[lit-ideas] Re: Griceian Nature Or Griceian Nurture?
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2014 18:30:58 +0000
"We can materialise this by thinking of little Grice. He was born in
Harborne, an affluent district of 'Brum', and he naturally learned English easy
enough."
Unless JLS meant "easily enough", he is perhaps making the point that Grice
came from an area of England where we cannot expect people to learn English
except of the type that is "easy enough". We might then expect people from that
area to adopt a philosophy that is "easy enough". This may well help explain
the philosophy of Grice and its appeal.
As to Popper/Kuhn, this is a large-scale debate that suffers from the fact that
Kuhn's own various expressions of his position lend themselves to distinct
interpretations and even to distinct Kuhnian positions (including one where
Kuhn resiles from the view that the 'gestalt-switch' of a paradigm-shift is a
non-rational and even irrational kind of psychologistic phenomenon - even
though others might think this 'fideism' is in fact the central thesis of _The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions_). There is an interpretation of both that
puts them very far apart and interpretation that makes their differences almost
marginal.
Popper does agree that Kuhn is importantly right about the development of
so-called "normal science", or routine puzzle-solving, and admits that he
neglected "normal science" prior to Kuhn: but Popper does not welcome this
development but instead sees it as a potential threat to proper science.
Actually that is understatement: for Popper "normal science" is almost
antithetical to proper science - "normal science" is an actual and potentially
lethal threat to proper science. It will have become lethal when it has killed
off proper science because we mistake "normal science" - mere routine
puzzle-solving - for proper science of the sort exemplified by Einstein's
theories. Or when we reject the work of someone like Einstein as not being
"scientific" because it is not "normal science".
Dnl
Ldn
On Friday, 7 November 2014, 13:06, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Some comments, below, on a book review from "World Wide Words" (© Michael
Quinion http://www.worldwidewords.org
Cheers,
Speranza
Quinion writes:
"For the past half-century, the dominant view ... has been that human
beings uniquely possess a hard-wired concept of language."
This of course was contested by Philosophers, notaby Davidson. In his "A
nice derangement of epitaphs" (in a festschrift for Grice) he claims that
'language' does not exist, never mind its concept.
"This implies that all languages are related at a deep level, because all
of them are created on the same fundamental grammar template. It explains
how a child is able to readily learn any language."
We can materialise this by thinking of little Grice. He was born in
Harborne, an affluent district of 'Brum', and he naturally learned English easy
enough. In Clifton, he later learned Greek and Latin, and I would add, "just
as easy"?
Quinion:
"The idea, called Universal Grammar, was created by the linguist Noam
Chomsky in the 1950s and has been enormously influential, not only in
linguistics but also in fields such as psychology and philosophy."
Oddly, the index to Chomsky's "Aspects" misquotes Grice, as "Grice, A. P.".
It is from Grice that Chomsky (in 1966) drew (I guess someone gave him a
transcript of one of Grice's Oxford lectures) the idea that
'and'
in sentences like
"The sun set and we had a party"
is truth-functionally equivalent to
"We had a party and the sun set"
(Or:
"He took the pill and died"
and
"He died and took a pill").
----
Quinion goes on:
"It’s still the standard view in most textbooks and has been popularised by
Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct and later books."
Which is not to surprise since Pinker and Chomsky shared a country (in the
sense that Cambridge, Mass., is a 'country' -- or academic country as
Oxford would be) and even an office! ("Professor of Linguistics and
Philosophy").
Oddly, Grice popularised his ideas not far from Chomsky's country, but in
the (some say) more prestigious campus, Harvard.
Quinion:
"However, the concept that language is an instinct, and a uniquely human
one, has been challenged as a result of research in a number of fields in
recent decades."
The opposition is: nature or nurture?
Quinion goes on:
"We now know much more about how children acquire language, the diversity
of the world’s languages, the evolution of the human species, the structure
and function of our brains, and the ways in which other animals
communicate."
Indeed. Notably in the field of conversational implicature:
We know much more about how children tend to be literalist -- and won't
accept an implicature. From a series Tv episode:
ADULT: Stop jumping on the bed!
CHILD stops jumping -- for 3 secs, then resumes.
ADULT: I told you to stop jumping.
CHILD: You never said "forever".
ADULT: Okay: stop jumping forever.
