It blew my mind when I heard about this too. It’s no joke. Have a look, just search The Man with no Language. — I like sushi
To add, there are many myths about learning languages that pervade. — I like sushi
I disagree. In fact, it's very hard to see how the capacity for language -- a digital infinite system -- could have evolved slowly. You don't go from one word to an infinite number of words in gradual steps. The language capacity evolved through some sort of rewiring of the brain, no doubt, but it's more likely this happened in an individual 200,000 or so years ago. — Xtrix
You misunderstand - Chomsky et. al. effectively say that the FLN ('faculty of language in the narrow sense', which includes only recursion and nothing else) should not be considered to be adaptive. They want instead to insist that it is exaptive - it evolved for some other, entirely unspecified, entirely speculative, and entirely theoretically unsubstantiated purpose. Literally, they throw out a few half-hearted guesses ("If, however, one entertains the hypothesis that recursion evolved to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social relationships, then it is possible that other animals have such abilities") without providing a single rationale whatsoever for why it would have done so in any of these cases. Not even an undergraduate would get away with such a hand-wavy, completely unargued-for line of reasoning. — StreetlightX
We have the ability to either create language from some faculty or we’re born with a faculty to create language - what’s the difference? If we’re to define language as necessarily requiring ‘syntax and grammar’ then we have our answer (or rather, the question then becomes ‘what is syntax and grammar’?) — I like sushi
I also want to caution that the speculative side of Chomsky's linguistics is only part of it – the part that's been most influential in linguistics is the application of new (in the mid-20th c.) mathematical tools to the practice of writing explicit 'generative' grammars, which is more like a formal science and has been enormously fruitful. — Snakes Alive
That doesn’t follow. The point is to narrow down the fuel for the system. As an analogy we could say liquid makes an engine run and fill our cars with coffee - that doesn’t mean engines don’t function. — I like sushi
I have no particular sympathy with Chomsky on this line (I don't study this, or much care one way or the other), but to demand just-so stories at this stage, and reject a hypothesis on account of having agnostic elements seems to me not to be a good idea — Snakes Alive
What would have falsified Chomsky's claim would have been that Pirahã people were unable to natively acquire a recursive language. — Snakes Alive
Except it's far from merely 'agnostic'. It's committed to a particular view in which evolutionary gradualism is ruled out in favour of a kind of linguistic catastrophism. — StreetlightX
And of course, what motivates this is not a shred of empirical evidence (other than the mere possibility of sharp evolutionary breaks as demonstrated in other wholly unrelated domains) but an a priori theoretical commitment to cutting langauge off from all history and all society so as to make it a wholly cognitive phenomenon. History, evolution, and society are all incredibly inconvenient for the thesis, so they get nothing but the most cursory and mind-bogglingly parsed-down treatment as could be possible. — StreetlightX
This is hilarious. Insofar as Chomsky's program is so disconnected from reality that is only deals with postulated potentials, the only apparent way to falsify it is to show that a potential does not exist. And of course, if never manifests in actual fact, the Chomskite simply falls back on the completely convenient idea that because it's just a potential, you wouldn't be able to observe it anyway. Self-insulating, pseudo-scientific trash. — StreetlightX
Refusing to entertain the possibilities off the bat isn't a good idea. — Snakes Alive
Can you reexplain in your own words what Chomsky's objection was, or can you repeat back to me my construal of it? — Snakes Alive
Hewing to Chomsky's linguistic program means disregarding history, society, child development, evolution, anthropology, and all the rest of it. This follows from his construal of language as a wholly cognitive phenomenon, utterly disconnected from function. — StreetlightX
To the point where the only thing left standing is the thin gruel of 'recursion', which itself is utterly controversial. — StreetlightX
I've made my point twice, and even quoted other authors on it. If you still don't get it, then the problem lies elsewhere. — StreetlightX
He thinks it has a different relation to them, to be sure, but the idea that being a Chomskyan involves wholesale 'disregarding' them is not plausible — Snakes Alive
What, in your own words, is Chomsky's objection? Not a criticism of it – a statement of the position itself. — Snakes Alive
I'm not restating shit. If you have an issue with what I said, tell me what it is. I'm not here to entertain you. — StreetlightX
The target of falsification has therefore been misunderstood. What would have been relevant to falsifying it would have been facts about Pirahã speakers, and their inability to learn a recursive language, not facts about the Pirahã language — Snakes Alive
the whole point of the generative grammar program is to discover the principles of linguistic competence - these principles are meant to be transhistoric and transcultural, so much so that, as our friend the threadstarter seems to celebrate, not even communication ought to be taken into account. In fact the principles are meant to be so abstract, that they are meant to have no relation to meaning at all. They are meant to be entirely syntactical, shorn of any semantic relevance. I mean, this is simply built-in to the program. — StreetlightX
But by doing this, by 'changing the target of falsification' from actual language use to a sheer potential, this effectively translates to unfalsifiability. Why? Because you can't test for the absence of potential (/of a faculty), only a presence. — StreetlightX
The presence or absence of a potential is revealed when, under the hypothesized conditions, it actualizes or fails to actualize. — Snakes Alive
No, the conditions under which children successfully learn their first languages is very well-studied. — Snakes Alive
Chomsky's whole schtick has always been explanatory adequacy, that is that grammars should reflect the way languages develop in children (not only that they reflect the empirical facts of adult language use). — Snakes Alive
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
Sounds like that is almost a reductive scientific approach. Limited, yes. Redundant? — I like sushi
Is your view VERY basically that language is a more or less a circumstance of other human facilities? — I like sushi
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
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