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.

Shrugs, I tend to believe they went to school for linguistics, as well people I know personally who definitely have went.

“A lot of people misunderstand what Universal Grammar (UG) is. UG is not about grammatical structures being in the brain at birth, or anything like that.

In its most simplified form, the argument for UG goes like this: all (non-mentally disabled) people learn languages. 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 languages. Let's call this mental property "Universal Grammar." That's it.

I don't think anyone really disagrees with the argument up to this point. I guess someone who doesn't think learning things is a mental process might, but that's kind of the fringe. Most people who disagree are usually just misunderstanding the argument. What people tend to actually disagree on is how much of UG is specific to humans, and how much of UG is specific to language and how much is domain general. Chomsky argues that UG is specific to humans and that there is at least one language specific feature in UG. Others argue that there aren't any language specific features in UG. (Fewer argue that it's not species specific, though there are some who do.)

A lot of people assume that being specific to language is an intrinsic part of UG, but it's not. Most people arguing against UG are actually arguing against UG being language specific: they are arguing that the mental property or properties that allow humans to learn languages are also applied in a variety of ways to tasks not involving language.”

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-universal-grammar-theory/answer/Michael-Wilson-11

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'.

Tigers are pre-wired to hunt. Humans, to speak. You're the one who's trying to make it into something spooky.

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 have no idea how you drew that interpretation from the quoted passage I linked, that talking about the capacity for language acquisition means it’s wholly biologically autonomous and determined or whatever.

I believe it is a mistake to understand "language" as one coherent whole, as if we could have a concept of language which would encompass all aspects of it. What is evident, is that there are two distinct aspects of language, the vocal and the written, which initially evolved to serve very different purposes. The vocal evolved with a social purpose of communication. And this type of language has been around for a very long time. There's no point to discussing the age of it, because evidence shows that even dinosaurs used sounds to communicate. The written evolved with the purpose of a memory aid, make a mark, a sign to remind yourself of something at a future time. This is a very personal purpose, and due to competitive motives, the memory aid, sign, might be designed with a view towards being difficult to understand by others. Therefore we have fundamentally incompatible elements of "language" if taken as a whole.

It is only when these two very distinct aspects of language became united in actual use, or used together, that there was any sort of "rapid" evolution of language. The rapid evolution can be described as due to the increased ability to pass the contents of one memory to another memory through written symbols, when marking symbols is adapted to a social context rather than a personal context. This implies a shift from making the symbols difficult to understand by others, for the purpose of hiding things from others, toward a universal intelligibility.

Further, it is wrong to characterize these two aspects as one internal, and the other external. As you can see, they both have internal aspects as well as external aspects. The difference between them is in the intent, or purpose, for which they evolved in the first place, one being communion oriented, the other selfish. The incompatibility between these two types of intent make "language" as a whole, unintelligible. When language is characterized as fundamentally communicative, the roots of the selfish aspect, the personal use of signs, is commonly excluded from "language" because it is not consistent with the communion oriented aspect. So those who take this view are prone to simple denial of this aspect. But this renders understanding of the selfish aspect of language, what a sign actually symbolizes, as completely unintelligible, such that any attempt at representing this, is filled with misunderstanding, such as Platonic realism.

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.

Well I wish there were better methods for me to cite for it look more official, but academics use these websites to share information and their perspective. I hate twitter’s format for instance, but academics for some reason gather there to talk more than any other website.

It looks to me you have an axe to grind on the subject to be honest. 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). Your portrayal of the ideas being debated, it’s hyperbolic.

. 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

That being said, I think what’s more relevant here is the “theory” part of that sentence. The statement was in response to the claim that Chomsky asserts language is “characterized by universals.” 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. Either you disagree with (1) and (2), which I assume you aren’t, or by “universals” you’re referring to universal features (like negation or noun/verb phrases). I assumed the latter — and if so, that’s misleading. — Xtrix

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. — StreetlightX

Recall what Chomsky said, and I was trying to emphasize: UG is the name for the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty.

Obviously a lot has to be clarified here. What is meant by "language"? What is meant by "faculty"? And what, exactly, is the theory about this genetic capacity?

