Sure man, it's all about what you find plausible and credible based on your own experience of the world.

The case was that we thought we knew almost everything about the way matter worked, and were proven wrong. — Manuel

That's simply because we don't know how it is to be matter.

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. — StreetlightX

That's like saying they're trying to explain the specificities of German or Swahili or Japanese through biology. That's not the case. The capacity to acquire German or Swahili or Japanese, which every human baby is already equipped with, is what's being sought to explain. You mentioned before the principles and parameters view. That's changed somewhat, to the "minimalist program." I talked before about merge, which is central to this view. It's a computational view of language's recursion property -- i.e., binary set formation. From there the research gets technical -- but none of this is the religious chicanery you make it out to be.

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. — StreetlightX

What grammar are you referring to? Different languages have different syntax and morphology, which are shaped by the social environment. Who's denying that?

There's one quite important philosophical conclusion in all this, and this is the notion of "innate ideas", already argued for by Plato, Descartes, Cudworth, Leibniz and so forth. — Manuel

That is the underlying cause behind the acrimonious debate in this thread. "Innate ideas" are a no-go for empiricism as they're intractable to naturalism, which long ago banished Platonism to the dustbin of history. Hence:

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. — StreetlightX

Whereas, I am more than happy for the nature of language and indeed rationality to be declared out of the reach of science, as science is all about subordinating human nature to objective measurement and control, and is intrinsically anti-humanist and reductionist.

Note this conclusion to a review of Chomsky and Berwick's 'Why Only Us?':

Is there an ontological discontinuity between humans and other animals? Berwick and Chomsky arrive, on purely empirical grounds, at the conclusion that there is. All animals communicate, but only humans are rational; and for Berwick and Chomsky, human language is primarily an instrument of rationality. They present powerful arguments that this astonishing instrument arose just once and quite suddenly in evolutionary history—indeed, most likely in just one member of Homo sapiens, or at most a few. At the biological level, this involved a sudden upgrade of our mental machinery, and Berwick and Chomsky’s theories of this are both more plausible than competing theories and more consistent with data from a variety of disciplines. But they recognize that more than machinery is involved. The basic contents and meanings, the deep-lying elements of human thought—“word-like but not words”—were somehow there, mysteriously, in the beginning.

So that challenge to empiricism can never be allowed to stand. Hence the hostility.

But Chomsky is empirical, and is a scientist. He's not an idealist. The "innate ideas" he's proposing has very little to do with past thinkers. He's starting with a truism in biology: there's a biological substrate. Much like the mammalian visual system, or spatial navigation in ants, it's something that can be studied biologically. It's not magic. It's not supernatural. We don't possess the ability to speak because of a miracle.

We cannot do experiments with humans like we can with animals, so we have to find different ways of studying the biological capacity of language. That's the difference.

He's the modern founder, basically, of "biolinguistics." There's really nothing voodoo about any of this, and attempts to portray Chomsky as a mystic or Platonist is just hyperbolic rantings -- no sense paying much attention to it. The more frequently and vehemently it's claimed, the easier it is to ignore. Because it's unsubstantiated high school gossip.

That is the underlying cause behind the acrimonious debate in this thread. "Innate ideas" are a no-go for empiricism as they're intractable to naturalism, which long ago banished Platonism to the dustbin of history. Hence: — Wayfarer

I mean, I agree with you if by naturalism you mean what is meant by Dennett and Carrol and so on. I don't think that's "real naturalism", but this is terminological quibble.

What's a bit interesting, is that these things (innate ideas) are assumed for other creatures. We take it for granted that a puppy knows not to go over a ledge, or that a cat "knows" how to avoid falling on its back and so on - this isn't learning.

What's quite ironic in all of this - these so called "naturalists" and "empiricists" - who look at say, Hume, with much admiration, is that they don't read him, or they read him badly, not only with regard to mysteries, but regarding "innate ideas".

