On Wed, 21 Jul 2010, Ed Weick wrote:
> Reminds me of Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" (2002) in which he
> argues that, as part of our genetic inheritance, we are programmed to
> learn language (whichever language is spoken) and many of the other
> attributes of being human. Before Pinker and others argued this, the
> newborn's mind was thought to be devoid of anything social or
> cultural. The ability to learn language, music, etc. had to be
> programmed into it by teachers and caregivers.
The notion of an inborn grammar template for language is Noam Chomsky's
major thesis, and has been around since about the sixties, and for most
of that time it has been the accepted wisdom.
For the individual, once language is acquired, much of culture is more
or less bootstrapped onto it. The scaffolding for language incorporates
easy connection points for logic and mechanics; and I'm sure Ray can
point out the link between language structure (particularly the
treatment of time and causation) and broader cultural perceptions of
reality, as manifested with some North American languages - like Hopi,
if I recall correctly.
I'm not familiar with Pinker's contribution to this line of thought.
...Anthropologists, of course, define culture as anything that's
associated with creatures but not fully prepackaged in the genome,
so they point to the rudiments of learning in the hunting skills
passed by adult predators to their offspring during play, as examples
of the roots of culture. They also name pre-human cultures after the
characteristic stone tools that they can group in style and time. The
earliest of these is over 3 milion years old ("Oldowan"), and is
suspected to predate any structured language (ie, with a grammar
linking the "words" - more likely "calls" - and a vocabulary of
more than a dozen or so calls).
But this area is of course rich in speculation, while the practitioners
are quite comfortable in acknowledging their ignorance of the true
nature of the details in the original eruption of human language and
culture. What they are certain of is that as language developed over
millions of years, it did so hand in hand with the development of
complexity in culture, and if Chomsky's thesis is true, then no doubt
other aspects of culture interacted with the genome as well, to bring
about other inherited abilities.
-Pete
>
> Something else I read recently (I forget where), suggests that babies
> are programmed from the earliest stages of gestation and have already
> learned a lot in the womb by the time they are born.
>
> Ed
>
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