You're right that i-language is a term made up by Chomsky. It is taken to consist, essentially, of merge -- the ability to take two objects and make a new one. (i.e., binary set formation.) Recursion is thought to be a property of the faculty of language -- just as binocular vision is a property of the human visual system.

"Faculty" refers to the system/capacity itself. Again, vision is a good example. We have a visual system, a visual faculty. There's no controversy about that -- any more than there is a circulatory system. Is it something you can cut out, like an actual organ? No. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I don't see how any of this is related to Aristotelianism.

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. — StreetlightX

This is just another mischaracterization, in my view. Of course there's a diversity of languages. There's a diversity of skin color as well. It's not that this fact is "epiphenomena," it's that it's trivial.

Likewise, no noumena are being proposed.

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 [...] — StreetlightX

I don't see how, really. Culture, society, and the environment in general bring out all kinds of features of human beings, not just language. If you restrict the human ability to be around a language, they will not acquire the ability to speak. If you blindfold a human from birth, they won't acquire vision. The environment is extremely important. But there is still, nevertheless, a biological/genetic component -- and that's true for everything in biology. So if it's true for everything, it's going to be true for language.

In any property, there is a genetic component and the data from the environment. There's no way around it. It's true that this isn't saying much, but that's the basic approach to studying any biological property -- whether insect navigation or aviation or the visual system. Why shouldn't it apply to the language capacity? What's metaphysical about it?

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. — StreetlightX

It will tell you little about how it evolved perhaps, but that wasn't the point. The point was about language's function. Your claim is that it's for social communication. "Function" is a fuzzy word, of course (what's the function of the bone? To store calcium, to keep the body from falling to the ground...) -- but still, when asking this question we tend to look at how the object in question is used. When we do so, it seems to be more about thought than about speech. Does this tell us how it evolved? No.

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'. — StreetlightX

We acquire the ability to see through our interaction with the environment. We can then shut our eyes and imagine all kinds of things, internally. This tells us nothing about the human visual system.

No one is debating whether there's an environmental/social component to language.

Chomsky argues that UG is specific to humans and that there is at least one language specific feature in UG. Others argue that there aren't any language specific features in UG. (Fewer argue that it's not species specific, though there are some who do.) — Saphsin

Exactly.

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

Of course you can substitute almost anything for it. It's a truism. Which is why the arguments against it tend to be absurd -- they're simply misunderstanding it.

Again, in any system of growth and development -- the visual system, the immune system, the circulatory system, or the language system -- there is going to be external data (which have an effect on how it develops -- like in the visual system, where if you manipulate early visual stimulation you get totally different visual systems), some sort of genetic component, and natural law.

So for language, the data could be from English or Portuguese, the genetic component is what's being researched (UG), and natural law will be things like computational efficiency.

That's not enough to answer everything, but it's the framework for any answer -- and used in all the rest of the biological sciences.

To argue this is metaphysics, or theology, or creationism, etc., is simply hyperbole.

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'? — StreetlightX

That's like asking if there's a genetic component to the Internet or the Post Office. Is there a genetic component to a hammer?

If you think this is the same as asking about the genetic component of language, or vision, or walking -- then yes, you've completely lost the plot.

EDIT: I posted a response to this thread but I got a heart palpitations attack this afternoon and cant continue any discussions. I just need to focus on relaxing hobbies atm.

don't smoke pot, cigarettes or drink caffeine

Yep, but the basic idea is nothing strange. You're born with an innate capacity for walking, but the structures needed for walking won't form until you try to walk. And if you never try, you'll never walk. Innate capacity doesn't mean assured ability.

Doesn't mean Chomsky is right, just means his view is entirely possible.

Jeez! Those really suck.

Hope you're OK.

If you have anti-anxiety meds, that could help.

Relax and come back when you're feeling better. Good luck.

You're born with an innate capacity for walking, but the structures needed for walking won't form until you try to walk. — frank

Exactly -- not until you've grown in a normal environment. Not all people can walk, not all birds can fly, etc. -- there are exceptions, depending on environment or genetic disability. But that there's a capacity and a genetic component is just assumed in any other biological system. When it comes to language, or human cognition generally, there's an impulse to become irrational.