This is Hume, worth quoting in full:

"But though animals learn many parts of their knowledge from observation, there are also many parts of it, which they derive from the original hand of nature; which much exceed the share of capacity they possess on ordinary occasions; and in which they improve, little or nothing, by the longest practice and experience. These we denominateInstincts, and are so apt to admire as something very extraordinary, and inexplicable by all the disquisitions of human understanding. But our wonder will, perhaps, cease or diminish, when we consider, that the experimental reasoning itself, which we possess in common with beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power, that acts in us unknown to ourselves; and in its chief operations, is not directed by any such relations or comparisons of ideas, as are the proper objects of our intellectual faculties. Though the instinct be different, yet still it is an instinct, which teaches a man to avoid the fire; as much as that, which teaches a bird, with such exactness, the art of incubation, and the whole economy and order of its nursery."

Bold letter added by me.

Eh. I wouldn't phrase it like this, nor do I think he would agree. I don't think he would mind being called a "rationalistic idealist" like he labels Cudworth, though he prefers "methodological naturalism."

Remember he says that the shift from "magic" to "science" is subtle.

And he does actually refer to Descartes and Cudworth for innate ideas, saying that he agrees with this tradition. What he says is that this tradition should be fleshed out.

These things are astonishing for him and for I think most people in the world who have babies, they are shocked to see how the baby does things or says things they weren't taught.

See this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVXLo9gJq-U&t=328s

Min. 37:43 onward.

But Chomsky is empirical, and is a scientist. — Xtrix

Forgive me, but my observation is that you also have a bit of a hot button about this issue. Whenever it's suggested that Chomsky's ideas might be incompatible with naturalism, you react strongly against that - the suggestion, for example, of 'voodoo' in the post above. The implication is, either you're a naturalist, empiricist scientist, or the alternative is 'voodoo' and supernaturalism, as if that line is clearly delineated. But I think that is a product of an underyling fissure in the culture which you're giving voice to. Consider the subject of this particular debate, which is speech and language - that is also the subject of many other disciplines, as diverse as linguistics, semiotics, and even literature and communications. You can study it from a naturalist perspective, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has a wholly naturalistic basis. But to question the scope of current naturalism isn't therefore to 'accept voodoo'. You should ask yourself why you automatically react that way.

He's starting with a truism in biology: there's a biological substrate. Much like the mammalian visual system, or spatial navigation in ants, it's something that can be studied biologically. It's not magic. It's not supernatural. We don't possess the ability to speak because of a miracle. — Xtrix

The vistas, the possibilities and potentialities, that are opened up by speech and language, are, I think, incommensurable with those of ants or insects or even other animals. From the viewpoint of biology, we study h. sapiens as a species, and in that sense study the evolution of language. Butare language, culture, ideas, reason thereby solely biologically determined? Obviously a very big question.

When h. sapiens evolves to the point of being able to speak, create art, tell stories, and contemplate meaning, and so on, then I say we've transcended the strictly biological domain. To say that all human culture past this point is a product of biology is the essence of biological reductionism. And if you ask the question 'why did the human species evolve the ability to speak and reason?', the only answer that neo-darwinism seems to have is the same reason that applies to any other species - to successfully survive and procreate. That is really what constitutes 'a reason' in biological terms but it doesn't cut it as a reason in the philosophical sense. OK, you'll say, there isn't any reason. But that is also a philosophical judgement, and one that is often implicit, being culturally-determined.

(I've mentioned it before, but one of the essays pinned to my profile is relevant - Maritain's critique of the cultural consequences of empiricism. It is writ large throughout this debate. Yes, Maritain was a Roman Catholic, that immediately disqualifies him for a lot of people, although I'm not, and it doesn't, for me. Logging out for the day, I have an assignment.)

