6 ms·

Irrespective of Pirahã, I still think Chomsky and anyone who agrees with him are wrong. Yes, he's come up with some useful abstractions and has identified, arti

by bedobi 6y ago

Irrespective of Pirahã, I still think Chomsky and anyone who agrees with him are wrong. Yes, he's come up with some useful abstractions and has identified, articulated and put into models ubiquitous features in human languages and cultures, but for him or anyone else to make universal claims... It seems arrogant and ridiculous to say the least.

bawolff 6y ago
Isn't that how science preceeds? Someone makes a universal claim, and either its disproven or it isn't. I don't think its wrong to swing for the fences, after all, the wider the claim the easier it is to disprove.
- bedobi 6y ago
  Intuitively, at least to me, human languages and cultures don't lend themselves to universal laws. And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws. You could just say "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models" without claiming universality.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    That is exactly the major insight from Chomsky - that it's wrong to think about language the way you are. Language is a human capacity, so in fact there MUST be universal laws that govern it (to be more specific, this is true of human languages; aliens could have entirely different languages, but for any particular alien species, there will have to be some laws of the structure of that species' language). How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense. That is not to say that the laws that Chomsky has identified must be correct. He could even be wrong about searching for universal laws at the level of grammar. But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
    - tralarpa 6y ago
      > How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? Why should there be a predetermined law? I have never understood this argument and no, I don't "see that the alternative actually makes no sense". I would like to see some facts that support it, something its followers have failed to delivered for how many decades now?
      - tralarpa 6y ago
        I would have preferred some evidence, but I guess the downvote can be also seen as an answer to my question :) Still looking for those facts, are we?
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
        To be clear, the alternative to having a pre-determined structure for language is that any sound or gesture you see/hear coming from ypur parents as a small child could potentially cary semantic meaning. Also, any characteristic of that spund or gesture (pitch, length, order, frequency, loudness, correlation with other events, time of day etc) could encode that meaning. Even once you somehow identify words as being the relevant part, you still have to identify how words relate to each other - the way order of wrods matters, the way order of sentences matters etc. All of this ends up with a huge combinatory explosion of possible ways to assign meaning to language, requiring a huge amount of examples and counter examples to actually learn a human language. Just look at the training corpuses of something like GPT-X to see the amount of information that is required to learn elements of a human langauge if you start without any assumptions. However, we know for a fact that human children get many orders of magnitude less examples of languahe use before learning a language - far too little to actually rule out all other possible structures if they had started with 0 assumptions. Adding to this, there are certain elements of language structure that are not commonly thought about that happen to work identically in all natural languages that have been studied, sucha s the fact that order of words in a sentence matters, or the way certain words are omitted when constructing embedded sentences (e.g. 'can eagles that fly swim?' always having 'can' refer to 'swim', never 'fly').
  - bawolff 6y ago
    > Intuitively, at least to me, human languages and cultures don't lend themselves to universal laws. I wouldn't think so either. That's what makes the claim, whether its right or wrong, interesting. > And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws. Well it sets a goal post and leads to further questions. Are there exceptions? Why are these features universal and not others? Why is any feature universal? If there are exceptions and they're rare what makes them different from the other cases? Etc. > "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models" If your model/abstraction doesn't differ from the ground truth as far as we know (or the proposer doesn't believe it does), what's the difference between that at claiming universality. I'd claim that reality is just a model we don't yet know is wrong. For a long time we would say newtonian mechanics was universal. Now we say its a model that works at low velocity (relative to c). Was it wrong to claim universality back when we weren't aware of any counter examples?
lacker 6y ago
I thought the way Chomsky means it, "ubiquitous" and "universal" are the same thing. He isn't saying it's impossible for some aliens to develop a different sort of language. He's just claiming that all human languages share some properties, and those properties are genetically determined. It might be incorrect, but it doesn't seem arrogant and ridiculous. Plenty of human mental qualities are genetically determined across cultures, like reactions to a sweet taste or the sight of a snake-looking thing, so why not language?
goatinaboat 6y ago
