The appeal of P&P

[sergi balari]

Mike Maxwell wrote:

> Sergei Balari writes:
>
> >Chomskyan nativism is naive because the
> >sort of genetic determinism it presupposes
> >is hard to reconcile with most current views
> >within developmental psychology and biology.
> >The point is that strong nativism invokes a view
> >that gives almost all the poser to the gene,
> >whereas the developmentalists's work (both in
> >biology and in psychology) is providing very
> >interesting evidence that ther's no much sense
> >in this conception of innateness.
>
> This is news to me, although that could be because I haven't read much in
> the way of developmental biology, and specifically the development of
> behavior, in the last thirty years :-).  But I'd like to hear more, and
> while "The Ontology of Information" sounds like a fascinating title, I can't
> put my hands on it right now.
>
> So let me ask some questions.  At one point there was work on the
> acquisition/ development of birdsong by young birds raised in isolation and
> exposed to no birdsong, or to recordings of other species' songs, or to
> recordings of their own species' songs.  As I recall, there was variation
> among species as to what they would learn under those circumstances.  All
> the songbirds ended up with _some_ singing, regardless of the
> environment--surely an innate behavior.  But the singing that resulted from
> zero exposure to other birds' songs was badly distorted from normal singing.
>
> As for the birds who had exposure to recordings of other birds' singing:
> some species were fairly plastic, in that they could pick up most any song
> (Mockingbirds, I suppose); others had a much more fixed ability, i.e. they
> could only learn their own species' songs.  If I'm remembering this
> correctly (big if), that sort of thing (esp. the species that could only
> pick up their own species' songs) would seem to be reasonably good evidence
> for an innate behavior, coupled with an ability for learning (and a critical
> period for learning, as I recall, but perhaps I'm not recalling :-)).
>
> Does anyone have any references on this sort of study?  Or am I making it
> all up out of my head?

I cannot give you the details, since I'm not very much into birds, but I guess
most of this work is extensively reviewed in Marc Hauser's book The Evolution
of Communication (MIT Press, 1996; esp. sect. 5,2).


>
>
> >It doesn't make much sense to say that genes
> >code for such and such capacity, as it appears
> >that development of such capacieties is best
> >seen as a complex, dynamical, dialectical, process,
> >where the end product is a function of the complex
> >interactions that occurred among environmental
> >and genetic factors.
>
> I don't see how "coding for... capacity" is incompatible with "complex
> interactions".  If we all ended up speaking the same language, one might
> question the need for the interactions; but since we don't, it seems to me
> to be a reasonable position--and in fact, Chomsky's position--that there is
> a dialectical process.  In other words, isn't there a bit of a straw man
> here, in calling Chomsky's nativism "naive" and "deterministic"?

Honestly, it is not entirely clear to me if it's a straw man or just that
Chomsky is a moving target (cf. Dick Hudson message, for example). But I'm
coming to the conviction that the kind of 'interactionism' Chomsky has in mind
is not of the same kind as the idea of interaction developmentalists have in
mind. Let me quote from Lewontin's foreword to Oyama's book:

"There are no 'gene actions' outside environments, and no 'environmental
actions' can occur in the absence of genes. The very status of environment as a
contributing cause to the nature of an organism depends on the existence of a
developing organism. Without organisms there may be a physical world, but there
are no *environments*. In like manner, no *organisms* exist in the abstract
without environments [...]. Organisms are the nexus of external circumstances
and DNA molecules that make these physical circumstances into causes of
development in the first place. They become *causes* only at their nexus, and
they cannot exist as *causes* except in their simultaneous action. That is the
essence of Oyama's claim that information comes into existence only in the
process of ontogeny."

This appears to me rather different from the idea of a universal body of
knowledge (information) with a number of pre-defined options (parameters) that
get fixed on the basis of external information. Anyway, this is not what I
understand by a dialectical process. Dialectical, to me, is what Lewontin
describes. Perhaps this what Chomsky has in mind, but, as far as I can tell he
has never put it in such explicit terms as Lewontin.

Best,

Sergio
--
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Sergio Balari Ravera
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Àrea de Lingüística General
Departament de Filologia Catalana
Facultat de Lletres, Edifici B
E-09193 Bellaterra (Barcelona)
Spain
Phone: +34 935 812 350 Fax: +34 935 812 782
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