"The epistemic naturalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was science, and attempt to construct an empirical theory of mind…” (Chomsky, 2000: 80)

“We plainly cannot read back into earlier periods a distinction between science and philosophy that developed later. We would not use the term “visual naturalism” to refer to the empirical study of the growth and functioning of the visual system… implying that there was some coherent alternative for the same realm of problems.”

Eh. I wouldn't phrase it like this, nor do I think he would agree. I don't think he would mind being called a "rationalistic idealist" like he labels Cudworth, though he prefers "methodological naturalism." — Manuel

Fair. I didn't mean to imply Chomsky doesn't pick out parts of Plato, Descartes, etc., but he rejects (as he says in the video you linked to) a great deal of this thinking as well. He re-interprets Plato's reincarnation of the soul to be essentially referring to genetic endowment.

What he says is that this tradition should be fleshed out. — Manuel

Right.

But to question the scope of current naturalism isn't therefore to 'accept voodoo'. You should ask yourself why you automatically react that way. — Wayfarer

What is the alternative, exactly? I've written for years on this very forum about the very concept of "nature," and how materialism (or naturalism) cannot explain everything in the world. But that doesn't mean when it comes to language we have to depart from the standard framework of all the biological sciences.

Butare language, culture, ideas, reason thereby solely biologically determined? — Wayfarer

Not solely, no.

but he rejects (as he says in the video you linked to) a great deal of this thinking as well. He re-interprets Plato's reincarnation of the soul to be essentially referring to genetic endowment. — Xtrix

Correct.

He also rejects the notion of transparent ideas, or the notion that we can introspect into our ideas perfectly clearly, this is also common with the empiricists incidentally, but it's not true.

I think that if we have a disagreement (foreseeing one which is possible and good), would have to be on what we think philosophy can do for the study of mind. Besides some topics in linguistics and perhaps some psychological studies, we just know too little about the mind.

I think this is fertile area for conceptual analysis, which can help clear up some confused notions get a better framework for analyzing different aspects of the world and so on. Chomsky tends to go to physics for a lot of clarification on many of these things, I think that that approach makes sense, but it can be limiting to an extent. Here, I know I'm playing with fire.

So in this case, you tend to go with Heidegger's philosophy, I tend to like Tallis' approach. But I honestly think, however self-flattering this may sound, that in this area, we have lots of fertile stuff to think about and try to clear up, acknowledging that we're likely wrong in many important aspects.

But if you think philosophy is either much more than this, or much less, then we'd disagree. I know you haven't said anything, I'm just thinking out loud...

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).

I've written for years on this very forum about the very concept of "nature," and how materialism (or naturalism) cannot explain everything in the world. But that doesn't mean when it comes to language we have to depart from the standard framework of all the biological sciences. — Xtrix

But language surely straddles two realms. Yes, we're biological beings but we're observably the only beings that really have language. We're unique in that respect - so where within the standard framework should this go? Might it not be anomalous?

There was something a bit fishy about that quote earlier about treating 'the mind' the same way you treat the objects of physics and chemistry - because (and I say this a lot) the mind is not an object, not at all. (This is why behaviourism and eliminativism are the most honest empiricists.) You can experiment on the objects of physics and chemstry, make testable predictions with great accuracy. But you can't do that with the mind, and hardly with language, as it's such a vast subject matter. So it's a bit trite to say that the mind can be dealt with in that way.

What is the alternative, exactly? — Xtrix

What I'm observing is that the argument against Chomsky is that his theory of universal grammar is not a properly empirical theory, that it's dependent on metaphysics or something like 'innate ideas'. Which is leads to the:

"God did it" account of Chomsky — StreetlightX

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.

This is what I mean by the cultural dynamics behind this argument. I hope you can see that now.

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.

