> Hello everyone,
> Paul Henry Rosenberg wrote Wednesday Aug 12,98:
> "Structuralism has always struck me as a kind of reductionism."
>
> Doyle
> I gather from using reductionism this way you imply that structuralism
> is scientifically oriented. Do you have a problem with reductionism?
No I didn't mean to imply that.
Yes I have a problem with reductionism.
IMHO, reductionism is an ideology (classically in science) analogous to fundamentalism (classically in religion).
I see no need to equate the recognition of structures with the reductionist explantions of structuralism.
> Paul
> "...one thing is faily clear -- that the brain IS "pre-wired" for
> language."
>
> Doyle
> The usual meaning of wired for language is that language is innate.
I spelled out what I meant via my reference to Chomsky: the CAPACITY for language is innate, not language per se.
> For a contrary opinion out of connectionism: "The Symbolic
> Species, The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain", which
> uses the evolutionary concept of Baldwinian adaptation to a
> niche to explain the rise of language in our ancestors. By
> Terrence W. Deacon, Norton, 1997.
Don't tell me where to look, show me what you mean. From the pre-pub info it didn't seem that Deacon's book was proposing a contradictory explanation to Chomsky's. It seemed quite compatible with _The Prehistory of the Mind_. If I'm mistaken, please explain how.
> Paul
> "In fact, there most certainly ARE structures in the brain, in the sense
> of inherint loci of organization, dedicated to more or less specific
> functions. These are, as Steven Pinker notes in *How The Mind Works*,
> not so much like mechanical modules, neatly localized with sharp
> boundaries, but, following Chomsky, more like "mental organs."
>
> Doyle
> Steven Pinker is a leading supporter of the innateness of language. He
> has written some technical defenses of language modules, as well as
> attacks against connectionist claims. He is mainly a popularizer of the
> Chomsky claims.
He's much more than that, and his book, *How The Mind Works* is simply the most recent, most comprehensive on the subject. As a scientist writing a popular work on such a broad subject he consulted as a peer with a broad network of frontline researchers.
> Doyle
> Functional Modularity of the brain had an early influence upon my
> thinking. About 1975. See Semir Zeki's book on color vision, "A Vision
> of the Brain", Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1993, for a good
> roundup on functional modularity of the brain. The concept does not
> necessarily support an innate language module. It is about functions
> such as color being processed in local centers of the occipital lobe. A
> complex subject with still a lot to be understood.
As I mentioned, there are a number of different theories of modularity. There are much better grounds for debate BETWEEN them than there are grounds for aruging against modularity. But ALL of them--implicitly or explicitly--argue for something like structures in the brain.
And NONE of them, to my way of thinking, presents ANY reason to embrace structuralism.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"