UG is the name for the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty. — Xtrix

There is no, and cannot in principle be, a ‘genetic component of the language faculty’. That's the point. Quite literally, there is nothing biological that corresponds to anything like ‘a language faculty’, nor could there be, not even in principle. This may sound wild to your ears, but it is no wilder than saying that ‘there is no genetic component of the faculty of driving drunk on a Sunday’: there are certainly biological prerequisites without which one cannot drive drunk on a Sunday, but the level of specificity packed into the idea of a ‘drive-drunk-on-a-Sunday-faculty’ is as arbitrary and only slightly more stupid than the idea of a language faculty.

Tomasello said it best: “children are not born with a universal, dedicated tool for learning grammar. Instead they inherit the mental equivalent of a Swiss Army knife: a set of general-purpose tools—such as categorisation, the reading of communicative intentions, and analogy making, with which children build grammatical categories and rules from the language they hear around them.” That we can learn language, is, at it were, a bonus, what in some biological vocabulary they call a ‘kludge’. Language-ing is, as it so happens, just one of the things we can do - like walking or shitting - given the kind of beings we have evolved as. Of course this doesn’t preclude the fact that, having been the result of a kludge which has contingently conferred evolutionary advantage, evolution selects for adaptations that refine said kludge. Hence why no one looks for a walking or shitting faculty - and why anyone who does ought to be laughed out the room, as one should laugh Chomsky's writings on language out of existence.

This is why the faux-innocent counter-objection that UG is merely the search for the biological pre-reqs of language is anything but innocent: it already builds in a one-to-one mapping from biological capacity to language. But such one-to-one mapping is both an illusion and a metaphysical - that is, entirely non-empirical, in fact anti-empirical - assumption. Rather, the mapping is many-to-many: there are range of biological capacities, many developed for things far removed from language, that, when put to use for a range of linguistic abilities (not ‘language’), happen to allow for language. Incidentally this is far more plausible given what we understand of evolution than Chomsky’s just-so magic theory of spooky creationism.

Again, the idea is that Chomskites like to push is that while the ‘content’ of UG is up for grabs - so up for grabs that speculation over that content is the effectively the same as scholastic arguments over the properties of God, just like the theology it is, with no agreement and constant, un-empirical speculation - it is nonetheless the case that something will correspond to it. The problem for them - and you - is the details. But point is that there is not and cannot be, even in principle, anything that could correspond to it. It’s not the details that are up for grabs. It’s the entire research project, which is trash.

This is just another mischaracterization, in my view. — Xtrix

Your view, as usual, is wrong. From Chomsky’s Language and Nature: “A rational Martian scientist would probably find the variation rather superficial, concluding that there is one human language with minor variants”. This ‘one human language’, is of course, Chomsky’s noumenal language: its one no one has ever seen, said to be the Linguistic Soul that animates the actual diversity of real languages, which are just so many accidents that happen to be birthed from the Linguistic Substance buried at the core of humans. That anyone could read Chomsky and not see in him the shitty speculations of an armchair metaphysician is beyond me.

Ahh, Tomasello is such a king:

I think it is important that the oddness of the UG hypothesis about language acquisition be emphasized; it has basically no parallels in hypotheses about how children acquire competence in other cognitive domains. For example, such skills as music and mathematics are, like language, unique to humans and universal among human groups, with some variations. But no one has to date proposed anything like Universal Music or Universal Mathematics, and no one has as yet proposed any parameters of these abilities to explain cross-cultural diversity (e.g., +/- variables, which some cultures use, as in algebra, and some do not — or certain tonal patterns in music). It is not that psychologists think that these skills have no important biological bases — they assuredly do — it is just that proposing an innate UM does not seem to be a testable hypothesis, it has no interesting empirical consequences beyond those generated by positing biological bases in general, and so overall it does not help us in any way to get closer to the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of these interesting cognitive skills

https://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/Benjamins/Tomasello_Evidence_StudLang_2004_1555709.pdf

This whole for page paper is worth reading. It shows nicely just how utterly fucking rubbish UG is.

