Western philosophy is a European folk tradition that has remained practiced, pretty much unchanged, since Socrates (as portrayed by Plato).

I'm all too happy to maintain that philosophers have long known that this is exactly what what happens in their discourse, and that Witty was simply making explicit what every competent philosopher has known implicitly since time immemorial (Wittgenstein projected, as it were, his own naivety onto the philosophers whom he never read). — StreetlightX

I'm reminded of Schopenhauer's three stages of the acceptance of an idea! Not that I'm complaining.

But I think that the history of philosophy is simply not possible without the kind of semantic blindness Wittgenstein puts his finger on. That is, if philosophers know this, they sure act like they don't.

Great video. There's more insight in ten minutes there than in the body of work of most philosophers.

I agree that linguistic analysis is 'about the world,' but it's not clear to me how it could not be, and so not clear what this call is supposed to do.

That is, if you study what's talked about and how, you study what's talked about. I don't see how one could even do the 'linguistic analysis alone,' unless you mean actually doing empirical linguistics, which turns language into its own special domain, but this isn't what philosophers have ever done, to my knowledge, except maybe some very recent philosophers of language.

Linguistic analysis tends to be relevant to philosophical problems specifically, because philosophical problems are not typically about the way the world is. They instead ask about categories, with questions framed like: "Suppose there is a case X. Is X an instance of Y?" There is no real interesting way to answer this question, since it just depends on how the word "Y" is used. The philosopher doesn't intend to inquire into anything regarding the world in asking this question, and the method itself presupposes that one knows 'all there is to know' by the presentation of the example. The question itself only ever serves to move around the way words like "Y" are used, and whether they apply to case X or not – and so there is no other answer that one can give the philosopher but a linguistic one.

Religion tends to be more interesting than philosophy, because it's less afraid of substantive claims (as opposed to 'conceptually necessary' ones that venture little) & it's more deeply tied to mankind's cultural origins and deepest fears / desires / etc. It's also generally a culturally more well-developed realm of human thought / action. Philosophy has some advantages, but if anything mixing the two debases religion, not vice-versa.

The length of a reply isn't directly proportional to its seriousness or insightfulness. Sometimes you need to ask clarificatory questions so that you know what your interlocutor is talking about.

Long, angry ideological screeds are often less 'engaged' than brief Socratic questions, because they show a lack of seriousness in actually listening to the person you're talking to (and being willing to learn something).

Anyway, I'm leaving, but my advice would be: read another article.

I do, I'm a linguist. All of your responses in this thread just puzzle me, to be honest. It takes less effort to talk to someone than to freak out and proclaim them to be an ignoramus or idiot any time they say something. And you'll note people have been reading what you've cited in this thread, and have critiqued it as well! But you are not engaging with what anyone says.

I didn't ask for an explanation of basic debates in linguistics, though. I asked you a specific question with respect to what you're claiming. And it's not a question that can be answered by telling someone to read up on functionalist grammar.

It doesn't even make sense as a response to what I said. It's a link to the Wikipedia page for functional grammar.

The functionalist doesn't deny this, though – the issue is what the shape of this capacity is, and what its domain-generality is.

My experience in studying different languages has always been that the initial shock of diversity gives way to a feeling of familiarity as you begin to recognize the same several hundred elements all shuffled about in different ways, and that is what is so intriguing to the generativist. That may be due to the biased sample of what I've happened to learn and study, but the commonalities even across typologically unrelated languages are almost disturbing from a purely functionalist perspective – they aren't just similarities in function, but similarities in weird formal features, that do not have prima facie functional explanations.

Are you serious? :confused:

So the reason language evolved, was to be used as language? I don't know how to read this except as a tautology, so I'm genuinely perplexed by what you're saying.

Or are you just, in a roundabout way, saying that language evolved for the purpose of communication? But this is just to repeat a take on the question the thread started with, without offering any interesting support for the idea. There isn't much content to the rest of the post.