That's changed somewhat, to the "minimalist program." I talked before about merge, which is central to this view. It's a computational view of language's recursion property -- i.e., binary set formation. From there the research gets technical -- but none of this is the religious chicanery you make it out to be. — Xtrix

Oh yes, it has indeed changed to the 'minimalist' program, because one-by-one, as the claims of UG have been shown to be trash, it has had to whittle itself down into a theory of almost nothing in order to save whatever claim of explanatory power it could possibly - minimally - have. And, having whittled itself down to recursion (at least for Chomsky), what it has given up is precisely any linguistic specificity. Its minimalism is bought at the price of its generality which has exposed ever more easily how stupid the whole enterprise is. So let's examine recursion. Does it do this?:

The capacity to acquire German or Swahili or Japanese, which every human baby is already equipped with, is what's being sought to explain. — Xtrix

The answer is a laugh-out-loud "No". Evens and Levinson:

1. Many languages do not have syntactic constituent structure. As such, they cannot have embedded structures of the kind indicated by a labelled bracketing like [A[A]]. Most of the suggestions for rule constraints (like Subjacency) in UG falsely presume the universality of constituency.

2. Many languages have no, or very circumscribed recursion in their syntax. That is, they do not allow embedding of indefinite complexity, and in some languages there is no syntactic embedding at all. Fitch et al’s (2005) response that this is of no relevance to their selection of syntactic recursion as the single unique design feature of human language reveals their choice to be empirically arbitrary.

3. The cross-linguistic evidence shows that although recursion may not be found in the syntax of languages, it is always found in the conceptual structure, that is, the semantics or pragmatics – in the sense that it is always possible in any language to express complex propositions. This argues against the syntacticocentrism of the Chomskyan paradigm. It also points to a different kind of possible evidence for the evolutionary background to language, namely, the investigation of embedded reasoning across our nearest phylogenetic cousins, as is required, for example, in theory of mind tasks, or spatial perspective taking. Even simple tool making can require recursive action patterning.

Dor elaborates on point 3, which, frankly, is the most devastating:

"The idea that recursion generates infinity is valid as a logical statement, but this logical statement is only applicable to mathematics. As far as language is concerned, it is nonsensical: nothing in human life is infinite. Recursion has been shown to play an important role not just in language, but also, for example, in toolmaking (Greenfield 1991), but no one would suggest that the capacity to re-apply manual operations to their own outputs—and then to do it again and again—allows for the making of infinitely complex tools. The recursive operations in message construction (in those languages that have them) do allow for the production of very complex messages, much more complex than the messages produced in non-recursive languages, but this is all."

In other words, not only has UG contracted itself to a single, measly syntactic operator, in any case controversial and empirically destitute, it has also abstracted itself to so rarefied a level that it is unable to function as a recognizable theory of language. It's like a dying star, winking itself out into irrelevance.

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. — StreetlightX

This type of description misses one very important aspect, and that is the will to learn. The distinction between "ready-to-hand" and "present-to-hand" is dependent on practice. That distinction takes practice for granted. But practice requires will. Because the nature of "will" remains in the category of the mystical, the mystical aspect cannot be avoided in this way.

In Aristotelian terms, from his On the Soul, the child is born with a "potential". Also, the grown and learnt human being, has a "potential". But these two senses of "potential" are obviously very different. We might say that the latter is an "informed potential". And the problem we have with this type of analysis is that providing a description of the "informed potential" does not give us a method toward understanding the uninformed potential, because a description always refers to the formal part. So taking the descriptive aspect of informed potential, "grammar", and applying it toward the uninformed aspect is actually a step in the wrong direction.

The issue present at hand though, is that the deeper we move toward the more raw, or uninformed potential, the bigger the gap we get between our principles for understanding, which are posterior to practice, and how well they are suited toward understanding what we are trying to understand, what is prior to practice. So we have to turn around, and start from the very bottom, and consider the principles required to describe the most raw potential possible. This is metaphysics. But such a start leaves absolutely no direction for the will. Therefore we must conclude that the will is directed by something completely other than "informed potential", being in some way the cause of informed potential, and this conclusion provides no way out of mysticism.