So yes, maybe language is primarily a system of communication, and evolved as such. Maybe not. But that there exists in the human brain a capacity for acquiring language is hardly metaphysics.

I think a question that should be asked is, is language something that can be understood in principle solely through the lens of biological evolution? I notice one of the criticisms of universal grammar is that 'it is in conflict with biology: it cannot have evolved by standardly accepted neo-Darwinian evolutionary principles.' Again, that criticism is grounded in the empiricist bias of science - that explanations have to be grounded on observable, biological grounds, or else they're suspiciously like the:

'faculty of the imagination', or 'a faculty of sensibility' - typically attributed to the Soul or the 'Rational Intellect' — StreetlightX

and are suspicious on those grounds alone. There's a 'deep structure' right there.

Note also the problem of recursion: that language and rational abstraction are themselves the basis of whatever explanation naturalism wants to articulate. So, how to explain the very faculty which enables naturalistic explanations? To put it another way, what naturalistic explanation might there be for the assumptions that naturalism starts with? Let's not forget that naturalism begins with excluding certain categories of ideas from consideration. So, maybe universal grammar is too close to scholastic realism for comfort, being too close to the 'innate ideas' of platonism which were rejected at the outset by naturalist dogma.

What if, with the advent of language, speech and abstract thought, h. sapiens has begun to transcend the biological? That is, to enter a domain which is not reducible to the kinds of factors that evolutionary biology comprehends? That's what I think is behind a lot of this pushback.

But that there exists in the human brain a capacity for acquiring language is hardly metaphysics. — Xtrix

:up:

But that there exists in the human brain a capacity for acquiring language is hardly metaphysics. — Xtrix

'Interpretations of physics' are metaphysics. Metaphysics is a lot more than what is in textbooks about metaphysics.

But that there exists in the human brain a capacity for acquiring language is hardly metaphysics. — Xtrix

Isn't the question whether that capacity is specialized to language?

There's neurophysiological evidence for this:

"Consider speech processing. Babies are immensely attracted to language. They probably begin to learn it inside the womb, because even newborns can distinguish sentences in their mother tongue from those in a foreign language. Language acquisition happens so fast that a long line of
prestigious scientists, from Darwin to Chomsky and Pinker, has postulated a special organ, a “language acquisition device” specialized for language learning and unique to the human brain. My wife, Ghislaine Dehaene Lambertz, and I tested this idea directly, by using fMRI to look inside babies’ brains while they listened to their maternal language. Swaddled onto a comfortable mattress, their ears protected from the machine’s noise by a massive headset, two-month-old infants quietly listened to infant-directed speech while we took snapshots of their brain activity every three seconds.

To our amazement, the activation was huge and definitely not restricted to the primary auditory area. On the contrary, an entire network of cortical regions lit up (figure 34). The activity nicely traced the contours of the classical language areas, at exactly the same place as in the adult’s brain. Speech inputs were already routed to the left hemisphere’s temporal and frontal language areas, while equally complex stimuli such as Mozart music were channeled to other regions of the right hemisphere. Even Broca’s area, in the left inferior prefrontal cortex, was already stirred up by language. This region was mature enough to activate in two-month-old babies. It was later found to be one of the earliest-maturing and best-connected regions of the baby’s prefrontal cortex."

Consciousness and the Brain - Stanislas Dehaene

pp.253

More info can be found in this very interesting book, pp.253-257

http://www.softouch.on.ca/kb/data/Consciousness%20and%20the%20Brain.pdf

It is curious not that the functions of a human brain are ‘localized’ to some degree, but that they are localized in the same places, which suggests existing and inherited specialization waiting to be activated rather than very general learning capacities. But maybe not, depending on what we take ‘activation’ to mean. After all, linguistic ability being localized is not quite the same thing as there being a ‘language acquisition module’ of some kind — which of the linguistic modules is the one responsible for acquisition, and what happens to it after the lion’s share of your language learning has been done?