------- Yes. Quaint. From a repeat of "The nephews" in "Little house in the
prairie", a repeat.
----
We know much more about the diversity of the world's languages: and how
conversational implicature is a universal phenomenon, except, perhaps Elinor
Ochs Keenan thought, in Malagasy.
"We know much more about the evolution of the human species" -- from
non-human species.
"We know much more the ways in which other animals communicate".
It was thought that for them, "Try to make your contribution one that is
true", was not a guideline, since it was held, by Lyons ("Linguistics") that
animals cannot lie. Of course they can. In this way, the do follow
'conversational maxims' which can be flouted, in e.g. irony, when one's
addressee
assumes that the animal is not making a genuine contribution ("What a
rotten day", to implicate, "It's a beautiful day"), or when a plover screams to
have his addressee think, falsely, that he is near the plover's nest. It's
different with bees, apparently.
Quinion:
"A vigorous debate is raging. Vyvyan Evans ... has written The Language
Myth to bring together the growing evidence against Universal Grammar."
Oddly, "Language Myth" was I think the title of a collection of essays ed.
by Trudgill, or "Language Myths". The idea here, in Evans, is that language
IS a myth, alla Davidson.
Quinion:
"For example, Chomsky’s view that this instinct for language is unique to
humans and arrived suddenly as a mutation about 100,000 years ago cannot be
true. Our complicated vocal apparatus, with the sophisticated brain
necessary to manipulate it to utter and remember speech, couldn’t have been
the
result of a single sudden change but must have evolved stage by stage among
our hominin ancestors. Neanderthals had similar vocal anatomy to ours and
so were very probably able to communicate through speech."
I think Umberto Eco discusses this in "Open Work" (Opera aperta). He
refers, more biblically, to Adam's language -- lingua adamica. Eco notes that
the requirement is the ability to think BINARILY.
Quinion:
"One implication of Universal Grammar is that there must be some module or
faculty in the brain, present at birth, dedicated to processing grammar.
Though the brain does have sections devoted to specific functions, such as
Broca’s area, responsible for the creation of speech, we know now that this
area does other jobs as well and that the work of processing language takes
place quite widely across various parts of the brain. A grammar module as
such doesn’t exist."
Chomsky will have occasion to reconsult Grice in his John Locke lectures
(which he gave before Grice gave his). He refers to Grice's behaviouristic
approach in thinking of Aunt Matilda's resultant procedures and the readiness
to respond in this or that a way. Chomsky is defending indeed the idea of
a module, and a 'pragmatic' module he thinks dubious. On the other hand, to
quote from a western, the Griceian does not seem to need 'no stinkin''
module?
Quinion goes on: "The truth, Professor Evans argues on the basis of current
research, is very different. Babies are not born with a set of internal
rules but with a universal capacity to learn about themselves and the world
around them."
This should sound Kantian and rationalist enough to please both Grice _AND
POPPER_. (cfr. Piaget and his polemic with Chomsky).
Quinion goes on: "The brains of infants are plastic: experience and
discovery moulds them and acquiring a language is one aspect of this. Professor
Evans also partly rehabilitates a theory developed in the 1930s by Benjamin
Whorf; a version that was developed after Whorf’s death is called the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after him and his mentor Edward Sapir. Whorf called it
linguistic relativity, arguing that speakers of different languages
conceptualize and experience the world differently."
The locus classicus is alas, not Latin (since 'locus classicus' is Latin)
but Eskimo, and the zillions (more or less) ways to say 'snow is white' in
Eskimo.
Quinion goes on:
"This has been denied by followers of Chomsky’s work, since if true it
would refute the view that language is innate and universal. Subtle
neurological experiments in the past couple of decades have suggested that at
an
unconscious level people can be influenced by the nature of their language."
I think this was the challenge by Asian linguists, and for that matter
Orwell (whose real name was Blair).
Quinion concludes:
"The Language Myth is a wide-ranging polemical dismissal of the received
wisdom of many linguists. It’s worth reading also as a classic case study of
an orthodoxy undergoing what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift."
Misusing a term that for Plato triggered quite the opposite implicature,
but still lovely!
(I'm not sure Popper bought Kuhn's idea of the paradigm shifts -- Grice
possibly didn't. He shared the Philosophy Dept. with Feyerabend, who was much
more of a radical anarchist in terms of scientific revolutions, and stuff).
Cheers,
Speranza
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