Chomsky's primary opponent was Skinner. You're kind of dancing on Chomsky's shoulders claiming to have killed him.

Interesting stuff, particularly Daniel Dor. I am in your debt.

My sympathies tend to be with the communication-first side, but of course language as a technology for communication is enabled by capacities not necessarily evolved for that. That’s saying nothing, so an example: I’ve never forgotten my German linguistics professor demonstrating the original purpose of vocal chords by lifting the end of a table as he spoke (they close the windpipe to maintain air pressure in the chest under load).

In a related way, I find the speculation that language was originally gestural rather than vocal interesting, because vocal language also involves very precise gestures we don’t think of that way because they are done with the tongue and the mouth; thus not only are there obvious advantages to switching to sound as your medium, you may get to repurpose the brain’s existing skill at orchestrating complex fine motor movements. Which obviously also has other uses. Pure speculation.

In that spirit, I have tried to leave room for what I think of as language to be dependent on something more like what Chomsky thinks of as language, which looks more like a mathematical symbol system. I do wonder if the communication-first, social technology sort of view — which, as I said, is where my sympathies lie — can quite reach to certain fundamentals: the distribution of sign tokens into buckets via systems of differences (as in phonology and morphology); the ability to take a sound or a mark or a gesture as a sign at all, to treat it as referential.

It’s hard to shake the intuition that communication is late to the party in some respects, that certain key abilities must already be in place before we can talk about communication, language as a technology for solving coordination problems, and so on. So, as I said, I’ve tried to leave open the possibility that Chomsky’s little syntax engine, even if it’s really a machine for assembling a syntax engine, is one of those things, but that’s all.

Again, really interesting stuff, Street. Much appreciated.

I’ve never forgotten my German linguistics professor demonstrating the original purpose of vocal chords by lifting the end of a table as he spoke (they close the windpipe to maintain air pressure in the chest under load). — Srap Tasmaner

As any weight-lifter knows, it's dangerous to hold your breath while lifting a load. Your lung expansion is maintained by your ribs and diaphragm, not your trachea. This is why linguistic professors shouldn't play pulmonologist.

Fair enough

So let's examine recursion. Does it do this?:

The capacity to acquire German or Swahili or Japanese, which every human baby is already equipped with, is what's being sought to explain.
— Xtrix

The answer is a laugh-out-loud "No". — StreetlightX

Does recursion explain the capacity to learn English and Japanese? No, of course not. Recursion is a property of the human language system. Binocular vision is a property of the human visual system. So yes, exploring this won't explain everything, but it's a research goal.

What I'm observing is that the argument against Chomsky is that his theory of universal grammar is not a properly empirical theory — Wayfarer

Yes, that's an augment against Chomsky -- and happens to be completely wrong.

The evolution of language is mostly speculative, whether one claims it evolved for communication or for thought. To argue one theory is empirical and the other isn't (because it's largely speculative), is just asinine.

In a related way, I find the speculation that language was originally gestural rather than vocal interesting, because vocal language also involves very precise gestures we don’t think of that way because they are done with the tongue and the mouth — Srap Tasmaner

It's hard to make up a story that starts with a sensorimotor system fully ready for speech. Whatever changed with the human brain, it's unlikely it happened to several people all at once. If some neural rewiring occurred in the brain of one person, and gave that person a selective advantage that than spread to others, then it would take time both to link this change to the sensorimotor system and for others to be able to understand any received messages. There's good reason to believe that gestures -- a kind of sign language -- was the first to develop.

Infinite expression with finite means. That seems to be the case with language -- we can express almost any thought/feeling we want, using very few tools. We see this in writing. The English alphabet consists of 26 letters, yet we see what we do with them. Likewise for phonemes. Limited in number. If we want to claim this was all acquired gradually, it always appeared to me that there's simply not enough evolutionary time -- given that behaviorally modern humans have been around for maybe 200 thousand years. What changed? Well, the capacity for language changed -- the capacity that separates us from other species. Either this took millions of years to evolve gradually, and then reached a point where creativity exploded (tools, cave art, burials, etc), or it happened very quickly (similar to the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis), perhaps even in one individual -- which is Chomsky's position.

