Is Chomsky's View on the Mind-Body Problem Redefining Materialism?

[Mr.Samsa]

Yeah, for sure. The above was just a lecture for students. In general, modeling at the cellular network level (neural systems) is very complicated when relating it to behavior, this is what I'm most familiar with.

But there are more abstracted approaches; most I've heard from apeiron: Friston's Free Energy Principle of the Brain, bayesian inference networks.

One I found years ago was Mark Gluck's approach:

Cheers. Yeah I did see it was an introductory lecture that you linked to, I was just interested if it extended much beyond that. I'll check out the link and have a read up on some of the stuff you've mentioned.

 

[bohm2]

Some might find this article interesting:

Computational Phenotypes: Where the Theory of Computation Meets Evo–Devo
www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/view/93

 

[apeiron]

Some might find this article interesting:

Computational Phenotypes: Where the Theory of Computation Meets Evo–Devo
www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/view/93

What a curious paper. It starts off with an excellent review of evo-devo thinking on this issue, starts to get down to things with Lieberman's "basal ganglia" theory of language evolution (but neglecting the critical element of the vocal tract constraint on expression) then goes completely left-field with its speculation that the first speakers would have been social misfits excluded from the tribe for their strange solitary chattering habits.

We believe that the first humans who showed the capacity to externalize the complex expressions which their computational phenotype was able to process did not obtain great benefits from it. On the contrary, in the context of an evolutionary scenario dominated by forms of expressivity completely alien to the degree of sophistication of the sequences emitted by the members of this mutant population, it may well have been the case that it was taken as an element of stigmatization and exclusion for these individuals, who would have effectively been seen by the rest of the population as true “social monsters”.

But rolling back to earlier in the paper, given recent comments, this was an interesting parallel between behaviourism vs cogsci and modern synthesis darwinism vs evo-devo...

Finally, we come to the study of observable behavior, which for a long time was the alibi of twentieth-century behaviorist psychology to attain the kind of scientific respectability imposed by the dominant positivist ideology in the philosophy of science. Curiously enough, Amundson (2006) suggests that transition of theoretical psychology towards a more cognitivist approach is, historically, comparable to the deliverance of Evo–Devo from the narrow-minded perspective imposed by the MES. In both cases, so Amundson argues, we observe a transition from an approach focused on environmental conditioning factors to a perspective where the search for internal constraints prevails.

Overall, the paper goes right off the rails after a promising start.

It at least shows that not a lot has to change with the brain to enable symbolic speech. Just some tuning of developmental schedules.

But the paper does not then tackle the critical sources of change as argued by Leiberman - the evolution of a vocal tract that imposed a strong serial order constraint on the brain's hierarchically-organised (ie: recursive) motor output.

And then the reasons why that could lead to symbolic, syntactic, language. Key facts like it takes the same effort to speak any word and so that effectively zeroes the ergonomic costs. As with hardware and software, it is this particular feature of speaking that creates the necessary epistemic cut between what is said and what is meant.

The basal ganglia-based motor sequencing of behaviour already existed in the animal brain. It is of course important that animals do not try to do everything that they are thinking about all at once. And in primates/hominids, the manipulation of tools had led to an increasing ability to consciously plan complex sequenced actions to achieve larger goals.

But it was the fortuitous emergence of something new to control - expressive noises - that opened the door to the realm of semantic constraints and syntactic organisation. The transition could be made from iconic and indexical gestures to properly symbolic ones.

 

[bohm2]

I haven't read it, yet. I just skimmed it and printed it. I'm looking forward to reading it. I read the first one below and I'm also looking forward to reading the second one also, particularly because of this argument presented:

This way, the minimalist proposal of reducing the role of genes in language growth leads to reducing the UG to a minimum. That means, as clearly stated by Chomsky (2005: 9), that MP (Minimalist Program) crucially implies “shifting the burden of explanation from the first factor, the genetic endowment, to the third factor, language independent principles of data processing, structural architecture, and computational efficiency”. It is in this sense that the notion of (a rich) genetic program for language seems to be ill-suited from a minimalist perspective.To sum up, we claim that, if the minimalist unspecificity thesis is seriously considered, the assumption of a highly detailed structure of purely linguistic knowledge, as sustained by GB (, should be replaced by another according to which the initial state should be freed from any grammatical residue (Lorenzo & Longa 2003). This means the abandonment of gene-centrism by MP...If the reduction of the role of genetic endowment raised by MP is considered, in order to draw analogies between Evo-Devo and the minimalist BA an Evo-Devo theory rejecting gene-centrism and the notion of genetic program should be chosen. Such an Evo-Devo theory could well be Developmental Systems Theory (henceforth, DST; see Oyama 1985, 2000, Oyama et al. 2001b; see also Longa 2008 and Lorenzo & Longa 2009 for a implementation of the minimalist framework from the DST view).

Evo-Devo — Of Course, But Which One? Some Comments on Chomsky’s Analogies between the Biolinguistic Approach and Evo-Devo
www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/.../175/195

Beyond Generative Geneticism: Rethinking Langauge Acquisition From A Developmentalist Point Of View
http://pdn.sciencedirect.com.myacce...3c7e2be5bc9/1-s2.0-S0024384109000448-main.pdf

 

[bohm2]

But the paper does not then tackle the critical sources of change as argued by Leiberman - the evolution of a vocal tract that imposed a strong serial order constraint on the brain's hierarchically-organised (ie: recursive) motor output.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, in post #334, I linked some stuff by Fitch that seriously question this argument. There are also many more articles. I don't think Lieberman's argument is tenable. I'm not sure even if he still buys it? Here's Fitch's PhD. thesis and note that Philip Lieberman was one of the reviewers.

Vocal Tract Length Perception and the Evolution of Language
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/thesis.pdf

 

[apeiron]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, in post #334, I linked some stuff by Fitch that seriously question this argument. There are also many more articles. I don't think Lieberman's argument is tenable. I'm not sure even if he still buys it? Here's Fitch's PhD. thesis and note that Philip Lieberman was one of the reviewers.

Have you actually read the thesis? As I don't see Fitch seriously questioning Lieberman in it at all...

Thus, there is reason to believe that selection for increased vocal tract length may have provided the initial force which led ultimately to the uniquely-human vocal tract necessary to produce speech. A similar suggestion has been made by Ohala (1984), buthe has missed the point that the human vocal tract has shown subsequent adaptation for speech production (Lieberman 1984), claiming instead that body size provides the only explanation for the human larynx position. I suggest instead that vocal tract length provided the initial selective force only, serving as a preadaptation for speech-specific selection.

So Fitch is speculating that there may have been an initial lengthening of the vocal tract for sexual display, and this then paved the way for other articulatory adaptations (lips, tongue, palate, basal ganglia motor control, etc).

Note also that Hauser was one of the thesis reviewers and who Fitch actually joined up with to push an arguably more Chomskyite approach - the same Hauser who sadly had to resign recently after concerns over his experiments.

And as for Lieberman, he does not seem that swayed by Fitch's moves in that direction since that 1986 thesis...

Chomsky’s most recent candidate for the productive capacity of syntax is a narrow faculty of language that is specific to humans and to syntax (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). The proposal here is that cortical-striatal-cortical neural circuits regulate syntax as well as speech production, yielding the productive qualities of syntax.

http://www.cog.brown.edu/people/lie...The evolution of human speech, Its anatom.pdf

 

[bohm2]

Have you actually read the thesis? As I don't see Fitch seriously questioning Lieberman in it at all...

I don't think Lieberman's arguments are convincing at all. There are many articles where Fitch does including the ones I posted in post #334:

For a long time, the descended larynx was considered unique to our species, and the key to our possession of speech. Researchers had even tried to place a date on the emergence of language by studying the position of the larynx in ancient fossils. Evidence from two different sources of comparative data casts doubt on this hypothesis. The first was the discovery of animal species with permanently descended larynges like our own. We now know that lions, tigers, koalas and Mongolian gazelles all have a descended larynx – making it a convergent trait. Since none of these species produce anything vaguely speech-like, such changes in anatomy cannot be enough for speech to have emerged.

