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The crux of their argument is that the language faculty and other faculties (math/logic/abstract, theory of mind/social reasoning, spatial/temporal imagination,

by calf 2y ago

The crux of their argument is that the language faculty and other faculties (math/logic/abstract, theory of mind/social reasoning, spatial/temporal imagination, and other cognitive abilities) all evolved in parallel, so the most plausible explanation is that language is mostly independent of all those other faculties which are activated in distinct neural network areas of the human brain, based on brain scan studies in the last 20 years. I imagine a counterargument (or complication) to that is that such parallel evolution would require the neural networks to independently evolve certain breakthroughs multiple times before reaching the Homo sapiens stage. For example, language is recursive and yet human mathematical reasoning is recursive, but these use two different brain areas (according to the paper). So in their figure of two different brain regions for language processing versus math/code thinking, both regions had to somehow evolve the "wetware" for recursive computation. How did natural evolution manage that in general?

4b11b4 2y ago
If language is no longer part of thought, then sure, breaking down... thought... into many different mechanisms also makes sense (quite a bit of sense actually). From there, you ask: "What is the fundamental aspect underlying each of these different faculties?"
- calf 2y ago
  The authors say their opponents want a singular fundamental aspect, supposedly because of parsimony or Occam's razor (but this is the authors' framing). It's not clear to me who's account is more likely.
deleted 2y ago
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derriz 2y ago
Actual human natural language isn’t recursive in any meaningful sense. Formal grammar - an (often futile) attempt to describe the structure of natural languages - is generally expressed using a formal mathematical system which features recursion.
- calf 2y ago
  Actual human natural language is meaningfully recursive, because any grade school student understands the recursive properties of certain toy sentence examples in that they could "go on forever" as a set of arbitrarily larger complex sentences. The commonality of mathematical grammars (as mathematical objects in their own right) and natural language is that both have computational properties such as recursive structure - or ambiguity, which was discussed in the paper.
  - derriz 2y ago
    You're confusing the object language (human natural language) and the meta-language (formal grammars - ala Chomsky). Formal grammar theory relies on recursive formulae to define what is a a language (formally set of sentences), natural language itself does not use/require recursion as understood in the same way. Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the sense that attempts to describe such features (using formal language grammars) use recursion when in fact and in practice nesting sub-clauses do not "go on forever". An analogy with computer programming languages - programming languages exist that do NOT support recursion (pre-Algol) but nonetheless require recursion to define their formal grammar. For example, a programming language can support limitless nested lexical scoping (loosely analogous to sub-clauses in natural language) WITHOUT supporting recursion (which requires a stack and managing frames). For some programming languages (functional for example), recursion is such a key feature that it's inconceivable that the language could be useful without it. This is not the case for natural languages. Most of the people I interact with daily have English as a second language and rarely or never use sub-clauses (which are not recursive but are often used to claim that language is recursive) so from practical experience, I know that English as a communication tool looses very little expressive power when users do not use sub-clauses.
    - bbor 2y ago
      I'd definitely say all language use must rely on recursion, you're just highlighting our tendency to halt the pronunciation of it early at arbitrary points due to linguistic norms. Like, AFAIU this was Chomsky's whole impetus, and I really don't think anyone has answered better than he: how can a finite system compute linguistic meaning in finite time, otherwise? I'd guess the "natural language" answer would be along the lines of "it just comes naturally who knows", in which case I'm staying I'm on my side of the battle lines ;) Either way, I think you'd win a Nobel for proving that complex recursive processes aren't going on inside the head of someone speaking in natural language. We can discuss the likely situation all day, but directly measuring this in the moment seems well beyond our technical capabilities

by calf 2y ago

4b11b4 2y ago

If language is no longer part of thought, then sure, breaking down... thought... into many different mechanisms also makes sense (quite a bit of sense actually). From there, you ask: "What is the fundamental aspect underlying each of these different faculties?"

calf 2y ago
The authors say their opponents want a singular fundamental aspect, supposedly because of parsimony or Occam's razor (but this is the authors' framing). It's not clear to me who's account is more likely.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

derriz 2y ago

Actual human natural language isn’t recursive in any meaningful sense. Formal grammar - an (often futile) attempt to describe the structure of natural languages - is generally expressed using a formal mathematical system which features recursion.

calf 2y ago
Actual human natural language is meaningfully recursive, because any grade school student understands the recursive properties of certain toy sentence examples in that they could "go on forever" as a set of arbitrarily larger complex sentences. The commonality of mathematical grammars (as mathematical objects in their own right) and natural language is that both have computational properties such as recursive structure - or ambiguity, which was discussed in the paper.
- derriz 2y ago
  You're confusing the object language (human natural language) and the meta-language (formal grammars - ala Chomsky). Formal grammar theory relies on recursive formulae to define what is a a language (formally set of sentences), natural language itself does not use/require recursion as understood in the same way. Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the sense that attempts to describe such features (using formal language grammars) use recursion when in fact and in practice nesting sub-clauses do not "go on forever". An analogy with computer programming languages - programming languages exist that do NOT support recursion (pre-Algol) but nonetheless require recursion to define their formal grammar. For example, a programming language can support limitless nested lexical scoping (loosely analogous to sub-clauses in natural language) WITHOUT supporting recursion (which requires a stack and managing frames). For some programming languages (functional for example), recursion is such a key feature that it's inconceivable that the language could be useful without it. This is not the case for natural languages. Most of the people I interact with daily have English as a second language and rarely or never use sub-clauses (which are not recursive but are often used to claim that language is recursive) so from practical experience, I know that English as a communication tool looses very little expressive power when users do not use sub-clauses.
  - bbor 2y ago
    I'd definitely say all language use must rely on recursion, you're just highlighting our tendency to halt the pronunciation of it early at arbitrary points due to linguistic norms. Like, AFAIU this was Chomsky's whole impetus, and I really don't think anyone has answered better than he: how can a finite system compute linguistic meaning in finite time, otherwise? I'd guess the "natural language" answer would be along the lines of "it just comes naturally who knows", in which case I'm staying I'm on my side of the battle lines ;) Either way, I think you'd win a Nobel for proving that complex recursive processes aren't going on inside the head of someone speaking in natural language. We can discuss the likely situation all day, but directly measuring this in the moment seems well beyond our technical capabilities