Even though Chomsky never refers to or invokes God. But it is implied by what he says. If his theory is not an empiricist account, 'properly situated in history, social dynamics and concrete utterances' then what else can it be? That's why I said earlier in this thread that he must be basically regarded as some kind of closet theist. — Wayfarer

Agree again! God is of course, the ultimate reductionist, which all Chomsky-like accounts end up being, whether recognized or not.

y’all have been at this for 65 years; if you haven’t figured out the elements of UG by now, it’s not gonna happen. You’ve been chasing a ghost. That’s not a terrible argument, but it’s not a great argument either. — Srap Tasmaner

To be clear, I'm not arguing against UG because of it's empirical failures. Those failures are to be expected and are the natural outcomes of it's prior metaphysical commitments. To the degree that UG is an empirical mess, that only serves to confirm what can be figured out before hand.

To make your analogy hold, you, or Tomasello, would have to show that by dropping the assumption of there being a UG at all, you can produce a dramatically simpler and convincing account of syntax. Is that what’s happened? — Srap Tasmaner

There are models, and they revolve around recognizing that it is communication between agents that drive syntax formation. That's the Copernican revolution - in displacing the centre of gravity from language as a tool for thought, to language as a tool for communication. Chomskities have been famously averse to this because of the so-called 'poverty of stimulus' argument - really the only argument they have for the mythological innateness of grammar. It's the idea that socializing cannot account for the rapid grasp of syntax amongst new language-learners. From this, they conclude - in what amounts to nothing other than a failure of their own imaginations - that the only alternative choice is that grammar must be innate.

But, as has been pointed out by plenty of people, the 'poverty of stimulus' argument relies on a crude 'associationist' approach to learning that isolates language-learning in children from any other cognitive and pragmatic skills that children have. But as soon as children are taken as living, thinking, interacting beings (beings-in-the-world with language ready-to-hand, as distinct from having language merely present-to-hand, to use the Heideggarian lingo), there simply is no poverty of stimulus. Attention-directedness, social-cues, semantic constraints, memory of previous social interactions and so on, all serve to account perfectly well for the so-called surprise at 'ungrammatical' statements.

To quote Daniel Dor: "Observations of syntactic complexity thus reflect the prescriptive meanings of the symbolic landscape — not the experiential meanings of private cognition. This is why they are autonomous, just as Chomsky claimed. They are autonomous, however, not because they are cognitively unique, but because they are collective. Syntactic analysis, the crown jewel of cognitive science, is a fundamental branch of the social sciences" (Dor, The Instruction of the Imagination). So really, the poverty of stimulus argument ought to be turned around on its creators: it is the Chomskites' own narrowed and stilted vision of the human being (as effectively language-processing robots abstracted from the world) that attests to a poverty of stimulus - not of children, but of Chomsky.

As for the specifics of the alternate accounts, I refer you to the essays I've linked to which attempt to cash out just what it means to understand syntax as a matter of social interaction. I will say that they will not necessarily be simpler than UG. By taking language out of the mystical and Platonic realm of innateness, grammar is properly situated in history, social dynamics, and concrete utterances: the study of grammar becomes properly empirical, and not metaphysical: not a mythical, unobservable posit lurking like a noumena behind the diversity of actually existing languages, but a study of language evolving in time, contingently, and according to the dictates of social prescriptions. A properly materialist, rather than idealist understanding of language, in other words. Better, in any case, than the "God did it" account of Chomsky and his idiot retinue (UG only quibbles among itself as to what, exactly, God did).

You chose your philosophy (or even metaphysics) first, and then offer your support to the professor who is more closely aligned with your philosophy, and you oppose the professor who seems more aligned with an opposing philosophical camp. Is that right? — Srap Tasmaner

No, I disagree. My philosophical priors gives me reason and motivation to suspect that Chomsky is full of shit, and, having actually looked to see if the theory stands on its own two feet, it turns out that it does not. This is not surprising of course, given that all idealism is full of shit, but it's all full of shit for localized reasons, which are worth exploring on their own. And I like to think I've done the latter. And I don't believe this is a intra-scientific dispute either, because - and I mean this, I'm really, really not being hyperbolic - I don't believe that what Chomsky is doing is science. His approach to language is theory-first, and to the extent that he looks to the science, it is to curve-fit it into his theory. Like all idealism, Chomsky places language outside the remit of science: or better science becomes a matter of mere taxonomy, or rather, taxidermy, not genuine discovery. Grammar simply has to 'fit' what is already in the theory, which accounts for all of grammar from the get-go, the only question being how. It's because I would, in fact, like the study of language to be scientific, that I think Chomsky needs to be thrown in the trash.

I really think the comparison to geocentrism is apposite: UG is basically full of people positing epicycles, retrograde motions, and unseen bodies in order to account for the fact that so much of it comes to naught, empirically. I mean, really, look:

Although the most common practice is to invoke UG without specifying precisely what is intended, there are some specific (though mostly non-exhaustive) proposals:

– In his textbook, O’Grady (1997) proposes that UG includes both lexical categories (N, V, A, P, Adv) and functional categories (Det, Aux, Deg, Comp, Pro, Conj).
– Jackendoff’s (2002) proposal includes X-bar syntax and the linking rules ‘NP = object’, and ‘VP = action’. Pinker (1994) agrees and adds ‘subject’ and ‘object’, movement rules, and grammatical morphology.
– The textbook of Crain and Lillo-Martin (1999) does not provide an explicit list, but some of the things they claim are in UG are: wh-movement, island constraints, the subset principle, head movement, c-command, the projection principle, and the empty category principle.
– Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) claim that there is only one thing in UG and that is the computational procedure of recursion. Chomsky (2004) claims that the only thing in UG is the syntactic operation of merge.
– Baker (2001) lists a very long set of parameters in UG, including everything from polysynthesis to ergative case to serial verbs to null subject. Fodor (2003) gives a very different list, with only a couple of overlaps, for example: V to I movement, subject initial, affix hopping, pied piping, topic marking, I to C
movement, Q inversion, and oblique topic.
– Proponents of OT approaches to syntax put into UG such well-formedness constraints as stay, telegraph, drop topic, recoverability, and MaxLex (see Haspelmath 2003 for a review).
– And Wunderlich (this special issue) has his own account of UG, which includes: distinctive features, double articulation, predication and reference, lexical categories, argument hierarchy, adjunction, and quantification (he specifically excludes many of the other things on the above lists). — via Tomasello

