Pete:
>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.
Given that Naom Chomsky has invariabley first said what anyone else has said, I
guess I have to accept this. However, I do wonder if Pinker and Chomsky really
are on the same page. Here's what my favourite source of all wisdom, Wikepedia,
says about Pinker (and Chomsky):
Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and language
development in children, and he is most famous for popularizing the idea that
language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection.
On this point, he opposes Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity
for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. He is the author of
five books for a general audience, which include The Language Instinct (1994),
How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002),
andThe Stuff of Thought (2007). Pinker's books have won numerous awards and
been New York Times best-sellers.
Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard. I picked up "The Blank Slate"
after I read a review of it somewhere, perhaps the New York Review of Books,
because it was supposed to contain something new and different about human
adaptational skills. I still believe it does, but then I'm not even remotely
expert in Pinker's field.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "pete" <[email protected]>
To: "RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION"
<[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 11:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Here's to mental health at 90!
>
> 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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