[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.

[Young Master Smeet]

That individualism has an advantage of providing for a form of human universalism, and being a decent rebuff to some of the worst of post-modernism.  HIs exclusion of context, which he seems to prefer to call communications, rather than language is n attempt to concentrate on the mechanics of language.  Much like a telecoms engineer doesn't concern themself with social context, but the mechanics of radio transmission.The evidence is that language is innate, taking, for example, the maroon communities.  You yourself have noted that some human communities worlds apart share basic structures, and ideas, which also point to an innateness.  In some ways, it's a hopeful notion that were civilisation to be smashed any remaining humans would jut begin again.

[Young Master Smeet]

I've read Knight's articles on Chomsky, and his dodgey tarry brush, in the past, and been distinctly unimpressed.  I'm no expert, and so don't have much of a dog in the fight, other than the impression that Knight really wasn't arguing from evidence. Chomsky's rationalism does impinge, somewhat, on his politics, in his claims of an innate sense of morality/human values relate to that view.

[Young Master Smeet]

And on the carburetor (sort of):

Quote:

By sharp contrast, she continues, for human infants even the first words ‘are used in a kind-concept constrained way (a way that indicates that the child's usage adheres to “natural kind” boundaries)’. Even after years of training, a chimpanzee's usage ‘never displays this sensitivity to differences among natural kinds. Surprisingly, then, chimps do not really have “names for things” at all. They have only a hodge-podge of loose associations’ ([24], p. 86). This is radically different from humans.A closer look shows that humans also do not have ‘names for things’ in any simple sense. Even the simplest elements of the lexicon – ‘water’, ‘tree’, ‘river’, ‘cow’, ‘person’, ‘house’, ‘home’, etc. – do not pick out (‘denote’) mind-independent entities. Rather, their regular use relies crucially on the complex ways in which humans interpret the world: in terms of such properties as psychic continuity, intention and goal, design and function, presumed cause and effect, Gestalt properties, and so on. It follows that the meanings of even the simplest words depend crucially on internal cognitive processes and cannot be spelled out in strictly physical terms. Human words and concepts differ sharply from those in the rest of the animal world in just about every relevant respect: their nature, the manner of their acquisition, and their characteristic use.

Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2013, Pages 89–98Evolution, brain, and the nature of languageRobert C. Berwick1,Angela D. Friederici2,Noam Chomsky3,Johan J. BolhuisWhich is where Chomsky is going with the Carburetor example (see also the quotatation here:https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8SjbFBKq35QC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=Carburetor+Chomsky&source=bl&ots=7qB8vRbJCH&sig=qBiHSk_7iZASSIepj2_fo7hEB-c&hl=en&sa=X&ei=C330VKizPIfWavnEgOAO&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Carburetor%20Chomsky&f=false )Not that the cocnept of carburetor was born fully formed one hundred thousand years ago, but that the concept emerges within the mind before the word.  At least, thats my reading, on aquick scan of the lit.

[Young Master Smeet]

oooh, I've learnt a new word: exaptation.  Anyway, an abstract, Chomsky isn't alone:

Quote:

Human beings are distinguished from all other organisms by their symbolic way of processing information about the world. This unique cognitive style is qualitatively different from all the earlier hominid cognitive styles, and is not simply an improved version of them. The hominid fossil and archaeological records show clearly that biological and technological innovations have typically been highly sporadic, and totally out of phase, since the invention of stone tools some 2.5 million years ago. They also confirm that this pattern applied in the arrival of modern cognition: the anatomically recognizable species Homo sapiens was well established long before any population of it began to show indications of behaving symbolically. This places the origin of symbolic thought in the realms of exaptation, whereby new structures come into existence before being recruited to new uses, and of emergence, whereby entire new levels of complexity are achieved through new combinations of attributes unremarkable in themselves. Both these phenomena involve entirely routine evolutionary processes; special as we human beings may consider ourselves, there was nothing special about the way we came into existence. Modern human cognition is a very recent acquisition; and its emergence ushered in an entirely new pattern of technological (and other behavioral) innovation, in which constant change results from the ceaseless exploration of the potential inherent in our new capacity.

Theory in BiosciencesSeptember 2010, Volume 129, Issue 2-3, pp 193-201Date: 28 May 2010 Human evolution and cognitionIan Tattersall

[Young Master Smeet]

Hud955,again, it's not that absurd, from an evolutionary perspective, given that language is (arguably) irreducibly complex, to come to a view that some other function has been repurposed, and language was absically born 'intact'.  If one accepts the argument by lack of data, and therefore the language acquisition device, it pretty much follows that language did not emerge from the same route a monkey howls and doesn't represent a continuation of the same.Afterall, the article cited is Chomsky's own work, so should represent an 'authoritative' example of his actual views.It is consistent with the essentailly chaotic character of the theory of evolution.