All of it is pretty speculative, and although I find Chomsky's position more compelling, I have no solid stake in it. If it turns out language evolved gradually as a communicative tool, so be it. The evidence for this is very limited indeed.

I mean, it’s not interesting to me, insofar as I agree with this approach to philosophy and see people who disagree with the main points to be very mistaken. However, if I had to attack it, I don’t see any alternative to people who currently ridicule “mysteriansim”, like Dennett or the Churchlands. — Manuel

As I already said earlier, I don't think that Chomsky, in this essay at least, engages with the issues that animate debates between Nagel, Chalmers, McGinn, etc. on the one side, and Dennett, Churchlands, etc. on the other. Calling Chomsky's position "mysterianism" is misleading. Indeed, going by the evidence of this essay, I am not sure that he is even familiar with that other "mysterianism."

If you think that he is advancing a "mysterian" thesis, how would you summarize it? It is not all that clear to me that he is developing a consistent thesis throughout the essay, but here is how I might tentatively reconstruct it. As Chomsky tells it, up until Newton, natural philosophy was following our intuitive understanding of how the world works. At one point he makes a connection with our innate intuitions, as revealed in psychological studies - folk physics and the like. More often, he talks about a "conception of the world as a machine"; how naturally intuitive that is is not obvious to me, but apparently he believes it to be so.

(This is a very dubious claim, by the way: to equate 18th century European philosophers' thinking with innate, animalistic intuitions. So, neither Aristotle nor three millennia of human civilization made a dent in their thinking? Or were they all that childish-simple, Aristotle included? I hesitate to attribute this claim to Chomsky, so correct me if you read it differently.)

So then comes Newton with his radically unintuitive theory, and after some fruitless attempts to reconcile it with traditional metaphysics, he throws up his hands and pleads hypotheses non fingo: it's just a mathematical theory, and the only thing going for it is that it works. And thus modern science was born, increasingly divorced from our intuitions, comprehensible only to the intellect, if even that.

But the picture is not so simple, is it? Our understanding evolves throughout our individual lives, as well as throughout humanity's cultural evolution. At one point Chomsky seems to acknowledge this, seemingly contradicting the thesis that he has been developing, when he quotes 19th century mathematician Friedrich Lange saying that we have "so accustomed ourselves to the abstract notion of forces, or rather to a notion hovering in a mystic obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension, that we no longer find any difficulty in making one particle of matter act upon another without immediate contact, ... through void space without any material link." The same could be said about anyone educated in a modern school system. Action at a distance is not that big a deal any more. We throw around concepts like "force" and "energy" as if knew what we were talking about. And that's just the average person; physicists, mathematicians and other specialists develop even more advanced intuitions in their areas.

There could be a case to be made for a core of innate intuitions, but what would be the significance of it? That we can transcend our nature-endowed intuitions is perhaps the defining trait of our species. So what is all this hand-wringing about the unintelligibility of the universe?

What's quite ironic in all of this - these so called "naturalists" and "empiricists" - who look at say, Hume, with much admiration, is that they don't read him, or they read him badly, not only with regard to mysteries, but regarding "innate ideas". — Manuel

"Naturalists" and "empiricists," with or without scare quotes, can admire Hume, if it pleases them, but why should they slavishly follow him in everything? What good are you as a philosopher if all you can do is repeat what someone else wrote three hundred years ago? Don't confuse philology with philosophy.

The point is that people like Sean Carroll or Daniel Dennett say they follow Hume, so they too "repeat what someone else wrote three hundred years ago", it's just that they do so quite poorly on elementary reading, literally.