The exaptation thesis has to ignore all of this, because it is utterly committed to the idea that language evolved for means other than language. — StreetlightX

I don't understand this. What does it mean for language to be the means for which language evolved?

Quite literally, he has to be committed, on pain of incoherence, to the insane idea that language initially evolved for means other than language. Which would be fine for a great deal of other exaptations, except that language is so incredibly specialized that the suggestion is pure madness. — StreetlightX

I don't understand why this is insane. Exaptation is normal. The exception clause that language is special makes no sense to me – it's 'specialized?' Huh?

Obviously, that doesn't accurately describe the situation! Again, you shouldn't be getting your opinions about a movement from its ideological opponents – be better informed and fairer-minded!

Like, this is simply a preposterous statement on the face of it, and the only way to understand how anyone could hold such a view is to recognise the grip of ideology at work. This is the kind of rubbish one can come up with when one hews to Chomskian views on language, one that requires one to ignore an ocean of cognitive dissonance. In the face of this kind of tripe, one has to wonder, who exactly is being hyperbolic?

And you really need to drop the idea that Chomskian linguistics is scientific. It's simply not. It's self-immunizing against all counter-evidence, and its empirical basis is limited to nothing other than sheer speculation. It's creationism in the realm of linguistic theory. — StreetlightX

This is just an ideological screed.

I don't know what 'human facilities' are meant to be, but I do believe that language must be studied in the context of it's history, development, and socio-cultural specificities, along with it's biological and cognitive aspects. I believe in a kind of wholism and embeddedness of language, if it could be put that way. The exact opposite, that is, of the Chomskian program which seeks to isolate, dehistoricize, desocialize, and place language under the air-tight seal of a hermeticism for nothing more than ideological prejudice. — StreetlightX

I mostly agree with this, and I'm sympathetic with the idea that patterns seen across the world's languages can't be explained without reference to historical facts – it seems to me that a lot of the distribution of grammatical structures is a historical accident, albeit often a 'deep' one rooted thousands of years in the past. Why do so many Austronesian languages have a certain article system, for example? Yes, a synchronic psychological account can tell us how it is possible, or plausible, for a language to adopt such a thing, but the sample of languages we have is just a 'random' historical sample that happened upon a bunch of clusters of features in different families, decided some thousands of years ago – and we do not know what an 'alternate history' would look like, and what it would tell us about human language capacity.

But as it stands, this is just a heuristic dislike of the flavor of a research program, based on (it looks like, inaccurate) reports about it from its ideological opponents (ideological opponents, in general, cannot be trusted to report the theories of their adversaries!). Flavors and heuristics are just not what we decide these things based off, and what one 'favors' is not particularly interesting in the long run.

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.

The article you linked to is...well, embarrassing, frankly. It seems to imply, early on, that Chomskyans thought that a universal grammar literally meant that all the world's languages had a structure similar to the European languages the researchers spoke (not only is this not true, but Chomsky was a scholar of Hebrew, a Semitic language, and generativists were early on studying languages like Japanese – that languages existed in a wide variety was utterly common knowledge, of which everyone was aware, including him and the other generativists!) The article also repeats the myth about Pirahã.

You should know you're not getting a good depiction of your purported ideological opponent, and you should know this because if you want to criticize something, you have an interest that it's represented accurately to you.

Chomsky is most certainly not famous for that –

Generative grammar has always had an interest in linguistic acquisition. 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). In fact the entire point of postulating UG to begin with was as a means to explain child language acquisition.

And in fact looking only at 'actual language use' prevents one from talking about this explanatory adequacy, because actual use will be consistent with any number of grammars, and the actual use of the language in its developed state is consistent with any number of hypotheses about how that state comes to be in the child.

No, the conditions under which children successfully learn their first languages is very well-studied.

What you quoted was just the more general point, though – clearly the issue can't be that something appeals to potentials or dispositions. There would be little science without such appeals.

