[Young Master Smeet]

Could you provide more context?  I mean, by definition, the simple refusal to work is a peaceful act, we're not murdering anyone, simply demonstrating the need for our labour?  It strikes me that strong trade unions are an essential part of a peaceful revolution.

[Young Master Smeet]

Not quite, we do physically "pay" the taxes in so much as many workers do hand over tax (especially VAT); we don't bear the burden, is the point, our incomes adjust so that someone else has to have a smaller share of the total wealth.  We do bear the burden of taxes/duties on non-essentials, like beer and wine duty or tobacco.  The point is, though, that it all comes down to the class struggle, and the strength of the various sides in the wages market.

[Young Master Smeet]

DJP wrote:

Though this of course depends on how broad you defininition of 'ideology'… Define it too broadly and I don't think you're saying anything of much use.

Well, indeed, in many hands "ideology" simply becomes an excuse for why the apparent material conditions have not yet lead to a workers revolution.  The big problem being, if everyone is under the spell of ideology, how can anyone become free of it? was answered by the vanguard party, or an elite who could see through ideology (possibly intellectuals outside the class); or, by an appeal to "science" as being an ideology buster.  I'd suggest, as you say, that a much more restricted definition of ideology means we don't have to come up with such magic thinking work arounds.

[Young Master Smeet]

*Watches Lbird run away into the distance*Either one can make non-ideological claims about the world, or one cannot. If one cannot, then one cannot make non-ideoloigical claims about one's ideology, including its source and its objective partisanship.

[Young Master Smeet]

There may be a book that can help:The Labour Party PLC / David Osler  ISBN 9781840186000That's from 2002 (I think it may have been reviewed in the standard).  Your local library should be able to get it for you.

[Young Master Smeet]

Quote:

The difference between us is, I don't hide my ideological beliefs.

But the point is Lbird, you do hide them.  Everything you say about your ideology contains hidden ideological elements.  You cannot expose your ideology, because that would be an non-ideological truth claim about the world.  Nor can you know whether your ideas are working class ideas, or ruling class ideas.

[Young Master Smeet]

Adam,I don't think he is positing a gene, as such, but an organ, or, rather, a module of the brain, but you're right, given the way he has happily shifted ground over the years,it's an hypothesis, maybe even as far as theory…

[Young Master Smeet]

I think Stuart has hit on an interesting point on Ideology and the impossibility of communication.  Lets tease that out.1) Ideology mediates all truth claims about the world, with unstated (and unstatable) premises, presuppositions and assumptions.2) The ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class: so ideology mediates in the interests of class rule.3) Therefore ideology is part of the world, and can be subject to truth claims.4) But any truth claim about ideology is subject to mediation by ideology.5) Therefore all statements about ideology are in the interests of the ruling class.If you meet anyone who talks about ideology, they are trying to put a ruling class policeman in your head.

[Young Master Smeet]

Just to try and keep things up to date:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4332683/This one should be freely accesible. PLoS Biol. 2015 Feb; 13(2): e1002063. Published online 2015 Feb 13. doi:  10.1371/journal.pbio.1002063PMCID: PMC4332683Language: UG or Not to Be, That Is the QuestionJohan J. Bolhuis,1,2,* Ian Tattersall,3 Noam Chomsky,4 and Robert C. Berwick5 

Quote:

Language is a computational operation occurring in the mind of an individual, independent of its possible communicative use, while speech is one possible externalization of language (among others such as sign) and is not an essential aspect of it.

I think this is a key statement (and made this year) of what Chomsky et al mean by language, and they don't mean words, at all.  Hence why, I think the post I quickly made on Sunday is important, since it shows that human individuals can create sign language.  Indeed, Bolhius et al argue

Quote:

Emphasis on speech and the vocal tract is beside the point; as Lenneberg [9] showed nearly 50 years ago, signers acquire and use sign just as speakers do.

So according to Chomsky and his colleagues, language does not even ferature in that internal monologue in your head, language is what lies behind the words (much as Serle's Chinese Box thought experimment suggested intentionality does lie behind symbolisation).