[Young Master Smeet]

PGB,it's also suggested that wealthy Qataris and Saudis are funding ISIS (so, not necessarily capitalist interests, but definitely reactionary rent seekers).  Reactionary rent seeking in the material class interest behind ISIS, in the poliical form of returning the profits of the wealth under the desert sands to the followers of the prophet.

[Young Master Smeet]

I'm not sure the article from the Conversation challenges the notion of a "language acquisition device", I'm sure the notion has always been that various linguistic opaths are switched on and off in language deveopment.Likewise, Chomsky's view on evolution isn't that weird, it's simply that he doesn't se a necessary continuation from hooting and noise signals to developed speach, as a naive evolution would have it.  Much like the idea that you can't have half a blood clot, the suggestion is that some other brain aspect was re-purposed wholesale.  Steve Jones (in the lecture where I nicked the blood clot point from compares evolution toa  shanty town, making uses of whatever it finds lying around.This is a useful summary of how Chomsky sees the situation:

Quote:

The astronomical variety of sentences any natural language user can produce and understand has an important implication for language acquisition, long a core issue in developmental psychology. A child is exposed to only a small proportion of the possible sentences in its language, thus limiting its database for constructing a more general version of that language in its own mind/brain. This point has logical implications for any system that attempts to acquire a natural language on the basis of limited data. It is immediately obvious that given a finite array of data, there are infinitely many theories consistent with it but inconsistent with one another. In the present case, there are in principle infinitely many target systems (potential I-languages) consistent with the data of experience, and unless the search space and acquisition mechanisms are constrained, selection among them is impossible. A version of the problem has been formalized by Gold (100) and more recently and rigorously explored by Nowak and colleagues (72-75). No known "general learning mechanism" can acquire a natural language solely on the basis of positive or negative evidence, and the prospects for finding any such domain-independent device seem rather dim. The difficulty of this problem leads to the hypothesis that whatever system is responsible must be biased or constrained in certain ways. Such constraints have historically been termed "innate dispositions," with those underlying language referred to as "universal grammar." Although these particular terms have been forcibly rejected by many researchers, and the nature of the particular constraints on human (or animal) learning mechanisms is currently unresolved, the existence of some such constraints cannot be seriously doubted. On the other hand, other constraints in animals must have been overcome at some point in human evolution to account for our ability to acquire the unlimited class of generative systems that includes all natural languages. The nature of these latter constraints has recently become the target of empirical work.

and

Quote:

In particular, these chimpanzees required thousands of training trials, and often years, to acquire the integer list up to nine, with no evidence of the kind of "aha" experience that all human children of approximately 3.5 years acquire (107). A human child who has acquired the numbers 1, 2, and 3 (and sometimes 4) goes on to acquire all the others; he or she grasps the idea that the integer list is constructed on the basis of the successor function. For the chimpanzees, in contrast, each number on the integer list required the same amount of time to learn.

On evolution:

Quote:

One possibility, consistent with current thinking in the cognitive sciences, is that recursion in animals represents a modular system designed for a particular function (e.g., navigation) and impenetrable with respect to other systems. During evolution, the modular and highly domain-specific system of recursion may have become penetrable and domain-general. This opened the way for humans, perhaps uniquely, to apply the power of recursion to other problems. This change from domain-specific to domain-general may have been guided by particular selective pressures, unique to our evolutionary past, or as a consequence (by-product) of other kinds of neural reorganization.

The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh FitchScienceNew Series, Vol. 298, No. 5598 (Nov. 22, 2002), pp. 1569-1579Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3832837

[Young Master Smeet]

From the article I linked to before, which I thought was a very interesting way of expressing it:

Quote:

In simple human societies, lethal violence may be high in aggregate statistical terms, but the pervasive ethos is one of active cooperative affiliation among diverse groups of relatives and nonrelatives (Knauft I987a).  The cultural norms of sociality in these societies seem to be both strong and prone to lethal contravention within the local group.  The violence that does occur has relatively little to do with territorial rights, property, ritual status, or male leadership concerns and is based more on consensually approved status leveling among men than on status elevation.

  I looked up the article for comparison with other great apes, and indeed:

Quote:

Damaging fights have not, however, been witnessed (de Waal I989b:22I-22), and techniques of managing conflict seem highly developed; in this respect, bonobos may exhibit important similarities with simple human societies in harboring both strong conflict-mediation  skills and the potential for rare but ultimately extreme violence

(apparently a lot of bonobos are missing fingers, suggesting they mayhave been bitten off in a fight).

