Hud955
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I think you are right, Alan: there doesn't appear to be any direct connection between Chomsky's politics and his linguistics – if by that you mean no direct intellectual connection. But that is not what Chris is arguing. I don't go along with some of his (Chris's) political assumptions and therefore don't agree entirely with the conclusions of his argument, but that's another matter.Chris has regularly expressed admiration for Chomsky's political position and his political courage, at the same time as taking a dim view, not only of his linguistics but of the role this has given him.I'm not sure what people here mean by biological determinism. I think this is one of those very difficult terms which can have a very wide range of meanings. It fragments as soon as you start to unpick it. Given our present level of understanding, the idea that our genes have no influence on us could only be held by someone in a powerful state of denial (or possibly a genius about to initiate a gigantic paradigm shift – but I think we can reasonably discount the likelyhood of that right now.) Biological determinism and cultural determinism in any kind of extreme and exclusionary form both appear to me to be unsustainable.
Once again, YMS, the biological ability to create language is not what is in question here. At least it is not what I am arguing. (As already indicated, I think there is a good prima facie case for it.) Chomsky does argue for this, but it is by no means all that he is arguing. If you want a discussion on Chomsky and evolution then you will have to be more specific about the claims you making here. (Unless your reference is to an earlier post I have missed, in which case apologies. Let me know.) In all the reading I have done I have never seen anything that would confirm this view.
"PS Knight was not in the SWP as far as I know, but was in the Militant Tendency. He was chucked out for being too mad. No further comment."I'm not sure that Militant Tendency would be the first place I would go for an opinion on whether a person was mad or not, Stuart. But anyway…
I'm not entirely sure which 'empirical facts' you are referring to, LB. The term 'band' is only generally applicable to immediate return hunter gatherers. Delayed return hunter gatherers are mostly sedentary or semi sedentary and do not live in communities composed of hunting bands. If you are referring only to immediate term systems then you could, I suppose describe the majority of non-warring bands as peace-bands' and the minority that do make war as 'war-bands', but what would be the point in this? We can already make that distinction. It would only add another set of complicating labels. It would also obscure the generalised relationship between immediate return bands and their structural propensity for peaceful behaviour which is not an a priori (definitional) relationship but one that can only be determined empirically. And it would further obscure the fact that although some delayed-return hunter gatherers make war, not all do, and those that do, don't all the time, while few make war as frequently as tribal people.If you are wanting to identify immediate return bands as peace bands, and delayed return groups as war groups (not bands), then you would have a different kind of problem. These labels are highly exacting, while the tendency to make war or otherwise does not map exactly onto immediate-return or delayed-retuirn hunter gatherers, for many of the reasons mentioned in my previous post.'Immediate-return' and 'delayed-return' are good and useful terms in my view since they identify a fundamental and useful aspect of the way such social groups reproduce their real lives and one that appears to have an impact on their behavour. 'Peace-band/group' and 'war-band/group' refer only to secondary behavioural characteristics of people in these different kinds of community.
Just to add to that, Robin. Immediate return hunter gatherers are largely confined to tropical regions, where food is available throughout the year. In other latitudes the need to store food has given rise to more developed delayed return systems, and therefore to greater status relationships and to the kinds of behaviours that go with them. In terms of human origins though, it is tropical immediate return hunter gatherers, principally those in Africa where our species began, that are important.
Except of course, that Chomsky has utterly failed to find anything universal about language forms. In terms of language itself, I don't think it needs an MIT professor to tell us that it is universal. Chomsky does not however exclude content. He believes, as I have been saying, that content – a universal grammer and set of concepts – are a given. He simply excludes social content, or indeed any kind of explanation that requires social input – like the idea that language evolved. It is because of this that he has been forced to hold the rather mad idea that a language module appeared in our minds fully formed at some time in our past. (Note in our minds. For Chomsky 'body' is an 'inchoherent' concept.) Lots of people have been misled into thinking that Chomsky has at certain times accepted an evolutionary explanation of language origins. He hasn't. It is just that his views have sometimes been conflated with those of others with whom he has collaborated. I'm not a biological determinist, I'm a cultural materialist. I don't believe that human communites share basic structures because they are innate as, for example, Levi-Strauss sometimes maintained. I believe that human communites share basic structures because their need to solve similar problems has given rise to similar material solutions and thence structurally similar ideological forms.I don't see any compelling evidence that the content of language is innate, which is Chomsky's foundational view and which over decades and many different theories he has been unable to demonstrate. Prima facie it seems very likely that our capacity for language contains factors of some kind that are innate (though some argue otherwise) but that is an entirely different matter
Hi Robin, this will have to be a very short answer (for me), as I am in the last stages of preparing for my holiday. It is nearly thirty years since I read Evans Pritchard so I don't recall much about the Nuer, but here are some things to consider. You can tell me if they fit what you know about them. Egalitarianism seems to be closely related to and consequent on the way in which societies obtain their means of life. It is principally found among hunter gatherers, both immediate and delayed return, though it does extend to some pastoralists and herders and even some horticulturalists where finely balanced factors may tip them either way. It needs to be noted, however, that delayed return hunter gatherers, although they generally retain a largely egalitarian structure including the use of demand sharing, do tend to have some status relations and sometimes chiefs. Structurally induced warfare on the other hand seems to be related primarily to delayed return systems and so includes states, tribes and delayed return hunter gatherers. In other words delayed return hunter gatherers do sometimes make war, though less on the whole than tribes and states. If I recall (correct me if I am wrong) the Nuer have a delayed return system so the fact that they make war would not be entirely surprising. There is another big factor to consider, and that is the relationships of a group to other societies. Warlike behaviour may not arise from the internal structures of a group; it may arise from the need to respond to external conditions. Even immediate return hunter gatherers are known to have developed a warlike culture in circumstances where they are subject to attack or have been predated, often by slave traders and colonial and post colonial states. And that is especially the case where they are hemmed in by the territorial claims of neighbouring peoples and cannot therefore flee. I think much of this is the situation with the Nuer.Either of these conditions my therefore apply.These are, of course, highly generalised comments, so you always have to look at the ethnography of an individual group to determine what is going on among them and of course that may not always be possible. (I think there are occasions like this when the use of rather baggy categories can be useful. Pare them down and refine them too much and we lose the ability to make useful generalisations.)