It's like scholastics listing the properties of angels. It's an embarrassment. The only empirical surety about it is that it has no empirical surety. The only stable content UG has, is its metaphysics - essentialist and idealist in form - which is why it pays to deal with it at that level. It also happens that the above list is more than enough to give lie to @Xtrix's protestations that UG is nothing but a theory of the genetic component of the language capacity. UG is all about positing grammatical structures that are (somehow, magically) "instantiated" in biology (much like the Platonic Forms are 'instantiated' in particulars), which then go on to explain the shape of actually existing grammars. This isn't biology, or science. These are speculative castles in the sky, no more scientific than glitches in the Matrix being an explanation for deja vu. They are supposed to explain why grammar is as it is. They do not.

There is no reason to doubt, and every reason to assume, that the brain, cells, neurons, etc., are involved with the development of language, like any aspect of growth and development. — Xtrix

Except that Chomskites keep wanting to make the move from this triviality ('biology is involved' - yeah no shit Sherlock), to the non-trivial claim that it is this biological 'involvement' (nice and vague) that actually explains the specificities of actually existing grammar. But actually existing grammar is communicatively shaped; what is contingent, in fact, is the biology itself. Hence why Chomsky is a linguistic geocentrist. Insofar as language is a literal technology, trying to understand it as a biological capacity (rather than saying that we have a capacity to employ said technology, that just so happens to be biological, because what else could it be?) is to approach it from the entirely wrong way. It's not just that 'the environment has a crucial role to play' (again with the vagueness) - it's that the environment (or better, interaction in the environment) that explains the grammar.

What it as stake is the mechanism of grammatical genesis. That there is biology 'involved' or that language seems to be universal among humans does not allow one to make the leap that the mechanism is itself biological. Those two conditions are too underdetermined to explain why grammar is as it is.

In a word, essentialism vs. materialism. Or idealism vs. science. I've tried previously to characterize this in terms from the history of philosophy: Chomsky's is a substance-accident conception of language. Language appeared fully-formed, out of the blue one day, as a mysterious substance - the content of which no one can agree on, which alone should damn it to irrelevance - which is supposed to explain the diversity of actually existing language. It's the substance which underlies the accidents. It's like a germ-plasm theory of language. This substance also happens to be totally immutable: all of history, all of the dynamics of society, all of human interaction, merely activate (or not) the latent potentialities of this substance, which is otherwise unaffected by it. It stands outside of space and time (other than having appeared one day like the monolith in A Space Odyssey), and, like a Platonic Form, is meant to explain the grammatical features of language. Just like a Platonic Form however, it is also entirely mythical. A pure posit, a theory in search of evidence, which cannot be falsified. It precludes all novelty, and cannot be squared with evolution (the only thing Chomsky has to say about it is that it happened really fast, and, because of that, natural selection cannot bear upon it). It is sheer idealism, and nothing other.

Yes, if one makes the utterly wrong assumption that language is a biological capacity, then it follows that one can bracket social and communicative contexts. But it is just that assumption that is bunkum, and pointing to other fields of study which are entirely disanalgous to language is nothing more than an excercise in question begging. Which, of course, is about the best way to characterize the program of UG.

Try this argument with the visual system or the nervous system. — Xtrix

Except language is not a biological capacity. I don't know how many times I have to say this. It is not a biological capacity like writing letters is not a biological capacity. This doesn't make letter writing any more magic than language. Again, it's this assumption - metaphysical and unempirical - that needs to be exploded. Your incredulity is nothing but a function of the fact that you're wedded to a completely mistaken conception of language which has so stunted your imagination that moving beyond the terms posed by UG is impossible for you.

A Martian would indeed look down and conclude the same thing about skin -- all humans have it, despite different colors. — Xtrix

It's cute how you went from "that's a mischaracterization" to white knighting for your priest once it was pointed out that he said the very thing you said he did not. Like arguing with a Trump supporter. In any case, grammar is somewhat more complex than skin color, and the analogy is a total non-sequitur.

Tomasello wants to make a name for himself by going after Chomsky, but is as convincing as Everett -- who's a complete fraud. — Xtrix

Lmao, Tomasello is one of the most prolific and respected cognitive scientists out there. He doesn't need to make a name for himself. See, he is an actual scientist, unlike Chomsky, who made shit up while sitting in his basement. It's funny that anyone who disagrees with Chomsky is suddenly a fraud though, even as, uneducated as you are, you've never heard of them in your life - says more about your slavish adherence to doctrine rather than anything else.

As a biological faculty?

Ahh, Tomasello is such a king:

I think it is important that the oddness of the UG hypothesis about language acquisition be emphasized; it has basically no parallels in hypotheses about how children acquire competence in other cognitive domains. For example, such skills as music and mathematics are, like language, unique to humans and universal among human groups, with some variations. But no one has to date proposed anything like Universal Music or Universal Mathematics, and no one has as yet proposed any parameters of these abilities to explain cross-cultural diversity (e.g., +/- variables, which some cultures use, as in algebra, and some do not — or certain tonal patterns in music). It is not that psychologists think that these skills have no important biological bases — they assuredly do — it is just that proposing an innate UM does not seem to be a testable hypothesis, it has no interesting empirical consequences beyond those generated by positing biological bases in general, and so overall it does not help us in any way to get closer to the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of these interesting cognitive skills

https://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/Benjamins/Tomasello_Evidence_StudLang_2004_1555709.pdf

This whole for page paper is worth reading. It shows nicely just how utterly fucking rubbish UG is.