The second line of evidence is even more damning. X-ray observations of vocalising mammals show that dogs, monkeys, goats and pigs all lower the larynx during vocalisation. This ability to reconfigure the vocal tract appears to be a widespread, and probably homologous, feature of mammals. With its larynx retracted, a dog or a monkey has all the freedom of movement needed to produce many different vocalisations (see diagram, right).The key changes must therefore have occurred in the brain instead.

The evolution of language
http://www.newscientist.com/data/doc/article/dn19554/instant_expert_6_-_the_evolution_of_language.pd

 

[apeiron]

I don't think Lieberman's arguments are convincing at all. There are many articles where Fitch does including the ones I posted in post #334:

But the same evidence is in his thesis and is not used as an argument against Leiberman, so you might have to fill in the blanks here about how you believe it somehow is.

For a start, Fitch says the lowering of the larynx is not the major change. He already concedes that it is changes to the filter rather than the source that is the essential vocal tract adaptation for speech (or is this just something you think Lieberman forced him to put in his thesis? ).

And in his thesis, Fitch agrees that the human vocal tract is distinctive when it comes to the larynx apart from a few unusual cases of convergent evolution such as koala and red deer.

And while a deep voice is a mildly sexually dimorphic characteristic in humans, this is not really relevant to speech. Humans are not harem species in which the male bellows for mates. Nor are women any less capable of speech than men (whereas I don't think female koalas and red deer are so hot at bellowing).

The descended larynx in other bellowing species is often just retracted by muscles rather than being a permanent change, in both sexes. And only in humans does it create a choking risk due to the windpipe being left open. If we are talking convergent evolution, some things don't appear so convergent.

And then the key issue is that the actual claim under discussion here is that it was the linear constraint imposed by an articulate vocal tract on a hierarchically organised brain which is central to explaining the evolution of symbolic human speech.

Now Chomsky apparently has come around to that way of thinking. Although he may not want to talk about the obvious source of that linearity.

And nowhere in Fitch's writings have I seen this hypothesis actually discussed, let alone refuted.

So the descended larynx stuff has a lot of heat around it because of the old Neanderthal vs human arguments. But the debate has moved along from that now. The dropped voice box was one of the adaptations, or even pre-adaptations, but there had to be quite a few other more intricate changes to the vocal tract.

Leiberman says...

Studies of species whose tongues are positioned in their mouths (e.g., Fitch 1997, 2000a) show that their vocalizations are limited to the schwa vowel...in itself a low larynx is not an indicator of potential phonetic ability. Claims such as Fitch’s (2000b) that the human vocal tract evolved to produce lower formant frequencies by laryngeal descent (providing a false vocal impression of a larger body) cannot account for the evolution of the species-specific human vocal tract, which involves the descent of the tongue into the pharynx.

 

[bohm2]

I really do not understand what you are saying here, especially that part about Fitch's thesis or Chomsky coming around. Both of them do not believe that vocal tract has much to do with language evolution. There's no debating this point. You can e-mail them if you don't believe me. Have a look through Fitch's papers. It seems clear that he doesn't agree with Lieberman with respect to this position. Same with Chomsky. They might be mistaken but both believe that the major/key change leading to language was in the brain not the vocal tract. In fact, they have said so, in many of their papers. Have a look through Fitch's papers (see below).Do you disagree with this?

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/publications.htm

 

[apeiron]

I really do not understand what you are saying here, especially that part about Fitch's thesis

You cited Fitch's work on a descended larynx as a convergent evolutionary trait. How is that an argument against Lieberman when his crucial claim concerns the repositioning of the tongue?

or Chomsky coming around.

Are you forgetting that was from the Newport paper you cited?...

Chomsky argues that the structure of human language derives from two types of constraints:
the nature of thought (is this thought special to language, or is it simply special to humans?)
and the pressures of externalization. On his view, the nature of thought is nonlinear; it is hierarchical and recursive. His hypothesis about language is that it acquires its linear organization in the process of being externalized—at the sensory-motor interface, presumably in accord with pressures supplied by the nature of the articulation process, and perhaps also from the perceptual process applied by the listener.1 An overriding constraint applied to externalization is minimal computation, the constraint that there should be minimal computational complexity in the relationship of the hierarchical representation and its linearization. For me, this view, though more elegant, more detailed, and more beautifully articulated than any I know among nonmodularists, is nonetheless surprisingly similar to what the most promising nonmodularist approaches are trying to argue as well.

1 In broad strokes, this is like the position articulated by Liberman (1970), who suggested that grammar is the outcome of the mismatch between the structure of thought and the workings of the mouth and ear—that grammar is the system that links these two very different types of structure and process to one another.

http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/newport/pdf/Newport_%20LLD11.pdf

Both of them do not believe that vocal tract has much to do with language evolution.

Newport's comments were about Chomsky, not Fitch.

 

[bohm2]

What does Newport's paper/views have to do with Chomsky's views on the importance of vocal tract, etc. on guiding the evolution of language? Chomsky and Fitch both believe it plays a minor role. Their position hasn't changed much. The reason is because both (especially Chomsky) think that there is a difference between evolution of communication versus evolution of language. Consider these quotes on this issue from his most recent publication (2012) on the same volume as the Newport piece:

Let me illustrate with a recent essay that encapsulates clearly many of the assumptions of the nonexistence approach to language and its evolution. In a recent issue of Science magazine, there is a review-article discussing books on evolution of language by N.J. Enfield (2010) of the Max Planck Institute. He finds essentially nothing of value in the books reviewed, apart from some discoveries about the lowered larynx in mammals, which have at best a remote relation to language and its evolution.

As pointed out previously, Chomsky thinks that one must be careful to delineate the difference between the evolution of language versus evolution of communication:

Very little is known about evolution of cognition generally. Furthermore, it is quite possible that nothing much can be learned by currently available methods, as the prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin (1998) has argued in unfortunately neglected essays. A look at the literature on evolution of language reveals that most of it scarcely even addresses the topic. Instead, it largely offers speculations about the evolution of communication, a very different matter. It is also often based on very strange beliefs about evolution, to some of which I will briefly return.

Langauge and Other Cognitive Systems. What Is Special About Language?
http://www.tandfonline.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/doi/pdf/10.1080/15475441.2011.584041

Similar arguments are presented here:

Langauge can of course be used for communication, as can any aspect of what we do: style of dress, gesture, and so on. And it can be and commonly is used for much else. Statistically speaking, for whatever that is worth, the overwhelming use of language is internal – for thought. It takes an enormous act of will to keep from talking to oneself in every waking moment – and asleep as well, often a considerable annoyance. The distinguished neurologist Harry Jerison (1977:55) among others expressed a stronger view, holding that “language did not evolve as a communication system…. the initial evolution of language is more likely to have been…for the construction of a real world,” as a “tool for thought.” Not only in the functional dimension, but also in all other respects – semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological – the core properties of human language appear to differ sharply from animal communication systems, and to be largely unique in the organic world.

Luria was the most forceful advocate of the view that communicative needs would not have provided “any great selective pressure to produce a system such as language,” with its crucial relation to “development of abstract or productive thinking.” The same idea was taken up by François Jacob, who suggested that “the role of language as a communication system between individuals would have come about only secondarily...The quality of language that makes it unique does not seem to be so much its role in communicating directives for action” or other common features of animal communication, but rather “its role in symbolizing, in evoking cognitive images,” in molding our notion of reality and yielding our capacity for thought and planning, through its unique property of allowing “infinite combinations of symbols” and therefore “mental creation of possible worlds.” These ideas trace back to the cognitive revolution of the 17th century, which in many ways foreshadows developments from the 1950s (Luria, 1974; Jacob, 1982).

