Is Chomsky's View on the Mind-Body Problem Redefining Materialism?

[apeiron]

What science? I thought there is very little science in this area.

Why do you think that? There are journals, conferences, turf battles over whether you belong to paleolinguistics, biolinguistics or historical linguistics. Every semblance of an active academic domain

If his papers and that of people like Ian Tattersall, Hauser, etc. aren't convincing then it's unlikely that a non-expert like myself can do justice to their arguments but two very good papers giving these arguments are the following:

OK, what is it that Tattersall is claiming here in your view? I'm not sure where the significant dispute might be?

Apparently the major biological reorganization at the origin of Homo sapiens involved some neural innovation that “exapted” the already highly evolved human brain for symbolic thought. This potential then had to be “discovered” culturally, plausibly through the invention of language. Emergence rather than natural selection is thus implicated in the origin of human symbolic consciousness, a chance coincidence of acquisitions having given rise to an entirely new and unanticipated level of complexity. This observation may undermine claims for “adaptedness” in modern human behaviors.

So as I argue, the brain is exapted for grammar/syntax. And then this possibility had to be "discovered" culturally.

Tattersall's gloss is in error I would say for not treating cultural evolution as an actual form of evolutionary change (he calls this second stage emergence rather than evolution).

But really, he is not addressing the points that I was raising. He does not deal with the vocal tract (though elsewhere he has said he is more swayed by the evidence that an articulate tract arose only in sapiens - something that is quite possibly true, indeed what I would prefer to believe, and doesn't change anything here except the timings).

And so far as "major brain reorganisation" goes, Tattersall is not presenting any evidence of such.

He says...

What exactly this change was, is beyond my expertise to speculate, although numerous suggestions have been made: one intriguing suggestion is that a neural system linking the basal ganglia and other subcortical structures with the cortex, and initially adapted for motor control,
was coopted to cognitive functions (Lieberman, 2006, 2007); another possibility is of a mutation affecting working memory or phonological storage capacity in the prefrontal cortex (Coolidge and Wynn, 2005).

He then goes on to say that this change was like the keystone of an arch - a small but significant change. So not in fact anything major in morphology, just retrospectively major in consequence.

At this point, it would be worth turning to a better authority like Lieberman - the original vocal tract theorist! Whose "intriguing suggestion" is precisely that the critical shift was from a low-level autonomic control over the vocal tract to a high-level one, setting up the ability to actually plan complex and novel vocalisations.

Vocalisation became more complex because of considerable change to the vocal tract. And because of the fine-tuning of top-down neural connectivity that created more "oversight" of the motor control of that tract.

It does pay to understand brain evolution in some detail here. The top-down connections already existed. So you could say the brain was exapted - but then it has connections in every direction so it is exapted to do just about anything on this score. All that had to actually happen was an adjustment of ratios. More widespread top-downness, more plasticity of motor control.

That is not to say a whole lot of other fine-grain twiddling of neurodevelopmental settings were not going on. Rather than a single hopeful monster genetic change, you would expect many millenia of fine-tuning that continued even for the next 40k years after symbolic speech definitely existed.

So did you see something critical in the Tattersall paper that I've missed? It's certainly not an argument against the possible importance of the vocal tract as a new constraint on expressive communication, or the likely fine-grain and cumulative nature of any related "brain reorganisation", or the need for the later cultural evolution of language itself, as far as I can see.

 

[Albuquerque]

...the advantage in the evolution of vocal communication in relation to say gestural communication is probably related with the constant use of hands either to gather to hunt or to work...curiously face mimics can be considered the only exception to this situation...no wonder our complex array of facial expressions is so important in communication specially considering that baby´s could not resort to complex vocalizations while very young...for that very same reasons it is currently believed women are far better prepared to interpret facial signs regarding states of mind then man...

 

[bohm2]

So did you see something critical in the Tattersall paper that I've missed? It's certainly not an argument against the possible importance of the vocal tract as a new constraint on expressive communication, or the likely fine-grain and cumulative nature of any related "brain reorganisation", or the need for the later cultural evolution of language itself, as far as I can see.

I think the key difference can be framed around a modern version of the Darwin-Wallace debate. Maybe you can expand on it because your background is far more extensive than mine in this area. Consider these points by Chomsky but also repeated by Tattershall and the others:

The language faculty is one component of what the cofounder of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, called ‘‘man’s intellectual and moral nature’’: the human capacities for creative imagination, language and symbolism generally, mathematics, interpretation and recording of natural phenomena, intricate social practices, and the like, a complex of capacities that seem to have crystallized fairly recently, perhaps a little over 50,000 years ago, among a small breeding group of which we are all descendants—a complex that sets humans apart rather sharply from other animals, including other hominids, judging by traces they have left in the archaeological record. The nature of the ‘‘human capacity,’’ as some researchers now call it, remains a considerable mystery. It was one element of a famous disagreement between the two founders of the theory of evolution, with Wallace holding, contrary to Darwin, that evolution of these faculties cannot be accounted for in terms of variation and natural selection alone, but requires ‘‘some other influence, law, or agency,’’ some principle of nature alongside gravitation, cohesion, and other forces without which the material universe could not exist. Although the issues are framed differently today within the core biological sciences, they have not disappeared (see Wallace 1889: chap. 15, Marshack 1985).