I still think Chomsky and anyone who agrees with him are wrong. Chomsky has been known to be wrong for decades. His real talent, if not genius, was pivoting away from linguistics while his reputation was still strong, and managing to preserve it despite his original claim to fame being thoroughly debunked.
- bolzano 6y ago
  This isn't true at all. Chomsky created a paradigm shift in linguistics. For that alone he deserves great credit. In fact, his review of BF Skinner's Verbal Behaviour [1] was enough to break new ground and help start the cognitive revolution. You may or may not think Generative Grammar (or his more recent Minimalist program) is correct, but it's certainly not KNOWN to be wrong, and has yielded some insights. Has it changed over the years, of course, that's normal science. New data is found, new explanations are posited. Further, Chomsky is still heavily and actively involved in linguistics. See his Feb 4th 2021 presentation [2] to eminent linguistics researchers in the field. I'm not sure where this kind of comment comes from? [1] http://www.ugr.es/~fmanjon/A%20Review%20of%20B%20%20F%20%20Skinner%27s%20Verbal%20Behavior%20by%20Noam%20Chomsky.pdf http://www.ugr.es/~fmanjon/A%20Review%20of%20B%20%20F%20%20S... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4F9NSVVVuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4F9NSVVVuw
nathias 6y ago
But you are making universal claims in this post, and without any arguments at all ...
- bedobi 6y ago
  I'm not the one making claims about universal laws governing human languages and cultures. Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary, in your face, irrefutable evidence. I'm simply saying that to me the whole notion of it seems intuitively nonsensical and the "evidence" provided appears to amount to not much more than armchair philosophizing. But I'm not a linguist ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (though I'm sure there are plenty of actual linguists who also disagree with Chomsky)
  - nathias 6y ago
    Yes, it's worse, you are making completely unsupported claims about universal laws governing human knowledge, you are claiming Chomsky is wrong because he's making universal statements which is itself an universal epistemological statement. Do some more armchair philosophizing, it will do you good.
    - bedobi 6y ago
      "Universal laws about human language and culture are impossible" Ah, but the above is a universal law, so it's self refuting! Therefore, universal laws about human language are possible. Checkmate, skeptics! Anyone who actually thinks that is not just uncharitable, unproductively pedantic and arguing semantics, they're also wrong. But OK, to satisfy them, we could say that, yes, universal laws about human language are indeed possible, and there is one such law. Let's label it "The Universal Law About Human Language". It states "The only universal law about human language is that there are no universal laws about human language (other than The Universal Law About Human Language)" It even has recursion! (pun intended) So I guess us skeptics will also have to admit defeat that recursion is in fact universal...
      - nathias 6y ago
gumby 6y ago
I think you’re missing the context. Clearly we have evolutionary structures that provide a language affordance. We can see the manifestation of similar, less complex such structures in other vertebrate species. Chomsky says there are universal, physiologically-based manifestations which are universal across humans. That is not really demonstrates but would not be surprising any more than the universality of the human visual system (as well as individual variation). He claims to have identified some such universals, and that they are relatively high level. THAT is a bold claim, hard both to verify or falsify. But in principle not absurd. I don’t believe it, but I no longer mock him with the phrase “grammar gland”. There is some insight there.
- plutonorm 6y ago
  I buy it to an extent. But what gives me pause: When we compare the early stages of the visual system of animals we see striking similarities to neural networks we train on visual data. The detectors in the artificial neural network converge to detect the same kinds of features found in the biological network. In other words the structure that we find in the networks comes from the data. We can also see this when brain areas are recruited for tasks they were not specifically designed for. For instance visual processing areas can be recruiited for other tasks in the blind. So while there is specialisation in brain tissue, rather than there being circuits designed at a low level for certain cognitive tasks, it is more that the connectivity and kinds of neurons within an area are tuned to excel at a specific class of problems. It is softer and more diffuse organ than a "grammar gland". Rather it is a kind of soil within the mind that permits the growth of certain kinds of cognitive structures. Rather than being computer like and existing prior to the input of data, it is merely a capability expressed by the tuning of an overall system. Chomsky's universals in this view become rather less important. It is merely the statement that brain tissue is tuned in such a way that it encourages, among other things, certain specific kinds of linguistic structure. It's similar to noticing that the human hand is good stirring soup and then describing it as a soup stirring organ. Yes the hand has properties that allow it to be easily used as a soup stirring organ, but those same properties make it useful for some other things as well.
  - anticensor 6y ago

by bedobi 6y ago

bawolff 6y ago

Isn't that how science preceeds? Someone makes a universal claim, and either its disproven or it isn't. I don't think its wrong to swing for the fences, after all, the wider the claim the easier it is to disprove.