UG is the name for the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty. — Xtrix

There is no, and cannot in principle be, a ‘genetic component of the language faculty’. That's the point. Quite literally, there is nothing biological that corresponds to anything like ‘a language faculty’, nor could there be, not even in principle. This may sound wild to your ears, but it is no wilder than saying that ‘there is no genetic component of the faculty of driving drunk on a Sunday’: there are certainly biological prerequisites without which one cannot drive drunk on a Sunday, but the level of specificity packed into the idea of a ‘drive-drunk-on-a-Sunday-faculty’ is as arbitrary and only slightly more stupid than the idea of a language faculty.

Tomasello said it best: “children are not born with a universal, dedicated tool for learning grammar. Instead they inherit the mental equivalent of a Swiss Army knife: a set of general-purpose tools—such as categorisation, the reading of communicative intentions, and analogy making, with which children build grammatical categories and rules from the language they hear around them.” That we can learn language, is, at it were, a bonus, what in some biological vocabulary they call a ‘kludge’. Language-ing is, as it so happens, just one of the things we can do - like walking or shitting - given the kind of beings we have evolved as. Of course this doesn’t preclude the fact that, having been the result of a kludge which has contingently conferred evolutionary advantage, evolution selects for adaptations that refine said kludge. Hence why no one looks for a walking or shitting faculty - and why anyone who does ought to be laughed out the room, as one should laugh Chomsky's writings on language out of existence.

This is why the faux-innocent counter-objection that UG is merely the search for the biological pre-reqs of language is anything but innocent: it already builds in a one-to-one mapping from biological capacity to language. But such one-to-one mapping is both an illusion and a metaphysical - that is, entirely non-empirical, in fact anti-empirical - assumption. Rather, the mapping is many-to-many: there are range of biological capacities, many developed for things far removed from language, that, when put to use for a range of linguistic abilities (not ‘language’), happen to allow for language. Incidentally this is far more plausible given what we understand of evolution than Chomsky’s just-so magic theory of spooky creationism.

Again, the idea is that Chomskites like to push is that while the ‘content’ of UG is up for grabs - so up for grabs that speculation over that content is the effectively the same as scholastic arguments over the properties of God, just like the theology it is, with no agreement and constant, un-empirical speculation - it is nonetheless the case that something will correspond to it. The problem for them - and you - is the details. But point is that there is not and cannot be, even in principle, anything that could correspond to it. It’s not the details that are up for grabs. It’s the entire research project, which is trash.

This is just another mischaracterization, in my view. — Xtrix

Your view, as usual, is wrong. From Chomsky’s Language and Nature: “A rational Martian scientist would probably find the variation rather superficial, concluding that there is one human language with minor variants”. This ‘one human language’, is of course, Chomsky’s noumenal language: its one no one has ever seen, said to be the Linguistic Soul that animates the actual diversity of real languages, which are just so many accidents that happen to be birthed from the Linguistic Substance buried at the core of humans. That anyone could read Chomsky and not see in him the shitty speculations of an armchair metaphysician is beyond me.

where what is real exists "in the world", and what is imaginary is "in the head" (note, both are part of reality). — hypericin

Right, but why not revise what we understand of the real, rather than create new categories because they do not fit tradition? We made up what we understand by the real. We can make it up differently in response to what we know of the world.

Or maybe I can put it differently: if these distinctions are to be more than nominal, is there something at stake is excluding money from the real?

It seems funny to me that what is at stake in the OP is that money fails the expectation of what reality somehow ought to be, rather than in fact, motivating its placement in an entire new category. In which case the problem is not reality, but our expectations. Why not admit that money really is part of what is real, but simply that what is real is far more interesting than we give it credit for (interest, credit... monetary terms)?

. Like Jablonka & Dor in that paper you cited, they disagree with his generative approach and its implication for evolution of language, but they explicitly say that Chomsky brought valuable progression on the questions needed to be asked about language acquisition (it’s an old paper from 20 years describing a different state of the debate, but never mind that for now). — Saphsin

Sure, and Ptolemy was a bona fide astronomical genius who just so happened to believe in geocentrism. Chomsky is effectively a linguistic geocentrist - or rather, a linguistic noocentrist in his case; like, sure, he made up alot of cool stuff, but he's just like, fundamentally, deeply wrong at the level of approach. To quote Tomasello from his other paper - found in your Reddit thread, incidentally:

Evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time. ... [On the basis of that evidence,] all of this leads ineluctably to the view that the notion of universal grammar is plain wrong.

http://lefft.xyz/psycholingAU16/readings/ibbotson-tomasello-2016-scientific-american.pdf

Yeah I also don't know how I changed one word and drew this totally erroneous conclusion.

You know what never mind. You quoted Quora. That, like Reddit, is definitely a source more authoritative than the papers I posted. I defer again to your Google searching.

Tigers are pre-wired to hunt. — frank

Ah, must be because of their hunting faculty. The Universal Hunting (UH) module. If you question it, you're being spooky.

Why [anything]? Because of [anything] faculty.

Ah, science.

Even Molière found this shit embarrassing in the 1600s, and people are supposed to take it seriously today.

I find this to be such a dodge. Here, substitute anything that we can do for 'language' and you can see why:

"A lot of people misunderstand what Universal Insulting (UI) is. UI is not about insult structures being in the brain at birth, or anything like that. In its most simplified form, the argument for UI goes like this: all (non-mentally disabled) people learn insults. The ability to learn things depends on mental properties. Therefore, there must be some mental property all (non-mentally disabled) people have that allows them to learn insults. Let's call this mental property "Universal Insulting." That's it."

I mean this is a philosophy forum. Have people forgotten that the ancients used to refer to a 'faculty of the imagination', or 'a faculty of sensibility' - typically attributed to the Soul or the 'Rational Intellect'? I mean literally, this is metaphysical language. You can't get more metaphysical if you tried. It is not some kind of neutral characterization. And of course the reason we don't go searching for a 'faculty of sensibility' or 'faculty of insults' (anymore) is because it's not at all clear that these are insolatable, biological 'properties'. This stuff is theory-laden as can possibly be: in particular the language of 'faculties' precisely individualizes and anatomizes what is, properly understood, a social technology. Is there a 'faulty of the internet'? A 'faculty of the post office'? Like, why not a faculty for everything we can do? A faculty for laughter? A faculty for driving home drunk on a Saturday night? Pretty sure monkeys can't do the last thing either - must be a 'faculty'.

