Chomsky wrong on language?

[ALB]

gnome wrote:

ALB wrote:

I don't understand why you say Chomsky's view will irritate some here.

I suspect for the reason that there are some here who appear to see Chomsky, like Brand, as some kind of inspiration for the socialist movement, and hang on his every word.

Not me. I've been waiting for years for evidence that Chomsky's biological determinist theory of language is wrong and here it is. Reporting on a study of why people who have grown up learning to speak an essentially non-tonal language like English have difficulty in learning a tonal language like Chinese,  the Times (25 February) remarked::

Quote:

The study casts doubt on the linguistic theory that every chold is born with the mental equipment to learn any language, often referred to as "universal grammar" and associated with Noam Chimsky. An alternative model suggests that infants' brains are moulded by the language they hear in their first few months. By the time they are ten months, their brains are "tuned" to the sounds of their native language, according to research.

More on the research here:

http://theconversation.com/if-you-speak-mandarin-your-brain-is-different-37993

Cultural determinism rules, ok?

[Hud955]

Hang on!  No serious academic linguist outside Chomksy's immediate circle has taken his theories seriously for decades, as the mountain of papers demolishing his views demonstrates.  I say 'views' in the plural because as each of his theories has proved unworkable he has simply responded by producing another one.  If you are talking about disproof of his theory, it has to be asked 'which one'?  His theory of universal grammar is probably the best known outside academia.  Yet few people realise that this has long since been thoroughly discredited. In fact, Chomsky has never been able to produce a single 'universal' rule to which there are no exceptions.  He retains a level of pre-eminence only because he is backed by funding and support from The Pentagon. Through this, and through this alone, he has achieved an unassailable position which bears no relation to the lack of support which his theories actually attract. All it means is that other linguists are obliged to identify their views in relation to (and usually in opposition to) his.  He is a kind of touchstone, but is hardly anyone's guru.It seems that few leftists or socialists actually understand Chomsky's reputation within academia or his  relationship with the Pentagon.  I've only begun to get a grip on it myself in recent months.  The fact that the Pentagon has been the main paymaster for his research is, as Chomsky would say, completely uncontroversial. Chomsky recognises it in the acknowledgement section of every book on linguistics he writes. The Pentagon funds him to do research into the supposed underlying universal grammar of language (a kind of human linguistic machine code) because of its potential use in developing computer systems to control American weapons programmes.  As Chomsky himself would say, there is noting controversial about this.  He refers to 'The Language Lab', the MIT department where the Pentagon first set him up as 'The Death Lab' in recognition of its intended purpose.  He has frequently sought to justify his work there by claiming that pure research cannot be held responsible for the use to which it is put.   Chomksy's theories of language have always been bizarre in the extreme.  He believes, for instance, that language did not evolve in humans over time but was installed instantaneously, whole and complete, in the mind of a human ancestor at some unspecified moment in our distant past. When asked how this occurred, Chomsky has always declined to be specific, but when pushed, replies with a metaphor:  It was, he has said, as though our ancester had been hit by a 'cosmic ray shower'.  From this moment our minds contained not only all the grammer we would ever need or use, but also every concept.  For Chomsky, the concept 'carburetor', for example,  did not emerge culturally in response to developments in machine engineering but was, like all other concepts, installed in our minds millennia back in that initial moment of langague acquisition.  ('Carburetor' is Chomsky's own chosen example, by the way, not mine.)  Chomsky also believes that language has nothing to do with communication.  It purpose, he claims is to provide us with a means of talking to ourselves in the privacy of our own heads.Although Chomsky has produced one bizarre version of this linguistic theory after another throughout his career, all of them thave one interesting thing in common, they all deny the idea that language has any social origin or any social application or function – perfect for a machine code, but not a very good model to explain how it actually functions in human society.      

[LBird]

Thanks, Hud, for your very interesting and enlightening post.Your explanation of the problems with Chomsky's ideas is a model for socialists to follow, when trying to explain difficult 'science' issues to 'non-scientists'.Of course, one of things that attract me is that the post is laced with concerns about ideology (theories, definitions, purposes behind research, political and economic power), but that's my particular thirst being sated. I'm sure others will gain from reading your post, whether they share my interests or not.

[ALB]

Interesting stuff, Hud. But is Chris Knight actually claiming that Chomsky is a Pentagon agent? That would be going way beyond where I'd want to go. I merely want to see his biological determinism refuted.I notice you use the present tense but hasn't Chomsky long since stopped linguistic research, whether funded by (and/or for) the Pentagon or not?