The Biolinguistic Program: The Current State of its Evolution and Development
http://www.punksinscience.org/klean...L/material/Berwick-Chomsky_Biolinguistics.pdf

 

[apeiron]

As pointed out previously, Chomsky thinks that one must be careful to delineate the difference between the evolution of language versus evolution of communication:

The speculation that language arose for thinking before it became used for communication is a separate hypothesis to the argument that the imposition of a serial constraint on hierarchical motor output was the rubicon evolutionary change. Whether talking to yourself or talking to others, the vocal tract would have made the difference.

The self-speech first hypothesis is of course quite ridiculous (even if supported by some very eminent microbiologists and molecular biologists ).

Chomsky is full of these arbitrary distinctions that seem mainly designed to carve out a chunk of academic territory for himself and his acolytes. He creates a medieval map in which the world ends abruptly with a general "here be dragons" warning for any tempted to stray beyond his paternalistic authority.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, people are studying the interaction between the vocal tract and the brain and coming up with good stuff...

http://www.cogcrit.umn.edu/docs/macneilage_11.pdf

 

[apeiron]

...apart from some discoveries about the lowered larynx in mammals, which have at best a remote relation to language and its evolution.

You keep citing this Fitch work on animal bellowing as if it is somehow conclusive. Again, as the Lieberman 2007 paper makes clear, it is the position of the tongue that is crucial. You have not addressed that fact at all.

MacNeilage's work on infant babbling again highlights the importance of things other than just the larynx descent. Does Chomsky have a position on babbling?

Another problem for Fitch, as the Lieberman paper points out, is the evidence that humans are expert at discounting differences in vocal tract length in order to hear a vowel as the same, no matter whether it is said by a lisping toddler, reedy adolescent or husky adult male.

So for animals, we have a descended larynx for sexual display where size counts. But for humans, we have the reverse story of size factors being actively filtered out so as to focus on the message.

So much for a case of convergent evolution.

 

[apeiron]

I haven't read it, yet. I just skimmed it and printed it. I'm looking forward to reading it. I read the first one below and I'm also looking forward to reading the second one also, particularly because of this argument presented:

This way, the minimalist proposal of reducing the role of genes in language growth leads to reducing the UG to a minimum. That means, as clearly stated by Chomsky (2005: 9), that MP (Minimalist Program) crucially implies “shifting the burden of explanation from the first factor, the genetic endowment, to the third factor, language independent principles of data processing, structural architecture, and computational efficiency”. It is in this sense that the notion of (a rich) genetic program for language seems to be ill-suited from a minimalist perspective.

There seems to be some confusion about what Chomsky actually believes these days. The Enfield review of Fitch and others says:

In his single authored chapter in Larson et al., Chomsky maintains the centrality for language evolution of an abstract and narrow language faculty, driving a saltationist argument whose central hypothesis is that “some genetic event rewired the brain.” Both Fitch (in his book) and Hauser (in his chapter) now explicitly acknowledge the possibility that the putative narrow language faculty “may be completely empty” (i.e., may not exist), and this is indeed what many researchers in the cognitive sciences currently believe.

http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/it...0/Enfield_Science_Language Evolution_2010.pdf

We seem to be going from "genetic module" to "minimal genetic module" to "no genetics/no modules minimalism".

Chomsky takes his chapter as an opportunity to boldly assert his personal position on language evolution. Many linguists will feel a familiar sense of frustration at his omission or dismissal of decades of prominent and successful linguistic research that has not necessarily aligned with various influential Chomskyan programs.

So no change there at least.

As Enfield argues, the irony is Fitch's discoveries on animal vocalisation came about from studying the dynamic, in the field, story, which is exactly what a Chomskian-dominated linguistics has failed to do when it comes to the communicative purposes of speech...

But linguistics has little to say about this. The empirical domain of language in its role as a central tool for human social life remains untouched by the mainstream of linguistics and is now largely in the hands of sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists.

 

[apeiron]

The distinguished neurologist Harry Jerison (1977:55) among others expressed a stronger view, holding that “language did not evolve as a communication system…. the initial evolution of language is more likely to have been…for the construction of a real world,” as a “tool for thought.”

While it is laughable that Chomsky should cite Nobelist micro and molecular biologists as authorities on paleolinguistics, I was intrigued by his mention of Jerison, a genuine authority on brain size evolution.

It turns out Jerison has a rather cranky personal hypothesis on language evolution (what is it about language evolution that brings out the worst kinds of unexamined "just so" speculation?)

See: http://www.fathom.com/feature/122113/index.html

He makes the reasonable starting point that early hominids were social hunters with large territories. But then immediately and unaccountably drops the "social" bit to speculate they needed proto-speech to memorise geographic landmarks which somehow helped organise the information in long term memory.

So on how many different grounds does this fall immediately flat on its face? Any evidence that we still use this method to get around our worlds? Taxi drivers and hippocampus anyone? And as said, why would a social hunter evolve private language?

If these kinds of cites are the best Chomsky can do to support his case, then you can see why people get a bit fed up with his pontificating.

 

[bohm2]

There seems to be some confusion about what Chomsky actually believes these days. The Enfield review of Fitch and others says:

We seem to be going from "genetic module" to "minimal genetic module" to "no genetics/no modules minimalism".

Chomsky discusses Enfield's article below in this transcript of a lecture he recently gave:

Enfield, in the same article, he also puts forth a far-reaching thesis which is quite standard in the cognitive sciences and a very clear expression of the non-existence hypothesis, I'll quote him. He says: "Langauge is entirely grounded in a constellation of cognitive capacities that each, taken separately, has other functions as well." Notice, that's kind of an updating of the nineteen-fifties position that I quoted. Well, that means language exists only in the sense that there exists such a thing as today's weather, which is also a constellation of many factors that operate independently...

(Another)leading figure is Michael Tomasello. So, in a recent handbook of child development he explains that there aren't any linguistic rules and there's nothing to say about descriptive regularities, say, like those ECP examples. Rather, there's nothing at all except a structured inventory of meaningful linguistic constructions, all of them meaningful linguistic symbols that are used in communication. That's his topic, there being no such thing as language. The inventory is structured only in the sense that its elements -- words, idioms, sentences like the one I'm now speaking-they're all acquired by processes of pattern finding, schematization and abstraction that are common to all primates.

Enfield also presents a closely related thesis, that's also very widely held, I'll quote it: "There are well-developed gradualist evolutionary arguments to support the conclusion that there's no such thing as language, except as an arbitrary complex of independent cognitive processes." Again, no relevant sources cited, and none exist.

Langauge and the Cognitive Science Revolution(s)
http://chomsky.info/talks/20110408.htm

Chomsky is full of these arbitrary distinctions that seem mainly designed to carve out a chunk of academic territory for himself and his acolytes. He creates a medieval map in which the world ends abruptly with a general "here be dragons" warning for any tempted to stray beyond his paternalistic authority.

It sounds like you have some personal bad feelings about him. You have made similar comments before. I don't understand this stuff, at all. Why do you think he's trying to carve out academic territory and why would he care, especially since he's arguably already accomplished this stuff (assuming he even cares)?

 

[bohm2]

MacNeilage's work on infant babbling again highlights the importance of things other than just the larynx descent. Does Chomsky have a position on babbling?