I'm sorry, you're right, I defer to your reddit thread, please ignore my citation of a linguist, or the series of essays I posted, my mistake.

but all UG was coined to mean is the initial state of the language learner, what is the biological capacity for language. Not language universals. — Saphsin

This is both true and not true. True in the sense that UG was meant to mean the "biological capacity for language", but not true in that what was/is understood as "biological capacity" is a particular sense of what this term means - as I mentioned in my post to Xtrix above. And of course, the idea that universal grammar does not concern itself with universals, well, I'll leave you to make the inference. The very last line of Tomasello is relevant here:

Why don’t we just call this universal grammar? The reason is because historically, universal grammar referred to specific linguistic content, not general cognitive principles, and so it would be a misuse of the term. It is not the idea of universals of language that is dead, but rather, it is the idea that there is a biological adaptation with specific linguistic content that is dead.

For a fun debate about universals, along with all the ways in which they are characterized, Evens and Levinson's essay, on the Myth of Language Universals - along with replies both for and against, is a very good read:

https://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Evans-Levinson%20BBS%202009.pdf

Tomasello's reply - lovingly titled "Universal Grammar is Dead" - is wonderful:

"Universal grammar is, and has been for some time, a completely empty concept. Ask yourself: what exactly is in universal grammar? Oh, you don’t know – but you are sure that the experts (generative linguists) do. Wrong; they don’t. And not only that, they have no method for finding out. If there is a method, it would be looking carefully at all the world’s thousands of languages to discern universals. But that is what linguistic typologists have been doing for the past several decades, and, as Evans & Levinson (E&L) report, they find no universal grammar.

...For sure, all of the world’s languages have things in common, and E&L document a number of them. But these commonalities come not from any universal grammar, but rather from universal aspects of human cognition, social interaction, and information processing – most of which were in existence in humans before anything like modern languages arose. The evolution of human capacities for linguistic communication draw on what was already there cognitively and socially ahead of time, and this is what provides the many and varied “constraints” on human languages; that is, this is what constrains the way speech communities grammaticalize linguistic constructions historically (what E&L call “stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints”)."

UG is a farce; reading Chomsky to understand language is like reading Galen to understand biology: Chomsky's 'universals' are as scientific as Galen's 'humors' - and just as laughable.

Other than assuming (1) all humans have language (which thus is a universal feature) and (2) that there’s a genetic component to this capacity, I have no idea what that means. — Xtrix

Then I would suggest that you do not know what Chomsky means. UG is not just the mere idea that there is a genetic component to language. It specifies - gives specificity to - this genetic component, by suggesting that it is composed of - depending on when exactly one were to ask Chomsky, since he keeps dropping elements as they become more and more inconvenient and obviously implausible - sets of rules or principles by which 'external' language becomes articulated. He calls this "I-language" ('internal language'), as distinct from 'E-language' ('external language'). The technicalities of it are whatever, but the whole schema can be captured by recognizing that it is basically a renovated substance-accident model that's just Aristotle linguistically redux'd.

The ridiculousness of the schema comes clear in Chomsky's insistence, often made, that there really is only 'one' language, whereas the actually existing diversity of languages are basically epiphenomena. In Kantian terms, Chomsky posits a linguistic noumena that underlies the linguistic phenomena, with the former accounting - magically - for the latter. As for the role of culture and society, it does nothing more than bring out this or that feature of I-language already there from the start ('parameters'). This is of course, pure metaphysics, and of the worst kind too - the kind that people used to mock when they posited that it was by means of 'dormitive virtues' that opium put people to sleep. Chomsky's answer to how language comes about is basically the same: language works by means of 'linguistic virtues' - a re-doubling of the explanandum in the explanans as though anyone with half a brain ought to be persuaded by this stupidity.

Incidentally, the fact that Chomsky is basically rehashing 17th century metaphysics - if not ancient Greek metaphysics - in linguistic garb might explain why, having been mired in that useless bog for his entire career - he also considers the failure of that outdated nonsense to say something about our capacities to understand things. It's almost as if the essay in the OP is nothing other than a projection writ scholarly.

But all of this is missing the point. In all people, whether deaf or otherwise, social communication — through speech or sign — is hardly characteristic use. — Xtrix

'Characteristic use' is irrelevant, even if I were to grant that it is in fact, characteristic use - which is neither here nor there. I use my computer everyday, but this says nothing about how it came to be as it is. The same is true of language: the issue is to account for why grammar is as it is. Chomsky's answer is basically a theological one: grammar appeared one day out of the blue, by a means lost in time, fully formed, and society just activates this or that already-latent potential in contingent and accidental ways. But this of course is no better than the positing of a linguistic Soul - a bit of unobservable magic that Chomsky by fiat claims to be identical to biology although exactly how that biology relates to language is someone else's problem, and not Chomsky's. It has no explanatory power, not one iota of it, no more than 'God did it'.

To understand language as social at it's core however, it to actually account for the mechanism by which grammar takes the shape it does, rather than believing in magic: because grammatical constraints are normative categories that specify what ought to be relayed in communication, society actually has a role as a selective mechanism (as in 'natural selection') which shapes grammar from the outset. This places language in time, in history, rather than essentializing it as having formed whole-cloth and positing - though an act of the mind alone - some linguistic Soul residing deep in the genes.