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

But this is just not true. For example, exposing a chimp to Portuguese will not result in the chimp learning it; but exposing a Pirahã person to it does result in them learning it in the normal way. The presence or absence of a potential is revealed when, under the hypothesized conditions, it actualizes or fails to actualize.

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

I've already told you what my issue is, though, twice – I can't tell from what you've written whether you understand Chomsky's objection, and so I can't address what you say until I know whether you do, and if you don't understand it, what you don't understand.

That's why I've asked you to tell me, in your own words, what it is Chomsky is objecting to with the Pirahã case, and why.

––––

So let's suppose you're not willing to do this – I don't know why, or why you're so angry at me. I'll give it a shot as to what I think, based on what you've said, you don't understand. Chomsky's hypothesis is about a language faculty present in human beings, not about the features of a particular language. Therefore, a particular language lacking a certain quality cannot, in principle, act as evidence against it. This is, in my own words, what I think Chomsky was saying.

Now, you've said this renders the theory unfalsifiable. But that is not right – it does rule out a specific kind of data as irrelevant to it, but this is true of all theories! They are relevant to some things, and not to others. 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. This doesn't make the hypothesis unfalsifiable – it just clarifies what it is about. The reason that I wanted you to restate Chomsky's position to me, before saying this, is that perhaps you already understand this, and don't need to be told. But I can't tell from what you've said whether this is so, because your criticisms do not unambiguously evince an understanding of this point.

–––––

I also need to stress, again – the Pirahã claims are not even true! The language does have recursive structures, some of which are documented in Everett's own work. It's important to keep that in mind.

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

Chomsky does not claim that language is disconnected from these things. 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. Or at least, it would take a huge amount of argument not present in this thread.

To the point where the only thing left standing is the thin gruel of 'recursion', which itself is utterly controversial. — StreetlightX

I don't understand – is the Chomskyan program non-empirical and unfalsifiable, or is it controversial and flying the face of empirical evidence? Surely it can't be both? This is the problem, when we don't stop to clarify what it is we take ourselves to be attacking.

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

I don't want to know what you said – I want to know what Chomsky said. What, in your own words, is Chomsky's objection? Not a criticism of it – a statement of the position itself.

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

Sure, I agree. It's a substantive speculative hypothesis. Maybe it's crazy – but I think crazy hypotheses are still fair game, while the field is open.

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

When you don't know what's happened, you often start off by fielding possibilities, and asking what would have to be true for them to hold up. Later, when you know more, you can see how the speculations hold up. Refusing to entertain the possibilities off the bat isn't a good idea.

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

Can you reexplain in your own words what Chomsky's objection was, or can you repeat back to me my construal of it? I ask because I can't tell from this post whether you understand the objection. If you don't, then your anger may be due to a misunderstanding.

There's a misunderstanding here. What would have falsified Chomsky's claim would have been that Pirahã people were unable to natively acquire a recursive language. This isn't so, since they obviously can speak Portuguese. It's not that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable – it's that the target of falsification was misplaced.

But the claims about Pirahã are false anyway.

The reason there are degrees in philosophy is because of an intellectual tradition in the Western world. There is no top-down function which philosophers are in service to.

There are more and less productive ways to make people think. I can't shake the feeling that a lot of analytic philosophy from this period didn't go anywhere, because nobody could ever figure out what the arguments were, or where they went. It is interesting, but often being interesting just isn't enough.

Philosophers cannot resolve political problems. No one calling for this is genuinely interested in 'truth.' That is what you need to get.

This sounds like a ploy to politicize philosophy. I would recommend avoiding it. The political spats will fade; [some of] the philosophical results will still be of interest later.

This is a tough paper. Like many analytic papers of its time, it expects the reader to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and prefers to slyly imply that an argument has been made, and that the work has already been done somewhere else (where is a good question).