Quote:

In only 1of the 22 homicides listed by Lee (I97ga:383) for the !Kung did the killer run off with the victim's wife, and this case is itself revealing; despite the fact that the couple had previously been lovers, the woman was frightened by the killing and as a result soon returned alone.  In most simple societies, aggressively self-interested persons may be killed with the consent or active collaboration of the community at large (see Lee I979a:chap. I3; Balikci I970:chap. 9)

  The article notes that a lot of violence in simple societies takes the form of a directionless outburst, akin to a psychotic breakdown, and often the people killed are bystanders, not parties to a dispute:

Quote:

Some forms of violence in simple societies thus appear almost more dysfunctional than functional and bear at least a passing resemblance to the syndrome of "phylo-genetic regression" described by Bailey (i985, I987;cf.NeumanI987). Bailey argues on neurophysiological grounds that sudden aggressive outbursts stem from phylogenetically "primitive" parts of the brain and characterize various forms of genuine brain dysfunction.

  After all, simple human societies wouldn't need sophisticated conflict resolution and violence mitigaton strategies if there were no pre-disposition to violence at all.  The part I bolded is suggestive to me, if a coalition can come about to kill a wannabe leader, then it's only a small step to a leader using a coalition to kill rivals and become an achievement based leader…

[Young Master Smeet]

Hud955,Do those immediate return bands who share a kill wit otehr groups share a language with them, or are there examples of co-operation across language barriers?And I believe it is undisputed that personal homicide may occur within those bands (from time to time), and that occasionally (especially to dispose of a bully and a wanna be leader) maybe even the odd conspiracy and group slaying?  As you say, hunting accidents with poisons do happen…Your mention of Gorillas does also  bring in the question of other great apes…This article may be interesting (haven't had much time to go beyond the abstract):http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2743815?sid=21105482636741&uid=2&uid=3738032&uid=4

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

This linking together by you of 'observation' and 'logical sequence' is itself an ideological belief.You appear to regard 'observation' to be non-ideological (ie., that the 'thing observed' is self-evident), and that linking a series of 'things observed' is entirely non-ideological (ie., that the 'link' is self-evident).

One person stabbing another is an event that has happened, irrespective of any ideology on earth, a sharp pointy thing has ended a life, the trick is putting that in context.Lets try another way: what do you think constitutes:1) Violence2) Warfare

[Young Master Smeet]

Hud955 ,that's interesting, particularly:

Quote:

Ethnographers are now coming to appreciate, for instance, that a great number of apparently warlike encounters between hunter gatherers (not between tribal societies or chiefdoms)  are best understood as sophisticated conflict management techniques.  Those working with Australian aborigines have noted that spear throwers are trained to be very skilled at missing.  They have also noted that many apparently violent encounters between bands are highly ritualised and aimed at avoiding conflict and death rather than expressing it.  If death does inadvertently occur, as it can, how then should we view this?

That was the sort of encounter I was particularly envisaging.  More specifically, say, two immediate return hunting bands are chasing the same mammoth?  I think you're right that they aren't going to stand and fight to the last man, and would more likely threaten and try and chase each other off.Likewise what you say about raiding is interesting.  I think the key is the definition of war not lying in violence, but in power, specifically the question of imposing ones will upon another. 

[Young Master Smeet]

Lbird,like it or not, the one person on one person infliction of harm occurs, and we need to call this something.  We then need to distinguish it fromcollective infliction of harm.  We can observe the different behaviour of inflicting harm as an end in itslf, and inflicting harm as a means to an end, and we can then observe inflicting harm as a means to an end involving a third party, this is a logical sequence of different classifications of observable behaviours.  I'm not saying one leads to another, that one on one harm in itself leads to collective harm, yes, the causation could be the other way round that collective harming could lead to within group harming.  But before we begind theorising we need to distinguish between different behaviours.

[Young Master Smeet]

Lbird,Well, we can quickly define  violence as the infliction of physical harm on one person by another (I am thus excluding verbal violence a priori).  We can then add a further layer: the application of harm in order to impose ones will upon another; the application of harm in order to slay.Punching in self defence has the intent of deterring the attacker, so that is imposing your will upon them, for example.  I'd suggest the next layer up is imposing harm (including slaying) on one person so as to impose your will upon another person (or persons).This second layer is the context in which we can begin to define warfare.  To get to war, we would need a third,  to have some notion of collective/group action to inflict harm (or death) in order to influence another person (or persons).

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