I’m new to this myself. Would you use ‘thought’ instead of ‘intelligence’? I’m still trying to determine whether it’s true that ‘thoughts are "sentences in the head", meaning they take place within a mental language’. (Wikipedia.) — Brett

We don’t need worded thought to solve complex problems. Chimps can do it and so can other humans with no ‘worded thought’. The use of ‘worded thought’ is taking the ’externalised world’ and bringing it to the ‘internal world’ so it can be modeled in more manageable ‘chunks’ of cognition.

Did thought exist without language, before language? — Brett

This is where the confusion begins. In the sense of what you may mean here (this here spoken/written for of communication), no, it isn’t necessary for ‘thought’ - as marked above in the instances of chimps. If you’re asking about what Chomsky is referring to, and consciously felt authorship, then it’s a much harder question to answer as we don’t know because what is being referred to as ‘language’ may be nothing more than something laying atop several other cognitive systems. That was why I took the ridiculous journey of reduction to pose language as a spandrel of ‘eating’, ‘locomotion’, and ‘breathing’. I did this to show that it is perhaps misleading to suggest that the reason we breath is to speak, and that to equate ‘language’ with some innate capacity is kind of leaning in this direction too - as there is no hard physical evidence for some ‘language module’ anymore than there is for some ‘conscious module’.

If some innate ‘language module’ exists - there are no cases of a genetic disorders that does this (FOXP2 is the closest we’ve got in terms of genes: far too complex a matter to distinguish any singular gene as responsible though), but that is a poor argument as there is limited understanding about every other aspect of human physiology in terms of genetics! Even still, even if, then are we talking about a ‘language module’ or would it be better to call ‘language’ a mere phenomenon repercussion of some deeper ‘cognitive module’ that just so happens to branch out into thought and make itself known via syntactic structures and our means of ordering data?

StreetlightX was correct in pointing out what appears to be a game of shifting the goal posts. It isn’t though. Simply put, a theory was put forward and over time it’s been shown to be wanting in several ways and since then other theories have popped up and older theories have adjusted to the evidence. MERGE has several other theories surrounding it and if isn’t, by any means, the most ‘popular’.

Anyway, this is an interesting read that fleshes out some of the problems and related issues of this broad topic:
http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/hl1755.pdf

Of course. In university you don’t have the time so you have to rely on second-hand sources - I said that in my post.

I understand that this is generally necessary for university students as they simply don’t have time to read through anything themselves. — I like sushi

No confusion here. Bye bye

To add ... avoid reading guides like the plague and DO NOT read introductions by translators other than to note issues with particular words.

By this I mean that you should avoid this the first time around and come to your own conclusions about the text written by the philosopher before being spoon fed someone else’s interpretation. All philosophers are basically working from others anyway so why bother to distance yourself fro the text by seeing it through the lens of another? I understand that this is generally necessary for university students as they simply don’t have time to read through anything themselves.

Note: I do use reading guides, and read introductions, after I have made up my own mind about a text. It’s not the quickest method but I believe it’s the most honest approach if you keep in mind your understanding in and of itself is limited (that changes once your horizons open up a little more and come to understand the landscape a little better).

This is a bit of a scatter gun approach. My intent here isn’t to ‘debate’ or ‘argue’. My intent is to explore the subject matter beyond the initial post made by you - I’m not really interested in talking about Merge in depth because I can, and have, read up on that elsewhere.

Well fine, but that's not saying much. Of course you agree language is something separate from, say, digestion. The visual system is separate from the circulatory system as an object of study. Are there overlaps and interactions? Yes, of course. I don't disagree with that. But we're trying to find out what language is and what the principles underlying it are. — Xtrix

This is just speculation as much as what I have mentioned regarding language acquisition in adulthood. Why dismiss instances of people who have difficulty in using language or who have been cut of from language (and human contact to some degree or other simply because the cases are in the low numbers). Anyway, there is no need to go back and forth over this ...

Something that is apparent from neurogenesis is the plasticity of the human brain. The acquisition of ‘communicative language’ (spoken/signed) shifts the activity fro the right hemisphere more into the left hemisphere - although some argue this is just a matter of motor function. Is the motor function necessary for language? It seems so on the surface but that may be too hasty to hold to.

Note: not interested in getting into semantics over the meaning of ‘function’ or ‘language’. It was apparent enough to me, before looking in to Chomsky, that ‘language’ is a loaded term and that linguistics - as a science - has many softer and harder edges in terms of psychology and computational analysis.