[Young Master Smeet]

My time running low, quick drive by link:http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00830/abstract

Quote:

Many sign languages display crosslinguistic consistencies in the use of two iconic aspects of handshape, handshape type and finger group complexity. Handshape type is used systematically in form-meaning pairings (morphology): Handling handshapes (Handling-HSs), representing how objects are handled, tend to be used to express events with an agent (“hand-as-hand” iconicity), andObject handshapes (Object-HSs), representing an object's size/shape, are used more often to express events without an agent (“hand-as-object” iconicity). Second, in the distribution of meaningless properties of form (morphophonology), Object-HSs display higher finger group complexity than Handling-HSs. Some adult homesigners, who have not acquired a signed or spoken language and instead use a self-generated gesture system, exhibit these two properties as well. This study illuminates the development over time of both phenomena for one child homesigner, “Julio,” age 7;4 (years; months) to 12;8. We elicited descriptions of events with and without agents to determine whether morphophonology and morphosyntax can develop without linguistic input during childhood, and whether these structures develop together or independently. Within the time period studied: (1) Julio used handshape type differently in his responses to vignettes with and without an agent; however, he did not exhibit the same pattern that was found previously in signers, adult homesigners, or gesturers: while he was highly likely to use a Handling-HS for events with an agent (82%), he was less likely to use an Object-HS for non-agentive events (49%); i.e., his productions were heavily biased toward Handling-HSs; (2) Julio exhibited higher finger group complexity in Object- than in Handling-HSs, as in the sign language and adult homesigner groups previously studied; and (3) these two dimensions of language developed independently, with phonological structure showing a sign language-like pattern at an earlier age than morphosyntactic structure. We conclude that iconicity alone is not sufficient to explain the development of linguistic structure in homesign systems. Linguistic input is not required for some aspects of phonological structure to emerge in childhood, and while linguistic input is not required for morphology either, it takes time to emerge in homesign.

Not fingding evidence of a universal grammar does not disprove the theory; nor does a Welsh difference in colour descriptions. 

[Young Master Smeet]

I'm afraid that's why I kept coming back to the poverty of stimulous thing, which, if I may (legitimately and properly) argue by appeal to authority, remains broadly acepted as holding in linguistic circles (there are critics, obviously).  If that holds then there must be *some* internal mechanism for language generation (rather than simple acquisition).  The range and extent is up for debate (and you don't need to go as far as Chomsky, but you need to travel down the same street at least).   Further, as I've noted, the creation of new languages by maroon communities shows how language is not a function of a communal transmission.  There are, IIRC, a range of conditions (I think, including some species of autism) that inhibit language acquisition, and seem to throw some light on the subject.The bottom line, WRT Chomsky, is that his contibutions have been significant, and he remains the old gun slinger that everyone wants to beat.  I'm sure one day he will be beaten.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

But there you go – a site which claims to be giving a lead to workers

We don't claim that.

[Young Master Smeet]

I believe Chomsky is fluent in several languages, and I beleive hs published an analysis of Hebrew.As for rationalism: part of the problem, as I suggest is once you elimjinate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be da troot, as someone never said.If I understand what I've read of what he's saying, it's not that "carburetor" relates to any real world object, but to a mental position.  It's rather like there is a filing cabinet in our minds, and an empty drawer gets made into the parking space for a new concept (and the same parking space in each mind).  That's slightly less implausible, if each mind is using the same indexing instrucions (lets all play spot the librarian).What this does, in effect, is take the ball away from the post modernists.  They play with the radical disconnect between signifier and signified, and eventually come up with the impossibility of communication.  He takes that, and, in much the same way as Russell, says that concepts are only ever interior, and there is no connection between signifier and signified at all.  There is a common "meaning" grounded ultimately in biology, and common humanity.If Chomsky is right, not only is communication possible, but it is possible without ideology, it holds open the prospect for genuine human communication.What, thouh, this ultimately comes down to is: how do you deal with the poverty of stimulous? Eitehr you experimentally disprove it, or you account for it, and the only account that can make sense is that there is firmware behind language.

