Feral children and enculturated apes

[David Golumbia]

I think Dan Everett's recent message is very on-target.

I am always confused by Chomsky's failure to look for close biological
analogues for the supposedly "mysterious" language organ, and the
individualist bias of so many thought experiments seem to fall into a
similar pattern.

Take a skill that is 90% biological, like walking. A child who is raised
without sufficient environmental stimuli will not learn to walk, or will
not learn to use the bipedal "endowment" as it can be fully used. Training
by adults is required at several steps. Experiments that isolate the
infant from this training seem to me to demonstrate very little about the
walking endowment.

Many animals hunt as a critical part of their biocultural endowment.
Although their bodies are tuned to hunting skills, these will not develop
without significant social coaching.

Let's ask the question a different way: if homo sapiens were to re-emerge
in evolution, with exactly the same biology, would their language be "the
same" as what we know of human language?

The truth is that we don't even know enough about all the languages spoken
today to make this question make any sense at all.

If Martians came to Earth (in one of Chomsky's famous but poorly
considered examples), would their language be "human" or "inhuman"? Who in
the world knows? What if it was hard for humans to learn, but after a few
years of study some humans learned Martian and some Martians learned
Creek? What if the Martians have 15000 languages like humans do, and the
Martians we meet speak only 1 of these 15000 languages? What if Hindi
speakers could speak Martian-3001, but Martian-3002 gave them pause?

Thought experiments are great, but it seems to me we remain in a state of
knowledge about human language and human cultures and what they are
capable of that makes generalizations about "human language itself" highly
problematic. It is my bet that no attempt to look "outside" what we have
as empirical matter will provide a better view: because it is only on
initial glance that the "outside" (Martian, thought experiment, feral
children) seems to offer an analytic purchase.

Another variation: put a group of infants into a world that somehow
provides them everything they need *except language.* Leave them alone for
50 years. I guarantee you, something will have developed, and whatever it
is will be human language, and it will be just as hard to cleave
analytically between what-they-speak and
what-humans-as-we-know-them-speak.

--
dgolumbi at panix.com
David Golumbia