<html><DIV> <P>>I sent Maureen's post about Terrence Deacon's critique of Chomsky to </P></DIV> <DIV></DIV>>Chomsky, who replied below. <DIV></DIV> <DIV></DIV>>DP <DIV></DIV> <DIV></DIV> <DIV></DIV>>Dennis, <DIV></DIV>> <DIV></DIV>>Deacon's book was reviewed as soon as it came out by Robert Berwick, a very <DIV></DIV>>prominent computer scientist, with an extremely strong background in biologty, linguistics, and psycholinguistics. <P>     commment:   berwick teaches at MIT and is in the chomsky school of linguistic theory camp----he has a joint appointment in cognitive science.   for chomsky to refer to berwick is like the Pope referring to some bishop's review of 'islam' or 'atheism' to say this proves its  bs.  or stalin asking one of his crew to criticize a bertrand russel type.  despite the fact that Chomsky has read Bakunin (a prominent liberal anti-elitist) he still uses the fact that someone is 'prominent' and teaches at 'MIT' as a propogandisitic tool for criticizing others' arguments---i seriously dought chomsky has read any in the past 10 years of people who work in different schools---he doesn't have to.  one problem is he then has to say that people such at the Institute for Advanced Study (Einstein and Godel's 'home') or in the UC system aren't any good because they contradict Chomsky's lingustic position, so one has! to learn to  distinguish credentials---MIT vs the ivies, the class 1 and class 2 ivies, etc etc.   </P> <P>   it can be mentioned thAT  berwick is now 'automating' language aquisition, which means that the 'social' as opposed to 'innate' aspect is discarded as 'real'. hence it would be inconveninant if it was 'learned' more than chomsky admits. (By the way, chomsky doesn't likePinker either because pinker discusses the taboo subject of language evolution. chomsky also thinks language was not evolved for social communication because people talk to themselves alot more than they do to others..it would seem the same argument could be made for sex indicating that Chomsky is right, and the biologists wrong, that sex did not evolve by evolution.  everything just happens, by prominent experts. aMen)</P> <P> </P> <P> >he tried to be polite, but >was able to do so only by keeping to the neuroanatomy, which is solid. </P> <P>    academics of the chomksy mold only feign politness.  they might also feign being 'radical' .  (eg do they think the 'rabble' should get near MIT?)</P> <P>>mentioned the work on language, dismissing it (politely) as worthless. </P> <P>   worthless---a good economic term.  berwick's work on automating language probably can be sold for alot of money to microsoft etc.   then the 'masses' won't even need to learn to read, satisfying both the 'anti-civs' (who see language as alienating) while giving progressives a future in despairing over those who they study.    progressives also think it worthelss that the 'masses' learn to read, or go to MIT.  rather, they just need to be told to 'get with the program' as defined by the status quo----you revolt, i write books.</P> <P> </P> <DIV></DIV>>There is a devastating critique by Lyle Jenkins, _Biolinguistics: Exploring <DIV></DIV>>the Biology of Language_ (Cambridge U, 2000). Jenkins is an outstanding <DIV></DIV>>linguist who has been working in biology for 25 years, and is highly >expert <P>   i agree outstanding expertise, while highly thought of as well as well thought out of as well by his highly self-esteemed self.    to quote feynman, another expert i wonder why i wonder why i wonder why this sounds like bs. </P> <P> </P> <P>. Jenkins did try to get Deacon to explain some of his outlandish >ideas in scientific conferences, but it was hopeless; at some level, he >presumably recognizes the absurdity, and just avoids discussion, so Jenkins >and other participants report.. I've written a little about it, but not >much; could send you if you are interested, but don't see why you should >be.</P> <P>   test him on this.   'don't see why you should be...'   why don't you go do a demo or something you can handle, rather than 'ideas' for 'experts'.</P> <P> </P> <P>deacon is commonly referenced in 'sociolinguistics' and culture evolution theory (an outgrowth of population genetics).   in evolution its Chomsky who doesn;t make any sense.</P> <P> </P> <P> Others haven't written about it much either, because it is an >embarrassment. He hasn't a clue about the work in linguistics to which he >alludes -- in such a vague way that it is not easy to trace his often >comical errors to the source; probably some second-hand gossip he heard. </P> <P>chomsky's errors on the other hand are first person gossip   they'd be comical as anyting or anyone would be  (ever see Springtime in Germany, a comic version of Hitler by some old comic)</P> <DIV></DIV>>His own proposals are sheer mysticism: "language" is some extra-human <DIV></DIV> <P>>entity that "co-evolves" with humans and then mysteriously "attaches" to >people (like a parasite and a host). </P> <P> </P> <P>actually no its like the songs of mockingbirds which combine innate phonemes with environemtal stimuli to create a repertoire.</P> <P>this is 'mysterious'  unlike the 'language organ' noone has found or even makes sense in terms of modern brain theory.   coevolutionary theory is well known in biology and popularion genetics.  