Same with our mathematical abilities:

Restriction to this case yields the successor function, from which the rest of the theory of natural numbers can be developed in familiar ways. That suggests a possible answer to a problem that troubled Wallace over a century ago: in his words, that the ‘‘gigantic development of the mathematical capacity is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause’’ (1889:467), if only because it remained unused.

Consider also Tattersall's point here:

Still, it is far more likely that the neurological underpinnings of the human symbolic capacity were born in the major genetic/developmental reorganization that resulted in the physical entity Homo sapiens as we know it today – but that the expression of this underlying capacity had to await release by some cultural (White, 1982) rather than biological acquisition (Tattersall, 2004). This, of course, begs the question of what this cultural acquisition might have been; and it is hardly original to suggest that the prime candidate for the cultural releasing agent of the human symbolic capacity is the invention of language, facilitated by an already existing neural substrate.

I think the difference is that Chomsky/Tattersall/Hauser see culture as an effect of our innate symbolic ability and not the other way around. I'm not sure if I'm making sense but the difference is important and is what separates these two contrasting positions, I think. What confuses me (and maybe I'm mistaken), is if evolution of these abstract faculties was not guided by natural selection but due to natural law, might this explain why we seem to have a much deeper understanding of mind-independent reality than other animals? This is more in line with Peirce's argument and not Chomsky's (e.g. "and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius, tending to make him guess those laws aright, or nearly aright..."). But maybe I'm way off the mark and direct access to some aspect of mind-independent reality is not possible (as Chomsky argues), even if evolution is guided directly by such laws.

Why do you think that? There are journals, conferences, turf battles over whether you belong to paleolinguistics, biolinguistics or historical linguistics. Every semblance of an active academic domain

I meant this:

The most direct potential approaches to such investigation lie in the examination of the fossil and archaeological archives of the human past. Sadly, though, cognition in itself leaves no imprint in the tangible record. As a result, in trying to understand the evolution of our unusual cognitive mode we have to seek proxy systems.

 

[Albuquerque]

...it is my impression that the gravitational information coming out from the Moon, not being the Moon it is a natural model of the Moon or what the system Moon is, functionally speaking, say, in relation to Earth...sets of gravitons may be said to constitute the "linguistic" medium by which packets of information can be conveyed regarding variations in distance and its respective influence say in tides and so on...additionally we could consider rotation magnetic fields heat and such like but for simplification sake gravity suffices for analogy...now it seams fair to assert that the fundamental distinction we usually do regarding the encoding of information from living beings at large and humans in particular in opposition to inorganic systems is deeply rooted to the innate persuasive and persistent sense of agency provided by the highly complex so called "self effect" common to the particular development of our own system/species which to some extent has recently progressively been called into question by neuroscientists...if such is proven the case the all endless debate on language miraculous specificity will look very funny on history books...

 

[apeiron]

What confuses me (and maybe I'm mistaken), is if evolution of these abstract faculties was not guided by natural selection but due to natural law, might this explain why we seem to have a much deeper understanding of mind-independent reality than other animals? This is more in line with Peirce's argument and not Chomsky's (e.g. "and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius, tending to make him guess those laws aright, or nearly aright..."). But maybe I'm way off the mark and direct access to some aspect of mind-independent reality is not possible (as Chomsky argues), even if evolution is guided directly by such laws.

I don't think you give near enough weight to the impact of cultural evolution. Langauge opened up an entirely new realm of world-modelling for the human mind. And if you don't find a way to factor this in as part of your view of epistemology, then indeed you may jump to more fantastical reasons why humans are so good at world-modelling.

 

[Albuquerque]

...complex algorithms in computer programs can be very good in prediction and control and the tendency is to improve in the long run but it is not the case that they are conscious or aware on anything per se...it seams to me that we must separate "awareness" a problem of its own from complex forms of convergent data analysis...other then that I am personally not denying the importance of culture in general or even Ethics and Moral as methods to improve social efficiency in producing work, which is what they do, as they are none less then organizing "operative systems" where obviously a precise and yet subjective multi modal language is instrumental to the diversified adapting progress of a large group as a whole...nevertheless communication as means of achieving efficiency between a constellation or a cloud of integrated systems hardly can be seen as a specific human invention if not through a very narrow conception of what "language" and "communication" actually mean...we are indeed to obsessed with our sense of self importance to look at such matters in a frivolous cold and sufficiently distant manner...I for one indulge myself in imagining such scenarios for the sole and modest purpose of entertainment..

 

[bohm2]

I don't think you give near enough weight to the impact of cultural evolution. Langauge opened up an entirely new realm of world-modelling for the human mind. And if you don't find a way to factor this in as part of your view of epistemology, then indeed you may jump to more fantastical reasons why humans are so good at world-modelling.

You're probably right. Do you think that as a species we've evolved at all in the past ~50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)? I mean if I was to take a human infant from ~50,000 years ago and bring him/her up in today's society would he/she be pretty well like any other human being? Take a Neandethal or a pre-human ancestor and do the same.