I'm guessing he doesn't buy it (at least, the talking one) for some of the following reasons:

Summarizing so far, entirely normal language acquisition occurs in profoundly deaf children exposed only to signed languages, hearing bilingual babies acquiring a signed and a spoken language simultaneously, and, most remarkably, hearing children without any spoken language input whatsoever, only signed language input. These data clearly provide no support for the prevailing hypothesis that normal human language acquisition in all children is determined primarily by the maturation of the mechanisms to hear and produce speech. Interestingly, the hearing bilingual babies who were presented at birth with a tacit choice (speech versus sign) attended equally to these two input signals, showed no preference for speech whatsoever, and achieved every language milestone equally and on the same timetable as monolinguals. Moreover, the hearing babies exposed exclusively to signed language exhibited normal language acquisition (albeit in sign) and did so without the use of the brain’s auditory and speech perception mechanisms, and without the use of the motor mechanisms used for the production of speech.

The existence of babbling has been further used to argue that the human language capacity is exclusively linked neurologically at birth to innate mechanisms for producing speech in the development of language in a child, or ontogeny (Liberman & Mattingly 1989). It has also been presented as proof that human language evolved over the period of human phylogenetic development exclusively from our species’ incremental motoric ability to control the mouth and the jaw muscles (Lieberman 2000)...The discovery of babbling in the silent modality of the hands disconfirmed the view that babbling is neurologically determined wholly by the maturation of the ability to talk. Instead, it confirmed a claim central to Chomsky’s theory: that early language acquisition is governed by tacit knowledge of the abstract...The deep commonalities between the linguistic patterns expressed on the tongue in hearing children’s vocal babbling and those seen on the hands of deaf children’s silent babbling (independent of the tongue) teach us that Chomsky’s prophetic emphasis on language’s core underlying principles and patterns (not the peripheral ability to talk) are the organizing force behind our extraordinary capacity for language.

How the brain begets language
http://www.olimon.org/uan/chomsky.pdf

 

[apeiron]

Chomsky discusses Enfield's article below in this transcript of a lecture he recently gave:

Yes, I know. But why not respond to the substance of Enfield's critique rather than merely quoting what Chomsky says yet again?

Same with Fitch. If Lieberman's story rests on changes to tongue, then how is Fitch an issue here?

It sounds like you have some personal bad feelings about him.

Yep, I have bad feelings about both his content and his style. He sounds like an old dinosaur.

You've got Chomsky claiming that Enfield supplies no sources for his claim about graduationalist approaches, and yet read the actual article and you see Enfield cites Hurford's The Origins of Meanings.

And it is with some amazement that I see he is in fact still pushing a "hopeful monster" story on language evolution.

Do you personally think this is a credible genetic hypothesis?

It appears overwhelmingly clear that a generative process suddenly emerged at some pretty recent point -- maybe that window I mentioned, the great leap forward, right about then. Well it emerged in an individual, mutations don't take place in groups, so some individual was fortunate or unfortunate enough to get this generative capacity. Well, maybe that's some slight rewiring of the brain. Furthermore, there was no selectional pressure at that time. There couldn't be. It's just something that happened to an individual. So, what you'd presumably expect what appeared at that point to be just determined by natural law, there's no other pressure, something kind of like a snowflake.

http://chomsky.info/talks/20110408.htm

Meanwhile over in the real world of neuroscience, it has long been understood that the brain has hierarchical organisation when it comes to both perception and action.

The fact that the tamarins used an inverted grasp (a posture they seldom adopted spontaneously) – to extricate the inverted glass from the apparatus suggests that they had the
cognitive machinery to represent future body positions and compute optimal series of body positions. Similar optimization is also seen in anticipatory co-articulation in speech, where the way a syllable is produced often depends on what syllable will follow (Kent, 1983; Ladefoged, 1993). The observation that tamarins demonstrate the end-state comfort effect while lacking language or tool use abilities suggests that the cognitive and computational machinery underlying the end-state comfort effect is part of the scaffolding for more complex behaviors. This view fits with other developments in animal cognition research (e.g., Terrace, 2005).

http://web.mac.com/gknoblich/page3/assets/2007_Rob_HMS.pdf

So brains are hierarchical. That just is their fundamental architectural design principle (along with them being forward-modelling - anticipatory). It did not require some individual mutant Homo sap to luck into a new brain design all on his/her ownsome.

And that is before we even get into Chomsky's bizarre assertion that hominids were not under great selective pressure for their social intelligence, immitative abilities and communicative capacities.

To bring the discussion back to the OP, there is this telling comment, from a review of MacNeilage's The Origins of Speech, that I agree with.

His foil throughout the book is what he calls the Classical position of Plato, Descartes, Saussure and Chomsky. He sees this position as asserting that speech and language are special forms, unique to humans. Although such forms are said to be genetically determined or innate in some unspecified manner, they are held to be without evolutionary predecessors. Thus, MacNeilage sets up two possible roots for the origin of speaking, one, Darwinian, (functionalist) and the other Classical (formalist)...

...MacNeilage believes that a basic biological orientation must be committed to finding serious answers to these questions. To shrug these questions off by retreating into the competence/performance distinction and ignoring them as mere performance problems, is
simply unscientific and a regression into the age-old mind-body distinction.

http://www.cogcrit.umn.edu/docs/Jenkins_10.pdf

So some people just cannot believe that materialist explanations can give rise to formal constraints. Which sets things up for dualism and Platonism.

Of course, it is just as bad when reductionists shrug off global organising causes as epiphenomenal, supervenient, or otherwise "merely emergent". These kinds of people would say that language involves no strong structural principles and that mind is simply what the brain does.

But with dissipative structure theory in thermodynamics, evo-devo in biology, and hierarchical approaches to neuroscience such as the Bayesian brain, we are seeing the move to systems style thinking in which material and formal causes are in interaction.

You started out quoting Chomsky as speculating there must be material causes we are missing, as the existing material causes are insufficient to bridge the gap between body and mind.

We can of course always learn more about the material causes of reality. And the formal causes. But what is actually missing is the modelling of the interaction between them. Which is where we get back to the systems approach, and in particular a focus on the epistemic cut, the semiotic mechanism, that is the common trick of both genes and words, and to a lesser degree, other varieties of informational/structural constraints such as axons, membranes, pores, tethers, etc.

 

[apeiron]

I'm guessing he doesn't buy it for some of the following reasons:

Did you read the MacNeilage paper first?

The belief that vocal and sign babbling have the same chronology appears to have arisen from a single sentence from the paper by Petitto and Marentette (1991), on the sign babbling in two deaf infants.

They assert that, “...by age 10 months, they were well into the syllabic manual babbling stage which occurred at the same time as in hearing infants (age 7 to 10 months)” (p.1494).

However, no data were presented in their paper to support the claim about when babbling actually began in these infants, and even if there were data, an N of two infants is insufficient to conclude that, on average, sign babbling in a population of infants exposed to sign language began at any typical point in time.

...a large proportion of the 2,530 spontaneous manual movements of newborn infants described by Ronnqvist and von Hofsten (1994) qualify as signs, leading to the problematic conclusion that spoken and sign babbling do not have an amodal basis because sign babbling begins at birth rather than in the 3rd quarter of the first year.

http://www.cogcrit.umn.edu/docs/macneilage_11.pdf

 

[bohm2]

The belief that vocal and sign babbling have the same chronology appears to have arisen from a single sentence from the paper by Petitto and Marentette (1991), on the sign babbling in two deaf infants.

There are a lot more than just 2 deaf infants. And many other papers by Petitto. And I side with her. She taught at my university. So I'm biased. What can I say?

 

[apeiron]

There are a lot more than just 2 deaf infants. And many other papers by Petitto. And I side with her. She taught at my university. So I'm biased. What can I say?

So your biases count for more than any arguments?

Deaf kids will spontaneously babble, but hearing kids do not spontaneously sign. Petitto's claims of an equivalent hand babbling phase in deaf kids learning sign shows at best only that the brain is plastic enough to respond to other kinds of speech input. The imitative reflexes are strong.

The debate here is about language evolution and why the vocal tract supplied the critical constraint. MacNeilage suggests a convincing story on one of the reasons why vocalisation was special - the dichotomous nature of vowel and consonant production that cuts up an analog flow of noise into a digital stream, thus creating the computational elements to ground symbol-mediated semiosis.

