FUNKNET] analysis: unhappiness

Robert Van Valin vanvalin at buffalo.edu
Mon Sep 13 14:46:06 UTC 2010


Dan Slobin refers to the argument that Dan outlined as 'the argument from the poverty of the imagination'.

Robert Van Valin

On Sep 13, 2010, at 8:37 AM, Daniel Everett wrote:

> Dear Geoff,
> 
> These are all valid points, but none of them support nativism. 
> 
> One place to start is with Fiona Cowie's relatively recent book, What's Within (http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Mind/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5NTE1OTc4Mw==)
> 
> There are many cultural artifacts and values and types of knowledge that are never taught, but are all acquired just fine, from knowing to sit still in a canoe to how to use a bow and arrow. They are learned out of necessity and by observation, with no explicit instruction.
> 
> In a paper with Mike Frank (Stanford Pscyhology), Ted Gibson and Ev Fedorenko, in Cognition, support was offered for the idea that there are cognitive tools, number and counting being the examples we discussed. 
> 
> The reasoning chain for innatism often goes like this:
> 
> 1. There is evidence that someone knows something that they were not taught.
> 
> 2. I cannot think of how they learned it.
> 
> 3. Therefore, they didn't learn it.
> 
> 4. Therefore, it is innate. 
> 
> Both 3 and 4 are non-sequiturs. I don't want to get into a big discussion of this here. And I talk about this quite a bit in the book. So I will try to resist the temptation to respond to further postings.
> 
> So I find your concerns both quite understandable, but not insurmountable or even particularly difficult problems for understanding language as a cognitive tool. 
> 
> -- Dan
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sep 13, 2010, at 9:36 AM, Geoff Nathan wrote:
> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "A. Katz" <amnfn at well.com>
>> 
>>> You might as well say that a person cannot possibly avoid watching TV
>>> once
>>> he's exposed to it, as say the same about language. But people can
>>> survive
>>> just fine without television, and unless someone shows them how to
>>> make a
>>> TV set, most people will never figure out how to build one. The same
>>> goes
>>> for language. We're great at using it, not so great at generating it
>>> out
>>> of thin air with no ambient culture.
>>> 
>>> --Aya
>> 
>> Those who are familiar with my work know that I'm anything but a Chomskyan, but I'm sorry, there's an enormous difference between the acquisition of language and the acquisition of the knowledge necessary to build a television set (or the brodcasting and recording technology behind it). As generativists have pointed out since the early sixties, nobody is explicitly taught language, yet we all acquire it. Conversely many are intensively taught elementary physics, engineering etc. and  DON'T aquire it. This is a difference in kind, not in degree. 
>> This is not to say that culture is taught either (of course nobody learns in school the correct distance to stand apart from an interlocutor, or how many milliseconds of silence in a conversation constitutes a 'pregnant pause'), but these are different kinds of knowledge from academic knowledge explicitly taught in some cultures and not in others. 
>> All cultures have correct social distance rules, syntactic structures and other tacitly acquired knowledge, but not all cultures learn physics, or which mushrooms are edible and which fatal.
>> I'm looking forward to reading Dan's book too, but I find 'tool' an inappropriate metaphor for a cultural artifact that is never explicitly 'taught', is learned without effort in all cultures regardless of level of technology and is never improved by explicit experimentation or accidental innovation--there will never be the linguistic equivalent of a 'better mousetrap'.
>> I prefer Rudi Keller's view that language is an object of the 'third kind'--an artifact that is neither wholly natural nor man-made, but that develops as a spontaneous order, without being designed, and with 'improvements' developing in different directions from the intentions of the developers. See his book 
>> 
>> Sprachwandel. Von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache. 2. Auflage Tübingen 1994
>> 
>> or, for those, who, like me are Germanically-challenged, 
>> 
>> On Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language, Routledge 1995, translated by Brigitte Nerlich.
>> 
>> Geoff
>> 
>> 
>> Geoffrey S. Nathan
>> Faculty Liaison, C&IT
>> and Professor, Linguistics Program
>> +1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
>> +1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)
>> 
> 
> 



More information about the Funknet mailing list