 

[Evo]

You're probably right. Do you think that as species we've evolved at all in the past 50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)? I mean if I was to take a human infant from ~50,000 years ago and bring him/her up in today's society would he/she be pretty well like any other human being? Take a Neandethal or a pre-human ancestor and do the same.

Humans from ~50k years ago, yes.

 

[bohm2]

Humans from ~50k years ago, yes.

Do you think that an infant from that era that is brought up in modern society would not have the same language/math/science/music abilities/potential, etc as a modern human infant?

 

[Evo]

Do you think that an infant from that era that is brought up in modern society would not have the same language/math/science/music abilities/potential, etc as a modern human infant?

They'd have the same abilities, the modern human brain has been around ~50,000 years.

 

[Pythagorean]

What about transgenerational epigenetic effects? They've begun to manifest changes in the body at least (grandmothers of the depression have granddaughters more susceptible to diabetes and obesity).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Transgenerational_epigenetic_observations

Won't it be a while (and a lot of experiments and studies) before we can say what such effects have played a role in brain function in 50k years? (given that the textbook example of famine and diabetes was a two-generation development).

 

[apeiron]

Do you think that as a species we've evolved at all in the past ~50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)?

Yes, some researchers argue there has actually been faster genetic change during the past 10k than during any earlier period!

Gould was one of those who pushed the view that H.sapiens would have been genetically frozen since the cultural revolution 50kya. But the evidence is not supporting him.

See http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.full.pdf+html

To the extent that new adaptive alleles continued to reflect demographic growth, the Neolithic and later periods would have experienced a rate of adaptive evolution 100 times higher than characterized most of human evolution. Cultural changes have reduced mortality rates, but variance in reproduction has continued to fuel genetic change (51). In our view, the rapid cultural
evolution during the Late Pleistocene created vastly more opportunities for further genetic change, not fewer, as new avenues emerged for communication, social interactions, and creativity.

So it is entirely probable that the human brain has continued to evolve. There are all the highly controversial ethnic morphometric studies (Australian aborigines having larger primary visual cortex, for instance) but now we are moving into the neurogenetics era and can expect to have some much clearer answers.

This is another celebrated recent result...http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/pdfFiles/ASPMMicrocephalin_Lahn.pdf

It could be something about an adaptation to tonal language, but what it is about is still speculative. The fact of continued genetic change, less so.

Could you adopt an archaic H.sapiens and rear it so it wouldn't stand out in high school? You would still want to say yes, but no longer with such certainty.

 

[apeiron]

What science? I thought there is very little science in this area.

This is a nice example of the kind of thing Chomsky has never done.

Restrictions on Biological Adaptation in Langauge Evolution
http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/329.pdf

Christiansen computer models the rate of cultural change against genetic change and argues that the co-evolution of language and genetic hard-wiring just can't happen as cultural evolution always runs ahead too fast - even if you invoke a Baldwin effect.

For example, the entire Indo-European language group, including Breton, Danish, Faroese, Gujarati, Hittite, Tadzik, and Waziri which exhibit huge variations in case systems, word order, and phonology, have diverged in just 10,000 years (33). Thus, the “environment” of linguistic conventions changes far more rapidly, and yields far greater diversity (34), than the typical properties of physical and biological environments to which organisms must adapt...

...Thus, a highly intricate and abstract language “module” (5), “instinct” (6) or “organ” (7) postulated to explain language acquisition (7, 39), language universals (7) and the species-specificity of human language (8) could not have arisen through biological adaptation.

Indeed, this conclusion is reinforced by the observation that, had such adaptation occurred in the human lineage, these processes would have operated independently on modern human populations as they spread throughout Africa and the rest of the world during the last 100 kyr. If so, genetic populations should have coevolved to their own language groups, leading to divergent and mutually incompatible language modules (40).

Linguists have found no evidence for this (6). For example, native Australasian populations have been largely isolated for 50 kyr (31), but learn European languages readily.

This is not such a problem for vocal tract evolution however...

Although we have shown that arbitrary linguistic properties cannot be genetically encoded through adaptation, this does not preclude genetic adaptation to aspects of language held stable by functional pressures. For example, changes in the vocal apparatus may have arisen from functional pressures to produce more intelligible vocalization, although this point is controversial (48-50).

Then on the question that seems central to your concerns - is human grammatical language merely contingent or does it have deep Platonic structure? - Christiansen comes down on the side of "just contingent".

Although our simulations indicate that some biological adaptations for functional aspects of language could have taken place, we suggest that the close fit between the structure of language and the mechanisms employed to acquire and use it primarily arose because language has been shaped by the brain through cultural evolution. Indeed, the astonishing subtlety and diversity of patterns in human language (34) may for the most part result from the complex interaction of multiple constraints on cultural evolution, deriving from the nature of thought, the perceptuo-motor system, cognitive limitations on learning and processing, and pragmatic/communicative factors (40). Thus, as suggested by Darwin (64), the evolution of human language may be best understood in terms of cultural evolution, not biological adaptation.