If we’re talking about evolution then I’m afraid you cannot ignore ‘anthropology’ and then make it out to be some can of non-science - it is a science, and like ‘linguistics’ it has softer and harder edges to it. The genetic factor has been pursued in term of ‘language genes’ but that whole endeavor has pretty much been dropped because the system is far too complex and there is very little evidence that singular genes act in isolation.

Let us take the example of ‘the man with no language’ and ask how we can identify some ‘innate’ capacity fro language. If, like you say, he always had the capacity for language there untapped then how come feral children cannot develop a language as fully as him? It seems obvious the telling factor is he lived in human society. This leads me to think that it is more a matter of associating abstract ideas with commonly lived features of the environment - as example if you show chimp faces to infants they develop the ability to distinguish monkey faces from each other, and it isn’t a huge leap to see that humans brought up without exposure to human features won’t find it easy to distinguish between different human faces (people to them will look fairly generic). This is a well known developmental feature of human’s (IOR - inhibition of return).

Let’s move onto other areas like the youngest language we know of developed by deaf children in Nicaragua. As I‘vepreviously mentioned the early stage of this language - its initial form - showed that fully grown adults were unable to hold both object colour and position in mind at once when asked where such and such an object was located (eg. near the blue box in the left corner). This is something a rat cannot do nor a 5 year old child - yet the adults were quite capable of solving other complex problems. The younger speakers had picked up more complex terms in language communication that dealt with this and many adults then learnt to apply this to their view of the world.

What is going on there? If the ability to perceive the objective world is shaped by word concepts in this way then does this mean it takes a huge cognitive leap to open up a more comprehensive amalgam of sensory data?

Let’s move onto other studies regarding ‘attention’. I’m sure you’ve heard of ‘blind-sightedness’ where subjects are consciously ‘blind’ yet they can navigate around obstacles. If we look at instances of stoke victims too who go through a recovery period they describe their lack of ability to ‘see’ one half of their body/face as more or less a lack of ‘attention’. In this respect we could suggest that language is more or less something like a mechanism of ‘attention’ - a mode of thought expression (not necessarily ‘external’ - meaning directed toward another individual). This would be where many Witty a fanboy would scream ‘there is no Private Language’ yet they are probably not quite aware of what Witty was saying and how he defined Language - he defined it in such a manner as to make any ‘Private Language’ impossible by way of how he framed the definition of “Language” ... nothing wrong with that, but I’m not going to misapply semantic value from one instance to another to suit my or anyone else’s purpose.

Then there are studies about split brain patients where we can see perfectly well that the separate hemispheres communicate with each other externally - one side of the brain guiding the other. In fact, when asked the same question each hemisphere gives a different answer and has different ‘attitudes’. It could be the ‘language’ faculty in question is nothing more than an externalised ‘communicative’ function between lobes/hemispheres.

Anyway, food for thought there (there are too many items to go into in detail in one post so thought I’d throw some out together). None of this is necessarily about Chomsky’s ideas or anyone else’s particular ideas of language. I just don’t look at this subject matter as self-contained or any position as writ in stone.

Now, back to the original quote from you above:

Are there overlaps and interactions? Yes, of course. I don't disagree with that. But we're trying to find out what language is and what the principles underlying it are.

Maybe it isn’t really a ‘distinct’ item at all - other than in a communicative sense. I don’t look at a knife and fork and think ‘knife and fork’, the ‘and’ is not perceived in any manner at all. What I mentioned above about signed language and the ability to apply ‘and’ was down to ‘communicative language’ not some internalised thought - that is not to say I don’t view ‘language’ (in the broader sense of the term) as function of thought. If the underlying principles is ‘thought’ then why are we not asking what ‘thought’ is? I don’t need ‘words’ to think or solve complex problems, yet it is apparently the case that articulating thought (an explicit example being the ‘written word’) allows me to ‘view’ my thoughts consciously - which hints at ‘theory of mind’.

Piaget did some interesting studies on children and how the used monologues in their early years; many times without concern for other listeners. I guess you’re familiar with that too?

The developmental stages in childhood often show a speeded up version of human evolution, we crawl on all fours rather than stand and walk - if raised by wolves we’d continue to crawl on all fours and our anatomy would take the strain.

Mouth are for eating and lungs are for breathing. The underlying principles of language must then be ‘eating’ and ‘breathing’ - the brain on top of this mechanism combines this with locomotion (to find air to breath and food to eat) and a memory to map the world for more efficient sourcing of said ‘food’ and ‘air’. So why not just say language’s underlying principles originate in memory and environmental mapping, which then became a function of consciousness and through ‘theory of mind’ took on a communicative function for thought too that was established by way of vocalisation, motor ability and spacial awareness through an ability to direct attention via memories/mapping/models.

