Relativity versus Reality 2

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/16/04 6:40:52 AM, rjfreeman at email.com writes:
<< My understanding is that Chomsky was forced to propose UG exactly because
he found it was _not_ possible for language to be "universally learned",
phonemes and all...  Essentially he was saying either language is innate or it is
subjective. >>

How did we get into that rather odd box?  Innate versus subjective?  What
kind of alternatives are those?

Here's something that should be emerging as an idea from the historical track
that we humans have been on for a long time -- innateness and learning both
solve the same general problems.  If flying in a bird called "innate," then
what is it when I fly to NY on Delta Airlines?   If nest-building in a bird is
innate, then what is renting a condo in Miami Beach?

Here Chomsky in an 1999 interview on the Language Acquisition Device:
"The existence of such LAD is sometimes regarded as controversial, or even as
having been disproven. If terms are being used in their technical sense,
these conclusions amount to saying that there is no dedicated 'language module,'
in which case it remains a mystery why my granddaughter's pet kitten (or
chimpanzee, or whatever) doesn't acquire a particular language just as she does,
given essentially the same experience...."

Think about this.  Can the mystery of why that pet kitten does not have a
cell phone, wear designer clothes or eventually manufacture a nuclear bomb also
only be resolved by postulating an innate Cell Phone Acquistion Device, etc --
given essentially the same experience?  Or is it that the products of human
technology is not "an open and infinite set" like the endless string of
sentences a human language can produce?  Obviously, our biology plays a significant
role in our ability to make cell phones, but obviously cell phones were not
implicit in our biology.

Why do we see language as somehow different than airplanes or cellphones --
other things that cats and chimps don't do?  Clothes-wearing is almost as
unique and universally human as language.  Why don't we postulate a Clothes
Acquistion Device?

Strict mentalism creates an artificial distinction between language and other
unique human activities.  It deceives us into thinking that our internal
system of symbols would be there if there were no outside world.  It is
essentially neo-platonism all over again.

Universal learning of the basic rules of the world we live in is a perfectly
logical evolutionary alternative to an innate compliance with those rules.
Both do the same job and roughly satisfy the same requirments of survival value.
 Where you don't have one, you are going to have the other -- or you won't
have survival.

It may be there is some kind of LAD, but it's output might probably be
indistinguishable from early universal human learning.  The solution would be the
same in either case.

What I'd like to see is someone come up with an alternative "Universal
Grammar" that universal learners could use and innates could not.  Without such an
alternative, there is no hypotheses to test.  If Universal Grammar is the only
path to language by the local laws of the universe, then universal learning or
an innate device will end up in the same place.

I suspect that in the end we are going to find that the difference between
animal communications and human communication is quantitive and not qualitative,
and that awareness of mental states is simply a by-product of a
quantitatively larger system of communication.  That is the assumption of continuity that a
naturalistic, scientific approach to this subject is bound to make.

So, as to whether "language is innate or subjective", it is probably neither
of the two.

There is a fascinating paper by Martin Neef ("The Reader's View: Sharpening
in German" in The Relation of Writing to Spoken Language (2002)) that is a
kernel of an idea that I think will point these things in the right direction.  In
that paper, Neef concludes that "writing systems aim at being consistent not
for the writer but for the reader." What a change of perspective that also is
on the rules of language.  Once we see language as a communal event
masquarading as an internal process, we go back to the common sense idea that we must
have something in common in order for language to make any sense among us -- and
is the real a priori for it to make sense to us individually, subjectively.
Whether that commonality is universal on one level or local on a later, more
complex level, the odd question of innateness versus subjectivity (how did
they become opposites?) falls away.

<<How to reconcile this subjective, lexical, character, with the assumed
innate universality of Chomsky's rules has become the central "dilemma" of modern
linguistics... Otherwise aren't we are in the incongruous position of trying
to bolt a fine grain subjectivity onto a system which is supposed to be innate,
exactly because it was considered unreasonable that it be subjective!>>

Perhaps the bolting was originally done in the opposite direction?  Perhaps
the lexical character of language was the original material and Chomsky's rules
were the way they had to be organized.  You can only put planks together in a
very limited number of ways to build a house or a bridge.  That's a dictate
of the laws of physics.  Perhaps the basic laws of organization dictate the
same kind of constraints on the structure of language? Again, has anyone
developed a working, communicative non-Chomskyian Universal Grammar?  Or is this just
a case of "if you are going to build a bridge, you'd better build it so it
does what bridges do?"

Regards,
Steve Long