[Young Master Smeet]

Well, my latest comment was after a skim read of:Title:Language and Other Cognitive Systems. What Is Special About Language?Source:Language learning and development [1547-5441] Chomsky Year: 2011 Volume: 7 Issue: 4 Page: 263 -278http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15475441.2011.584041#.VPgo5dhLdhcFrom the abstract:

Quote:

One conclusion that appears to emerge with considerable force is that Aristotle's maxim should be inverted: language is meaning with sound, a rather different matter. The core of language appears to be a system of thought, with externalization a secondary process (including communication, a special case of externalization).

Which I think is a good line.Here's how he characterises the position he argues against:

Chomsky wrote:

Fifty years ago, it was widely held by the most prominent philosophers and psychologists that language is just a matter of conditioning and some obscure general notion of “induction” or “analogy.” A widely held view in professional linguistics was that languages can differ arbitrarily (within very restricted constraints, like choice of phonetic features, perhaps just properties of the articulatory apparatus), and that the subject consists of nothing more than an array of procedures to reduce a corpus to an organized form in one or another way, selected on the basis of the specific goals of the inquiry, with no other criterion of right or wrong. Later versions of the “nonexistence” conception were that rules of language can be justifiably postulated only if they are “in principle” accessible to introspection, a dogma—largely incoherent in my opinion—that excludes almost everything. There are other variants, among them the insistence, again by prominent philosophers and others, that language must be regarded as a socio-political entity of some kind, hence dependent on continuity of empires and literary cultures, national myths, military forces, and so on.

And a footnote:

Chomsky wrote:

Statistically speaking, language use is overwhelmingly internal–“speaking to oneself.” If one chooses to call this “communication,” thus depriving the term of much significance, then imagined social context is relevant.

Quote:

Externalization by the [Sensory Motor] system appears to be a secondary property of language. Externalization is also in part independent of modality, as work of the past few decades on sign language has revealed. Sometimes externalization is employed for communication—by no means always, at least if we invest the term “communication” with some significance. Hence, communication, a fortiori, is a still more ancillary property of language, contrary to much conventional doctrine—and of course language use is only one of many forms of communication.

Quote:

Something like that seems to be true for animal communication. Symbols appear to relate to physically identifiable external or internal states: motion of leaves elicits a warning cry (maybe an eagle is coming); “I'm hungry”; etc. Nothing remotely like that is true for even the simplest elements of human language: cow, river, person, tree—pick any one you want.There are inklings of that understanding in classical philosophy, in Aristotle's Metaphysics, particularly. It was considerably enriched, with a shift from metaphysics to epistemology and cognition, in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the work of British neo-Platonists and classical empiricists. They recognized that there is no direct link between the elementary elements of language and thought and some mind-independent external entity. Rather, these elements provide rich perspectives for interpreting and referring to the mind-independent world involving Gestalt properties, cause-and-effect, “sympathy of parts,” concerns directed to a “common end,” psychic continuity, and other such mentally-imposed properties. In this respect, meaning is rather similar to sound: every act of articulating some item, say the internal syllable [ta], yields a physical event, but no one seeks some category of physical events associated with [ta]. Similarly, some (but by no means all) uses of the word river relate to physically identifiable entities, but there is no category of such entities identifiable in principle by a physicist investigating the mind-external world. In David Hume's phrase, summarizing a century of inquiry, the “identity, which we ascribe” to vegetables, animal bodies, artifacts, persons and their minds, and so on—the array of individuating properties—is only a “fictitious one,” established by our “cognoscitive powers,” as they were termed by his 17th century predecessors.

For example, the question of people born blind whop develop a full linguistic range, including concepts of things they have never (and will never) see.

[Young Master Smeet]

But Chomsky does accept an evolutionaery origin of language, admittedly via saltation (another new word, doing well this week), but that is perfectly consonant with biological evolutionary theories.  It's not a mad idea at all.If the poverty of stimulous is true, then Chomsky's line is the only option (I am aware it is disputed, but not completely overturned).  Further, as I said, the Maroon creoles, which developed out of the adult pidgins of the first generation maroons (but which later generations turned into a completely syntactically coherent language), is highly suggestive of a biological capability to create language.

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