If you do a quick TEDtalk search for ‘my child’s first words’ you’ll see how ‘vocal signs’ are mapped out in a landscape - nothing to do with grammar but it’s interesting to see how thoughts and experiences are accumulated in space and remembered.

One of my general ideas is that ‘language’ is more of less about an emotional narrative function used to instill memories and develop a set of thoughts that led to free formed abstract concepts - the rest is a matter of externalising and exploring differences of thought in ever growing intricacy. Any kind of ‘recursion’ is a matter of memory so maybe ‘language’ is spandrel of ‘memory’. After all explicit memory (‘semantic’ and ‘episodic’) are far more important for thought than anything else (without them there is no ‘thought’). The ‘language’ thing looks to me to be something to do with ‘episodic’ memory, yet I don’t believe ‘language’ preceded ‘thought’, it only preceded ‘communicative language’.

I would, and do, simply write down what interests me and try and answer questions that interest me. Then look into how others have approached those questions.

Basically, follow your interests and the horizon will broaden.

If you’re talking about more ‘academic scholarship’ then there are several ways to approach this to have a broad understanding of philosophical development. Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy is a pretty good place to start, and it can lead you into other more refined studies.

I think it is pretty foolish in the current age to lack a decent understanding of science. Perhaps looking into ideas about economic, political and educational development over human history would be a fruitful approach too.

Like I’ve said many times before a must read for anyone interested in philosophical discourse and writing should certainly read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but I wouldn’t recommend beginning with that text as it would likely put people off the entire field of interest in the first few pages.

Note: Logic is certainly the bedrock of philosophical pursuits so a thorough study of that is sure to set the person up with something more tangible.

Sorry, I was mistaken. Just noticed this isn’t in the ‘philosophy’ category. :/

That "it" may not be a faculty that is language specific: what's the "it" refer to? There's no question other systems are involved in language. — Xtrix

The point was that ‘language’ may not be the primary function. Chomsky himself practically admits this when he talks about Music or some other capacity. The neural basis maybe due to another primary faculty with ‘language’ piggybacking.

The case of the man with no language holds no interest for you? Not willing to speculate? It wasn’t a scientific study it was one woman ignoring (not knowing) that it was apparently ‘impossible’ to teach someone a language after adolescence - according to linguists. If the story isn’t fabricated then it backs up Chomsky’s position perhaps?

There have been plenty of studies into Piraha so to claim there is no science there is plain bloody-minded. Linguistics is a very young ‘science’. There is no conclusive evidence for a lack of ‘recursion’ within that language to date - that is the point of being scientific rather than dismissive.

I’m not willing to jump the gun. Chomsky in that clip using words like ‘seems’, ‘according to’ and ‘probably’ for good reason. When in comes cognitive anthropology Renfrew is a good place to begin.

If this is what's most fascinating to you, I'd recommend first learning something more about linguistics. It doesn't fascinate you that language is structure-dependent? It's not fascinating how quickly children acquire language? That we're the only species that can acquire language? That it's been attempted to teach primates sign language (remember Nim Chimpsky)? — Xtrix

You’re not talking to Streetlight anymore. I’m not here to debate Chomsky’s views. I wanted to expand the discussion beyond a boring is Chomsky right or wrong. I side with the view that language is at least mostly an innate faculty, but I’m not entirely convinced that language is really worth looking at as some ‘separate’ function of human cognition.

I’ve read more than enough to have a basic understanding of the field of linguistics. I’m mostly interested in cognitive linguistics and educational linguistics, but also have interest in formal linguistics and functional linguistics.

You sound like you’ve found the wrong forum to post on.

You posted something like a rant and some paranoid version of a post apocalyptic survival guide. It’s really hard to see the philosophical value if this unless you maybe shifted the discussion to a hypothetical scenario and ask how society would rebuild - that would interesting.

If others are happy to engage, fair enough. I don’t see any merit here though.

There's no one serious out there that believes the faculty of language in humans isn't innate. No one. It's like arguing the visual system isn't innate. Of course there's a genetic component to language, unless we're angels. There isn't "both sides" to this argument any more than there's two sides to the whether the earth is spherical. — Xtrix

I meant it may not be a faculty that is ‘language specific’. Meaning that ‘language’ may just be a spin-off of other systems.

In what area? — Xtrix

Linguistics. What else?

I find that to be a very poor basis to work from. I’m not denying that recursion is important but surely there is more.

