http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13049700 Further:- "We then asked [Popper] what his latest intellectual interests were. The origin of human language, and the philosophy of Parmenides, he replied, though he added that the theory on the origin of life still interested him greatly. He told us that the main conclusion he had arrived at in connection with his study of the origin of human language was that Chomsky could not be right in his allegation that all languages have a common structure; moreover, there is simply no such thing as Chomsky's "hidden grammar". Grammar, Popper maintained, came rather late in the evolution of human languages, and when it emerged, it was not in a "hidden" form." http://www.tkpw.net/hk-ies/n23a/ For Chomsky on one aspect of Popper: "The assumption that human language evolved from more primitive systems is developed in an interesting way by Karl Popper in his recently published Arthur Compton Lecture, “Clouds and Clocks.” He tries to show how problems of freedom of will and Cartesian dualism can be solved by the analysis of this “evolution.” I am not concerned now with the philosophical conclusions that he draws from this analysis, but with the basic assumption that there is an evolutionary development of language from simpler systems of the sort that one discovers in other organisms. Popper argues that the evolution of language passed through several stages, in particular a “lower stage” in which vocal gestures are used for expression of emotional state, for example, and a “higher stage” in which articulated sound is used for expression of thought – in Popper’s terms, for description and critical argument. His discussion of stages of evolution of language suggests a kind of continuity, but in fact he establishes no relation between the lower and higher stages and does not suggest a mechanism whereby transition can take place from one stage to the next. In short, he gives no argument to show that the stages belong to a single evolutionary process. In fact, it is difficult to see what links these stages at all (except for the metaphorical use of the term “language”). There is no reason to suppose that the “gaps” are bridgeable. There is no more of a basis for assuming an evolutionary development of “higher” from “lower” stages, in this case, than there is for assuming an evolutionary development from breathing to walking; the stages have no significant analogy, it appears, and seem to involve entirely different processes and principles." http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/chomsky.htm This criticism seems to me misplaced; in particular Chomsky seems to attribute to Popper the view that this process of linguistic evolution involves "bridgeable" stages, and that this denies "emergence" of something that is not reducible in principle to its evolutionary precursor. In fact, Popper's account of the functions of language (which is derived from Buehler) is based on arguing philosophically why the higher functions are not reducible to the lower functions and in this sense are not "bridgeable" to the lower functions; at the same time, they are "bridgeable" to the lower the functions in that it is impossible for a higher function to exist without a lower function: put simply, part of Popper's account is that it is impossible to argue without using the descriptive function of language and impossible to describe without using the signalling function and impossible to signal without using the expressive function of language. It is at least implicit in P's account (as in Buehler's) that the higher functions emerged only after the lower functions, whose existence they presuppose and without which they cannot exist. Yet this, contra Chomsky, is to assert emergence and not the reducibility of the higher to the lower functions. We might also note the fallacy in Chomskyist thinking that because independently evolved languages share common structural or grammatical features that shows that language is generated by some universal characteristics of the mind: by analogy, consider the independent evolution of the eye and that (all or almost all) eyes share some common structural features - this would not show the eye was on each occasion generated by some universal characteristics in any Chomskyist sense. The explanation for the common strucural features amid the eyes' independent evolution is that, from a Darwinian POV, any eye is an attempt to solve certain problems that are general to any organism that seeks to orientate itself using light, and these problems are sufficiently vital to survival that the proliferation of relatively successful solutions to these problems is only to be expected; and that relatively successful solutions will exhibit common features is also to be expected given the common features of the problems that those solutions address. Donal About to start the marathon London ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html