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
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
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
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
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.
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
But Chomsky is empirical, and is a scientist. — Xtrix
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
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
What he says is that this tradition should be fleshed out. — Manuel
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
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
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 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
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
What is the alternative, exactly? — Xtrix
"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. — Wayfarer
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
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
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.
"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."
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
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
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
What I'm observing is that the argument against Chomsky is that his theory of universal grammar is not a properly empirical theory — Wayfarer
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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