[lbo-talk] Kenneally, some notes and background

[Alan Rudy]

At the risk of being labeled a fool, too.  My point was Shag's (sorry to
hear of the accident, btw), linguistic natural selectionists are antisocial
hyperdarwinists who have no concept of the coevolution of the indeterminate
character of human nature in its dialectically and situated biophysical and
sociocultural modalities.  What is to be human is to make our own lives,
together, under conditions not of our own choosing... how can anyone think
otherwise?  I doubt many here disagree but it appears many in the realm of
linguistic study do (but I'm utterly ignorant of the field, which I why I
wrote "appears".)

It strikes me that Shag's point, and that of the book (that I've not read a
page of or anything off-list about), is that studies of language have
simultaneously tended towards the reductive and absolutist - claiming,
often, that the more we know about less and less, the more we can say about
more and more.... Now, there's some foolishness.

-A

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 8:45 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


>
>
> Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> 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?
>
> -----
>
> Alan, I can't construe this. Perhaps I'm just slow this morning, but I
> get lost several times intrying to pull this paragraph into focus. Could
> you spread it out a bit?
>
> Carrol
>
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