So the adaptability of the brain to other modalities, such as signing, or reading, is beside the point to the evolutionary thesis.

Reading is obviously unnatural. No-one claims it to be a brain module or innate ability. Although you see parents working hard to train their kids with flash cards these days.

Signing is interesting as it is in fact easier for babies to learn earlier. So it is an even newer fad to sign to your baby. See for a laugh...http://www.babysignlanguage.com/dictionary/

So presumably it is less cognitively demanding than vocalisation. But that would just make it more of a puzzle why it is not then the primary modality of speech in humans.

The answer has to be that signing lacks that "by necessity" digitisation of action that MacNeilage suggests with his opposed opening~closing of the mouth which paves the way for the sharp divisions between vowel and consonant production.

As Petiitto says, "a well-formed syllable [sign] has a handshape, a location, and a path movement (change of location) or secondary movement (change in handshape, or orientation)." The hands are less constrained and so that would make it much less likely they could ever lead to a symbolic method of communication that depends on a digital-level constraint over motor output in a communicative, social setting.

So the general hypothesis here is that brains are already hierarchically structured, but they needed some new novel constraint that led to symbolic speech. The flow of sound (or hand gestures, or scribblings on paper, or whatever) had to be broken up into a digitised stream, in just the same way DNA is string of discrete codons. You had to have a sharp epistemic cut between code and metabolism, or in the case of speech, between semantics and phonology.

Lieberman makes a case for the vocal tract which in humans has the critical novel feature of being split in the middle by the hunched ball of the tongue. You then have a whole tree of further vocalisation dichotomies (mouth vs nasal vocalisation, tongue blade vs tongue point, pursed lip vs bitten lip, etc) to create rich phonological structure (a nested hierarchy constructed out of digital components).

MacNeilage comes along and offers another element in the story by pointing out the basic antagonistic nature of vowel and consonant production. The babbling part of the story shows just how simple an alternating motor pattern it is. It is like the gait reflexes kids have which are the starting template for learning to crawl or walk. MacNeilage may well push the "development recapitulates evolution" angle too hard. But that is not the critical part of the story IMO.

So this is how it goes. You start by zeroing in on the crucial evolutionary novelty when it comes to language. And this is the digitised phonology that allows for the construction of recursive or nested hierarchical patterns. These hierarchical patterns then in turn result in a new realm of semantic control because each word is a symbol, a top-down acting constraint on the state of the brain.

Saying "cat" is just a noise, a puff of air. But it puts your brain into a specific anticipatory state. And I can construct a hierarchy of such semantic constraint by stringing words together, like "the pink cat that sat on the blue fluffy rug".

Having focused on the critical advance, the "deep structure" explanation, then you can start to look for the detailed story of how it might have evolved. That is why some stories, such as Lieberman and MacNeilage, stand out as immediately plausible, and may others are just lost at sea.

Chomsky got that there is hierarchical structure in there at the centre of the story. But he does not seem to understand that is just standard neurology. That is what optimal computation in fact looks like when it comes to forward-modelling the world.

And then he does not get the phonology digitisation angle which - as with DNA - is the only way to get a sharp epistemic cut between a code and the world it represents/controls. Or at least Newport thinks he is kind of coming around to the linearisation at the motor output interface (or whatever).

And again, this idea of modelling complexity as semiotic mechanism, as the implementation of epistemic cuts, is a general one. It applies to cellular structure like membranes and pores, it applies to neural structure like spikes and synapses. It is a general theory of systems causality, and so fundamental to the whole mind~body problem.

 

[bohm2]

You're very knowledgeable about this material. I will try to read some more stuff from Newport because I also found that article interesting. The Balari article was also very good but I agree with you about the 'social monster' part being overly speculative. What is interesting is Chomsky's notion of language as mostly internal thought. I think this is very much agreeable to me because I have mild ASD so I tend to become quite self-absorbed and require very little social interaction. In fact, I find it extremely tiring and exhaustive. A bit off-topic but there were a few other very speculative pieces on people on the ASD spectrum and introverts with respect to requiring much less social interaction and/or not getting as much pleasure from it and being adapted for a solitary lifestyle:

People on the autism spectrum are conceptualized here as ecologically competent individuals that could have been adept at learning and implementing hunting and gathering skills in the ancestral environment. Upon independence from their mothers, young individuals on the autism spectrum may have been psychologically predisposed toward a different life-history strategy, common among mammals and even some primates, to hunt and gather primarily on their own. Many of the behavioral and cognitive tendencies that autistic individuals exhibit are viewed here as adaptations that would have complemented a solitary lifestyle....The evolution of the neurological tendencies in solitary species that predispose them toward being introverted and reclusive may hold important clues for the evolution of the autism spectrum and the natural selection of autism genes. Solitary animals are thought to eschew unnecessary social contact as part of a foraging strategy often due to scarcity and wide dispersal of food in their native environments.

Conceptualizing the Autism Spectrum in Terms of Natural Selection and Behavioral Ecology: The Solitary Forager Hypothesis
http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP09207238.pdf

Do extraverts process social stimuli differently from introverts?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3129862/pdf/nihms281578.pdf

 

[apeiron]

What is interesting is Chomsky's notion of language as mostly internal thought.

Yes, this is the central belief from which most of the rest follows. Some think that their conceptual abiltities come entirely from within, and so must be a genetic part of being human, others take the Vygotskean/Social Constructionist view that the habits of thought are merely language-scaffolded and culturally evolved, so are learned skills.

There is plenty of scientific evidence for the Vygotskean view. But the irony is that our own cultures - the ones that shape our thinking - encourages us to believe the very opposite, especially in the Western tradition. You are taught to consider yourself as an autonomous being with freewill and responsibility for your own choices. The role given to you in life is to be self-actualising, to be "true to yourself", etc.

And now in the modern era we have the interesting situation where we have created such a rich world of cultural thought - Popper's world three - that we can "live" in that more than we live in the actual material world (which includes all the social relations needed to get things done).

We not only seem to have our own thoughts and conceptual abilities as a inner genetic right, but we also have a world of thought that may be culturally produced, but is very much also our own inner world as we are the ones in charge of what knowledge furnishes it, and what ideas we pay attention to.

Even a few hundred years ago, the private world of thoughts was probably pretty small and sparsely furnished for most people. But now world three is a place that can completely absorb you.

Many of the behavioral and cognitive tendencies that autistic individuals exhibit are viewed here as adaptations that would have complemented a solitary lifestyle.

The problem is that there is not much evidence presented here either that solitary foraging is a useful strategy, or that those on the autistic spectrum in fact have any talent for it.

Anthropology stresses the opposite - foraging is always intensely social. Even when there is division of labour - men going off on solitary hunting trips - the other side of the story is how they bring the food back to share, how tall tales are told about the adventure, how the necessary skills are taught to the young through social contact.

And the kind of systematising, stereotyped, narrow-focus cognitive style ascribed to autism seems the opposite of what actually makes a successful forager. The paper itself also notes that ADDH has been explained by the same kind of "just so" evo-psych explanation, a restless mind being more likely to note what is going in its environment.

So the solitary forager hypothesis does not ring true.

Another idea going around is that aspies and ADDH are due to Neanderthal genes getting mixed up with the human genome. It is very easy to invent these kinds of hypotheses. And evo-psych has given people the license to speculate.

It is quite funny I guess. Suddenly everything about human behaviour has an evolutionary reason - an efficient cause placed conveniently far in the unseeable past. You both must supply a reason for any chosen trait, and no-one can easily disprove whatever it is you say. Knocking a story down always requires too much knowledge of something else like genetics or anthropology.