However, I don't completely agree. I think that both the mammalian brain and language as the code of thought are subject to some severe optimality constraints. The evolution of both is guided by some deep structure. Which of course is why I think semiotics, hierarchy theory, dichotomies, dimensional constraint, etc, are crucial to explaining why brains and minds are the way they are. The evolution of reality-modelling is subject to stern efficiency constraints.

So Chomsky was never completely wrong. But he never properly engaged with the complexity of human evolution - the mix of the biological and cultural.

His response to the growing weight of evidence for the importance of the cutural bit seems to be to have stripped back his generative grammar to something more minimal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program - that could still conceivably be the bare bones of a genetic language organ.

However it still seems to miss what I think is essential - the serial/computational constraint imposed on a hierarchical/dynamic structure. Or the impact a vocal tract had on a brain. This is a crucial part of the "deep structure" story - as can be seen from Pattee's epistemic cut and his take on the genetic code/cellular metabolism.

So yes, there is something true about the structuralist/Platonic point of view - something regular reductionist science does not much consider. But Chomsky seems always too distanced from the real world evidence to get it.

 

[bohm2]

Yes, some researchers argue there has actually been faster genetic change during the past 10k than during any earlier period!Gould was one of those who pushed the view that H.sapiens would have been genetically frozen since the cultural revolution 50kya. But the evidence is not supporting him.

I'm pretty sure there is no evidence against Gould's major hypothesis, which is in agreement with Evo. Take any human infant from any part of the globe whether Africa, Asia, Europe, the Arctic or a human infant from ~50,000 yrs ago. If brought up in today's society they would be able to surf the net and do pretty much everything we can do. Do you disagree with this?

This is a nice example of the kind of thing Chomsky has never done.

From his most recent talk this is his argument (see video starting at ~27:00 minutes):

There is a field called Evolution of language, which has a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense. But anyway, its growing. In fact, it isn't even about evolution of language, its almost entirely speculations about evolution of communication which is a different topic. And its kind of natural topic to look at if your caught up in another myth, a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory, which holds that changes take place only incrementally. Small change, then another small change, and finally you get complex organisms. That was believed at one time, and you can find sentences in darwin... you can quote, that's the bible. But for a long time evolutionary biologists have understood it doesn't work like that. You can have quite sudden changes that, small changes, that lead to huge phenomenal difference. In the area of communication you can mislead yourself into believing that since every organism you can think of, from bacteria to humans, has some kind of communication system, so maybe our communication system us just a slight modification of primates' or whatever you like. But its undoubtedly not true, but at least you can delude yourself into believing it. On the other hand language seems totally separate. These nothing even remotely analogous or nothing at all homologous as far as anyone knows. Theres a few things that look similar, like say songbirds are at such a distance from an evolutionary point of view that its just got to be convergent evolution to the extent that there is a similarity. And there is interesting questions you can study, but only if you take biology in the last 50 years seriously. If you are back to the pop darwinism that you learned in 8th grade that's no good. Anyhow, the fact that there's been no evolution in 50000 years is interesting if anyone really wants to study evolution of language. It raises a lot of questions, but I don't want to get to far from the Poverty of the Stimulus...

On the Poverty of the Stimulus
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/research/linguistics/news-events/latest-news/n_chomsky

 

[apeiron]

If brought up in today's society they would be able to surf the net and do pretty much everything we can do. Do you disagree with this?

No, I think the odds are still that the genetic diversity within the modern population would swamp the genetic difference that would exist between us and H.sapiens circa 50kya. But this claim is now much more open to question.

For instance, a significant seeming observation about the famous cave paintings is they look like eidetic imagery. Which in the modern era would be seen as a primitive or even pathological trait.

The art of modern children and modern tribal art is about what the painter is thinking, rather than seeing.

So right there is evidence for a mental difference. Could it be simply a sociocultural difference? Probably. Or could it be a genetic one? Not so likely, but still possible.

Broadly, of course, I have been arguing all along for the fundamental importance of a sociocultural explanation of the human difference. Whereas I thought you were championing the genetic.

But on the question of whether the brain is unchanged for the past 50ky, the honest answer is no. And that is something a sociocultural approach has to take into account.

 

[apeiron]

From his most recent talk this is his argument (see video starting at ~27:00 minutes):

Hah, he still knows how to make himself the centre of attention, doesn't he. Fling around the outrageous comments, then retreat into opaqueness so he can't be pinned down by the stung critics. It's a tactic that has longed worked for his political views as well.

Geoff Pullum responds here...http://biolinguistica.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/1516/

These recent talks and papers share a steadfast refusal to engage with anything that might make the debate about the poverty of the stimulus (POS) an empirical one. They issue blanket dismissals of nearly all modern cognitive/linguistic science as worthless, and sweep aside whole genres of work on the basis of what seems to be extremely shallow acquaintance. Claims about parallels in the natural sciences feature prominently, as does a preference for authority over evidence...

...So he portrays current skepticism among cognitive scientists about linguistic nativism as not just obtuse, but actively harmful, a threat to our whole discipline. This is an interesting (if rather risky) new way of stoking enthusiasm for linguistic nativism: appeal to linguists’ self-interest and desire for security (you don’t want to be shut down, do you?). But it’s hard to take seriously. Linguistics is not going to die just because a fair number of its practitioners now have at least some interest in machine learning, evolutionary considerations, computational models of acquisition, and properties of the child’s input, and are becoming acquainted with probability theory, corpus use, computer simulation, and psychological experimentation — as opposed to waving all such techniques contemptuously aside...