Right. The question was whether more general learning mechanisms could account for learning language as well. More or less as old-timey empiricists might have imagined.

But it looks like a bad question to me now. We already know (as @Manuel reminded me) that linguistic functionality is localized in the brain, predictably so in normal, healthy brains, so it seems to be more a matter of activation, rather than learning or acquiring. — At least for certain aspects of linguistic capability.

Do we know something similar about mathematics? It would make sense. Music I would guess is more complicated. (I remember hearing many years ago that when listening to music, it’s the left brain for musicians and the right for non-musicians that lights up, or some such thing.)

I’m honestly not that interested in the brain science. I am interested in what philosophical hay we expect to make of all this. Thoughts? Why should current findings in neurolinguistics matter to us?

But no one has to date proposed anything like Universal Music or Universal Mathematics

Isn't mathematics universal already?

As a biological faculty?

UG is the name for the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty.
— Xtrix

There is no, and cannot in principle be, a ‘genetic component of the language faculty’. That's the point. — StreetlightX

Try this argument with the visual system or the nervous system. Also complex, and also involves genetics.

True, language could be magic. But that gets us nowhere, so I'm not interested.

children are not born with a universal, dedicated tool for learning grammar. — StreetlightX

That's not UG.

Children are born with a capacity to acquire language. Primates are not. This is why children can learn a language and non-human primates cannot.

Whatever is meant by "grammar" here is not the claim being made. Unless one takes grammar to mean "merge," which is an actual claim being made.

It’s the entire research project, which is trash. — StreetlightX

So the biological sciences are likewise "trash." No need to study the genetics of the visual system, or the navigational systems of insects, etc. That's "metaphysics."

It's clear you just don't know what you're talking about. You're welcome to create some straw man and hurl accusations about -- but it's irrelevant.

“A rational Martian scientist would probably find the variation rather superficial, concluding that there is one human language with minor variants”. This ‘one human language’, is of course, Chomsky’s noumenal language — StreetlightX

So the fact that a human baby can learn any language on earth is irrelevant, apparently.

The capacity for language is a universal human property, regardless of whether it's English or Swahili -- which is trivial. A Martian would indeed look down and conclude the same thing about skin -- all humans have it, despite different colors.

I’m honestly not that interested in the brain science. I am interested in what philosophical hay we expect to make of all this. Thoughts? Why should current findings in neurolinguistics matter to us? — Srap Tasmaner

Because it's the best we can do to study thought. Language isn't the same as thought, of course, but it's related.

But no one has to date proposed anything like Universal Music or Universal Mathematics

Isn't mathematics universal already? — Wayfarer

Indeed.

Tomasello wants to make a name for himself by going after Chomsky, but is as convincing as Everett -- who's a complete fraud.

The reality is that there has been much written about both mathematics and music -- including ideas about how they may be piggybacking off of language.

Question: Why do objects fall to the ground and the moon revolve around the earth?

Answer (Newton): Objects with mass exert a force (called gravity) on other objects with mass.

Question: Why do objects with mass behave this way?

Answer (Einstein): Objects with mass bend space (the force of gravity is an illusion).

Question: Why do objects with mass bend space?

Answer: ? (remains unexplained)

Explanations, the above count as such, lead to an infinite regress (of explanations explaining explanations). In other words, there's always room in science for mysterianism and mysterianism itself, as an alternative explanatory scheme, is susceptible to this infinite regress - mysterianism within mysterianism within mysterianism...

The observation about social context is actually uncontroversial with regard to communication — you can’t study communication without social context, that’s virtual tautology. So, of course, the study of communication takes it into account. But it’s also uncontroversial that the study of the mechanisms that we put to use in action, whatever it is, that study typically ignores social context and quite rightly so. For example, for those of you who know this work, the classic work on neurophysiology of vision, say, Hubel and Wiesel’s work, for which they got the Nobel Prize.