Having learnt language through social use, and then putting that learning to use in 'inner speech' is perfectly consistent with the theorized developmental pathway of 'inner speech'. As the article outlines - it begins with public speech (inter-social communication: 'mama, dada'), then private speech (talking to oneself out-loud), then 'inner speech'. That we end up 'using' the latter so much says nothing about why or how it got there. Again, your perspective is the same as the peasant who sees the sun rising every day while claiming that really, it's the sun that revolves around the earth, because that's the 'characteristic' phenomenology. It sure is, but it's also utterly irrelevant.

e. If language is simply the internalized system of complex social communication, which evolved gradually, then each step along the way had to somehow effect genetics — otherwise non human primates could learn language (as once thought, and probably still thought). But that’s not the Baldwin effect — that’s Lamarckism. — Xtrix

Unsurprising, for the follower of a priest, this is the same kind of rhetoric that creationists use to question evolution in general: "what's the use of half an eye"?. But what we know is that cultural evolution can far outstrip genetic evolution, without any necessary one-to-one relationship. In fact it is precisely this mismatch in pace that explains the Baldwin effect - cultural evolution confers an advantage without any corresponding genetic change, which then serves as a selective mechanism for genetic variation at the level of biology. That's nothing Larmarky about this, and is in fact just how evolution works past first year biology.

Piketty is an excellent scholar, maybe one of the best when it comes to inequality, and no one else has combed through the data on inequality like he has. But he is a scholar of inequality, not capitalism, and as such, he takes the former to be the issue to tackle without investigating its relationship with the latter. Piketty ultimately wants a more equitable capitalism - capitalism with a human face as it were. Not unlike what is suggested in the OP. But to the degree that capitalism is rotten to it's core, the focus on inequality will not cut it. It's a focus on symptoms, and not causes. Definitely read Piketty if you have your hands on it. Even studying the symptoms is a good step.

Jokes aside, I was right about the fact that you cannot read: the quote rightly refers to the fact that UG refers to "the genetic component of the language faculty", the genitive here referring not to language simpliciter but to Chomsky's technical term for the so-called invariant and computational part of language which he just so happens to identify with the genetic component of language tout court. One could see, however, how a vulgar reader could confuse the two, insofar as Chomsky himself would like to arrogate his idealist phantasm - really better named the Linguistic Soul to bring out its status as metaphysical hocus pocus - to the status of genetic fact. So I take my concession point back, and Chomsky can resume his rightful place as being mildly more intelligent than his internet stalwart.

What people? We’re talking to ourselves all day long. Just introspect for a while. — Xtrix

I don't think it's quite right or fair to elevate your mental illness to the status of general linguistic theory. Like I said, there are plenty of people for whom this internal dialog is minimal or even absent entirely. Again, the contingent pathologies of your idiosyncratic self-chatter isn't science, sorry to have to break it to you. No doubt this fact will not get in the way of you making your wrong theory unfalsifiable by both asking people to introspect before dismissing any inconvenient case where, having done just that, they apparently just 'don't notice' what you say is 'obvious to everyone'. But the sheer contradictions of your positions are yours alone to deal with, no matter how many slap-dash riders you use to patch them over.

Your imaginary head-friends do not a theory of language make. And in any case the idea that thinking is co-extensive with 'inner speech' is basically a child's understanding of thought. No one takes it seriously. To quote Dennett: "Our access to our own thinking, and especially to the causation and dynamics of its subpersonal parts, is really no better than our access to our digestive processes ... Consciousness is not just talking to yourself; it includes all the varieties of self-stimulation and reflection we have acquired and honed throughout our waking lives. These are not just things that happen in our brains; they are behaviors that we engage in". (From Bacteria...). And in any case, those who do in fact study 'inner speech', recognize as a matter of course that it is nothing other than internalized - albeit it transformed in the process - external or social speech - i.e. language.

Also worth keeping in mind is that nearly every organism on earth, including the insects, have some form of communication. Human speech and sign are unlike anything seen in other species. No other species have language. Given the generic similarity of humans and non-human primates, one could reasonably assume— if the communication story is correct — that apes can learn how to sign if given the opportunity. This too has been tried and has failed. So whatever is going on with human beings, our ability to think seems interconnected with language — and is unique in nature. — Xtrix

Which is why I have already addressed this by noting that language is not just any communicative tool, but one with specific design functions geared towards social coordination across distances in space and time. Language is unique in nature - but this is not a point against it's communicative grounding, but one for it. And it's true that Chomsky does seem to think language is badly designed for communication - but of course, that's precisely because language is not a general purpose communication tool - it fails badly at analog complexity and intensity but is exceptional at extensive, digital communication of types and kinds. But of course because of Chomsky's own failure of imagination, he imputes his own failure to grasp this point as a failure of language's communicative capacity tout court. But, like yours, Chomsky's failures are his alone.

The genes will come later — once the communication and “normative rules” get internalized. — Xtrix

Look, I realize that your understanding of linguistic theory and evolution has not itself evolved past the 1970s when Chomsky could in fact be taken seriously, but yes, that is precisely how the Baldwin effect works. Maybe you can read about it once you have expanded the range of linguists you are able to cite past exactly two.

Yeah yeah— This only means Chomsky is as dumb and vulgar as me, etc. — Xtrix

Well, point to you, I concede!

Similarly, the characteristic use of language is internal -- 99% of it. We know that. You can, in fact, check this yourself. — Xtrix

This is funny because it is so wrong and so commonly known a misconception that it is nothing other than a metaphysical prejudice - it's like opening the fridge door to check if the fridge light is on, only to find that lo and behold, it is every time! Not only do some people simply not have an internal dialog, any phenomenology of this 'dialog' will recognize it as a low-grade, scattered and fleeting use of 'language' that is more a matter of fragments and shards rather than language-use proper. It is certainly nowhere near what is needed to explain the genesis of grammar. Again, just as everything Chomsky says about language is wrong such the opposite is the case in reality, so too is it the case here: it's not that communication is an 'externalization' of language which first finds its home internally; it's that the 'internal' use of language is an internalization of language-use which developed as a communicative capacity between humans in the first place. Taking 'internal dialog' as the 'characteristic use of language' is about as sophisticated as considering the Sun revolving around the Earth because that's what you see everyday: a cute bit of so-called 'obvious' folk psychology, but completely wrong when even minimally investigated.