...The argument from absence of stimulus is pretty much demolished by this Bayesian insight: the argument form simply is not valid. And for people who use the phrase “the logical problem of language acquisition” (as linguistic nativists have been doing since 1981), that ought to mean something. It certainly seems to me sufficient to justify including at least a brief introduction to Bayesian statistical reasoning in the education of every theoretical linguist...

...Lieberman notes that dramatic evolutionary developments like disappearance of lactose intolerance or radical alteration in the ability to survive in high-altitude low-oxygen environments can take place in under 3000 years; yet (as Chomsky stresses) the evidence that any human being can learn any human languages is strong, suggesting that UG shows no genetic variation at all. Why would UG remain so astonishingly resistant to minor mutations for so many tens of thousands of years? There is no selection pressure that would make it disadvantageous for Australian aborigines to have different innate constraints on movement or thematic role assignment from European or African populations; yet not a hint of any such genetic diversity in innate linguistic capacities has ever been identified, at least in grammar. Why not? Chomsky’s response is basically that it just happened...

 

[bohm2]

Hah, he still knows how to make himself the centre of attention, doesn't he. Fling around the outrageous comments, then retreat into opaqueness so he can't be pinned down by the stung critics.
Geoff Pullum responds here...http://biolinguistica.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/1516/

Do you find Geoff Pullum's argument against the "poverty of stimulus" argument convincing?

We conclude that linguists have some additional work to do if they wish to sustain their claims about having provided support for linguistic nativism, and we offer some reasons for thinking that the relevant kind of future work on this issue is likely to further undermine the linguistic nativist position.

Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
http://www.ucd.ie/artspgs/research/pullum.pdf

Personally, I agree completely with Chomsky on this issue for the relatively simple and seemingly trivial (for me) reasons he offers here:

Poverty of stimulus problems are ubiquitous. Every aspect of growth and development poses huge poverty of stimulus problems. Now the term isn't used in biology and the reason is it's taken to be so obvious that there is no need for a term, so it's obvious that there is a poverty of stimulus problem when humans develop arms instead of wings or a mammalian visual system but not an insect visual system. There is a stimulus. There's external data like nutrition but there's – no one even bothers to argue about it - there is no way for nutrition to determine that you have a mammalian visual system so that's got to be accounted for by something internal, some genetic property. And then you go on to try to find out what it is and ask why it's that way and not some other way. In the case of language, there is a term, poverty of stimulus, and it's considered highly controversial, but just about everything about language is considered highly controversial, even if it is perfectly obvious, a total truism.

Poverty of Stimulus: Unfinished Business
http://www.stiftung-jgsp.uni-mainz.de/Bilder_allgemein/Mainz_transcript_edited.pdf
‘Poverty of the Stimulus’ Revisited: Recent Challenges Reconsidered
http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/proceedings/2008/pdfs/p383.pdf
Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/news-events/seminars-talks/berwicketal2011

 

[apeiron]

Personally, I agree completely with Chomsky on this issue for the relatively simple and seemingly trivial (for me) reasons he offers here:

It's just a crazy strawman argument. Kids are soaked in language from birth.

You cited Pullum's paper. What in it do you dispute?

...it is calculated that a child in a working-class family will have heard 20 million word tokens by the age of 3, and a child being raised in a family on welfare will have heard only 10 million (p. 132). Nonetheless, even in a welfare household, the cumulative exposure to language use of a 3-year-old amounts to ten times the entire extant corpus of Old English literature...

...By these numbers, even a welfare child would be likely to hear about 7,500 questions that crucially falsify the structure-independent auxiliary-fronting generalization, before reaching the age of 3...

And how do you make sense of Chomsky's statements like this?...

it's obvious that there is a poverty of stimulus problem when humans develop arms instead of wings or a mammalian visual system but not an insect visual system.

You don't learn an arm or a stomach. But you do learn to see, hear, move, and all the other stuff a brain does. Someone needs to take a course on infant brain development. Then quit comparing apples with oranges.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/13/5/1916.full.pdf

 

[bohm2]

It's just a crazy strawman argument. Kids are soaked in language from birth. You cited Pullum's paper. What in it do you dispute?[/url]

That's why I also posted the other links by Chomsky et al. that go into more detail. It seems the debate between him and Geoffrey Pullum go farther back than this:

On Formalization and Formal Linguistics
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~syntax-circle/syntax-group/spr06/chomsky1990.pdf

And I think I'm starting to understand why you don't favour the nativist approach. You favour the empiricist competitor model championed by Friston's 'Bayesian Brain' theory, according to which brains are hierarchically organized statistical inference machines operating via recurrent cascades of predictive coding (the paper you posted before):

The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?
http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The free-energy principle A unified brain theory.pdf

I think Chomsky and some of the authors do offer arguments against these type of Bayesian models, as per links I provided. I will look at the stuff more carefully when I finish my stupid exam. They made us have an exam on January 2/2012. I hate my college.