…

Or in fact virtually all of the fundamental work that aims to determine the properties of the modules of cognition at whatever level it’s conducted whether it’s neurophysiological, behavioural, perceptual, whatever, – it ignores social context totally, just following the normal methods of the sciences. However, we’re instructed that the study of mechanisms used, say, in the examples I mentioned, these ECP examples, or the study of, for example, vowel harmony in Turkish, or of the relative scope of operators, or, in fact, everything else about language has to depart from the scientific norm. That’s a principle. It cannot follow the methods of the sciences.

Well, this kind of critique, which is quite widespread, is, in fact, accompanied by a novel concept of science that has emerged in the computational cognitive sciences and related areas of linguistics. With this new notion of science, which is all over the literature, an account of some phenomena is taken to be successful to the extent that it approximates unanalysed data.

…

The major cognitive science journals, and general journals like Science, regularly publish articles triumphantly listing dramatic failures which are called successes because they accord with this new concept, which is unique in the history of the sciences and very radically restricted, in fact, almost specifically to language. So, nobody would suggest it for physics or bee communication or almost anything else, because it’s so obviously absurd that people would just laugh. In fact, it’s not even suggested for systems as close to a language as arithmetical capacity. So, you don’t study arithmetical capacity by constructing models based on a statistical analysis of masses of observations of what happens when, say, people try to multiply numbers in their heads without external memory. At least, I hope nobody does that.

Enfield, in the same article, he also puts forth a far-reaching thesis which is quite standard in the cognitive sciences and a very clear expression of the non-existence hypothesis, I’ll quote him. He says: “Language is entirely grounded in a constellation of cognitive capacities that each, taken separately, has other functions as well.” Notice, that’s kind of an updating of the nineteen-fifties position that I quoted. Well, that means language exists only in the sense that there exists such a thing as today’s weather, which is also a constellation of many factors that operate independently.

…

There’s another influential version of the idea that language doesn’t exist. It’s sort of highly dominant in language acquisition studies and the leading figure is Michael Tomasello. So, in a recent handbook of child development he explains that there aren’t any linguistic rules and there’s nothing to say about descriptive regularities, say, like those ECP examples. Rather, there’s nothing at all except a structured inventory of meaningful linguistic constructions, all of them meaningful linguistic symbols that are used in communication. That’s his topic, there being no such thing as language. The inventory is structured only in the sense that its elements — words, idioms, sentences like the one I’m now speaking — they’re all acquired by processes of pattern finding, schematization and abstraction that are common to all primates. A few other processes, all left quite obscure. So, in other words, these ECP examples that I mentioned, according to this story, are learned just the way a child learns ‘horse’, or an idiom like ‘how do you do’ or, say, ‘kick the bucket’ meaning ‘die’, and so on, or this sentence, they’re all learned exactly the same way. And the child somehow learns that the ECP violation is not usable for communication, even though the thought is fine, although the other expression somehow is. And presumably, the expressions could have virtually any other properties in the next language you look at. In fact, the inventory, as in the 1950’s versions is essentially an arbitrary collection of unanalysed linguistic symbols and it’s also finite, just like Quine’s pattern, apart from some hand-waving. In fact, I can think of no rational interpretation for any of this, but it’s overwhelmingly dominant in the fields, you might think about it.

Enfield also presents a closely related thesis, that’s also very widely held, I’ll quote it: “There are well-developed gradualist evolutionary arguments to support the conclusion that there’s no such thing as language, except as an arbitrary complex of independent cognitive processes.” Again, no relevant sources cited, and none exist.

https://chomsky.info/20110408/

Try this argument with the visual system or the nervous system. — Xtrix

Except language is not a biological capacity. I don't know how many times I have to say this. It is not a biological capacity like writing letters is not a biological capacity. This doesn't make letter writing any more magic than language. Again, it's this assumption - metaphysical and unempirical - that needs to be exploded. Your incredulity is nothing but a function of the fact that you're wedded to a completely mistaken conception of language which has so stunted your imagination that moving beyond the terms posed by UG is impossible for you.