Chomsky then represents the other extreme of thought - the under-specified rather than the overly specific. He says the brain just spontaneously reorganised in some distant ancestral mutant for reasons of computational optimality. Again, it is a just-so story that must be judged against an interdisciplinary context. Does it ring true against the broad view offered by science?

 

[bohm2]

It is quite funny I guess. Suddenly everything about human behaviour has an evolutionary reason - an efficient cause placed conveniently far in the unseeable past. You both must supply a reason for any chosen trait, and no-one can easily disprove whatever it is you say. Knocking a story down always requires too much knowledge of something else like genetics or anthropology.

Do you think the concept of "natural selection" is sometimes seen as being a bit tautological, for the reasons you cite above?

 

[apeiron]

Do you think the concept of "natural selection" is sometimes seen as being a bit tautological, for the reasons you cite above?

How do you mean exactly?

To the degree that behaviour is inherited, it would still in general be subject to selective pressure. What is in question is just what form this inheritance takes.

If you are still thinking of evolution in terms of the old modern evolutionary synthesis (MES) Darwinism, then the tendency will be to argue that every trait is individually selected for, so the dysfunctional in the modern world could well have once been the functional in the paleolithic world.

On the other hand, if you take the evo-devo view of today, then there is more emphasis on developmental complexity and so it is easier to imagine that the dysfunctional is just things going wrong due to small causes. And in the modern world, there are so many novel chemicals, diets, stresses, diseases and other potential environmental insults that it is easy to imagine developmental schedules being derailed in subtle ways.

So do we inherit modular traits or general developmental schedules? Either way, natural selection acts as the general constraint which winnows genomic variety.

 

[bohm2]

I’m just pointing out Gould’s, Chomsky’s, Turing’s and D’Arcy Thompson’s arguments that mutations and random variations that are viable and helpful are actually highly constrained by physical and chemical laws. So that evolution and natural selection are not synonymous. Natural selection is one process that helps direct evolution—that is, the change over time of groups of organisms—but physical and chemical laws also channel evolution. So when scientists observe some organisms’ traits and see that they’re well fitted to their environments and lifestyles, they are making a leap to assuming that natural selection was responsible for this. Consider these quotes:

It is therefore relevant to ask to what extent examples of adaptive radiation are shaped by natural selection alone rather than being compromised in some way by the processes that generate phenotypic variation. Given that some evolutionary innovation has occurred or some new ecological opportunity has arisen, we can then ask whether the subsequent pulse of elaboration on such a new theme is directed only, or even primarily, by natural selection. Such issues have led to much debate and discussion with numerous examples of potential modes of constraints...

Even in a dramatic example of adaptive radiation, such as Darwin’s finches, the ways in which variation in bill morphology has been generated might influence the morphologies found among the present-day species. In other words, even in the face of the intense natural selection known to occur, at least intermittently, in this system, the forms of bills and other morphological traits might be different from those currently observed if development worked in another way and was based on different genetic pathways and key control points…

Patterns of parallel evolution can provide even stronger illustrations of the need to distinguish explanations based on the similarity of natural selection from those involving developmental bias or genetic channeling…Thus, although natural selection in novel environments has no predetermined endpoints, examples of parallel evolution such as in the African cichlids suggest that the ways in which phenotypic variation is generated orchestrate adaptive evolution along certain trajectories.

Evo-devo and constraints on selection
http://eeb19.biosci.arizona.edu/Fac...ers/other/Brakefield evo devo constraints.pdf

 

[apeiron]

I’m just pointing out Gould’s, Chomsky’s, Turing’s and D’Arcy Thompson’s arguments...

Well, yes, I've been taking the evo-devo view all along as that is the systems/semiotic approach - the construction of constraints, the harnessing of self-organisation. And that is why I see Lieberman and MacNeilage as taking a "natural" view of the evolution of language. They are looking for the structural principles that constrain growth and development.

So MES is just a constructive view. The organism is built from a collection of discretely evolved genetic traits - evolutionary atoms.

But evo-devo is about the adjustment to global constraints - the control over maturation and growth schedules, etc. So this is the construction of constraints via selection acting on the genes doing the control to fine-tune their collective behaviour.

And then structural constraints are relevant as well. Some directions of change are easy, others are impossible, for reasons which cannot be controlled. Evo-devo accepts that natural selection can only remove variety. It is not the omnipotent creative force of MES.

So reductionism believes only in a causality based on construction - material and effective cause acting bottom up. And even when it comes to some contextual top-down cause - one including also form and finality - Darwinian evolution was cast so as to be as close to a reductionist view of causality as possible.

Fitness was accepted as the teleological goal - but then it was hastily said that evolution was also blind, the "blind watchmaker". The environment, the world, was treated as itself just a collection of events. And natural selection worked on the form of an organism one trait at a time. Organisms were simply bundles of traits.

But the systems view of evo-devo gives full recognition to top-down formal cause. Natural selection works at the level of constraints - the genetic and epigenetic control over developmental processes. The history of evolution generates its own deep constraints - paths that can no longer be followed, as in the Cambrian explosion. And even the world - a world which includes formal cause, the kinds of material limits described by geometry or statistics - provides still more general constraints.

So the focus on the vocal tract and babbling are evo-devo. MacNeilage identifies the dichotomy needed to digitise a stream of sound - the vowel~consonant distinction - and then seeks a structural explanation of its evolution. He is looking for an existing opposition that forces this kind of structure on articulation, an existing strong constraint. And chewing motion is the obvious candidate.

The vocal tract argument likewise seeks to explain rapid and novel evolutionary change in terms of some powerful new constraint on existing organisation. You can't change the existing functional organisation of the brain much - even if Chomsky believes in hopeful genetic monsters - but you can impose new constraints on its development and behaviour.

So Chomsky may now perhaps be calling himself evo-devo, but I don't see he actually gets it. Not, as I say, if he is still pushing the idea of hopeful monsters where a sudden dramatic mutation (what, in a single gene that has left no trace?) turns out to he hyper-functional, a gazillion-to-one successful shot in the dark, rather than dysfunctional, as mutant normally means.

Evo-devo is about putting together both the construction and the constraint, the full package of causality. Chomsky is suggesting a caricature of genetic constructive causality so as to argue for some mathematical, Platonic, level of formal cause as the "true cause".

Again, evo-devo accepts general physical level formal cause. But it takes a more naturalistic approach by in fact offering a hierarchy of top-down causality that includes genetic control over developmental processes, the impact of evolutionary history (natural selection removing once-available paths), eco-system level constraints (the phenomenon of convergent evolution), etc.

 

[bohm2]

The vocal tract argument likewise seeks to explain rapid and novel evolutionary change in terms of some powerful new constraint on existing organisation. You can't change the existing functional organisation of the brain much - even if Chomsky believes in hopeful genetic monsters - but you can impose new constraints on its development and behaviour...Chomsky is suggesting a caricature of genetic constructive causality so as to argue for some mathematical, Platonic, level of formal cause as the "true cause".

He has been propagating the same thesis for years. The idea is that language was a spandrel. As you know, this is the idea that a species uses an adaptation for a purpose other than what it was initially meant for. He argues that factors other than natural selection were active (physical constraints of growing brain size, etc.). Personally I do not find that argument that controversial, even though I know he is in the minority as most favour a gradualist approach to language evolution. But there are many papers suggesting saltatory evolution, punctuated equilibrium, etc. Moreover, as I already posted in post 282 there are papers suggesting that small changes may have a major effect on brain and perhaps lead to novelty, etc. This doesn't necessarily support Chomsky, though. It might support Leiberman or Fitch or whoever. But it may offer support for the spandrel part, I think.

Due to such constraints, selection for localized shape change in a single part of a structure can produce widespread morphological changes because relative constraints deflect the evolutionary response in a direction of morphological space that differs from the direction of selection (Schluter 1996; Klingenberg and Leamy 2001; Klingenberg et al. 2010).