the math is probably more fleshed out than linguistic which seems to coevolve wih the trend.</P> <P>So my granddaughter in Massachusetts </P> <DIV></DIV>>has one of these parasites, and my granddaughter in Managua has another <DIV></DIV>>(actually two, since she's bilingual). It surpasses silliness, which is <DIV></DIV> <P>>why there isn't much in the way of discussion. </P> <P>   at least not at MIT   lots of people don't like discussions for a variety of reasons  </P> <P> </P> <P> </P> <P> </P> <DIV></DIV>> <DIV></DIV>>Glad to hear about the Voice exchange. If you have copies of Hentoff and <DIV></DIV>>your response I'd like to see them. I've been collecting some of the <DIV></DIV>>recent nauseating accolades to this self-confessed mass murderer, and read <DIV></DIV>>the Hodgson biolgraphy and reviews of it. Everyone talks about his noble <DIV></DIV>>time in the UN, standing up forthrightly against Idi Amin and defending <DIV></DIV>>Israel (which takes enormous courage in New York). I have yet to see a <DIV></DIV>>single word referring to his proud description of his responsibility for <DIV></DIV>>undermining any UN action to impede Indonesia's invasion -- which must be <DIV></DIV>>one of the most extraordinary passages on record, describing what is surely <DIV></DIV>>the most important act of his life (he casually notes that 60,000 were <DIV></DIV>>killed in the first few months, pretending that this had to do with the <DIV></DIV>>"civil war" that was over months earlier, and then goes on to another <DIV></DIV>>topic. I'm surprised at Hentoff. He's been away from the activist <DIV></DIV>>solidarity scene for decades, as far as I know, but he surely must have <DIV></DIV>>known about this, if only from his earlier contacts in the pacifist <DIV></DIV>>nonviolent community. <DIV></DIV>> <DIV></DIV>> <DIV></DIV>>Noam <DIV></DIV>> <DIV></DIV>> <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >By chance are you familiar with Terrence Deacon's recent dismantling of <DIV></DIV>> >Chomsky's perspective? (Most accesibly in his _The Symbolic Species: The <DIV></DIV>> >co-evolution of language and the brain_.) <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >And if so, do you (or anyone else) know of any Chomskian rejoinders? I'm <DIV></DIV>> >curious because my layperson's impression was that TD blew Chomskian <DIV></DIV>> >approaches out of the water, yet I don't know any Chomskian-type linguists <DIV></DIV>> >to solicit reactions from. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >Deacon's argument is something like this: <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >First, he agrees with Chomskians that language acquisition is "rigged" in <DIV></DIV>> >the sense that yes language-acquiring children indeed perform astoundingly <DIV></DIV>> >feats of guess-work and inference, and yes their swift acquisition <DIV></DIV>> >couldn't possibly be the result of purely random trial and error. But, <DIV></DIV>> >says TD, Chomsky's argument-from-incredulity ends up inverting cause and <DIV></DIV>> >effect. The mysterious prior support of language acquisition doesn't come <DIV></DIV>> >from inside the brain but from outside: from the evolution of language <DIV></DIV>> >itself, whose characteristics by its very existence already bear the mark <DIV></DIV>> >of its protracted interaction with humans-in-action. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >Deacon somewhere uses a simple computer analogy to illustrate this point. <DIV></DIV>> >(But note, just a simple analogy! TD in fact makes very short shrift of <DIV></DIV>> >cognitive approaches that presume human brains and symbol-making work even <DIV></DIV>> >remotely like computers.) The analogy is to the Apple computer phenomonon. <DIV></DIV>> >Apple's trailblazing interfaces were so successful because they were <DIV></DIV>> >designed to be compatible with our own, already present, intuitions rather <DIV></DIV>> >than requiring us to sweat over stacks of manuals, memorize codes, and <DIV></DIV>> >absorb unfriendly program logics that make no intuitive sense without <DIV></DIV>> >having clocked in laborious hours. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >So Apple's interface ennabled computer-phobes like myself to learn, pretty <DIV></DIV>> >effortlessly, how to adapt to a complicated machine by simple trial and <DIV></DIV>> >error. But only, of course, because the deck was already stacked so that <DIV></DIV>> >our "random" guesses were far more likely to be good ones. We didn't need <DIV></DIV>> >special innate knowledge of Apple to explain our good guesses because it <DIV></DIV>> >was Apple's interface that had adapted to our capacities and limitations. <DIV></DIV>> >Likewise with human brains and lanaguage. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >*But!* Taking this narrow analogy out of Deacon's larger context is <DIV></DIV>> >extremely misleading. Because his larger point is that the human brain is <DIV></DIV>> >_not_ some independent given, which language was added and adapted to <DIV></DIV>> >later. His whole book's about precisely how the emergence of human <DIV></DIV>> >symbolic communication, an _utterly unique_ form of communication, <DIV></DIV>> >triggered a dialectical, co-evolutionary exchange between languages and <DIV></DIV>> >brains spanning over a couple million years. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >It's just that that co-evolution took place on vastly different terrains <DIV></DIV>> >and time scales. Transformations in languages (= products of concrete human <DIV></DIV>> >usage but not themselves material entities) take place at an infinitely <DIV></DIV>> >faster rate than biological transformations. Rather than supposing that <DIV></DIV>> >children require some mystical language instinct, it's more useful to think <DIV></DIV>> >of children themselves as the bottleneck through which languages do or do <DIV></DIV>> >not get successfully passed on. Language traits not compatible with <DIV></DIV>> >kid-friendly logic just wouldn't last. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >Understanding Deacon's critique of Chomsky requires following his larger <DIV></DIV>> >argument, which is about the emergence of human language as a mode of <DIV></DIV>> >communication and its utter uniqueness as a way of inhabiting the world. <DIV></DIV>> >(Which is not at all to suggest that we could possibly exist, or even think <DIV></DIV>> >symbolically, without the continued importance of our non-symbolic modes of <DIV></DIV>> >communication.) <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >Note that Deacon uses language in a very specific sense: as a mode of <DIV></DIV>> >communication based on symbolic referencing, which is different not in <DIV></DIV>> >degree but in kind from other communicative modes. The kinds of <DIV></DIV>> >communication that, say, chimpanzees have with each other, though subtle, <DIV></DIV>> >profound, and complex, work not at all like language. Nor are chimps using <DIV></DIV>> >"language" when they have learned by indexical association that a blue <DIV></DIV>> >triangle means banana, a red circle means eat, and so on. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >This distinction is important, says TD, and it raises a basic question <DIV></DIV>> >side-stepped by the Chomskian perspecitve with its fascination with complex <DIV></DIV>> >grammars: why is it that there aren't even any _simple_ languages in other <DIV></DIV>> >species? One could easily imagine languages far simpler than those that <DIV></DIV>> >beguile Chomsky. A language comprised of, say, a half dozen symbolic signs <DIV></DIV>> >and a couple combinatorial rules as simple as a toddler's would in most <DIV></DIV>> >ways be far simpler than the large communicative repertoire used by many <DIV></DIV>> >species. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >And yet these simple languages don't exist. Nothing even close, anywhere. <DIV></DIV>> >And even the most rudamentary symbolic sign system is practically <DIV></DIV>> >impossible to teach our intelligent primate brethren. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >This is because there's something exceedingly counter-intuitive about <DIV></DIV>> >making the leap from indexical referencing to symbolic referencing. That's <DIV></DIV>> >the real threshold; and it's one, says Deacon, that the Chomskian theories <DIV></DIV>> >don't address and so go barking up the wrong tree. (Where Descartes, btw, <DIV></DIV>> >is swinging his legs up there on the top branch, playing with his <DIV></DIV>> >dualisms.) <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >So the bulk of Deacon's book examines: why it's so practically and <DIV></DIV>> >intuitively difficult to cross that rubicon from indexical to symbolic <DIV></DIV>> >referencing; how humans happened to overcome that bottleneck and <DIV></DIV>> >consequently forged an uncharted path through the course of hominid <DIV></DIV>> >evolution; and (indirectly, in light of the foregoing) why Chomsky's <DIV></DIV>> >black-box innate grammatical knowledge isn't necessary and ultimately <DIV></DIV>> >misses the point. <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >...Anyway, if this sketchy evocation inspires anyone to take a look at the <DIV></DIV>> >book -- great. And please share reactions! I suppose most of us come to <DIV></DIV>> >broad and interdisciplinary themes like this one with a combination of <DIV></DIV>> >insider's appreciation and outsider's naivete. ...In fact Deacon's book <DIV></DIV>> >itself seems product of such a space. I thought parts reflected a <DIV></DIV>> >specialist's mastery, others an unconvincing naivete, and others, where he <DIV></DIV>> >shines his knowledge onto a different terrain and successfully recasts it, <DIV></DIV>> >positively inspired. (Myself, I never thought I'd see a <DIV></DIV>> >neuro-scientist/biological anthropologist put Saussurean and, especially, <DIV></DIV>> >Peircian referential signs to such novel use. But then maybe that's me.) <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >Anyway -- highly recommended for any of you erudite lbo-sters who may be <DIV></DIV>> >casting about looking for heady yet accessibly engaging holiday reading. <DIV></DIV>> >(Cheap too! in paperback, by Norton.) <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> >Maureen <DIV></DIV>> > <DIV></DIV>> <DIV></DIV><br clear=all><hr>Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at <a href="http://explorer.msn.com">http://explorer.msn.com</a><br></p></html>