A Martian would indeed look down and conclude the same thing about skin -- all humans have it, despite different colors. — Xtrix

It's cute how you went from "that's a mischaracterization" to white knighting for your priest once it was pointed out that he said the very thing you said he did not. Like arguing with a Trump supporter. In any case, grammar is somewhat more complex than skin color, and the analogy is a total non-sequitur.

Tomasello wants to make a name for himself by going after Chomsky, but is as convincing as Everett -- who's a complete fraud. — Xtrix

Lmao, Tomasello is one of the most prolific and respected cognitive scientists out there. He doesn't need to make a name for himself. See, he is an actual scientist, unlike Chomsky, who made shit up while sitting in his basement. It's funny that anyone who disagrees with Chomsky is suddenly a fraud though, even as, uneducated as you are, you've never heard of them in your life - says more about your slavish adherence to doctrine rather than anything else.

Yes, if one makes the utterly wrong assumption that language is a biological capacity, then it follows that one can bracket social and communicative contexts. But it is just that assumption that is bunkum, and pointing to other fields of study which are entirely disanalgous to language is nothing more than an excercise in question begging. Which, of course, is about the best way to characterize the program of UG.

Tomasello wants to make a name for himself by going after Chomsky, but is as convincing as Everett -- who's a complete fraud. — Xtrix

I don’t have a pony in this race, but Tomasello looks like a guy worth learning about.

The reality is that there has been much written about both mathematics and music -- including ideas about how they may be piggybacking off of language. — Xtrix

It did occur to me that there may be another option: perhaps what Chomsky has hypothesized as necessary for getting language going is the same thing that’s necessary for getting math or music going. He may even have said as much, I don’t know. Montague used to say that linguistics is a branch of mathematics (though he also thought Chomsky was full of shit).

Because it's the best we can do to study thought. Language isn't the same as thought, of course, but it's related. — Xtrix

Hmmm. This is a mess, but I want to say that thought is a psychological phenomenon, but something else too. Maybe it’s only the having of a thought that is a psychological phenomenon. There are related problems with language as, on the one hand, a means of either expression or communication, but on the other hand as something symbolic. — There is at the very least Frege’s little argument against psychologism and for the ‘third realm’, that it makes no sense to speak of “my Pythagorean theorem” and “your Pythagorean theorem” but only of “the Pythagorean theorem”. Frege, Platonist that he was, certainly saw something, shall we say, objective in thought and language, something beyond what’s in an individual skull. It may be possible to locate that sense of objectivity in very many skulls and their history, but David Lewis tried to do exactly that in Convention and couldn’t quite pull it off.

Can you explain to me like I’m five why it’s important for philosophy that Tomasello is right and Chomsky is wrong? What’s riding on this for philosophy?

Try this argument with the visual system or the nervous system.
— Xtrix

Except langauge is not a biological capacity. — StreetlightX

Of course it is. The capacity is there from the beginning, just as walking or vision. Yes, the environment has a crucial role to play.

There is no reason to doubt, and every reason to assume, that the brain, cells, neurons, etc., are involved with the development of language, like any aspect of growth and development. Unless it's magic.

It is not a biological capacity like writing letters is not a biological capacity. — StreetlightX

The ability to write is also not magical. It has a neurological and, hence, biological component as well, yes. Why? Because writing is something that is learned -- like walking or riding a bike. That doesn't mean there's a specific organ in the body that accounts for it. It means the capacity to walk, to write, to speak, to see, to play music, etc., is there -- otherwise it wouldn't be acquired. Hence why we don't see apes speak or play music, or even "get drunk on a Sunday night," for that matter. These are not possibilities for them, because the capacity (which is genetic, despite your claims of magic) is not there.

It's cute how you went from "that's a mischaracterization" to white knighting from your priest once it was pointed out that he said the very thing you said he did not. — StreetlightX

It is a complete mischaracterization, as I said all along. Language is a universal human property. What a Martian would conclude, hypothetically, is hardly what Chomsky is claiming. It would be rational to conclude this, but it's clearly wrong -- there are many languages. There are also many skin colors. But keep trying.