Pervasive Genetic Integration directs the evolution of human skull shape
http://www.flywings.org.uk/PDF%20files/Evol2012.pdf

I have no clue what you mean by Platonic cause? Are you sure you are not misinterpreting him or others are not misinterpreting him? Can you give me a quote that made you think this is his position with respect to the cognitive states he posits? In fact, he's not a Platonist even with respect to mathematical objects. As Collins points out:

Chomsky’s longstanding position is that linguistics is a branch of what we may refer to as abstract biology, or biolinguistics. In this light, the language faculty is just a state of the human brain viewed in abstraction from detailed neurological structure. The abstraction is called for, not because there is something over and above the brain at issue, or because something would necessarily be lost were we to descend to the level of neurophysiology, but because we are ignorant of how the human brain realizes the structures in question and because they appear to have an integrity in abstraction from more general biological properties.

The limits of conceivability: logical cognitivismand the language faculty
http://journals2.scholarsportal.info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/tmp/13517503144744299404.pdf

And as I posted in my first post on this thread in an article from Edward Fesser: Chomsky’s preferred approach...is just to carry on the task of developing and evaluating theories of various aspects of the mind and integrating them as one can into the existing body of scientific knowledge, letting the chips fall where they may vis-à-vis the definition of “physical” or “material.” (which is open and evolving)

[The terms] 'body' and 'the physical world' refer to whatever there is, all of which we try to understand as best we can and to integrate into a coherent theoretical system that we call the natural sciences . . . If it were shown that the properties of the world fall into two disconnected domains, then we would, I suppose, say that that is the nature of the physical world, nothing more, just as if the world of matter and anti-matter were to prove unrelated.

 

[bohm2]

I thought this was an interesting debate by pro-minimalist/optimalist paper (Hiroki Narita & Koji Fujita) arguing that physical law versus natural selection played a more important role in the evolution of language. Anna R. Kinsella, Gary F. Marcus (K & M) are critical of this vview. I'm not sure why but I just have this hunch that this minimalism/optimality of a mental organ (in language and math) may be one reason why Peirce may have been right but perhaps for the wrong reasons?

We also agree with K&M (and with every evolutionary biologist) that gradual adaptation by natural selection is a major element of biological evolution and that for familiar reasons it often yields only sub-optimal solutions, absolute optimality or perfection being rare cases...Building on Pinker & Jackendoff’s (2005: 27) remark that “nothing is ‘perfect’ or ‘optimal’ across the board but only with respect to some desideratum”, K&M go on to examine various possible criteria of optimality, including ease of production, ease of comprehension, ease of acquisition, efficient brain storage, efficient communication, efficient information encoding, and minimization of energetic costs...

To begin with, as K&M themselves admit, “evolution sometimes achieves perfection or near-optimality” (p. 188). So it is rather self-contradictory that they reject from the start the possibility that language is one instance of such perfection. In fact, many instances of biological design can be shown to obey some optimization principles. A classic case is bone structure, which achieves maximal strength with minimal material (Roux’s maximum-minimum law; see Gierse 1976). Likewise, blood vessels are known to have an architecture that ensures efficient blood flow with minimum energy consumption. Also, Christopher Cherniak’s work on brain wiring minimization, often cited in Chomsky’s recent writings (Chomsky 2005 et seq.), points to the fascinating conclusion that neural optimization is a ubiquitous biological property derived “for free, directly from physics” (Cherniak 2005,
2009, Cherniak et al. 2004)...

The theory of ‘symmorphosis’, for example, claims that a biological structure is economically designed, to an extent that is just sufficient to satisfy its functional need (Weibel 1998, Weibel et al. 1991). Given this state of affairs, we need to realize that at least conceptually, the evolvability condition on language does not preclude the possibility that (part of) the human language faculty also instantiates such optimal design found elsewhere in the biological world. K&M observe, ostensibly correctly, that perfection and optimality do not very often result from adaptation by natural selection, but then they hastily conclude, incorrectly, that evolvability considerations do not tolerate the optimality of language design that minimalism is searching for. While surely adaptation by natural selection is one major aspect of evolution, it must also be admitted that natural selection does not work in a vacuum, and a full understanding of biological evolution requires taking into account many factors other than natural selection, including random genetic drift, genetic assimilation, exaptation, self-organization, canalization, etc., all of which are presumably governed by the physical laws of nature. In other words, a theory of natural selection needs to be supplemented by those mechanisms if it is to explain anything about evolution...

As we saw in the previous section, minimalism is essentially a research program that seeks to identify the (optimizing) effect of physical laws of nature in the domain of human language. K&M’s rejection of the minimalist endeavor, then, essentially amounts to making a very unrealistic claim that we had better disregard the relevance of all such effects (viz. the third factor) from biolinguistic theorizing, prioritizing the notion of gradual adaptation. It can be pointed out that the above-mentioned unrealistic view can be seen as a particular instantiation of what Godfrey-Smith (2001) calls ‘empirical adaptationism’, a very strong empirical hypothesis which holds that it is possible to predict and explain the outcome of evolutionary processes by attending only to the role played by natural selection (p. 336). According to this view, no other evolutionary factor has the degree of causal importance that natural selection assumes, so that we can safely ignore all other non-selective factors, if any, and focus on adaptation by natural selection for the purpose of understanding evolution.

A Naturalist Reconstruction of Minimalist and Evolutionary Biolinguistics
www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/view/157

Evolution, perfection, and theories of language
www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/view/87

 

[apeiron]

[The terms] 'body' and 'the physical world' refer to whatever there is, all of which we try to understand as best we can and to integrate into a coherent theoretical system that we call the natural sciences . . . If it were shown that the properties of the world fall into two disconnected domains, then we would, I suppose, say that that is the nature of the physical world, nothing more, just as if the world of matter and anti-matter were to prove unrelated.

I don't see any appeal in leaving substance dualism open as a live option.

Instead, a systems approach simply treats forms as global constraints. And as the excellent evo-devo paper you cited shows, constraints can then be hierarchical in nature. You start out at the most mathematically general (constraints generated from the most primitive material conditions imaginable, like a point and a space) and then have the increasingly specified constraints that make up first our universe, then the history of dissipative structure within it.

So you can get all the benefits of Platonism without the drawbacks of dualism.

 

[apeiron]

I thought this was an interesting debate by pro-minimalist/optimalist paper (Hiroki Narita & Koji Fujita) arguing that physical law versus natural selection played a more important role in the evolution of language.

The examples of optimisation are standard fare for dissipative structure theory...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_theory

Nature is already self-optimising - it can adapt its constraints so long as there is a flow from which to learn.

The epistemic cut is then what happens when there is a strong separation between the information that constrains the flow and the flow, rather than the very weak separation we see in non-living dissipative structures, like tornadoes and whirlpools.

So it is not as if anything here poses any particular problem that has not already been addressed.

That is why the debates that swirl around Chomksy's ramblings sound like ancient history, folk fumbling in the dark after concepts already articulated.

 

[bohm2]

I don't see any appeal in leaving substance dualism open as a live option.

I don't think he really believes that. He's just arguing that it can't be ruled out a priori as it is really an empirical question (assuming we have the cognitive tools to answer it). His major argument is really this quote:

The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena fall beyond its range. The Cartesians offered a fairly definite conception of body in terms of their contact mechanics, which in many respects reflects commonsense understanding...[However] the Cartesian concept of body was refuted by seventeenth-century physics, particularly in the work of Isaac Newton, which laid the foundations for modern science. Newton demonstrated that the motions of the heavenly bodies could not be explained by the principles of Descartes’s contact mechanics, so that the Cartesian concept of body must be abandoned.

Unfortunately, while this argument may have been valid before Einstein, it is less valid after Einstein's classical field theory and general relativity where

...all of the beables are local, and local in the strongest sense: the entire physical situation is nothing but the sum of the physical situations in the infinitely small regions of space-time.