[Young Master Smeet]

I'm not sure the article from the Conversation challenges the notion of a "language acquisition device", I'm sure the notion has always been that various linguistic opaths are switched on and off in language deveopment.Likewise, Chomsky's view on evolution isn't that weird, it's simply that he doesn't se a necessary continuation from hooting and noise signals to developed speach, as a naive evolution would have it.  Much like the idea that you can't have half a blood clot, the suggestion is that some other brain aspect was re-purposed wholesale.  Steve Jones (in the lecture where I nicked the blood clot point from compares evolution toa  shanty town, making uses of whatever it finds lying around.This is a useful summary of how Chomsky sees the situation:

Quote:

The astronomical variety of sentences any natural language user can produce and understand has an important implication for language acquisition, long a core issue in developmental psychology. A child is exposed to only a small proportion of the possible sentences in its language, thus limiting its database for constructing a more general version of that language in its own mind/brain. This point has logical implications for any system that attempts to acquire a natural language on the basis of limited data. It is immediately obvious that given a finite array of data, there are infinitely many theories consistent with it but inconsistent with one another. In the present case, there are in principle infinitely many target systems (potential I-languages) consistent with the data of experience, and unless the search space and acquisition mechanisms are constrained, selection among them is impossible. A version of the problem has been formalized by Gold (100) and more recently and rigorously explored by Nowak and colleagues (72-75). No known "general learning mechanism" can acquire a natural language solely on the basis of positive or negative evidence, and the prospects for finding any such domain-independent device seem rather dim. The difficulty of this problem leads to the hypothesis that whatever system is responsible must be biased or constrained in certain ways. Such constraints have historically been termed "innate dispositions," with those underlying language referred to as "universal grammar." Although these particular terms have been forcibly rejected by many researchers, and the nature of the particular constraints on human (or animal) learning mechanisms is currently unresolved, the existence of some such constraints cannot be seriously doubted. On the other hand, other constraints in animals must have been overcome at some point in human evolution to account for our ability to acquire the unlimited class of generative systems that includes all natural languages. The nature of these latter constraints has recently become the target of empirical work.

and

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In particular, these chimpanzees required thousands of training trials, and often years, to acquire the integer list up to nine, with no evidence of the kind of "aha" experience that all human children of approximately 3.5 years acquire (107). A human child who has acquired the numbers 1, 2, and 3 (and sometimes 4) goes on to acquire all the others; he or she grasps the idea that the integer list is constructed on the basis of the successor function. For the chimpanzees, in contrast, each number on the integer list required the same amount of time to learn.

On evolution:

Quote:

One possibility, consistent with current thinking in the cognitive sciences, is that recursion in animals represents a modular system designed for a particular function (e.g., navigation) and impenetrable with respect to other systems. During evolution, the modular and highly domain-specific system of recursion may have become penetrable and domain-general. This opened the way for humans, perhaps uniquely, to apply the power of recursion to other problems. This change from domain-specific to domain-general may have been guided by particular selective pressures, unique to our evolutionary past, or as a consequence (by-product) of other kinds of neural reorganization.

The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh FitchScienceNew Series, Vol. 298, No. 5598 (Nov. 22, 2002), pp. 1569-1579Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3832837

[Hud955]

HI Adam.  No Chris is not a conspiracy theorist (or is that a cover-up theorist?) by any stretch of the imagination, and he has a strong regard for Chomsky as a political commentator.  His aim is to explain this apparent conflict, not to resolve it by writing him off as an Pentagon insider.  His conclusions are much more interesting and consequential than that.  But you will have to wait for the book…

[Hud955]

I'm familiar with these quotes YMS, but they don't go anywhere near revealing the core of Chomsky's position which is that the language faculty did not evolve into existence but was installed fully formed.  In other words, the relationships of human beings to each other and their environment had no part in its origin. By his own admission, he is a Cartesian and pretty much always has been.His fundamental need to keep social interaction out of the theory of language has forced him over and over again into absurd positions of this kind. 

[Young Master Smeet]

Hud955,again, it's not that absurd, from an evolutionary perspective, given that language is (arguably) irreducibly complex, to come to a view that some other function has been repurposed, and language was absically born 'intact'.  If one accepts the argument by lack of data, and therefore the language acquisition device, it pretty much follows that language did not emerge from the same route a monkey howls and doesn't represent a continuation of the same.Afterall, the article cited is Chomsky's own work, so should represent an 'authoritative' example of his actual views.It is consistent with the essentailly chaotic character of the theory of evolution.

[Young Master Smeet]

oooh, I've learnt a new word: exaptation.  Anyway, an abstract, Chomsky isn't alone:

Quote:

Human beings are distinguished from all other organisms by their symbolic way of processing information about the world. This unique cognitive style is qualitatively different from all the earlier hominid cognitive styles, and is not simply an improved version of them. The hominid fossil and archaeological records show clearly that biological and technological innovations have typically been highly sporadic, and totally out of phase, since the invention of stone tools some 2.5 million years ago. They also confirm that this pattern applied in the arrival of modern cognition: the anatomically recognizable species Homo sapiens was well established long before any population of it began to show indications of behaving symbolically. This places the origin of symbolic thought in the realms of exaptation, whereby new structures come into existence before being recruited to new uses, and of emergence, whereby entire new levels of complexity are achieved through new combinations of attributes unremarkable in themselves. Both these phenomena involve entirely routine evolutionary processes; special as we human beings may consider ourselves, there was nothing special about the way we came into existence. Modern human cognition is a very recent acquisition; and its emergence ushered in an entirely new pattern of technological (and other behavioral) innovation, in which constant change results from the ceaseless exploration of the potential inherent in our new capacity.