Lmao, Tomasello is one of the most prolific and respected cognitive scientists out there. — StreetlightX

Like Chomsky, in fact.

I don’t have a pony in this race, but Tomasello looks like a guy worth learning about. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but his claims about Chomsky are a joke. His article in Scientific American, years ago, was laughable. Incidentally, I didn't claim he was a fraud, I was referring to Everett. It's not that Tomasello isn't a scientist, it's that he completely misunderstands Chomsky. This has in fact been pointed out several times in print.

He may even have said as much, I don’t know. — Srap Tasmaner

He points out that if you restrict the lexicon to 1, with merge you can get arithmetic. But that's a different discussion.

In a word, essentialism vs. materialism. Or idealism vs. science. I've tried previously to characterize this in terms from the history of philosophy: Chomsky's is a substance-accident conception of language. Language appeared fully-formed, out of the blue one day, as a mysterious substance - the content of which no one can agree on, which alone should damn it to irrelevance - which is supposed to explain the diversity of actually existing language. It's the substance which underlies the accidents. It's like a germ-plasm theory of language. This substance also happens to be totally immutable: all of history, all of the dynamics of society, all of human interaction, merely activate (or not) the latent potentialities of this substance, which is otherwise unaffected by it. It stands outside of space and time (other than having appeared one day like the monolith in A Space Odyssey), and, like a Platonic Form, is meant to explain the grammatical features of language. Just like a Platonic Form however, it is also entirely mythical. A pure posit, a theory in search of evidence, which cannot be falsified. It precludes all novelty, and cannot be squared with evolution (the only thing Chomsky has to say about it is that it happened really fast, and, because of that, natural selection cannot bear upon it). It is sheer idealism, and nothing other.

Whereas the materialist explanation is that....

In a word, essentialism vs. materialism. — StreetlightX

Okay, but you’re answering a different question.

As I understand you, you’re saying Chomsky’s — I don’t know — “underlying” philosophy or even metaphysics is suspect, and therefore to oppose Chomsky is to oppose him as a philosopher who belongs to the opposing school of philosophy. No more, no less.

But you don’t see two scientists with different ideas here at all. And therefore there is nothing for philosophy riding on what some might see as an intramural conflict between scientists. There are genuine scientific disputes — I’m only assuming you agree — because evidence is incomplete and theories are imperfect, but this isn’t one of those at all.

You chose your philosophy (or even metaphysics) first, and then offer your support to the professor who is more closely aligned with your philosophy, and you oppose the professor who seems more aligned with an opposing philosophical camp. Is that right?

There is no reason to doubt, and every reason to assume, that the brain, cells, neurons, etc., are involved with the development of language, like any aspect of growth and development. — Xtrix

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. But actually existing grammar is communicatively shaped; what is contingent, in fact, is the biology itself. Hence why Chomsky is a linguistic geocentrist. Insofar as language is a literal technology, trying to understand it as a biological capacity (rather than saying that we have a capacity to employ said technology, that just so happens to be biological, because what else could it be?) is to approach it from the entirely wrong way. 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.

What it as stake is the mechanism of grammatical genesis. That there is biology 'involved' or that language seems to be universal among humans does not allow one to make the leap that the mechanism is itself biological. Those two conditions are too underdetermined to explain why grammar is as it is.

You chose your philosophy (or even metaphysics) first, and then offer your support to the professor who is more closely aligned with your philosophy, and you oppose the professor who seems more aligned with an opposing philosophical camp. Is that right? — Srap Tasmaner

No, I disagree. My philosophical priors gives me reason and motivation to suspect that Chomsky is full of shit, and, having actually looked to see if the theory stands on its own two feet, it turns out that it does not. This is not surprising of course, given that all idealism is full of shit, but it's all full of shit for localized reasons, which are worth exploring on their own. And I like to think I've done the latter. And I don't believe this is a intra-scientific dispute either, because - and I mean this, I'm really, really not being hyperbolic - 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.