There's little evidence to support this, as I've already mentioned. Externalization happens maybe 1% of the time. To argue this is what language is "geared towards" is just a fairytale. — Xtrix

Yeah, except for all the mass of evidence for it, which, despite your out-of-thin-air claim to the contrary, there is. I've cited two papers, and you're welcome to read both Dor's and Jablonka's independent work on the topic, which shows quite clearly how syntactic constraints developed as normative rules to coordinate communication between speakers - i.e. an empirically grounded mechanism that actually explains why and how grammar takes on the particular forms it does, rather than theory-laden pre-postulates about 'universal grammars' pulled out of this air. I realize you literally can't name any linguists apart from Chomsky or Everettt, only one of whom you've ever read - slavishly - but your ignorance of the evidence does not, in fact, translate into the absence of it. But I suppose this is a particularly Chomskian move, considering the paper in the OP: to make one's utter ignorance into an other people's problem.

What you mean to refer to is universal grammar, which is simply the name for the theory of the genetic component of language. — Xtrix

Wait, you think UG simply refers to the fact that 'there is a genetic component to language'? My God. I didn't realize I was literally arguing with someone who has no idea what he is talking about. UG does not refer to the mere fact of there 'being a genetic component to language'. That would be trivial and dumb, and thank God even Chomsky is not so vulgar as to describe it as such. It is meant to explain how this genetic component (whatever it is, which Chomsky never, ever expounds on because he cannot), accounts for the various grammatical structures found in language. I didn't realize I had to explain this but clearly I'm assuming more competence on this subject than you minimally exhibit.

He's said repeatedly that language is a biological capacity, and one that evolved. That's not metaphysics or mysticism or theology. — Xtrix

Of course he claims that. Otherwise he would be shown for the charlatan he is. But what he says and what he does are two very different things. The question is whether his theories about language do in fact lend themselves to being understood biologically, or evolutionarily, in any sensible capacity. They do not. Confusing Chomsky's lip-service to science with it actually being science is exactly how he gets away with all the bullshit he's peddled for years. Don't look at what he says about his theory - look at how the theory functions, what it entitles one to say. It does not entitle Chomsky to make any claims to science whatsoever.

It's true that we talk to ourselves all day long, but how much of that gets communicated (whether through speech or sign)? And how much of that is simply phatic communication? — Xtrix

This is a total non sequitur. It's like saying that because the function of ears are to hear, it cannot possibly be the case that eyes are also meant to perceive things. So there is pathic communication. What does this say about language? Literally nothing (incidentally: Chomsky's pet vocabulary is bunkum - what does this say about intelligibility? Literally nothing). In any case any the specificity of language is its symbolic function. Language introduces the negative into communication: one can communicate about what is not present at hand (I'm not referring to Heidegger); it allows one to say what cannot be shown, and represents a massive gain (along a certain dimension) of communicative capacity. There is, in other words, a functional specificity to language. It is not just any communication tool; it is very specific kind of communication tool.

Can I just ask, what’s going on here philosophically? You accuse Chomsky of promoting various sorts of pseudo-science, which suggests you see the role of philosophical analysis of linguistics as demarcation. Is that how you see what you’re doing here? — Srap Tasmaner

It's not demarcation - it's simply because Chomsky literally is wrong about everything. Seriously. If Chomsky said something about language, the truth of the matter will be the diametrically opposite of what he said. Chomsky says language is an individual/cognitive capacity; it's not, it's a social one; Chomsky says language is geared for the expression of thought; it's not, it's geared towards communication; Chomsky says language is characterized by universals; it's not: it's characterized by sheer diversity and not a single universal outside of the universality of diversity. Chomsky's whole program is a theory in search of data; an a priori that tries to curve-fit language into its ludicrous, idealist, metaphysical program. I mean it: if you take what Chomsky says about language, and then do the exact reverse of anything he says, you will arrive at quite a good picture of how language actually functions in the real world.

There is no one who has set the study of linguistics backwards by a matter of decades more than Chomsky. If there is any advantage in studying him, it is to know what to avoid at all costs when it comes to the study of language.

Here:

https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/danield/files/2010/07/selection-paper.pdf

Or: https://edoc.bbaw.de/opus4-bbaw/files/244/20mD5eCLI1Ih2_195.pdf

Basically Chomsky has everything ass-backwards: in his efforts to make communication a mere auxiliary of language - rather than its raison d'etre - he metaphysicalizes it and places it outside of any natural evolutionary account. It's why you are reduced to platitudes like: 'it evolved because gene changes' and 'it happened by chance' (what's next? Water's wet?). That's the only level of specificity Chomsky's theory of language allows because beyond the bare minimum without which its theological essence would become obvious, Chomsky has to say these things otherwise his theory's anti-scientific status would become clear as day. Chomsky's account of language is basically an allergic reaction to behaviourialism which he responded to by hermetically sealing language off from the world and entombing language in asocial brain-vaults considered as nothing more than meat carriers for immutable and Platonic language 'modules' that appeared one day out of thin, mythical air. It's vulgar Platonism forcibly shoved into a linguistic costume.

Yeah, you can really see how capitalism has made everyone so much poorer than before and they just keep on plummeting. — Paul

You can indeed, once you realize that GDP numbers are basically meaningless without accounting for who has captured all this wealth. Hint: it isn't the majority of people:

Indeed, the share of income presently captured by the poorest half of the world’s people is about half what it was in 1820, before the great divergence between western countries and their colonies. In other words, the rise of imperialism as the ‘latest stage’ of capitalism has delivered increased inequality of income globally. The personal income share of the poorest 50% of the world’s adults or around 3bn people is half what it was in 1820! So much for even and combined development after 200 years of capitalism.

Back to wealth, the WIR notes that while “Nations have got richer — governments have got poorer”. Wealth, both tangible and financial, is not held commonly at all. “Over the past 40 years, countries have become significantly richer, but their governments have become significantly poorer. The share of wealth held by public actors is close to zero or negative in rich countries, meaning that the totality of wealth is in private hands.