bedobi 6y ago
Intuitively, at least to me, human languages and cultures don't lend themselves to universal laws. And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws. You could just say "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models" without claiming universality.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  That is exactly the major insight from Chomsky - that it's wrong to think about language the way you are. Language is a human capacity, so in fact there MUST be universal laws that govern it (to be more specific, this is true of human languages; aliens could have entirely different languages, but for any particular alien species, there will have to be some laws of the structure of that species' language). How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense. That is not to say that the laws that Chomsky has identified must be correct. He could even be wrong about searching for universal laws at the level of grammar. But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
  - tralarpa 6y ago
    > How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? Why should there be a predetermined law? I have never understood this argument and no, I don't "see that the alternative actually makes no sense". I would like to see some facts that support it, something its followers have failed to delivered for how many decades now?
    - tralarpa 6y ago
      I would have preferred some evidence, but I guess the downvote can be also seen as an answer to my question :) Still looking for those facts, are we?
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      To be clear, the alternative to having a pre-determined structure for language is that any sound or gesture you see/hear coming from ypur parents as a small child could potentially cary semantic meaning. Also, any characteristic of that spund or gesture (pitch, length, order, frequency, loudness, correlation with other events, time of day etc) could encode that meaning. Even once you somehow identify words as being the relevant part, you still have to identify how words relate to each other - the way order of wrods matters, the way order of sentences matters etc. All of this ends up with a huge combinatory explosion of possible ways to assign meaning to language, requiring a huge amount of examples and counter examples to actually learn a human language. Just look at the training corpuses of something like GPT-X to see the amount of information that is required to learn elements of a human langauge if you start without any assumptions. However, we know for a fact that human children get many orders of magnitude less examples of languahe use before learning a language - far too little to actually rule out all other possible structures if they had started with 0 assumptions. Adding to this, there are certain elements of language structure that are not commonly thought about that happen to work identically in all natural languages that have been studied, sucha s the fact that order of words in a sentence matters, or the way certain words are omitted when constructing embedded sentences (e.g. 'can eagles that fly swim?' always having 'can' refer to 'swim', never 'fly').
- bawolff 6y ago
  > Intuitively, at least to me, human languages and cultures don't lend themselves to universal laws. I wouldn't think so either. That's what makes the claim, whether its right or wrong, interesting. > And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws. Well it sets a goal post and leads to further questions. Are there exceptions? Why are these features universal and not others? Why is any feature universal? If there are exceptions and they're rare what makes them different from the other cases? Etc. > "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models" If your model/abstraction doesn't differ from the ground truth as far as we know (or the proposer doesn't believe it does), what's the difference between that at claiming universality. I'd claim that reality is just a model we don't yet know is wrong. For a long time we would say newtonian mechanics was universal. Now we say its a model that works at low velocity (relative to c). Was it wrong to claim universality back when we weren't aware of any counter examples?

lacker 6y ago

I thought the way Chomsky means it, "ubiquitous" and "universal" are the same thing. He isn't saying it's impossible for some aliens to develop a different sort of language. He's just claiming that all human languages share some properties, and those properties are genetically determined. It might be incorrect, but it doesn't seem arrogant and ridiculous. Plenty of human mental qualities are genetically determined across cultures, like reactions to a sweet taste or the sight of a snake-looking thing, so why not language?

goatinaboat 6y ago

I still think Chomsky and anyone who agrees with him are wrong. Chomsky has been known to be wrong for decades. His real talent, if not genius, was pivoting away from linguistics while his reputation was still strong, and managing to preserve it despite his original claim to fame being thoroughly debunked.

