[lit-ideas] Universality of human languages

From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 13:20:41 +0100 (BST)
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




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[lit-ideas] Universality of human languages

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