Young Master Smeet wrote:I've read Knight's articles on Chomsky, and his dodgey tarry brush, in the past, and been distinctly unimpressed. I'm no expert, and so don't have much of a dog in the fight, other than the impression that Knight really wasn't arguing from evidence. Chomsky's rationalism does impinge, somewhat, on his politics, in his claims of an innate sense of morality/human values relate to that view.That's a dodgy tarry brush kind of contribution there, YMS. In my experience Chris is almost OCD about evidencing his work, especially anything he says about Chomsky, because he knows just what sort of a backlash it is likely to provoke.
ALB wrote:LBird wrote:More:regarding Chomskys theory, the article wrote:Speech is the natural, autonomous output of a dedicated computational mechanism – the ‘language organ’ – located in a special region of the individual human brain.'Individuals' and 'biology'.
It is this biological determinism that was why I was waiting for someone to refute him. A bit suspicious of Chris Knight though, as isn't he a bit of one too (ex-SWP, expelled I think, but in their argument I thought Chris Harman came off best)?
LOL, we have some ex SWPers, ex facists, ex everything in the party, Adam. Are you suspicious of them too? I think we need to approach this from a factual point of view. I don't go with everything Chris says by any means but I think his views needs to get a fair hearing, without their being loaded down with these kinds of irrelevancy.
It's Chomsky's rationalism, his extreme individualism and his (modified) Cartesianism that should immediately start raising issues. When it is asserted that language has no social fuction and no social purpose we need to look very carefully at the man's agenda. Chomsky: "I should mention that I am using the term ‘language’ to refer to an individual phenomenon, a system represented in the mind/brain of a particular individual…In ordinary language, in contrast, when we speak of language, we have in mind some kind of social phenomenon, a shared property of a community. What kind of community? There is no clear answer to this question…. The term ‘language’ as used in ordinary discourse involves obscure sociopolitical and normative factors."
Just to clarify the background, Chris Knight's academic specialism is linguistics. He is the founder of EvoLang, the international conference on the evolution of language, and his knowledge of Chomsky's linguistics is profound. He is also well known to Chomsky in his professional role, partly because he is one of the few people who are willing to challenge him publicly and directly on his linguistic theories. And you are right, Alan. Not only does Chomsky not connect his anarchism and his lingusitics, he has always attempted to erect an impenetrable barrier between the two, both professionally and personally. He claims that the two parts of his personality, linguist and political activiest don't even talk to one another. ‘The one talent that I have which I know many other friends don’t seem to have’ is I’ve got some quirk in my brain which makes it work like separate buffers in a computer." If you start to approach the Chomysky phenomenon in detail, however, and in all its aspects, then it should start to raise some interesting questions in your mind. I'm not suggesting that there is any kind of conspiracy going on, but something in the nature of a fortuitous conjunction of circumstances which have had interesting consequences. I do think the background facts of Chomsky's linguistics have a bearing on his politics and on the nature and direction of his influence in the world – not the linguistics themselves but their institutional setting. I don't see this exactly the way Chris does, but a lot of my thinking is nevertheless informed by privileged information I gained while subbing his book. As that is still in the early stages of publication, I think it would be unfair of me to speak about it openly now. Once it is out, you can read it for yourself, and I'd be more than happy to discuss it.Sorry, LB I'd like to chat to you about this and clarify, but for the reasons just stated I feel a little constrained at present. Maybe you would like to look at Chomsky's early attack on BF Skinner's theory of operant conditioning and place it in its world-political context, and in particular in the means used to control public opinion in the USA and USSR. (It was actually Chomksy that more or less took down Skinner single handedly. Unfortunately, it was also Chomsky that gave the initial impetus to the Tooby and Cosmides school of idealist Evolutionary Psychology. You can't have everything!
) "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.
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.
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.