Nevertheless there has been arguments over whether or not ‘recursion’ is exclusive to humans:

http://gentnerlab.ucsd.edu/publications/bloomfieldEtAl2011.pdf

I’m much more inclined to follow the Cognitive Linguistics approach as it provides a better overview of several combined fields of interest. A problem here is that we could find ourselves making false distinctions as some mental faculty requires several others. I suspect that in many circumstances a ‘faculty’ to do x is necessarily due to a combination of ’factors’, yet individually these ‘factors’ are cognitively useful in some minuscule way and only when combined with other ‘factors’ produce a unique ‘faculty’.

As a example of what I mean eyes that were disconnected from the the occipital lobes would still be of use for managing the circadian rhythm.

Another idea would be to consider the effects of emotion in language. Clearly the basic communication in nature results from matters of survival and reproduction. Even trees communicate about diseases, yet don’t exactly ‘scream’ (although some reports have suggested this for media effect). Cries for help, sexual posturing and general ‘danger’ calls come with certain spacial signals attached. It could be that humans have intricated their emotional ‘vocabulary’ more than other animals and thus had the need to express a greater range of ‘signs’.

Monkeys have calls for ‘danger below’ or ‘danger above’, but I think the true step is in abstraction when a system of communication has a singular instance that relates to an abstract concept cleaved from a several embedded instances - so once the term ‘above’ or ‘below’ is uttered we’re talking at a very special stage in ‘communication’/‘language’.

Then there is “Theory of Mind”. Clearly children can pick up a certain level of competence when it comes to communicating prior to having a fully established “Theory of Mind” - note that feral children miss out on this (sadly/luckily there are few cases of this reported and fewer still that have been studied extensively due to lack of information).

Personally I find the idea of an innate faculty of language to be a useful distinction for investigation. Both sides of the argument have weight, butI cannot see either as being exclusively ‘true’ unless it is framed in a very specific manner.

I guess we have to be forgiving for opposing opinions. My studies on this topic are, relatively speaking, outdated. The last time I looked into this in this specific area was around 4 years ago.

The most fascinating cases I have seen in this area is still ‘The Man with no Language’, feral children and Piraha. On the research side of things I feel that the Cognitive Sciences have done more for linguistics over the past few decades than psychology or linguistics in and of themselves. Before that computational models certainly had a good hold on the subject and lately people have become more open to different ideas due to misrepresenting neuroscientific or generic studies to back up any and every claim (that’s gotten old for most people who look beyond pop-science though).

Nothing ‘philosophical’ here. Flagged.

No two rules can be combined and none can be used more than once.

If you’re not very familiar then you may not be aware of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_identity

If you are then exactly what are you talking about that isn’t covered by this law? Identity is necessary for identifying - the idea of ‘identical’ is pretty much the basis of propositional logic and the means for common communication rather than having a constantly shifting perception of reality that remains wholly distanced from the next moment, person or thought.

Much like the question of ‘what happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object?’ The answer is so startlingly obvious we don’t appreciate it straight away. The answer is we either don’t ‘see’ what happens, or we reestablish our concepts for ‘unstoppable’ and ‘unmovable’ - perhaps identifying a new concept to explain the phenomenon (a modern example would be the phenomenon of quantum - we name it and then investigate further to identify what is happening).

The issue is an epistemic one.

If you’re trying to help StreetlightX derail your own thread you’ve pretty much succeeded. Kind of sad, but such is the nature of online forums.

Stop taking the bait? There has been four pages of hot air, and repetition dressed up as evidence. Some people just have a chip on their shoulder.

Basically you’re talking about immediate over future benefits. If not why bother? If so how far are you willing to go?

That’s your problem, and possibly mine and everyone else’s too if you have any actual influence in the world.

It’s part and parcel of the OP. I’m reasonably well versed in this area - more so in terms of the neurogenesis and the general neurological ‘mechanisms’ related to language, perception and communication.

It’s a delightful short film/interview that focuses on language (including the question of acquisition). Take it or leave it :)

I would highly recommend this both for an insight into Chomsky’s thinking and regard for linguistics and philosophy, AND because Gondry’s animations are wonderful.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cv66xFD7s7g

Put your dummy back in maybe?

In that sense it would be pretty hard to argue that when I talk about an apple and an orange, a dog and a cat, or a toilet, a shovel and a toadstool, that each iteration of ‘and’ is anything but ‘identical’.

There are several terms like this that transcend languages - the most obvious being numbers. In every language the number ‘one’ is the same number one not a different number ‘one’. That said, there is differences in each person’s lexicon and experience, so I may associate certain ‘universal terms’ like these with experiences that aren’t ‘universal’ - the meaning, in the purest sense of the term, does remain identical though.