--

Under communism, they literally have no choice but to work for someone else. Work is obligatory under that system, and knowing that the shoe factory is a collective doesn't make them feel any better about having to meet quota. Capitalism at least provides options. The factory worker can go try something else without getting permission from anyone. The factory worker can learn to code and be their own boss, as many people in impoverished countries have done. The factory worker can invent a new job that didn't exist before. It won't be easy for most, but there's no system under which it is. — Paul

I'm not entirely sure what to say about this propaganda, because I can't argue against whatever boogey-men you conjure up. For myself, I mostly believe in abolishing work, or at least as much of it as possible. I can say, however, that it is not a boogey-man that the idea that 'capitalism provides options' is mostly a myth. Social mobility has basically stalled since the 90s, and class war by the rich has mostly made it so that the poor remain poor by miring communities and countries in debt, while commodifying opportunity such that only those with means can, for the most part, continue to accrue more means. There is a reason that the concentration of global monopolies have exploded in the last few decades, precisely on account of the fact that capital attracts capital, acting like a centrifuge to expel all those who do not already have it.

The platformization of goods means that more and more, we don't even own our own stuff: we rent our (access to) music, our TV shows, our phones, our software, our homes, and even our household goods and cars (and jobs, in the case of uber and food delivery). If you're concerned about autonomy - and you should be - you ought to watch where the wind is blowing. And increased autonomy isn't the direction. Dependency has skyrocketed under capitalism. And this is all to say nothing about (forced) geopolitical dependency cutting across the Earth. And in any case, what I'm arguing for is more autonomy on the part of workers, not less: control over the means by which we reproduce our daily lives, so far sequestered to a small cabal of what are effectively private governments.

But figured I’d give at least a lightning sketch. — Xtrix

Mmm, so did Chomsky, before stopping right there. And well done on Googling I'm very proud of you.

As for the questions. Which genes? Possibly regulator genes. How? Via mutation. When? We can’t possibly know exactly when— but evidence from paleoanthropology suggests behaviorally modern humans have been around for roughly 200 thousand years. For what reasons did language evolve? Possibly by chance — but that it stuck around is obvious, and so must have had a selective advantage. I find that an odd question though. What “reasons” are there for anything to evolve beyond chance and selection? How the changes relate to linguistic ability — I can’t say I understand this question. What do you mean by linguistic ability? According to the article, language is given a technical notion. One basic property — called merge — is what is discussed, along with computational efficiency. — Xtrix

Ladies and gentlemen, Science.

Right, so you don't have anything argument apart from an argument from prestige. Got it.

Unless mutations to regulator genes is considered saying “nothing” and repeating into mysticism. — Xtrix

Hahahaha, 'evolution happened because some changes took place in genes' = 'evolution happened because evolution happened'. Does your credulity know no bounds? Which genes? How? When? Via what mechanisms? For what reasons? And - most importantly - how do those changes relate to linguistic ability? If you find tautologies convincing then no wonder you think anything that Chomsky has written on evolution is of any significance whatsoever.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Ray Jackendoff has rightly called Chomskys' view on evolution and language a 'retreat to mysticism', which, of course, it is.

How to pretend to science:

1. Propose some bullshit.
2. Say that its origins are shrouded in evolutionary history.
3. But it's compatible with evolution because "some changes happened to some genes - which ones? Dunno - somewhere, at some point, pretty quickly but who knows really".
4. And how do those genetic changes - whatever the fuck they are - relate to linguistic ability? Who the fuck knows?
5. Bullshit validated.

Nice.

I’d say that’s relevant — Xtrix

Oh gee, I guess you said it - and Chomsky said it - so it must be true.

all backwater imbeciles. — Xtrix

Given that the vocabulary is dead in the water - something we which all agree with - then yeah. We do not owe the contingencies of vocabulary which we have now outstripped anything; nor to those contingencies tell us anything necessary about our cognitive capacities. Really, do you have anything else other than an argument from prestige?

Of course natural selection played a role in language. It wouldn’t still be here if it didn’t confer an advantage. That’s different from saying it evolved through incremental steps, each through natural selection. Chomsky is arguing against gradualism. — Xtrix

Yes, it's telling that the only positive thing Chomsky does in fact have to say on the topic of evolution is in regard to it's pace. Which, conveniently, serves as an excuse as to why he cannot say anything else. The pithy article you cited is nothing but a list of excuses as to why Chomsky can't say anything else about language and evolution - because he has categorically placed it outside the ambit of evolution.

As for the weasel wording of "he isn't talking about natural selection he is talking about gradualism" - well, this isn't the big disjunction you think it is because even in the article you cite, he talks about both in the same breath: "it was acquired not in the context of slow, gradual modification of preexisting systems under natural selection but in a single, rapid, emergent event that built upon those prior systems but was not predicted by them". In other words: magic. Look, I believe in catastrophism in evolution, but it's 100% clear to anyone with a brain that Chomsky's recourse to catastrophism is nothing but an excuse to veil over his theology of language.

I guess I don't see how he could not. The Republican party is the Trump party, and, if you do like polls:

But a new Gallup poll shows that the public standing of President Joe Biden’s party has dropped rapidly over the last year, raising the likelihood that it will face a serious shellacking in November. In the first quarter of 2021, about 49% of Americans identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared with just 40% for the Republican Party, according to Gallup. By the fourth quarter, however, that advantage had been completely lost, with 47% of Americans surveyed identifying with or leaning toward the GOP, and just 42% of Americans identifying as Democrats.That’s a swing of 14 points in just one year, the largest shift Gallup has seen in its 30 years of polling.

https://fortune.com/2022/01/19/democrats-party-preference-falls-gallup-poll-history-republicans/

So yeah.

Hey, we agree on something!

Ah yes, the polls. They have been so useful in the past.