Anyway, leaving all that to one side, what does this evident brain specialization, however the details work out, tell us about the nature of language?

Very little, I think. Maybe sometime in the future some great technology will arise that may help us make sense of it, but I'm skeptical.

My take on this topic - which tends to be controversial - is that aside from hints and suggestions, looking at the brain tells us very little about higher cognitive faculties. It's not nothing, obviously, but little in terms of what we would like to know, such as the question you are asking.

What's curious here, about this activation pattern, is that (I don't think it's in this book, but in another essay whose name I've forgotten) similar sounding noise doesn't activate it. For instance, if I say:

Under space roaring goes doesn't anywhere nothing.

Here each individual word makes sense, but the sentence is gibberish.

On the other hand, if I quote Chomsky's famous:

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

The sentence makes syntactic sense but doesn't mean anything. I'm blanking on the study, but if I find it, I'll post it here.

When they do tests with subjects, they show them ordinary languages that they don't know. If it's a human language, the brain activates. But if they produce sentences that breaks these rules, the subjects don't register it as a language.

This of course leads to even deeper questions, such as, why don't we register every sound as something significant and meaningful and say, don't confuse others sounds with language? There must be an innate property we have, that accounts for this.

So other than a general comment about, human language being an extremely sophisticated, unique to humans' phenomena, I can't really answer the question.

great book, thanks for it. :up:

Yeah, the book and science are very good.

His philosophy isn't, it's the type of thinking you and I very much disagree with.

But don't let that get in the way of the rest of it, it's pretty interesting. :cool:

similar sounding noise doesn't activate it — Manuel

I’m almost certain there’s something similar with dogs. Did you hear about that little study? Somebody put a few dozen dogs into an MRI and had people speak to them. The result was that the dogs were responding not just to tone of voice, as one might speculate, but to specific words, because if you said some nonsense or some inappropriate words with the same tone and prosody as you usually said, “Good dog, Ginger!” the brain did not light up the same way. Dogs are able to learn to recognize specific words, as I suppose any serious dog trainer might tell you.

On the point of learnability: there are certainly things we want to say based just on the fact that language can be learned — that we must acquire a system for producing and consuming language, on demand, not just a bunch of language, not just, say, the meanings of a large number of sentences. Just as interesting, it must be acquirable in stages and usable, if limited, at each step of acquisition.<note> That’s a whole different sort of structure, the sequencing of acquisition.

I know that for concepts there’s work suggesting children generally start roughly in the middle on a spectrum of abstraction: you learn “dog” before “mammal” or “cocker spaniel”. I don’t know how the language story goes, but there are things about language use you clearly have to have some language to learn. (This is nearby the old criticism of older speculation about language acquisition, that people will tend to imagine it as learning another language, having already mastered one, and all the habits of thought that go with it, rather than genuinely imagining what it’s like to start from nothing.)

It’s not perfectly clear what philosophical hay can be made of any of this, especially since mistaken views about mind or language that might be corrected by the science were not exactly philosophy anyway, but armchair science.

I suppose what I’m wondering is whether learning more about how language is implemented will tell us more about what exactly it is — and that’s not perfectly clear, though it seems like it should. As noted above, we already know a little something of the constraints on what language can be just from knowing that it must be something that can be physically instantiated in a human being, and be acquirable. I suppose, in a sense, the controversy around Chomsky’s views is precisely about what could not conceivably be acquired and must simply be inherited.


<note>
(There is exactly one programming language I know of that took this lesson to heart — Raku, nee Perl 6 — because its designer, Larry Wall, did linguistics as an undergrad: you’re expected to speak “baby Raku” at the beginning, and be successful at that, and only gradually add more sophisticated constructions as you learn them.)

I'll get back to you, have to go.

:victory:

But that there exists in the human brain a capacity for acquiring language is hardly metaphysics.
— Xtrix

Isn't the question whether that capacity is specialized to language? — Srap Tasmaner

That the capacity to acquire language is specialized to language? I don't quite understand the question, I guess. Are you referring to things like mathematics and music (i.e., other human properties that it may be more specialized towards?)