Interesting, but it's hard to put too much stock in it. (I get confused as to what exactly is being attacked or rejected in these high-level debates anyway).

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

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. What details we demand depends on the state of our knowledge, which at present is too poor to demand fully worked-out stories.

I think that, given how little we know about the origins of language, speculation about it is appropriate at this stage.

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.

I'm also not sure that thinking about language in terms of its 'purpose,' communication or otherwise, is helpful. There is probably no well-defined 'purpose' for which it arose.

Maybe so. That is why Cavell and Rorty defected to literary criticism – I think they really believed it, and put their money where their mouth was. Many of the ordinary language philosophers effectively defected to linguistics, psychoanalysis, logic, or theology.

I wonder about it myself – the more one learns about philosophy, the less appealing it is. What if the blunter statements of the analytics are right, and philosophy isn't really any more contentful than New Age stuff? I am becoming more sympathetic to the position, and maybe the solution is not to reform the discipline, but simply to ignore it and do something else.

It is hard to draw boundaries, as with most traditions. But the advent of Moore looks like a hard break to me, and then around 1970, with the rise of Lewis and Kripke, seemed to be when that tradition more or less started to wither. I'm not sure why the label stayed the same – what analytic philosophers have done post-Lewis and Kripke doesn't bear too much resemblance to what they did before (and it strikes me as a lot more naive & less interesting: new scholastics, but without the allure of the divine!).

I would say the Frege-Russel line is really just an extension of Boole, who is the forerunner of modern logic, and inventor of the notions of compositional meaning, truth conditions, universes of discourse, etc.

Well, Moore is a weird case. I think that the commentaries on him were what really spurred ordinary language philosophy, but Moore himself wasn't too taken with them.

As for Moore himself, his main feat, as I see it, was to look at philosophical questions in the same register that you look at any other question. It sounds silly, but philosophers conduct their discussions in an alternate register, where the rules of reality don't really apply, and are bracketed for the sake of discussion. In other words, philosophers don't really take their own questions seriously, and don't really care about what they are talking about, or how it matches up with everything else they talk about. What is remarkable about Moore is that he simply took philosophical claims at their word, and when you do that, it becomes apparent how puzzling, and utterly batshit, they are.

This led, ultimately, to a new way of doing philosophy, which began not in puzzlement at the world, but in puzzlement at philosophers -- what could possibly cause someone to think and talk this way? And this in turn led to the fruitful program of seeing the conditions under which we make claims, how things get their meanings to begin with. Everything from positivism to quietism follows from that, and it seems to me to have been much more insightful and edifying than traditional philosophy.

There seem to be two roots of analytic philosophy. One traces to George Boole, and the other traces to G. E. Moore. The two roots don't have much to do with each other, but interestingly the tradition seemed to synthesize them at several points. Moore seems to me to be the most important impetus for the tradition, and his massive, massive influence is under-appreciated (I would say, for instance, that at the end of the day Wittgenstein is really just a Moorean), which is odd, because Moore himself is not all that interesting in my view, but he inspired one of the most interesting traditions in the world, seemingly by accident.

I really like the analytic tradition, especially from roughly Moore to Rorty. From the late 70's on, I'm not much of a fan. But the positivists and ordinary language philosophers are especially interesting to me, among modern philosophers.

What little continental philosophy I've read hasn't caught my interest.

The reason long posts tend to be bad is that people generally can't go for a long time without making mistakes, so it gives you the chance to confuse yourself badly with no one to stop you. What impresses me most about debate in general and in philosophy in particular, after many years witnessing it, is how bad it tends to be. This is its core feature and the one that needs to be made top priority if you ever want conversation to get anywhere (I am skeptical of the value of conversation for this reason – people just can't really do it).

You also get screeds, soapboxing, 'big picture' stuff that doesn't really amount to anything concrete, etc. It's impossible to get people to say something coherent and substantive when they have free rein.