I really think the comparison to geocentrism is apposite: UG is basically full of people positing epicycles, retrograde motions, and unseen bodies in order to account for the fact that so much of it comes to naught, empirically. I mean, really, look:

Although the most common practice is to invoke UG without specifying precisely what is intended, there are some specific (though mostly non-exhaustive) proposals:

– In his textbook, O’Grady (1997) proposes that UG includes both lexical categories (N, V, A, P, Adv) and functional categories (Det, Aux, Deg, Comp, Pro, Conj).
– Jackendoff’s (2002) proposal includes X-bar syntax and the linking rules ‘NP = object’, and ‘VP = action’. Pinker (1994) agrees and adds ‘subject’ and ‘object’, movement rules, and grammatical morphology.
– The textbook of Crain and Lillo-Martin (1999) does not provide an explicit list, but some of the things they claim are in UG are: wh-movement, island constraints, the subset principle, head movement, c-command, the projection principle, and the empty category principle.
– Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) claim that there is only one thing in UG and that is the computational procedure of recursion. Chomsky (2004) claims that the only thing in UG is the syntactic operation of merge.
– Baker (2001) lists a very long set of parameters in UG, including everything from polysynthesis to ergative case to serial verbs to null subject. Fodor (2003) gives a very different list, with only a couple of overlaps, for example: V to I movement, subject initial, affix hopping, pied piping, topic marking, I to C
movement, Q inversion, and oblique topic.
– Proponents of OT approaches to syntax put into UG such well-formedness constraints as stay, telegraph, drop topic, recoverability, and MaxLex (see Haspelmath 2003 for a review).
– And Wunderlich (this special issue) has his own account of UG, which includes: distinctive features, double articulation, predication and reference, lexical categories, argument hierarchy, adjunction, and quantification (he specifically excludes many of the other things on the above lists). — via Tomasello

It's like scholastics listing the properties of angels. It's an embarrassment. The only empirical surety about it is that it has no empirical surety. The only stable content UG has, is its metaphysics - essentialist and idealist in form - which is why it pays to deal with it at that level. It also happens that the above list is more than enough to give lie to @Xtrix's protestations that UG is nothing but a theory of the genetic component of the language capacity. UG is all about positing grammatical structures that are (somehow, magically) "instantiated" in biology (much like the Platonic Forms are 'instantiated' in particulars), which then go on to explain the shape of actually existing grammars. This isn't biology, or science. These are speculative castles in the sky, no more scientific than glitches in the Matrix being an explanation for deja vu. They are supposed to explain why grammar is as it is. They do not.

I saw a video about this but did not read a study - at least not one I can recall at the moment. Given that the exposure of the dogs to certain words ("sit", "paw", "down", etc.) is very frequent, they'd associate such sounds to an act of some kind. But if you go beyond that, it would be meaningless, they can't associate very many words we use to some object or act, it's way too much. And the way dogs interpret language is likely very very different from the human case.

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. The only thing I'd be cautious with in your account is the notion of "learning", it's more akin to growth. Babies grow into the language they are exposed to. And of course, young children have a much easier time acquiring a new language while young than after say, young adulthood.

This is an excellent interview with Chomsky by an excellent philosopher Bryan Magee:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVXLo9gJq-U

The relevant part on learning is from minute 5:26, probably goes on for a minute or two.

Th idea of "Universal Grammar" seems analogous to the idea of "inter-subjectivity". People take a variety of very wide ranging activities, which are quite difficult to understand the true nature of, and class them under one name. This facilitates reference to these activities, as a group, for the purpose of arguing a philosophical position. But it creates the illusion that there is a real, justifiable category of well-defined activities which is being referred to by the terms.

In reality such usage of terms is a symptom of a philosophical laziness, a declination from properly understanding the activities which get classed together, and apprehending the differences between these activities, recognizing the incompatibilities between them which make such categorization logically impossible.

