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I saw him give a talk about Pirahã and recursion in 2007 or 2008, and his argument depended entirely on data that he collected and translated. Pointing that ou
by meepmorp 6y ago
I saw him give a talk about Pirahã and recursion in 2007 or 2008, and his argument depended entirely on data that he collected and translated.
Pointing that out made him really defensive; understandable, perhaps, but recursion has been found in literally every other language in the world. You can't be that surprised when people have serious reservations an argument that hinges on the validity of a tiny data set from a language that only you understand.
I stopped paying attention after that, though. Maybe there's other people doing work on it now.
- raihansaputra 6y agoYeah. Possibly a black swan knowledge (every swan is white until a black one is found much later) but can't be accepted as valid until someone else verified it.
- garbagetime 6y agoDoesn't matter if some specific language lacks recursion. UG refers to a capacity of the human mind: if it happens to be the case that there is some language which does not feature recursion, that does not show that humans do not have that capacity. Just like how if there was a person somewhere who had grown up in isolation and never learned a language wouldn't show anything about UG.
- bedobi 6y agoBut don't you see how you've just made the hypothesis unfalsifiable?
- garbagetime 6y agoDo you also think the claims that dogs can talk or that humans can fly are unfalsifiable? All we are discussing is a biological system, and biological systems are things that may be investigated.