But, nice as it is to read anything by this venerable source, Chomsky's reply wasn't too helpful. Nor would I have expected it to be. Chomsky represents one end of a spectrum of views on language, while Deacon's at the other end. So when I asked if someone had a Chomskian rejoinder I meant if someone could patiently address the actual argument I described. Not surprisingly, getting into details of a huge theoretical issue for a bunch of non-specialists isn't on the agenda of a major partisan who also happens to be one of the most valuably productive people around. (Does the guy ever sleep??) Fine. Cranking out more stuff on the plight of Palestinians is a far better use of his time.
That said, all I saw in his response was flippant caricature and arguments from authority. And while arguments from some kind of authority are probably inevitable, they do work best when combined with more substantial forms of persuasion. Also I agree with m malak: citing these sources to prove Deacon a "worthless ...embarrassment...ignored by everyone serious" is indeed like invoking the Pope as an authority on the shortcomings of Islam or Calvinism.
Moreover if Chomsky is going to argue from institutional authority, it's wrth noting that many acclaimed researchers from numerous disciplines and elite institutions have embraced Deacon's synthesizing work as "transforming the foundations of the human sciences," etc. So argument from prestigious authority, at least here where we're all outsiders in some of the relevant areas, doesn't get us far.
Another thing. Very important given this list's orientation and given if one were to poll LBOsters on their Most Admired Public Figure, Chomsky would win hands down. While we're unlikely to agree here on the value of Chomsky's linguistics, there should be consensus that _no political view attaches to agreeing or disagreeing with his linguistic theories_. You can agree and be rightwing, or disagree and be on teh left. For instance the dialectical biology of a ("prestigious Harvard scientist") Richard Lewontin, another deserving hero of folks on this list, is much more compatible with Deacon's co-evolutionary model than it is to Chomsky's essentialism and conventional cognitivism.
Finally, Chomsky's caricature of Deacon:
>His own proposals are sheer mysticism: "language" is some extra-human
>entity that "co-evolves" with humans and then mysteriously "attaches" to
>people (like a parasite and a host). So my granddaughter in Massachusetts
>has one of these parasites, and my granddaughter in Managua has another
>(actually two, since she's bilingual). It surpasses silliness, which is
>why there isn't much in the way of discussion.
Like m malak I found Chomsky's charge of mysticism interesting since this is the prevailing criticism of his own language module. (Which, in Deacon's terms, collapses a whole social-evolutionary process into a static structure.)
As for his mockeries -- language as extra-human parasite, each language a different parasite attaching to each host -- they have little to do with the book I read. Yes a page or so in his 400+ pages uses the analogy of a symbiotic parasite/host relation. It's simply to convey the point (non-controversial in evolutionary biology) that language and human brains, though separate kinds of systems, have evolved in relation to each other, and that for many purposes an organism is a more useful metaphor for language and its socio-material conditions of reproduction than a mathematical proof is.
Actually Deacon uses lots of analogies to help his nonspecialist readers assimilate his often highly technical arguments. That's what makes the book readable.
For instance he also compares the evolution of universal grammar to the dorsal fins of various marine species. But Deacon doesn't really think grammar is a dorsal fin. He's actually quite clear that language systems are fuzzy abstractions, statistical collections of human behaviors at moments in time. He's just drawing on something many readers know already, that the independent development of dorsal fins in various species wasn't pre-programmed but emerged spontaneously when similar species biases responded to similar environmental conditions.
Broadly analogous processes account for universal grammar forms. Deacon discusses lots of these conditions: the biases of proto-human brains and neural networks; perceptual, mneumonic, and vocal constraints; the impact of early human anatomical forms and social practices, and so on. They're all products of multi-level evolutionary processes that evolved for entirely different purposes before (proto-symbolic and then fully) symbolic referencing emerged on the scene and language use and brain evolution increasingly and mutually shaped each other through the course of homo habilis, erectus and sapiens.
Among these conditions, the elective affinity between immature brains and the orientation needed to grasp grammatical relationships was interesting to me. Since this terrain overlaps and clashes with Chomsky's, I brought it up thinking others might have more input. But I kinda think now that this is one of those talk-past-each-other subjects.
Still, in light of Chomsky's dismissive response, I'll reiterate that Deacon agrees with Chomsky's well known points about grammatical rules: the difficulty of learning them because they're not mapped onto surfaces forms but instead embedded in more globally distributed, recursively hierarchical relations, where relations between levels produce relationships that violate rules within levels, adn so on. Deacon also agrees that these rules are impossible to learn by logical induction, if induction means a one-dimensional, bit by bit process of accumulating individual memories from which one derives generalizations.
But his suggestion is that that's not how grammar and symbolic reference are learned by immature humans. (Or, as it turns out, by immature chimpanzees: apparently the nonhuman who's developed by far the most advanced symbolic capacities is a young chimp who, still dependent on his mom, happened to be present and monkeyed around and was basically a childish disruption while researchers and mom worked diligently at language experiments. While his smart mom never could catch on to the symbol thing, they discovered by accident that the little one had spontaneously picked up more facility for symbolic reference than any other chimp.)
With various kinds of evidence Deacon argues that being able to hold many words of an utterance in short term memory, to competently link words to co-occuring objects -- to do the kinds o fthings that grownups do way better than young kids -- are disadvantages for grammar learning. Precisely because symbolic and grammatical associations form highly distributed, hierarchic patterns, focusing on the relevant level requires not being embroiled in local patterns of contiguity. So too much facility at recognizing local patterns actually obscures perception of the deeper, more indirect, global patterns. This because to the clever-minded, turning away from local patterns they've noticed for something more vague and indirect is too counter-intuitive.
So learning grammatical reference involves postponing commitment to more immediately obvious associations until after some of the less obvious, distributed, relationships have been perceived.
It goes back to differences between indexical and symbolic referencing. Individual symbols mark points in broader patterns of relations. They've already recoded the regularities of contiguous links to objects and only indirectly reflect these indexical correlations. Thus attending too closely to surface, contiguous correlations of individual sign-object associations hinders recognition of symbol-symbol regularities.
So precisely because of children's learning constraints, the deeper grammatical logic is able to emerge from a broad background of surface details too hard for them to have followed. Put differently, because kids are bad at telling trees apart, they're able to catch glimmers of the forest. Then, having glimpsed the forest's outline, they have a biased head start: the glimpse impacts how, as their brains do mature and they remember more details, they'll approach the local patterns of trees within the forest. (And to complete the continual cause-effect circle, languages themselves have evolved in light of these learning biases.)
...Anyway. My point was just supposed to be that Deacon's argument on the lack of necessity of an innate grammar module is a tad more nuanced than languages as bizarre extrahuman parasites. But once again my semi-outsider interest got me off and running. (And all this just a narrow piece of Deacon's neuro-cogno-socio-evolutionary synthesis -- some parts, to repeat, far more palatable than others!)
And speaking of relations of contiguity, please, Dennis, a request on electronic ones. Now that we know Chomsky's opinion of Deacon, I hope you don't think it necessary to solicit another email on the matter. Based on the last one it's probably counterproductive.
Besides, have pity: it already a bit humiliating that the only time I've registered as a blip on the guy's radar is as reminder of views beneath his contempt!
Maureen