> At 04:33 AM 6/10/2009, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
>> Two observations. First Kenneally's background is linguistics. I get
>> the idea that linguistics as a technical field is not overly impressed
>> with the social sciences. From her essay and speech, I don't remember
>> any mention of psychology, sociology or anthropology. There are many
>> references to what are more properly considered branches of the life
>> sciences as in animal field studies, cognative science, neuoscience
>> and genetics. So it seems to me there are some important dimensions
>> and work that is missing in Kenneally's broad review.
>>
>> Anthropologists, psychologists and sociologist have all done a quite a
>> bit of work on human thought, language, and sociey. In fact their
>> theories, schools of thought, and findings comprise a much larger body
>> of work than the johnny come lately biologists.
>>
>
> not at all. she incorporates work from all over, particularly psychology
> and anthropologists. I can't recite the variety, I left the book at work,
> but I'd say you've jumped to an unfair conclusion. Trained in sociology, I'd
> be the first one to whine if I thought she was ignoring insights from
> sociology.
>
> Indeed, the biggest take away from this book is the unremitting emphasis on
> the social -- on social relations -- in the development of language and
> speech. Even in her chapters on research on the brain and on the following
> chapter on genetics, which I'm just now reading, what you are confronted
> with is the fact that you can't understand any of this without considering
> the effects of our social environment on the brain and genetics. (basically,
> from what I get on the genetics chapter, which I haven't finished, is that
> the idea that we have a blueprint for a genome has been tossed, even though
> it was the dominant view just five years ago. But again, book's at work, so
> I might need to revise that.)
>
> shag
I've been following this with insufficient background, some interest and a bit of confusion... but shag's latest may have cleared some things up... at least to the point that I can ask a question or two.
Do I take it that the language-rooted-in-natural-selectionists are psychobiophysicalists and that these folks take Chomsky's stance that language is grounded in very specific brain structures (if I'm right about that) and run with it in a manner which suborns everything we know about the coevolution of human bodies and human sociality? That they run with it in a manner which suborns everything we ought to know to be the necessarily (if well nigh impossible to support with the kind of biophysical data evolutionists so like) historically contingent, physically spandreled and analytically stochastic coevolution of human bodies, sociality and language?
I guess if you take a structuralist view of the brain center/language equivalence, you might be able to explore the evolution of the hominid brain and tie it to stages of languistic development... but all you'd have would be a description of brain structure evolution, not an understanding of the socionatural process of that evolution...
Here's hoping I've ask a coherent question and made reasonable associations.
alan