Of course, all the classical figures made plenty of mistakes, that's clear. I don't think anyone today would be a Humean empiricist nor a Cartesian rationalist, much less a Platonist in the exact same terms and ideas they used back then.

We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We modify the terms for contemporary issues.

Admitting the mistakes they made - while being aware of the mistakes we're surely making now - it's evident they have things to teach us that we're forgotten or are thinking about in muddled way.

Philosophy is one of the few traditions that engages with people thousands of years ago and continues in the great debate concerning the most difficult questions people have been asking for a long time.

While not obligatory by any means, not engaging with such classics, likely makes one's philosophy poorer.

As I already said earlier, I don't think that Chomsky, in this essay at least, engages with the issues that animate debates between Nagel, Chalmers, McGinn, etc. on the one side, and Dennett, Churchlands, etc. on the other. Calling Chomsky's position "mysterianism" is misleading. Indeed, going by the evidence of this essay, I am not sure that he is even familiar with that other "mysterianism." — SophistiCat

Correct. He calls it a "truism", he doesn't like the term mysterian. Mcginn and others adopted it because the labels stuck. He has spoken about Dennett and Nagel and others in different essays.

If you think that he is advancing a "mysterian" thesis, how would you summarize it? It is not all that clear to me that he is developing a consistent thesis throughout the essay, but here is how I might tentatively reconstruct it. As Chomsky tells it, up until Newton, natural philosophy was following our intuitive understanding of how the world works. At one point he makes a connection with our innate intuitions, as revealed in psychological studies - folk physics and the like. More often, he talks about a "conception of the world as a machine"; how naturally intuitive that is is not obvious to me, but apparently he believes it to be so. — SophistiCat

It's the simple view that there are things we can know and things we cannot, given that we are natural creatures. Not in this essay, but in a different one, he distinguishes between "problems" and "mysteries", problems are those questions we can ask and (hopefully) answer. "Mysteries" are those we can ask and not answer, such as say, free will or how is it possible for matter to think? Then there are questions we can't even ask, because we don't know how to phrase them.

This would give an "updated" view on the intuitive aspect:

https://cprtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/COMPLETE-REPORT-Goswami-Childrens-Cognitive-Development-and-Learning.pdf

Particularly "naive physics" p.6.

This is a very dubious claim, by the way: to equate 18th century European philosophers' thinking with innate, animalistic intuitions. So, neither Aristotle nor three millennia of human civilization made a dent in their thinking? — SophistiCat

The 17th century scientific revolution was a reaction to Aristotelean physics, which postulated occult forces that no longer made sense. But of course, Aristotle was taken very seriously and was considered by many to be among the greatest of thinkers, no doubt about that. Aristotle was likely highlighting other aspects of our innate "folk psychology", putting emphasis on different aspects of the world, which were not satisfactory for many of the 17th century figures.

Action at a distance is not that big a deal any more. We throw around concepts like "force" and "energy" as if knew what we were talking about. And that's just the average person; physicists, mathematicians and other specialists develop even more advanced intuitions in their areas.

There could be a case to be made for a core of innate intuitions, but what would be the significance of it? That we can transcend our nature-endowed intuitions is perhaps the defining trait of our species. So what is all this hand-wringing about the unintelligibility of the universe? — SophistiCat

I agree that we just use these concepts without being troubled anymore. The issue, I think, is that we tend to be quite puzzled by QM - we don't understand how the heck the world could act like this. Yeah, well, we don't understand gravity either, we just got used to it. But it took over a hundred years to develop this attitude. Maybe in a few decades QM will simply be accepted as is, and we won't be puzzled by it anymore.

I'd only quibble that I don't think physicists have intuitions about how gravity works, they have intuitions about how theories about gravity work and how they can relate to other phenomena in the world. The intuition would be on the theory side.

The main topic of the essay, as I read it, is that we've lowered the standards of science, we no longer seek to understand the world, but seek theories about aspects of the world. That's a big lowering of standards of explanation.