 

[apeiron]

And I think I'm starting to understand why you don't favour the nativist approach. You favour the empiricist competitor model championed by Friston's 'Bayesian Brain' theory, according to which brains are hierarchically organized statistical inference machines operating via recurrent cascades of predictive coding (the paper you posted before):

Exactly. As a reductionist enterprise, science is always seeking to divide itself into either/or scenarios. Something is fundamental, everything else is emergent.

But every definite thesis must harbour its equally definite antithesis (the definition of a dichotomy) and so if someone like Skinner arises to say it is "all just associative learning", someone else gets the job of speaking for the other side, and becoming celebrated for saying "no, in fact it is all just innate knowledge".

So what I actually always seek is the middle ground that describes instead the interaction between what others have divided. And neural network approaches are an example of a fruitful balance between dynamics and computation, nature and nurture, structure and process.

The social dynamics of science really demand that Chomsky set himself up as "the clear other" in major debates. It is the way to make a career. And this is what he is very successful at. It is the trick that makes him even more famous in political discourse as well.

This is why, in the speech you cited, he creates a cartoon version of his enemy - scientists who are only interested in "communication", not real language and its "deep" structure. Or scientists who are like Skinnerians in believing the genome is sculpted gradually, gene by gene - the exact biological equivalent of his bogeyman of blind associative learning, statistics without informational structure.

So I don't favour a nativist approach, nor whatever is its dichotomistic opposite. Instead, if they are a valid dichotomy, then I would favour whatever arises in between as a scientific description of their systematic interaction.

To be against Chomsky, doesn't mean I am for some modern version of Skinner. And what really annoys me is Chomsky continuing to play a stale old game when confronted with modern science that tries to describe material reality from a systems perspective. It may serve his reputation, but it does not serve human knowledge.

Now you are trying to do the same thing with me. If I am not a nativist, then I must be some kind of other - an empiricist. And that is after I don't know how many of my posts highlighting the "deep structure" to be found in Peirce, Salthe, Pattee, Rosen, etc.

Analysis must be matched by synthesis, differentiation by integration. Once ignorance has been divided, the truth is to be found in the space cleared in-between.

 

[bohm2]

The social dynamics of science really demand that Chomsky set himself up as "the clear other" in major debates. It is the way to make a career. And this is what he is very successful at. It is the trick that makes him even more famous in political discourse as well.

I'm incapable of understanding such stuff even if that was the case. And I think it's the same with political discourse. I'll just stick to stuff that is at least within my capabilities. I seem to be right in the middle of this Venn diagram:

 

[bohm2]

This is the major author with Pinker who debated Chomsky/Hauser/Fitch on the evolution of language. I thought this quote on consciousness in a recent preliminary paper is interesting. For whatver reason, I think he is mistaken but it is possible that he might be right:

First he notes Chomsky's position with respect to language and thought:

From this perspective on the language faculty and its place in the mind/brain, let us consider a speculation of Chomsky’s concerning the evolution of the language faculty. For decades he has asserted (e.g. Chomsky 1975) that the basic function of the language faculty is not communication, and that language is in fact poorly designed for communication. More recently (e.g. Chomsky 2000, Berwick and Chomsky 2011) he has added an argument to the effect that we use language mostly to talk to ourselves, in an inner monologue or Joycean stream of consciousness, and he suggests that if language is “designed” for anything, it is for thought. The “externalization” of language as sound, he suggests, was a later stage in the evolution of the language faculty. As we saw in section 6, he further suggests that “externalization” may not even have required a cognitive innovation specific to language.

And contrasts it with his view:

My analysis of this situation (Jackendoff 1987a, 1996c, 2007a, 2012) is that Conceptual Structure, i.e. the formal structure of the thought conveyed by a sentence, is almost completely unconscious, and that what we experience as our inner monologue is actually the phonological structure linked to the thought. We are aware of our thinking because we hear the associated sounds in our head...

Consciousness is linked not with thought, but with phonology and the other forms of perception and perceptual imagery shown in Figure 7. That is, one has the experience of thought through phonological, visual, haptic, proprioceptive, and perhaps auditory imagery. As far as I know, this observation has not been made by any of the numerous philosophers and neuroscientists investigating consciousness. This is in part because they treat “language” as a single cognitive function, failing to recognize the crucial distinction between phonology, syntax, and semantics. As a result, they think of phonological imagery as simply “linguistic imagery” – a characterization that is too coarse to distinguish between a “mere” sound pattern and the thought it expresses. If this account is on the right track, our inner monologue is possible only by virtue of having words – and we have to learn words in the context of a communicative speech community. We can only talk to ourselves by virtue of having learned to talk to others. To be sure, speech and inner speech can enhance thought, by making it possible for us to attend to the combinatorial structure of thought, through its phonological proxies (Jackendoff 1996c, 2007a, 2012). But inner speech is not the thought itself (or the thought alone), as Chomsky appears to be claiming. Going back to evolution, I conclude that hominids could not have had an inner monologue until they had a language with phonology in it. I further conclude that the advantages of language for thought are a byproduct – albeit a substantial byproduct – of its advantages for communication, not the other way round, as Chomsky claims.

