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I only scanned through this very long article to pull out useful info.. I got this: > [Chomsky] concluded that [children] must be born with a rudimentary body

I only scanned through this very long article to pull out useful info.. I got this: > [Chomsky] concluded that [children] must be born with a rudimentary body of grammatical knowledge – a ‘Universal Grammar’ – written into the human DNA. > ... Chomsky is plain wrong > What is in dispute is the claim that knowledge of language itself – the language software – is something that each human child is born with. > Our brains really are ‘language-ready’ in the following limited sense: they have the right sort of working memory to process sentence-level syntax, and an unusually large prefrontal cortex that gives us the associative learning capacity to use symbols in the first place. > And of course, language doesn’t need to be spoken. ..linguistic meaning can be conveyed in multiple ways: in speech, by gestured signs, on the printed page or computer screen. It does not depend upon a particular medium for its expression. > As it happens, cognitive neuroscience research from the past two decades or so has begun to lift the veil on where language is processed in the brain. The short answer is that it is everywhere. > Why is it that today, only humans have language, the most complex of animal behaviours? > [Early humans'] new ecological situation would have led, inexorably, to changes in human behaviour. ... This allows us to picture the emergence of language as a gradual process from many overlapping tendencies. > We see this instinct [(cooperation)] at work in human infants as they attempt to acquire their mother tongue. Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw. They are able to deploy sophisticated intention-recognition abilities from a young age, perhaps as early as nine months old, in order to begin to figure out the communicative purposes of the adults around them. And this is, ultimately, an outcome of our co‑operative minds.

Retra 11y ago
I always like to frame this kind of thing using the term "appropriateness." We can imagine an amoeba having a rudimentary ability to detect whether its surroundings are hostile or not and employ an instinctual response to evade it. It's not much of a leap from there to say humans have a social instinct, and that our ability to evade hostility has become strongly correlated with our ability to identify behaviors that are appropriate in context. And language is, in an abstract sense, just this: choosing appropriate actions. Maybe they're words. Maybe they're intonations. Or other social norms. Nobody learns 'just' language as a child, they learn a whole way of life. They learn "swearing is wrong," not simply "this is the proper syntax for swearing." And they feel its wrongness when they swear. You can't know what swear words mean if you can't feel that, and you probably won't be able to survive very well as a human if you can't determine what behavior is appropriate or not in your situation.
chillacy 11y ago
On his point of DNA not having enough information: > But recent research in neurobiology suggests that human DNA just doesn’t have anything like the coding power needed to do this How could the author arrive at this conclusion without knowing what the universal grammar which needs encoding is? And beyond that, what if such a universal grammar is simply an artifact of existing structures accounted for in DNA?

Retra 11y ago

I always like to frame this kind of thing using the term "appropriateness." We can imagine an amoeba having a rudimentary ability to detect whether its surroundings are hostile or not and employ an instinctual response to evade it. It's not much of a leap from there to say humans have a social instinct, and that our ability to evade hostility has become strongly correlated with our ability to identify behaviors that are appropriate in context. And language is, in an abstract sense, just this: choosing appropriate actions. Maybe they're words. Maybe they're intonations. Or other social norms. Nobody learns 'just' language as a child, they learn a whole way of life. They learn "swearing is wrong," not simply "this is the proper syntax for swearing." And they feel its wrongness when they swear. You can't know what swear words mean if you can't feel that, and you probably won't be able to survive very well as a human if you can't determine what behavior is appropriate or not in your situation.

chillacy 11y ago

On his point of DNA not having enough information: > But recent research in neurobiology suggests that human DNA just doesn’t have anything like the coding power needed to do this How could the author arrive at this conclusion without knowing what the universal grammar which needs encoding is? And beyond that, what if such a universal grammar is simply an artifact of existing structures accounted for in DNA?