4 ms·

this article is bad. chomsky and his ilk have always acknowledged the wide variety of linguistic behavior; that's the whole point. universal grammar is the pa

this article is bad. chomsky and his ilk have always acknowledged the wide variety of linguistic behavior; that's the whole point. universal grammar is the parameters to be set (what sounds have meaning? what word order is used? etc). learning a language is the setting of those parameters. humans may have linguistic "knowledge" that they're born with, they may not... but this article is beside the point.

rspeer 11y ago
This article is very much on point when it comes to the language debate, you're just taking an oddly hedged position on it. Chomsky and his ilk have made very strong, very specific claims about language in the past. They have claimed that certain combinations of linguistic parameters are impossible, and that certain features are shared by all languages. They have actively denied the wide variety of linguistic behavior until the evidence piles up enough that they change the topic. Followers of this brand of linguistics have resisted empirical tests of these claims, and some of them have academically attacked those who disagree. And yet these claims have been chipped away anyway until all that's left is a really vague claim that most humans can communicate using recursion. Your second paragraph seems at odds with your first. If these parameters exist to be set, that's knowledge. Knowing that word order is a thing that can vary is knowledge. Chomsky says we are born with this knowledge. Some who disagree with him say we aren't born with it, and that we have to learn it from experience. In the part where you hedge and say "they may not...", you're surprisingly agreeing with this article more than Chomsky. Chomsky would say "Humans absolutely have linguistic knowledge they are born with. Anyone who disagrees is a behaviorist charlatan." Chomsky's linguistics was indeed a way better model of learning than behaviorism, but that was 60 years ago and we need a better model now.
- 4bpp 11y ago
  Right in its headline, the article makes the powerful claim that there is no language instinct (which I assume is to be read as equivalent to "innate language knowledge"). Unless you use some very specific notion of knowledge that makes this false, this is a much stronger claim than the claim that there is innate language knowledge - the reason is the same as why the claim that humans are all born with equal abilities is a stronger claim than the claim to the contrary. Now, you could say that Chomsky actually made the claim that /all/ humans have /the same/ innate language knowledge, which then of course would be as probabilistically absurd as the claim that all humans have none - but this is so obviously false (considering mental damage, mutations etc.) that surely everyone involved will have understood that what was meant was not this but rather some statement like "most humans (...)" or "central examples of the category of humans (...)" or "humans with high probability are hardwired to have a probabilistic affinity to interpret language in terms of these structural universals". (edit: Note though that "All humans have no innate language knowledge" is still orders of magnitude more unlikely than "All humans have some common particular set of innate language knowledge" - the latter just requires the highly unlikely even that the random drawing of every single human's innate language knowledge came out to some particular value, but the former requires that the random drawing of all of humanity's innate language knowledge came out to the particular set of preconceptions that you consider to be "no preconceptions", and then that the random drawing of every single human's innate knowledge also came out to that value. Think likelihood of discovering an animal species all of whose living members have exactly the same colour of fur at 24-bit granularity, versus the likelihood of discovering one all of whose living members have #F45080 fur.)
  - panglott 11y ago
    The headline makes the claim that the idea of a language instinct that has dominated linguistics for decades is completely wrong. That's a much narrower claim than "there is no innate linguistic knowledge."
  - rspeer 11y ago
    > Now, you could say that Chomsky actually made the claim that /all/ humans have /the same/ innate language knowledge I could say that because he has made that claim. You call it obviously false, he calls it obviously true. Mentally impaired humans do not necessarily contradict Chomsky's view: I think he'd say that they have an internal language ("I-language") that they are not capable of expressing in the real world. The idea that language is just a probability distribution over ways we can learn to communicate is the contrary position to universal grammar. If you're saying that's what Chomsky actually meant, you're basically moving his goalposts to the other side of the field.
- emn13 11y ago
  I have no idea about the details of this debate, but even so it's obvious that this article screams warnings signs - it's full of tricky strawmen and other fallacies. For instance, it makes the absurd comparison between the supposed innate talent for language and a spiders web-weaving - spiders weave webs without examples, so why not kids? Spiders are about as poor a stand-in for a human as you'll find in the macroscopic world. Also, even if something is instinctual, it's hardly reasonable to assume that instinct will always overcome any situation, regardless of trauma, especially in a animals as impressionable as humans. Finally, just because an animal has an instinct and/or innate aptitude doesn't mean that practice is irrelevant. The girl that was held in a cellar until she was 13 only shows that either the instinct isn't absolute (no surprise there), or even just that the instinct still requires exercise. Then there's the flatly false statement that dna doesn't have the storage capacity to store a universal grammar. Oh really? The human genomes codes for on the order of a gigabyte of data. AFAIH, there's strong evidence that there's not a lot of evolutionary pressure to keep genomes small, IIRC based on the observation that even small, competing microbes have dramatically varying sizes of genomes (when you'd expect smaller-genomed competitors to have won if it really mattered). For some context: A compressed wordlist containing 350000 english words is less than a megabyte. In general, grammars tend to be much smaller, especially if you consider that it's not claimed that a full grammar is stored, but at most the "basics" that can get rehydrated based on learnt language. Another poster in this thread claimed his 500 line python program can generate a good approximation of human language given enough input data. I wouldn't be surprised if a few kilobytes would suffice to describe the components from which any grammar can be built - much smaller than the full grammar itself. There's another absurd misunderstanding of evolution in which the article manages to suggest that because evolution is necessarily continuous in the space of genomes, it thus must be continuous in the space of outcomes (i.e. language is so large a leap, it couldn't have evolved). I'm sure many creationists feel the same way about the eye - not to mention the fact that the article then proceeds to knock down some straw-men about when that language ability might have evolved according to chomsky (which is basically saying that because chomsky apparently doesn't know how language evolved, his other theory must be false. Really?) I have no idea about the details here, but this article is about as unconvincing as you can get. He may well be right - I'm not a linguist, and to be frank I'm not entirely sure why the claim even matters (not a great sign for a scientific hypothesis). But I'm sure this article isn't making a lot of sense.
4bpp 11y ago
In addition, as far as I can see, all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of linguistics would know that no syntacticist expects grammatical universals, if they exist, to be something as simplistic as "words are always ordered like this" or "there are adverbs", or even that there exist positive statements that can be made about all human languages at all (trivially false: put two individuals with a severe speech development disorder in a room and let them establish some basic form of communication; call it a language). Theorems like EPP and much of 80s control theory (the interplay between recursive structure and what determiner phrases, e.g. pronouns like "he" or demonstratives like "that", refer to), while occasionally being painfully overstretched, do seem to exhibit far better than chance predictive power and had their physics-like moments of conspicuous gaps in predicted taxonomies being neatly filled later. (Check "empty categories" or the rules mentioned under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28linguistics%29. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28linguistics%29.) I'm fairly disappointed comparing this to the usual quality of Aeon's articles.
- tmalsburg2 11y ago
  > all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Innateness of language is not a theory because it lacks what is the hallmark of any scientific theory: the ability to produce falsifiable predictions. People argue against ridiculous straw-men because there is nothing better that we could test. Chomsky proposed innateness to challenge the behaviourists who simply assumed that language is learned without even trying to proof it. Back in the day that was an honorable goal but half a century later we have to acknowledge that Chomsky and his followers have failed to offer something better, they just replaced one unfounded belief by another.
panglott 11y ago
The article has plenty of flaws, sure, and anyone familiar with linguistics could point some of them out. One of my favorites was the statement that Broca's area was the language center, without any mention of Wernicke's area. But Chomsky has switched his theoretical perspective so much and so many times that it's hard to tell what his current framework actually is. And increasingly, how relevant it is to contemporary research. It seems like you're advocating the "principles and parameters" approach, but AFAIK Chomsky hasn't advocated that in something like 20 years. P&P is where Chomsky lost me—with the argument that dropping pronouns in English and French amounts to a mental switch that languages flip on or off. Whereas subsequent research immediately showed that pronoun-dropping is just a continuum where English is at one extreme. And lots of Chomsky's arguments, like the poverty of the stimulus, just plain look bad. Stephen Pinker has completely dominated popular understanding of linguistics with "The Language Instinct", which has influenced how a generation of ordinary people think about language and linguistics. And Chomsky's program dominated both academic and popular understanding before that. But linguistics is a strongly multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic field, and this is an article aimed at a popular audience that helps make that more plain.

rspeer 11y ago

This article is very much on point when it comes to the language debate, you're just taking an oddly hedged position on it. Chomsky and his ilk have made very strong, very specific claims about language in the past. They have claimed that certain combinations of linguistic parameters are impossible, and that certain features are shared by all languages. They have actively denied the wide variety of linguistic behavior until the evidence piles up enough that they change the topic. Followers of this brand of linguistics have resisted empirical tests of these claims, and some of them have academically attacked those who disagree. And yet these claims have been chipped away anyway until all that's left is a really vague claim that most humans can communicate using recursion. Your second paragraph seems at odds with your first. If these parameters exist to be set, that's knowledge. Knowing that word order is a thing that can vary is knowledge. Chomsky says we are born with this knowledge. Some who disagree with him say we aren't born with it, and that we have to learn it from experience. In the part where you hedge and say "they may not...", you're surprisingly agreeing with this article more than Chomsky. Chomsky would say "Humans absolutely have linguistic knowledge they are born with. Anyone who disagrees is a behaviorist charlatan." Chomsky's linguistics was indeed a way better model of learning than behaviorism, but that was 60 years ago and we need a better model now.

4bpp 11y ago
Right in its headline, the article makes the powerful claim that there is no language instinct (which I assume is to be read as equivalent to "innate language knowledge"). Unless you use some very specific notion of knowledge that makes this false, this is a much stronger claim than the claim that there is innate language knowledge - the reason is the same as why the claim that humans are all born with equal abilities is a stronger claim than the claim to the contrary. Now, you could say that Chomsky actually made the claim that /all/ humans have /the same/ innate language knowledge, which then of course would be as probabilistically absurd as the claim that all humans have none - but this is so obviously false (considering mental damage, mutations etc.) that surely everyone involved will have understood that what was meant was not this but rather some statement like "most humans (...)" or "central examples of the category of humans (...)" or "humans with high probability are hardwired to have a probabilistic affinity to interpret language in terms of these structural universals". (edit: Note though that "All humans have no innate language knowledge" is still orders of magnitude more unlikely than "All humans have some common particular set of innate language knowledge" - the latter just requires the highly unlikely even that the random drawing of every single human's innate language knowledge came out to some particular value, but the former requires that the random drawing of all of humanity's innate language knowledge came out to the particular set of preconceptions that you consider to be "no preconceptions", and then that the random drawing of every single human's innate knowledge also came out to that value. Think likelihood of discovering an animal species all of whose living members have exactly the same colour of fur at 24-bit granularity, versus the likelihood of discovering one all of whose living members have #F45080 fur.)
- panglott 11y ago
  The headline makes the claim that the idea of a language instinct that has dominated linguistics for decades is completely wrong. That's a much narrower claim than "there is no innate linguistic knowledge."
- rspeer 11y ago
  > Now, you could say that Chomsky actually made the claim that /all/ humans have /the same/ innate language knowledge I could say that because he has made that claim. You call it obviously false, he calls it obviously true. Mentally impaired humans do not necessarily contradict Chomsky's view: I think he'd say that they have an internal language ("I-language") that they are not capable of expressing in the real world. The idea that language is just a probability distribution over ways we can learn to communicate is the contrary position to universal grammar. If you're saying that's what Chomsky actually meant, you're basically moving his goalposts to the other side of the field.
emn13 11y ago
I have no idea about the details of this debate, but even so it's obvious that this article screams warnings signs - it's full of tricky strawmen and other fallacies. For instance, it makes the absurd comparison between the supposed innate talent for language and a spiders web-weaving - spiders weave webs without examples, so why not kids? Spiders are about as poor a stand-in for a human as you'll find in the macroscopic world. Also, even if something is instinctual, it's hardly reasonable to assume that instinct will always overcome any situation, regardless of trauma, especially in a animals as impressionable as humans. Finally, just because an animal has an instinct and/or innate aptitude doesn't mean that practice is irrelevant. The girl that was held in a cellar until she was 13 only shows that either the instinct isn't absolute (no surprise there), or even just that the instinct still requires exercise. Then there's the flatly false statement that dna doesn't have the storage capacity to store a universal grammar. Oh really? The human genomes codes for on the order of a gigabyte of data. AFAIH, there's strong evidence that there's not a lot of evolutionary pressure to keep genomes small, IIRC based on the observation that even small, competing microbes have dramatically varying sizes of genomes (when you'd expect smaller-genomed competitors to have won if it really mattered). For some context: A compressed wordlist containing 350000 english words is less than a megabyte. In general, grammars tend to be much smaller, especially if you consider that it's not claimed that a full grammar is stored, but at most the "basics" that can get rehydrated based on learnt language. Another poster in this thread claimed his 500 line python program can generate a good approximation of human language given enough input data. I wouldn't be surprised if a few kilobytes would suffice to describe the components from which any grammar can be built - much smaller than the full grammar itself. There's another absurd misunderstanding of evolution in which the article manages to suggest that because evolution is necessarily continuous in the space of genomes, it thus must be continuous in the space of outcomes (i.e. language is so large a leap, it couldn't have evolved). I'm sure many creationists feel the same way about the eye - not to mention the fact that the article then proceeds to knock down some straw-men about when that language ability might have evolved according to chomsky (which is basically saying that because chomsky apparently doesn't know how language evolved, his other theory must be false. Really?) I have no idea about the details here, but this article is about as unconvincing as you can get. He may well be right - I'm not a linguist, and to be frank I'm not entirely sure why the claim even matters (not a great sign for a scientific hypothesis). But I'm sure this article isn't making a lot of sense.

4bpp 11y ago

In addition, as far as I can see, all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of linguistics would know that no syntacticist expects grammatical universals, if they exist, to be something as simplistic as "words are always ordered like this" or "there are adverbs", or even that there exist positive statements that can be made about all human languages at all (trivially false: put two individuals with a severe speech development disorder in a room and let them establish some basic form of communication; call it a language). Theorems like EPP and much of 80s control theory (the interplay between recursive structure and what determiner phrases, e.g. pronouns like "he" or demonstratives like "that", refer to), while occasionally being painfully overstretched, do seem to exhibit far better than chance predictive power and had their physics-like moments of conspicuous gaps in predicted taxonomies being neatly filled later. (Check "empty categories" or the rules mentioned under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28linguistics%29. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28linguistics%29.) I'm fairly disappointed comparing this to the usual quality of Aeon's articles.

tmalsburg2 11y ago
> all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Innateness of language is not a theory because it lacks what is the hallmark of any scientific theory: the ability to produce falsifiable predictions. People argue against ridiculous straw-men because there is nothing better that we could test. Chomsky proposed innateness to challenge the behaviourists who simply assumed that language is learned without even trying to proof it. Back in the day that was an honorable goal but half a century later we have to acknowledge that Chomsky and his followers have failed to offer something better, they just replaced one unfounded belief by another.

panglott 11y ago

The article has plenty of flaws, sure, and anyone familiar with linguistics could point some of them out. One of my favorites was the statement that Broca's area was the language center, without any mention of Wernicke's area. But Chomsky has switched his theoretical perspective so much and so many times that it's hard to tell what his current framework actually is. And increasingly, how relevant it is to contemporary research. It seems like you're advocating the "principles and parameters" approach, but AFAIK Chomsky hasn't advocated that in something like 20 years. P&P is where Chomsky lost me—with the argument that dropping pronouns in English and French amounts to a mental switch that languages flip on or off. Whereas subsequent research immediately showed that pronoun-dropping is just a continuum where English is at one extreme. And lots of Chomsky's arguments, like the poverty of the stimulus, just plain look bad. Stephen Pinker has completely dominated popular understanding of linguistics with "The Language Instinct", which has influenced how a generation of ordinary people think about language and linguistics. And Chomsky's program dominated both academic and popular understanding before that. But linguistics is a strongly multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic field, and this is an article aimed at a popular audience that helps make that more plain.