Jackendoff does consider deaf children on a footnote on p. 33 and attempts to explain it but I'm not sure he succeeds.

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/RayJackendoff/humanlanguage.pdf

 

[apeiron]

For whatver reason, I think he is mistaken but it is possible that he might be right:

So, is there a reason why he is mistaken?

First he notes Chomsky's position with respect to language and thought: The “externalization” of language as sound, he suggests, was a later stage in the evolution of the language faculty.

This must count as Chomsky's single most egregious error.

And contrasts it with his view: We can only talk to ourselves by virtue of having learned to talk to others.

Jackendoff is obviously correct, but his error was to think that this is in anyway an original thought.

 

[Pythagorean]

Toddler's have no obvious vocal feedback. Possibly may rely on social cues from parents to regulate proper speech patterning.

Children and adults reacted to this manipulation by changing their vowels in a direction opposite to the perturbation. Surprisingly, toddlers' speech didn't change in response to altered feedback, suggesting that long-held assumptions regarding the role of self-perception in articulatory development need to be reconsidered.

Current Biology 22, 1–5, January 24, 2012, Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.052

 

[bohm2]

So, is there a reason why he is mistaken?...This must count as Chomsky's single most egregious error...Jackendoff is obviously correct, but his error was to think that this is in anyway an original thought.

These authors suggest the following evidence:

The development of a regularized, structured homesign system in the face of little to no linguistic input, including parental input, gives credence to those arguing for innate language via Poverty of the Stimulus. The fact that the deaf children were found to form recursive, creative, and meaningful signs and systems similar to the natural and more developed languages of the world by their own invention would indicate an innate drive to linguistic communication (Goldin-Meadow et al., 1984). As Feldman, Goldin-Meadow, and Gleitman 91978, p. 408) stated,

We have studied the communicative system developed by young children who are as radically deprived of language input as can be imagined. We have found that these linguistically isolated individuals display communicative skills that are language-like, despite their deprivations. We conclude that there are significant internal dispositions in humans that guide the language acquisition process. Such expressive output from such impoverished, and indeed almost nonexistent, input supports the Poverty of the Stimulus argument and indicates an internal system for language...

A more specific situation can be seen in the case of Simon, a profoundly deaf boy who is the son of deaf parents who learned ASL as teenagers...Additionally, Simon’s performance on the use of movement morphemes was on par with that of the compared deaf children from native-input backgrounds (Newport, 1999). As there is no outside influence to support this compensation, such an improvement points towards an internal correction mechanism and drive towards convergence upon the standard form.

The author concludes:

These last two observations imply that when a feature is simply an element of one specific language some initial input is needed, but when it is universal it can be internally realized. The evidence for an ability to create universals without input suggests an internal, innate language faculty and supports Poverty of the Stimulus-type arguments.

I haven't looked at other similar deaf children research, etc. and I didn't look at her arguments closely.


Incomplete Input as a Poverty of the Stimulus Argument
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mgullick/gullickpovertystim07.pdf

 

[apeiron]

I haven't looked at other similar deaf children research, etc. and I didn't look at her arguments closely.

You seem to be entangling several separate questions.

1) the evolution of language
2) the neurology of language
3) the relationship between language and thought

If you are citing the evidence of the congenitally deaf in relation to (3), for example, I could point to the studies that show the deaf with fluent signing use signing in their interior dialogue. And those without were once regarded as mentally retarded, on a par with animals, in their cognition.

This then perhaps goes to the other two questions as it illustrates the plasticity and lack of cognitive modularity/hardwiring in the human "faculty" for speech and higher order thinking. It can be related also to the findings that Broca's area is a premotor area for hand as well as oral motor planning.

Then arguments can begin whether this means a gestural language predated oral language, or as seems more plausible, the brain was pre-adapted for syntactical language because of about a million years of evolution for tool-making and tool-use.

But it would really help if you could spell out the exact nature of your hypothesis here.

The bare basics of Chomsky's current views are maybe not controversial. Langauge must be some combination of a genetic endowment, developmental environment and structural principles - the last being the least well defined.

But Chomsky still has big blindspots in his thinking.

- Like the belief that language IS thought, rather than scaffolds thought.

- Like that there is not abundant evidence that sociality has been a prime driver of anthropoid neural evolution and so deserves to be the default hypothesis when it comes to communicative capacity.

- Like there is a problem in the "poverty of stimulus", when there is neither any great lack of stimulus, nor a lack of models, such as generative or Bayesian neural nets, that can manage fast learning.

- Like the fact that the evolution of a vocal tract is precisely the kind of architectural constraint on the unfettered recursive abilities of the brain that would count as one of his "deep structure" principles.

- Like that there is some kind of grammatical module in the brain when current research is revealing just how distributed the syntactical machinery actually is.

For example, three key elements of grammar: three different bits of the brain - only one in the old putative "grammar module".