As a rule of thumb any ‘abstract’ term - not concrete nouns - is identical, yet it’s use is rarely, or maybe never, used in an identical way (as above with the example of items listed). Remove items located in time and space and you’ll find many identical items of thought such as conjunctions and identifiers.

I’m interested in moving this into a more fruitful area of discussion - more fruitful for me at least.

I’ not specifically interested in Chomsky or any other view as a stand alone account of language so maybe another thread? Let me know if you wish this split off (or inform a mod).

I’m very interested in how we distinguish between general communication and language. I’ve always been intrigued by how our cognitive abilities manifest as we grow and how these abilities develop in other species too - as a means of singling out different stages of progression from ‘basic communication’ to a full-blown ‘language’.

Note: Using ‘language’ here in terms of this here written/signed/spoken structure.

I mentioned the ‘baby babbling’ early (or maybe in another thread?) as it seems inherent to be part of language development - there is also ‘signed babbling’ too so it appears to be apparent in language. It is also a property of ‘song birds’ too.

Also, although it seems kind of obvious that ‘language’ evolved for ‘language’, that is actually not necessarily the case. For instance the idea of biological spandrels may be one counter example, but there is a lot about language in our early development that plays into giving people a sense of identity - it could be that ‘language’ is a spin-off of other cognitive functions that just happened to evolve alongside each other with the capacity for complex vocalisation.

Bees communicate locations of nectar and ignore other bees if the source doesn’t coincide with their ‘mental picture’ - the example of this is that in an experiment a source was floated in the middle of a lake, the bee returned to the hive and gave a waggle-dance signal that the other bees ignored. This suggests that the bees have a clear world map that they adjust to their requirements. If more bees keep returning with nectar from the lake then they adjust their map. I am not suggesting the bees are having a ‘conversation’ here, but they are clearly using given information to judge their world view - not that this is ‘identity’.

Furthermore, when it comes to looking at cognitive capacities in terms of ‘world view’ researchers returned to Nicaragua and look at how the language had developed. What is fascinating is they found something they previously missed, the original speakers were unable to to combine abstract concepts (ie. ‘to the right of the blue box’, not being able to hold both ‘blue’ and ‘right’ together to distinguish where the person meant - the same capacity of a 5 yr old I believe, or a rat). This may be due to ‘language’ being a learned tool rather than an innate ability - keep in mind when the younger generations began to mix with the older speakers they picked up this ability to distinguish items in the real world (the learned language helped them ‘refine’ their experience to equate more readily with reality).

Note: I don’t believe there is any true dividing line only that there are areas that are more or less distinct than others.

who exactly is being hyperbolic? — StreetlightX

You.

I don't know what 'human facilities' are meant to be, but I do believe that language must be studied in the context of it's history, development, and socio-cultural specificities, along with it's biological and cognitive aspects. — StreetlightX

I agree. I imagine we disagree about the use of parcelling off certain areas for focus study. The major problem above is how we then distinguish between terms like ‘socio-cultural’ and ‘biological’.

At the end of the day we need people like yourself and hardcore ‘Chomskyans’ - I just feel, like Pinker stated in the article above, it’s a lot of noise over nothing much at all.

I just had a brief look, but I can tell already that it's not rigorous enough. Studying human beings without language is very interesting, but we have to be very careful before we throw out a widely held idea (for good reasons). One case study doesn't doesn't quite cut it. But I'll take a look at it. Maybe it does show that there's no critical period -- I'm not married to the idea, just very cautious, as it tends to make good sense. — Xtrix

Of course. I’ve never read her book and she openly admits that her method wasn’t scientific and that she is no linguist. Nevertheless I have looked at various accounts of this and I don’t believe this is a made up story at all - too many people verify the account. The main critique I’ve seen is some kind of attempt to parcel off ‘deafness’ as some contributor to this? Something also done in regard to the language created by deaf Nicaraguan children.

When it comes to language I’m much more interested in more obscure ideas and thoughts involving comparisons with various seemingly unconnected fields of interest. How/Why human languages evolved the way they evolved is interesting to speculate over, but I don’t find it anywhere near as interesting as several other items of neurogenesis (my opinion is that the question over such distinctions is too simplistically formed).

Eh, again I have no particular sympathy for Chomsky, but these reactions are hyperbolic, even hysterical. Complaining that a scientific theory postulates an ideal object that is then subject to performance constraints doesn't seem like an interesting criticism to me. That's how a lot of science works, and there's nothing methodologically objectionable about it per se (it does not, pace your claims, make a theory unfalsifiable that it works in this way). If there are valid criticisms of Chomsky, one would hope they'd be better than this. — Snakes Alive

:up: