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That seems downright nuanced for Chomsky talking about language. Did he really say this? Chomsky considers language to be a thing that physically evolved in hu

• ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  "Did he really say this?" That is my interpretation of what he'd said - there's no obvious evolutionary/natural selection ... impetus to it. Doesn't that make it necessarily emergent? Eyes on the front are common to nearly all predators. I think the contrast between octopus eyes and human eyes is used frequently to deduce that eyes are indeed emergent. But we have nothing on the raptors.
  • rspeer 10y ago
    It's just, calling language emergent sounds close to the view that you have to whisper furtively when you get too close to MIT: that maybe there was no evolutionary event that created language at all, it's just a really good meme[1] that makes use of other faculties that already existed in the human brain. Maybe universal grammar isn't a physical fact about the possible ways the human brain can communicate, it's just that if we observe 6,000 variations on an idea with the same[2] origin and try hard enough to sum them up, we'll succeed. [1] In the original sense. [2] Or similar origins. Maybe language is a good enough idea to arise multiple times and converge, much like eyes. And I'm not sure whether to count things like Nicaraguan Sign Language as a separate origin of language.