Now that I have got you to admit that you know practically nothing about the biolinguistic research program in language maybe I can someday get you to admit that you know practically nothing about the research program that takes sociobiology as a premise.
For instance most (possibly all) vertebrate species that take a relatively long-time from birth to maturation seem to show certain similar characteristics. One of those characteristics is cooperation in raising children. Many sociobiologists propose that there is a relationship between the length of maturation and cooperative parenting. If there is no cooperative parenting then of necessity the length of time from birth to maturity will be short. If the length of time between birth and maturity is long-enough to tax the energy or threaten the survival of mother and infant then there must be cooperative parenting. It is true of all other species. Why shouldn't it be true of the hominid line?
This is a sociobiological hypothesis. It is argued through cross-species analysis and through looking at other primates. I don't want to go into the intricate details and evidence for this hypothesis. I think it is certainly a good hypothesis. The hypothesis is narrow and their is good evidence for it.
Do you reject the hypothesis simply because it is part of the sociobiological project? Do you reject it because it somehow does not match your views of "self-determination"? If you do reject it, is it because you have examined the evidence and found it lacking?
> The reason arguments defending sociobiological conceptions of our
> thinking are self-contradictory is that they're inconsistent with the
> idea of our thinking as self-determined. An "argument" offers
> reasonable grounds, e.g. textual evidence, for choosing to believe
> something, e.g. that Marx's idea of "conscious species being" isn't
> compatible with sociobiology. So attempting to persuade people with
> argument that their ideas are determined in a way that prevents them
> from being changed by argument is self-contradictory.
Ted, I have asked you before to please explain to me what you mean by determination and self-determination and how it can at all be applied to the issues that we are talking about in these threads. I think that the evidence is good that I-language is a biological faculty in an analogous way that vision is a biological faculty. What does this have to do with determination or self-determination? In what sense is vision "determined" or "self-determined" and what would have to do with the biological system of vision?
I think that it is a good hypothesis that the extended length of hominid childhood necessitated cooperative parenting and a high level of food sharing among early hominid food groups. It also seems a reasonable hypothesis that homo sapiens are the biological descendants of these hominids and have thus inherited many of their capacities. This hypothesis neither denies nor accepts what you call self-determination. It maybe a "sociobiological" necessity for hominid hunter gatherers to cooperate in parenting in order to survive. It maybe in "harmony" with our general tendencies if modern humans similarly cooperate in child rearing. There may be a whole host of biochemical triggers that increase our tendency to cooperate in such projects. (For instance see Fleming, Corter, Stallings, Steiner, "Testosterone and prolactin are associated with emotional response to infant cries in new fathers," showing that their are profound chemical changes among fathers who stay close to their new children and arguing that these chemical changes may help to induce care-taking among fathers.)
But even if all this is true it does not tell us how we choose to cooperate or even if we might choose to commit a form of group suicide instead. Or to put it more poetically, if what Auden once said is true "we must love one another or die", it does not tell us how to love one another or if we will choose to die instead.
> The beginning point I made about language repeats Whitehead's
> argument in response to criticism of his idea of "internal relations"
> as inconsistent with the subject/predicate structure of ordinary
> language.
>
> Ted
>
Just by the way.... Chomsky does not speak about "ordinary language" in any philosophical sense. He doesn't think there can be a theory of what philosophers call ordinary language. Which is why your use of Whitehead was off the mark, in the case of discussing Chomsky.
Jerry