bolzano 6y ago
This isn't true at all. Chomsky created a paradigm shift in linguistics. For that alone he deserves great credit. In fact, his review of BF Skinner's Verbal Behaviour [1] was enough to break new ground and help start the cognitive revolution. You may or may not think Generative Grammar (or his more recent Minimalist program) is correct, but it's certainly not KNOWN to be wrong, and has yielded some insights. Has it changed over the years, of course, that's normal science. New data is found, new explanations are posited. Further, Chomsky is still heavily and actively involved in linguistics. See his Feb 4th 2021 presentation [2] to eminent linguistics researchers in the field. I'm not sure where this kind of comment comes from? [1] http://www.ugr.es/~fmanjon/A%20Review%20of%20B%20%20F%20%20Skinner%27s%20Verbal%20Behavior%20by%20Noam%20Chomsky.pdf http://www.ugr.es/~fmanjon/A%20Review%20of%20B%20%20F%20%20S... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4F9NSVVVuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4F9NSVVVuw

nathias 6y ago

But you are making universal claims in this post, and without any arguments at all ...

bedobi 6y ago
I'm not the one making claims about universal laws governing human languages and cultures. Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary, in your face, irrefutable evidence. I'm simply saying that to me the whole notion of it seems intuitively nonsensical and the "evidence" provided appears to amount to not much more than armchair philosophizing. But I'm not a linguist ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (though I'm sure there are plenty of actual linguists who also disagree with Chomsky)
- nathias 6y ago
  Yes, it's worse, you are making completely unsupported claims about universal laws governing human knowledge, you are claiming Chomsky is wrong because he's making universal statements which is itself an universal epistemological statement. Do some more armchair philosophizing, it will do you good.
  - bedobi 6y ago
    "Universal laws about human language and culture are impossible" Ah, but the above is a universal law, so it's self refuting! Therefore, universal laws about human language are possible. Checkmate, skeptics! Anyone who actually thinks that is not just uncharitable, unproductively pedantic and arguing semantics, they're also wrong. But OK, to satisfy them, we could say that, yes, universal laws about human language are indeed possible, and there is one such law. Let's label it "The Universal Law About Human Language". It states "The only universal law about human language is that there are no universal laws about human language (other than The Universal Law About Human Language)" It even has recursion! (pun intended) So I guess us skeptics will also have to admit defeat that recursion is in fact universal...
    - nathias 6y ago

gumby 6y ago

I think you’re missing the context. Clearly we have evolutionary structures that provide a language affordance. We can see the manifestation of similar, less complex such structures in other vertebrate species. Chomsky says there are universal, physiologically-based manifestations which are universal across humans. That is not really demonstrates but would not be surprising any more than the universality of the human visual system (as well as individual variation). He claims to have identified some such universals, and that they are relatively high level. THAT is a bold claim, hard both to verify or falsify. But in principle not absurd. I don’t believe it, but I no longer mock him with the phrase “grammar gland”. There is some insight there.

plutonorm 6y ago
I buy it to an extent. But what gives me pause: When we compare the early stages of the visual system of animals we see striking similarities to neural networks we train on visual data. The detectors in the artificial neural network converge to detect the same kinds of features found in the biological network. In other words the structure that we find in the networks comes from the data. We can also see this when brain areas are recruited for tasks they were not specifically designed for. For instance visual processing areas can be recruiited for other tasks in the blind. So while there is specialisation in brain tissue, rather than there being circuits designed at a low level for certain cognitive tasks, it is more that the connectivity and kinds of neurons within an area are tuned to excel at a specific class of problems. It is softer and more diffuse organ than a "grammar gland". Rather it is a kind of soil within the mind that permits the growth of certain kinds of cognitive structures. Rather than being computer like and existing prior to the input of data, it is merely a capability expressed by the tuning of an overall system. Chomsky's universals in this view become rather less important. It is merely the statement that brain tissue is tuned in such a way that it encourages, among other things, certain specific kinds of linguistic structure. It's similar to noticing that the human hand is good stirring soup and then describing it as a soup stirring organ. Yes the hand has properties that allow it to be easily used as a soup stirring organ, but those same properties make it useful for some other things as well.
- anticensor 6y ago