Even the word "language" is used in this way. It's used to class together a wide ranging variety of activities which are so different from each other, that some of them ought not ever be placed together in any rigorously defined logical category. Hence the argument that there is no such thing as "language". That word does not name any sort of justifiable category of activity.

Both the assumed existence of the universe as a language and math being the language spoken by it (the "universal language") are utterly nonsensical. The assumptions reflect the attitude to objectivize a way of thinking, and by projecting these on the universe it makes one think that there is only one true language for all.

I don't know if you have any interest in this question, I was just curious: if you were going to launch a serious attack on the OP essay, or on innate language capacity, how would you do it?

That’s quite helpful. Thanks.

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. — StreetlightX

I’m not sure this is fair, historically. The search for “deep structure” may fail, but is analagous to the search for “logical form” — which Wittgenstein also concluded had failed. But it begins as an attempt to explain known phenomena: back in the days of transformational grammar, for instance, as an attempt to systematize the apparent connection between the syntax of statements and questions. Montague, who did his Ph.D. under Tarski, denied there was a distinction — as Tarski had assumed — between formal and natural languages. He seems to have believed that so-called natural languages are just more complicated, but just as a systematic as, say, first-order predicate logic.

But for such a research program, the proof is in the pudding: can you produce a model that accounts for all the data? Tomasello is right that there is something suspiciously ad hoc about what various people think goes in the core — but it’s ad hoc precisely because it’s trying to track the data, again rather like geocentric astronomy. You see the claim that there is a core syntax as the equivalent of the assumption that the heavens revolve around the earth, the assumption that both adds complexity to the theory and limits it. People working on UG might agree that what they have so far is a bit Keplerian, but they’re all looking for that Copernican breakthrough simplification. 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?

There’s another argument I think is lurking in the background: 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. We’ve had quantum mechanics for a hundred years, and I don’t think anyone’s happy with the state of things, but our failure to finish it doesn’t mean we ought to just abandon the whole thing and start over.

People working on UG might agree that what they have so far is a bit Keplerian, but they’re all looking for that Copernican breakthrough simplification. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think so. They've reconstructed proto-Indo-European. They know how, for instance, Semitic languages imagine events vs other languages. The very act of analyzing languages implies a common ground. I think the science of linguistics, the child of Chomsky, is much more sophisticated and complex than you're thinking.

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. I’d say that we don’t know what we don’t know beforehand, and that many times in the past something seemed impossible, yet was achieved by a lot. Therefore, those who say that there are forever mysteries, will be proven wrong as was done before. That would be the idea. I think this completely misses the point, and implies that Hume, Newton, Leibniz, Locke and others, were stupid in the way they reasoned, which hasn’t improved to my knowledge- which is a remarkable conclusion. But I can see those arguments, and they make sense, even if I think they are way wrong. So in short, read those two authors, or even better, read Alex Rosenberg.

However, if I had to attack it, I don’t see any alternative to people who currently ridicule “mysteriansim”, like Dennett or the Churchlands. I’d say that we don’t know what we don’t know beforehand, and that many times in the past something seemed impossible, yet was achieved by a lot. Therefore, those who say that there are forever mysteries, will be proven wrong as was done before. That would be the idea. I think this completely misses the point, — Manuel

Could you explain why it misses the point?

Because they assume that all there is is “understanding” in the theoretical sense. Therefore, if we understand a theory, we understand everything that matters about that phenomenon. Tell that to a painter about colours, they are “just” light, or to a mother who has lost a son that she lacks serotonin or tell any person that’s burning that it’s just particles moving fastly, so don’t worry about pain. In short, such an attitude assumes science can say MUCH more than it does. I think it is obvious that understanding is not close to being exhausted by theoretical accounts. And I also think it is equally obvious that we don’t really understand much of anything, hence the infinite "why" questions, which must be answered with a “that's the way it is” type replies. Because we just don’t know.

I'm going to have to ponder that for a while.