Theory in BiosciencesSeptember 2010, Volume 129, Issue 2-3, pp 193-201Date: 28 May 2010 Human evolution and cognitionIan Tattersall

[Hud955]

No, indeed not.  Tattersall is one of Chomsky's true believers and has collaborated on various pieces of research with him.

[Hud955]

There is a great deal more to the language faculty than recursion, YMS.  And it does not explain Chomsky's fundamental position on this.  He has repeatedly come up with ad hoc attempts of this kind to justify his basic position, but none of them have proven anything like adequate. "it pretty much follows that language did not emerge from the same route a monkey howls and doesn't represent a continuation of the same."  That may be so but there is no need to accept that this is the way language did evolve – there are numerous other approaches to the problem.  And so there is no need to accept a premise that leads to such an absurd conclusion.I don't see any way around this.  The idea that the concept of 'carburetor' was implanted in our early brains millennia before the invention of the internal combustion engine strikes me as the pinnacle of absurdity.  

[Hud955]

Just to add to that:"the anatomically recognizable species Homo sapiens was well established long before any population of it began to show indications of behaving symbolically."Recent evidence for the  earliest origins of human symbolic thought, especially in Africa is pushing back the date all the time.  This claim can no longer be taken for granted.   It has always caused problems.

[Young Master Smeet]

And on the carburetor (sort of):

Quote:

By sharp contrast, she continues, for human infants even the first words ‘are used in a kind-concept constrained way (a way that indicates that the child's usage adheres to “natural kind” boundaries)’. Even after years of training, a chimpanzee's usage ‘never displays this sensitivity to differences among natural kinds. Surprisingly, then, chimps do not really have “names for things” at all. They have only a hodge-podge of loose associations’ ([24], p. 86). This is radically different from humans.A closer look shows that humans also do not have ‘names for things’ in any simple sense. Even the simplest elements of the lexicon – ‘water’, ‘tree’, ‘river’, ‘cow’, ‘person’, ‘house’, ‘home’, etc. – do not pick out (‘denote’) mind-independent entities. Rather, their regular use relies crucially on the complex ways in which humans interpret the world: in terms of such properties as psychic continuity, intention and goal, design and function, presumed cause and effect, Gestalt properties, and so on. It follows that the meanings of even the simplest words depend crucially on internal cognitive processes and cannot be spelled out in strictly physical terms. Human words and concepts differ sharply from those in the rest of the animal world in just about every relevant respect: their nature, the manner of their acquisition, and their characteristic use.

Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2013, Pages 89–98Evolution, brain, and the nature of languageRobert C. Berwick1,Angela D. Friederici2,Noam Chomsky3,Johan J. BolhuisWhich is where Chomsky is going with the Carburetor example (see also the quotatation here:https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8SjbFBKq35QC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=Carburetor+Chomsky&source=bl&ots=7qB8vRbJCH&sig=qBiHSk_7iZASSIepj2_fo7hEB-c&hl=en&sa=X&ei=C330VKizPIfWavnEgOAO&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Carburetor%20Chomsky&f=false )Not that the cocnept of carburetor was born fully formed one hundred thousand years ago, but that the concept emerges within the mind before the word.  At least, thats my reading, on aquick scan of the lit.

[Hud955]

 "Not that the cocnept of carburetor was born fully formed one hundred thousand years ago, but that the concept emerges within the mind before the word.  At least, thats my reading, on aquick scan of the lit."Absolutely, but in Chomsky's view, the concept not only precedes the word, it also precedes any possible experience to which either the concept or the word could be related.  You don't have to hold a crude referential theory of meaning to see the absurdity of this.  The problem Chomksy has always had seems to lie in his underlying agenda, which is to deny that language has any social content whatsoever.  There are currently quite a few theories about the origins of language acquistion, which avoid the kind of absrudist implications that have always been a hallmark of Chomsky's writings.   Several  linguists are now arguing that we learn language through a statistical process,  for instance.  Vyvan Evans at Bangor has recently published the latest blast against Chomsky.  He believes that language can be explained without any 'innate' characteristics at all, which seems to me to be going a bit too far in the opposite direction, but not having read his book I can't really comment.  What I do know is that if you are not careful, an apparently rational conceptual cascade can lead you in all kinds of absurd directions till, before you know it,  you can be insisting that the moon is made of green cheese.  

[robbo203]

I'm quite rusty on all this but what is the relation between Chomsky's ideas and those of Claude Levi-Strauss, the structural anthropologist?  Levi Strauss as I recall,  argued that there were certain  mental structures that underlie human behaviour which we may not be aware of – in the same way that  we all participate in society without necessarily being aware of its underlying "grammer" or social structure  or when we speak. we dont consciously apply the rules of grammerI know Levi-Strauss was influenced by people like Saussure and  Roman Jakobson in his project of bringing linguistic theory into social anthropology and that these figures also exerted an influence on Chomsky

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