Chomsky's recent challenger (was Race Math & Language)

[Maureen Therese Anderson]

[more catching up:]

 > "learning" doesn't stand up to how language
 > acquisition actually works. What
 > Chomsky proved (and I stress the word *proved*,
 > through an elegant
 > mathematically-based reductio argument) is that
 > humans *cannot* pick up all
 > the rules for language through their environment; in
 > fact, their exposure to
 > language is relatively impoverished, and only
 > through hypothesizing an
 > internal language-generating organ (Chomsky's
 > preferred word) can one
 > explain this infinitely-generating marvel known as
 > human language.

By chance are you familiar with Terrence Deacon's recent dismantling of
Chomsky's perspective?  (Most accesibly in his _The Symbolic Species: The
co-evolution of language and the brain_.)

And if so, do you (or anyone else) know of any Chomskian rejoinders?  I'm
curious because my layperson's impression was that TD blew Chomskian
approaches out of the water, yet I don't know any Chomskian-type linguists
to solicit reactions from.

Deacon's argument is something like this:

First, he agrees with Chomskians that language acquisition is "rigged" in
the sense that yes language-acquiring children indeed perform astoundingly
feats of guess-work and inference, and yes their swift  acquisition
couldn't possibly be the result of purely random trial and error.  But,
says TD, Chomsky's argument-from-incredulity ends up inverting cause and
effect. The mysterious prior support of language acquisition doesn't come
from inside the brain but from outside: from the evolution of language
itself, whose characteristics by its very existence already bear the mark
of its protracted interaction with humans-in-action.

Deacon somewhere uses a simple computer analogy to illustrate this point.
(But note, just a simple analogy! TD in fact makes very short shrift of
cognitive approaches that presume human brains and symbol-making work even
remotely like computers.)  The analogy is to the Apple computer phenomonon.
Apple's trailblazing interfaces were so successful because they were
designed to be compatible with our own, already present, intuitions rather
than requiring us to sweat over stacks of manuals, memorize codes, and
absorb unfriendly program logics that make no intuitive sense without
having clocked in laborious hours.

So Apple's interface ennabled computer-phobes like myself to learn,  pretty
effortlessly, how to adapt to a complicated machine by simple trial and
error.  But only, of course, because the deck was already stacked so that
our "random" guesses were far more likely to be good ones.  We didn't need
special innate knowledge of Apple to explain our good guesses because it
was Apple's interface that had adapted to our capacities and limitations.
Likewise with human brains and lanaguage.

*But!* Taking this narrow analogy out of Deacon's larger context is
extremely misleading.  Because his larger point is that the human brain is
_not_ some independent given, which language was added and adapted to
later.  His whole book's about precisely how the emergence of human
symbolic communication, an _utterly unique_ form of communication,
triggered a dialectical, co-evolutionary exchange between languages and
brains spanning over a couple million years.

It's just that that co-evolution took place on vastly different terrains
and time scales. Transformations in languages (= products of concrete human
usage but not themselves material entities) take place at an infinitely
faster rate than biological transformations.  Rather than supposing that
children require some mystical language instinct, it's more useful to think
of children themselves as the bottleneck through which languages do or do
not get successfully passed on.  Language traits not compatible with
kid-friendly logic just wouldn't last.

Understanding Deacon's critique of Chomsky requires following his larger
argument, which is about the emergence of human language as a mode of
communication and its utter uniqueness as a way of inhabiting the world.
(Which is not at all to suggest that we could possibly exist, or even think
symbolically, without the continued importance of our non-symbolic modes of
communication.)

Note that Deacon uses language in a very specific sense: as a mode of
communication based on symbolic referencing, which is different not in
degree but in kind from other communicative modes.  The kinds of
communication that, say, chimpanzees have with each other, though subtle,
profound, and complex, work not at all like language.  Nor are chimps using
"language" when they have learned by indexical association that a blue
triangle means banana, a red circle means eat, and so on.

This distinction is important, says TD, and it raises a basic question
side-stepped by the Chomskian perspecitve with its fascination with complex
grammars: why is it that there aren't even any _simple_ languages in other
species?  One could easily imagine languages far simpler than those that
beguile Chomsky.  A language comprised of, say, a half dozen symbolic signs
and a couple combinatorial rules as simple as a toddler's would in most
ways be far simpler than the large communicative repertoire used by many
species.

And yet these simple languages don't exist.  Nothing even close, anywhere.
And even the most rudamentary symbolic sign system is practically
impossible to teach our intelligent primate brethren.

This is because there's something exceedingly counter-intuitive about
making the leap from indexical referencing to symbolic referencing.  That's
the real threshold; and it's one, says Deacon, that the Chomskian theories
don't address and so go barking up the wrong tree.  (Where Descartes, btw,
is swinging his legs up there on the top branch, playing with his
dualisms.)

So the bulk of Deacon's book examines: why it's so practically and
intuitively difficult to cross that rubicon from indexical to symbolic
referencing; how humans happened to overcome that bottleneck and
consequently forged an uncharted path through the course of hominid
evolution; and (indirectly, in light of the foregoing) why Chomsky's
black-box innate grammatical knowledge isn't necessary and ultimately
misses the point.

...Anyway, if this sketchy evocation inspires anyone to take a look at the
book -- great.  And please share reactions!  I suppose most of us come to
broad and interdisciplinary themes like this one with a combination of
insider's appreciation and outsider's naivete. ...In fact Deacon's book
itself seems product of such a space.  I thought parts reflected a
specialist's mastery, others an unconvincing naivete, and others, where he
shines his knowledge onto a different terrain and successfully recasts it,
positively inspired.  (Myself, I never thought I'd see a
neuro-scientist/biological anthropologist put Saussurean and, especially,
Peircian referential signs to such novel use.  But then maybe that's me.)

Anyway -- highly recommended for any of you erudite lbo-sters who may be
casting about looking for heady yet accessibly engaging holiday reading.
(Cheap too! in paperback, by Norton.)

Maureen