As for your last question, I think, in the end, the point is going to be person dependent. For me, it's quite crazy that we understand so little and that the world exists at all, it's baffling to me. There's no reason to expect any species to evolve having a capacity to ask and answer questions about the world at all, there's no obvious benefit to doing these things.

Heck, we might be the only intelligent species in the universe, as some biologists say.

Which makes me grateful for the parts of the world we can understand to an extent, due to the advances of modern science.

I have tried to leave room for what I think of as language to be dependent on something more like what Chomsky thinks of as language, which looks more like a mathematical symbol system. I do wonder if the communication-first, social technology sort of view — which, as I said, is where my sympathies lie — can quite reach to certain fundamentals: the distribution of sign tokens into buckets via systems of differences (as in phonology and morphology); the ability to take a sound or a mark or a gesture as a sign at all, to treat it as referential.

It’s hard to shake the intuition that communication is late to the party in some respects, that certain key abilities must already be in place before we can talk about communication, language as a technology for solving coordination problems, and so on. So, as I said, I’ve tried to leave open the possibility that Chomsky’s little syntax engine, even if it’s really a machine for assembling a syntax engine, is one of those things, but that’s all. — Srap Tasmaner

This is why I am really partial to the treatment of grammar as being a matter of social normativity: it places language on a continuum with extra-linguistic behaviour (like gesture, or even music). If grammar is fundamentally a matter of protocol - a conventionally agreed "how" (messages are communicated) - then grammar is, fundamentally, a kind of (set of) behaviour (but not a matter of 'behaviouralism' insofar as behaviour here isn't a matter of stimulus-response, but of active communicative/lived problem-solving). In which case, knowing - or not knowing - whether a gesture is a sign, or a mark is referential, is not a linguistic behaviour, but a semiotic one, continuous with, say, tracking a bear in the woods by means of following its droppings and pawprints.

Dor again: "When conventionalizing a speech-act, what the members of the community agree on is this: “from now on, when we behave this way — when, in these particular contexts, we use this intonation, this word order, this gesture — we mean to ask a question (or make a promise, or tell a story)... When the members of a community mutually identify a norm, what they say to each other, across the experiential gap, is: “here we do the same thing.” (Incidentally, compare Wittgenstein on grammar: "The danger here, I believe, is one of giving a justification of our procedure where there is no such thing as a justification and we ought simply to have said: that’s how we do it".)

This 'embedding' of language in wider structures of living and communicating is correspondent with a broader and more encompassing conception of how learning works: Chomsky's - correct - aversion to behaviourialism shared with it its rather stilted conception of learning. But the kinds of (biological!) capacities involved in learning language are not necessarily language specific. Tomasello: "These skills are necessary for children to find patterns in the way adults use linguistic symbols ... are evolutionarily fairly old, probably possessed in some form by all primates at the very least. [They are] domain-general, in the sense that they allow organisms to categorize many different aspects of their worlds into a manageable number of kinds of things and events (although it seems very likely that when these skills are applied to linguistic symbols — as they are in humans but not in other primate species — some novel characteristics emerge)").

Which is all to agree that communication is late to the party and that it piggy-backs off capacities already developed for other uses, as you said. What seems specific about grammar is that it is a kind of 'calcified semantics': it deferentially specifies what *kind* of information we ought to convey in a message (if an [event] then what about a [temporality] or an [agent]? Was the [event] [passive] or [active]? Should the grammar be indexed to a first, second, or third person?, etc). In any case, it makes more naturalist sense than Chomsky's sui generis, deus ex machnia "account" of language.

No, of course not. Recursion is a property of the human language system. Binocular vision is a property of the human visual system. So yes, exploring this won't explain everything, but it's a research goal. — Xtrix

Ah right so you're just restating your claims without addressing anything I said. Well, fun's over I guess.