It is only with QM, that Chomsky's argument is once again valid. Consider, Kim's 2 questions below. Do they even make sense with what we know today from QM?

1. How can a thing such as consciousness exist in a physical world, a world consisting ultimately of nothing but bits of matter distributed over space-time in accordance with the laws of physics?

2. How can the mind exert its causal powers in a world that is fundamentally physical?

What I mean, is those assumptions by Kim seem questionable and one of them probably inaccurate with what we know today in QM, I think. Moreover, this also assumes that physics is finished or won't change much as per Nagel's argument. Unfortunately another form of dualism seems to exist even in physics, whether one is talking about attempts to unify QM with GR or even with respect to the wave-particle dichotomy in QM. By the way, I thought this was interesting piece in a Biosemiotics journal contrasting the similarities and differences between Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky:

On the Origin of Language: A Bridge Between Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics
http://www.biosemiotica.it/internal_links/pdf/Barbieri%20(2010)%20On%20the%20Origin%20of%20Language.pdf

I still don't understand that part about heirarchical constraints. How is this incompatible with Chomsky's position. I've read stuff of his from the 1960s where he argues about heirarchy and constraints. Do you mean that the concept is been used differently in semiotics/biosemiotics, etc?

 

[apeiron]

By the way, I thought this was interesting piece in a Biosemiotics journal contrasting the similarities and differences between Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky:

Barbieri has already been discussed in this thread. See post #209.

I still don't understand that part about heirarchical constraints. How is this incompatible with Chomsky's position. I've read stuff of his from the 1960s where he argues about heirarchy and constraints. Do you mean that the concept is been used differently in semiotics/biosemiotics, etc?

The context was Chomsky's claims to be evo-devo, yet he is still bringing up these hopeful monster genetic scenarios.

The Brakefield paper you cited illustrates how people are now trying to conceptualise the hierarchy of contraints that guide development. So Brakefield distinguishes between absolute physical constraints imposed by the material world and generative constraints imposed by the vagaries of a genetic history.

He also talks about morphospaces - convergent evolution - which to me is just another level of the constraints hiearachy, the one due to the structuration of eco-systems. Ecological niches in other words.

Semiotics recognises yet a further hierarchy in the nature of the constraints (another kind of change going on apart from general spatiotemporal scale). You have the Peircean levels of icon, index and symbol - a hierarchy of the epistemic cut itself.

So the idea of downward causality - the top-down action of constraints - is itself a complex and still developing story.

We are dealing here with at least two kinds of hierarchies.

There is the kind that runs from the general physical state of the universe down to the particular developmental history of some organism - so from the laws of nature down to the contingencies of a specific individual.

Then also the kind of "constraint on dimensionality itself" needed to create the kind of sharp hardware/software divide, or code/meaning divide, that is the basis of the epistemic cut/semiotic story. So that gives us a hierarchy like the increasing constraint seen as we go from 3D cells, to 2D membranes, to 1D microtubules, to zero-D pores.

At some point in this kind of simple dimensional constraint - a direct physical constraint on reaction mechanics, on rate dependent material processes - there is the sharp transition to formal meaning. Suddenly a receptor becomes a lock and key mechanism that functions as an informational symbol. Or a codon comes to stand for an amino acid. Or a word comes to represent a constraint on the freedom of our ideas (or more correctly, our anticipatory states).

So yeah, I see virtually nothing in Chomsky's writings that reflects this kind deep detail. Some of what he says is certainly compatible with it of course. He sometimes waves his hands in the general direction.

 

[apeiron]

By the way, I thought this was interesting piece in a Biosemiotics journal...

I see Biolinguistics has an article on this also in the current issue...

Signs Pointing in a New Direction: A Biosemiotic Framework for Biolinguistics
Liz Stillwaggon Swan
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/issue/current/showToc

a distinction between the two fields can be identified with regard to their respective methodological foci: While biolinguistics focuses on human language and tries to embed it conceptually and empirically among grander patterns in the natural world, biosemiotics focuses more fundamentally on sign processes in the living world, of which human language is but one example.

Oh dear, Hauser is now a cautionary tale, even if it does not seem clear what he actually did yet...

Swiss zoologist Heini K.P. Hediger, whose work goes a long way in explaining what went so horribly wrong in the lab of former Harvard primatologist Marc Hauser, a salient example of observer bias based on strongly wished for results,

If you want a more populist treatment, there is Terrence Deacon's new book - Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter.

From a review...

In his approach to the question of how sentience emerged from "dumb" and "numb" matter, Mr. Deacon mobilizes some radically new ideas, taking us back to thermodynamics to show how it might have happened. His key argument, developed over several hundred pages, centers on what he calls a "teleo-dynamic" system—a self-organizing system that "promotes its own persistence and maintenance" by modifying itself "to more effectively utilize supportive extrinsic conditions." He suggests how such a system might spontaneously arise out of thermodynamic processes, as predicted by chaos theory.

Living organisms are such self-organizing teleodynamic systems, and they have a key property. He calls this the absential. An absential is a phenomenon "whose existence is determined with respect to an . . . absence." This sounds somewhat opaque but captures something essential to mind. In the push-pull universe of ¬mechanical causation, only that which is present shapes the course of events. In our lives, by contrast, we are always taking account of things that are no longer present or not yet present or that may never come to pass. Thus "absentials" include our beliefs, the norms to which we subscribe and those great silos of possibility such as "tomorrow" and "next year."

But absentials long precede human consciousness, Mr. Deacon claims. All "teleodynamic systems" are shaped and defined, in great part, by the constraints placed on their development. The constraints are evident in the directed development of organisms or the limited patterns of behavior they may exhibit: Living matter is, as it were, "railroaded" along certain paths. It is through these constraints that, ultimately, "that which is not" asserts its power. Mind emerged not from matter, Mr. Deacon concludes, but from the constraints on matter. These constraints then shaped the emergence of brand-new "higher level" properties—mind and thought—that are not susceptible to reduction.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576642991109496396.html

So you see, things are beginning to move at a fast pace on the semiotics front.

The systems view is being driven by a connection to a generalised theory of symbols/semiosis on the one hand, and a generalised theory of dissipative structure thermodynamics on the other. These are the two essential aspects of the one larger story. The formal and material causes of consciousness.

 

[bohm2]

This site gives links with many anti-nativist stances that question Chomsky's stuff:

Could Chomsky be Wrong?
http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/LangTeach/CounterChomsky.htm

I'm actually surprised of the opposition to his stuff. Maybe it was because I was always a nativist. I think it's because I was always convinced by pro-nativist arguments who argue that,

there is no known process, either in biology or in cognition, that literally amounts to learning in the traditional 'instructive' sense, that is, to a transfer of structure from the environment to the organism.

I do think Pinker (who I also find very easy to understand) raises some good points against Chomsky's saltatory evolution/genetic monster stuff (e.g. very rapid evolutionary and novel change) but I still think the language/math/cognitive abilities in humans are qualitatively different than any other cognitive systems in other animals/other primates, so I find Chomsky's arguments stronger. I mean just think what we are capable of doing compared to our nearest ancestor. There's just no comparison. And as I much as I dislike the hairless, linguist, ground chimps of which I am a member, I can't help but notice this difference. Berwick and Chomsky argue for this qualitative difference when they write:

Notice that there is no room in this picture for any precursors to language – say a language-like system with only short sentences. There is no rationale for postulation of such a system: to go from seven-word sentences to the discrete infinity of human language requires emergence of the same recursive procedure as to go from zero to infinity, and there is of course no direct evidence for such “protolanguages.”

The Biolinguistic Program: The Current State of its Evolution and Development
http://www.punksinscience.org/klean...L/material/Berwick-Chomsky_Biolinguistics.pdf