...three seemingly distinct syntactic operations are supported by mechanisms in distinct brain areas – Movement in Broca’s (perhaps to an extent in Wernicke’s) are; Dative Shift in posterior portions of the right frontal lobe (vPCS, aINS); reflexive-antecedent binding in an anterior part of the right frontal lobe (SFG).

http://freud.tau.ac.il/~yosef1/papers/Grodzinsky_BR.pdf

And as I said, Broca's is now understood to be a premotor area for hand control as much as vocalisation. So there is nothing functionally unique in this organisation either. Broca's just contributes certain computational activities to the mix.

 

[apeiron]

Toddler's have no obvious vocal feedback. Possibly may rely on social cues from parents to regulate proper speech patterning.

Yes, this is another thing they need to learn. And can't even begin to learn until the higher cortex has matured enough to form connections to the parts of the brain that have to be regulated.

 

[bohm2]

- Like there is a problem in the "poverty of stimulus", when there is neither any great lack of stimulus, nor a lack of models, such as generative or Bayesian neural nets, that can manage fast learning.

With respect to the skeptical position on "poverty of stimulus" is that something that you believe to be true or is it something that most linguists/psychologists/cognitive scientists believe? I was under the impression that most in these fields do think it's valid. I'm pretty sure even Pinker et al. who question Chomsky on his view on the evolution of language would agree with Chomsky on this point. And last time I sat in courses in this area, I got the impression that most researchers in this area, take this notion of poverty of stimulus as not very controversial (despite Pullum's and Bayesian learning arguments to the contrary). I honestly can't see how anyone can believe otherwise. Regardless, if I took a poll on this issue from scientists in this area, do you think most would favour the "poverty of stimulus" argument or your position that there is no great "lack of stimulus"? Not that it makes it true, either way.

- Yes, this is another thing they need to learn. And can't even begin to learn until the higher cortex has matured enough to form connections to the parts of the brain that have to be regulated.

Are you sure that is what that study Pythagorean posted really means?

 

[apeiron]

With respect to the skeptical position on "poverty of stimulus" is that something that you believe to be true or is it something that most linguists/psychologists/cognitive scientists believe?

Again, Chomsky's POS was a criticism against the atomistic reductionism of Skinnerian Behaviourism. And I am sure that these days - despite the cult-like grip that Behaviourism can have on people - no one would believe it to offer an adequate account of language learning.

It is also obvious just from having kids that they learn in a generative, world-predicting, fashion.

So then the next step is to develop theories of prediction-based learning.

Instead, Chomsky and his disciples (yes, another cult it looks like) exaggerate POS-like arguments to rule out any sort of learning machines. The role of experience must be limited to something like flicking the developmental switch on some sort of genetic hardware.

And even this hardware mustn't be contaminated by learning/experience of the evolutionary kind.

Chomsky would like the genetics to be the product of some kind of Platonic efficiency principles, some UG deep mathematical structure, rather than something that might actually have an evolutionary history.

So again, he trots out a POS argument against the gradualism and atomism of modern synthesis Darwinism. Langauge and symbolic thought erupted too suddenly in human history. Therefore ordinary evolutionary learning must have a minimal explanatory role.

I didn't quite realize it before, but there is a consistent pattern in Chomsky's thought. At every turn, reject the vagaries of the material world and turn inward towards the certainty of logical structure. Empiricism bad, rationalism good.

As antithesis to Skinner's equally rigid thesis, it catapulted Chomsky to fame/notoriety.

Great for him. Meanwhile serious science can get on with the business of synthesis - a balanced approach to evolution like evo-devo, or to brain organisation, like generative neural network theory, or to metaphysics generally, such as Peircean semiotics.

(Yes, I know Chomsky claims these days to be all evo-devo, but again, read what he actually writes and you can see he is still humming the same rationalist tune.)

 

[bohm2]

Instead, Chomsky and his disciples (yes, another cult it looks like) exaggerate POS-like arguments to rule out any sort of learning machines. The role of experience must be limited to something like flicking the developmental switch on some sort of genetic hardware.

I think you are being a bit unfair/biased/judgemental here (e.g. cult/disciples?). He does offer evidence against the Bayesian models if you check the links I provided (PTR refers to the Perfors/Tenenbaum/Regier paper):

Crucially, however, it does not follow that such learners will acquire grammars in which rules are structure dependent. On the contrary, as we show below, the acquired grammars may still operate structure-independently. In short, inferring that language is hierarchical (in PTR’s sense)leaves the original POS (poverty of stimulus) question untouched, and their Bayesian model does not explain the constrained ambiguity facts. Let us examine why...

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/news-events/seminars-talks/berwicketal2011

And from reading of the literature, most researchers also recognize the limitations of neural networks/connectionist models you favour. For instance consider this recent review:

The neural basis of structure in language
http://www.illc.uva.nl/Research/Dissertations/DS-2011-11.text.pdf

I realize Chomsky seems very dismissive of these models (and maybe comes off as a bit arrogant?) and probably pisses off a lot of researchers. Then again, it could also be his radical politics that many dislike? I'm not sure. I don't really understand his arguments against these models but he seems pretty aware of all the research in this area, if you read his writings, despite some of your old posts arguing otherwise. Anyway, my excursion into this area is indirectly because of my obsession with the "hard" problem of consciousness and so far, I haven't made any progress which kinda sucks.