I’d say a notion of the material world in the early scientific evolution being abandoned, one based on common sense notions — and which hasn’t been replaced to this day — certainly tells us something about our cognitive abilities. It shows us that yet again our intuitions, everyday experiences, folk source, and common sense notions simply don’t work. We have to find other ways of grasping the world — and we have. — Xtrix

*yawn* Again with the conceptual chauvinism. Again, the failure of Chomsky's toys says nothing about anything else. Just because you'd like to give your toys pride of place (by using the weasel words of 'based on common sense' - as if lots of things couldn't be 'based on common sense' or that 'common sense' mandates any technical elaboration of it whatsoever, or that 'common sense' is, in fact, common) doesn't mean they have pride of place.

I’m talking about science, and I’m talking matter, physical, material, “body,” etc. — Xtrix

No you're not. You like to pretend that you're talking about science, but of course, you are not. You're talking about some conceptual schemes foisted upon science from without, while trying to claim the prestige and backing of science to naturalize what is effectively some backwater vocabulary of a limited cabal of European thinkers. Like I said, science will chug along just fine - in fact, does chug along just fine - without reference to this backwater philosophical vocabulary. In fact this philosophical vocabulary is quite dead precisely because science has been chugging along without it.

Not once does he say this. Not once. — Xtrix

Oh I see I've made the mistake of assuming you've ever read the person you're discussing:

At present, however, we see little reason to believe either that FLN can be anatomized into many independent but interacting traits, each with its own independent evolutionary history, or that each of these traits could have been strongly shaped by natural selection, given their tenuous connection to communicative efficacy.

http://psych.colorado.edu/~kimlab/hauser.chomsky.fitch.science2002.pdf

but we have other ways of understanding the world. Ways that aren’t based on “common sense.” Namely, our explanatory theories — which are revised in time. — Xtrix

In which case so much for the failure of mechanism to imply anything - literally anything - about our cognitive abilities.

But importantly, nothing has been proposed since to replace that notion. — Xtrix

Nothing has been proposed? Says who exactly? Have you opened a philosophy journal recently? There are a blossoming of theories all over the place. If you mean there there has not been a consensus reached, then, well, who cares? Consensus is for flies who like shit. And it turns out that the last consensus was pretty rubbish too. Again, just because Chomsky own limited imagination is so limited, does not mean it is limited for others. Neither should anyone else give in to his protestations that they ought to be of limited of imagination as he.

In fact he’s offered plenty of ideas about it over the years. It happened, obviously, through generic changes. Chomsky just doesn’t think it happened through gradual steps. — Xtrix

Lol, Chomsky literally says that his shitty conception of language cannot be accounted for by natural selection - after which he postulates, with exactly zero elaboration - that it might have been exapted from prior adaptations ... and that's it. It's lip service. It's all he can offer because his shitty conception of language has so thoroughly hermetically sealed it off from the world - being nothing but an instrument of the expression of thought - that it's basically metaphysics - in the bad sense - masquerading as science. Everything about Chomsky's understanding of language is pseudo-scientific, from the ground up. It's all trash, every word of it. He's a closet creationist and nothing he says about language ought to be taken seriously on pain of dying of embarrassment.

Chomsky's theory of language evolution:

1. No language.
2. ??? [exaptation from something, somehow, very quickly, but not natural selection]
3. Language!

What's interesting to me is if you say these distinctions don't matter, and its reduced to simply worker vs. capitalist, then why is class consciousness difficult for the majority of workers? Why is there a lack of solidarity that stretches beyond so many different occupations? — Rob

I didn't say they don't matter simpliciter. In fact the dilution of the worker-capitalist distinction is precisely one of the reasons that solidarity is so hard to come by. All the little sub-categorizations that pit workers against each other, all the better to suck energy out of the only class war worth having: that against owners of capital. Funnily enough, the class most aware of the importance and centrality of the distinction is none other than the capitalist class itself, which it why it spends enormous amounts of money and time trying, precisely, to cast it into obscurity with shitty ideas like 'the middle class'.

"Physical" (in terms of contact action) was one of these common-sense based technical notions that was abandoned. — Xtrix

Sorry but this is just an excuse for what is effectively conceptual chauvinism. There is nothing - nothing - about object permanence that makes physicalism or mechanism 'common-sense based technical notions'. Literally nothing. Again, trying to naturalize and retrofit a set of historical notions as something that is built-in - hey, much like Chomsky's rubbish linguistics - so as to argue for some kind of mysterianism is bad philosophy and worse history. There is no natural mapping from object-permanence to 'mechanism' and physicalism. Just as there is no natural mapping from the failure of the latter to the failure of our cognitive abilities.

I think Chomsky is going from C to A, not A to C. — Xtrix

To be fair, because the paper is such a rambling mess, I'm quite happy to grant that Chomsky wants it both ways. He does want the failure of mechanism to be an example of how our ability to grasp the world can fail, but he clearly wants it also to shore up the the idea to begin with. But again, the problem is that he says nothing - nothing at all - about what it means to have a grasp on the world in the first place in any independant manner. All he does is index the latter to the former and then say that because the former fails, the latter does too. But this begs the whole question, which is why the paper comes off as nothing more than a provincial dispute arrogated to the status of the universal.

In fact the undecidable shuttling back and forth between A and C exposes the effectively tautological nature of the essay: because Chomsky lacks any terms other than 'the physical' or the mechanical to grasp the world, the failure of his pet vocabulary must imply the failure of human understanding and vice versa. It's like the child who whines that because his toys are broken, no one else can have any toys either. The only appropriate response is to ignore the child, or laugh at it for being so irredeemably moronic.

"Effective"? Chomsky has never once, in my reading, questioned whether language evolved. That it came about rapidly instead of gradually, as some propose, yes. That's "effective creationism"? — Xtrix

Yeah it "evolved", but exactly how is just one of those mysterious things that we'll never know, because his vision of language is Platonic and basically theological. He wants to pretend that his understanding of language is scientific by paying lip service to the language, but then does literally everything he can to put it outside scientific explanation by - guess what - shrouding the mechanism of that evolution in mystery. "It's innate". lol. Sure. Just like mechanism is 'innate'. He's a priest in disguise.