#261 Noam Chomsky: Cognitive Revolution, Piaget, Foucault, And Evolutionary Psychology

hello everybody welcome to a new episode of the dissenter and today I have the great honor of being here with dr. Noam Chomsky he holds a joint appointment as Institute professor emeritus at MIT and laureate professor at the University of Arizona and he is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics war politics mass media and others so dr. Chomsky thank you for taking the time to come on the show it's a real honor to everyone thank you very much okay great so I would like to go through some of the major highlights of your intellectual life that is very long by now and the first question I would like to ask you is since you were one of the major figures that was behind what we call the cognitive revolution back in the 50s and 60s what would you say was the importance of that revolution in terms of studying human behavior well Vlasto words are crucial the standard approach to the study of human beings at the time was called behavioral science or behaviorism inquiry was pretty much limited to actual behavior organization of behavior description of Bajor eliciting controlling behavior and so on but that's not the way you study any organism if you won't understand it so he what you'd want to do is try to understand what the internal mechanisms are that are causing the behavior and that was considered improper at the time you had to keep to the analysis of behavior so the cognitive revolution so-called was pretty much with the word suggest it was trying to study the nature of the cognitive processes that are being carried out internally what we call mental processes processes in the brain which we try to describe and discover her and see how they eventuate in behaviour this was not entirely new there was a kind of a cognitive revolution in the 17th century which began to study such question early the beginning of the Scientific Revolution among the topics that was investigated the words among those topics were vision language other topics that became central in the revived cognitive revolution of the 1950s so in the case of vision for example if you go back to 16th century assumptions was believed that if you perceive a triangle the form of the triangle somehow passes through space and implants itself in your mind and Galileo and other initiators in the Scientific Revolution regarded that correctly as mysticism and wanted to discover what the actual mechanisms were so for example Descartes argued that the way you see a triangle he argued is kind of the way of blind man with a stick would see it a blind man would touch various points on the triangle a series of stimuli and the mind would create the image of a triangle because the mind works as on principles like Euclidian geometry that turns out to be rather accurate it's not a stick reaching from the object to you but it's emotions called saccadic I emotions which just when you look at something you don't see it what you see is a series of stimuli around that your mind constructs in the image when Iced construct the image of you triangle or anything else the case of language they were quite interesting developments Galileo and his contemporaries were amazed and shocked at what they regarded correctly as a most remarkable phenomenon that with a few dozen symbols we can somehow construct in our minds an infinite number of thoughts and we can even convey that as thoughts to others who have no access to the workings of our mind the Galileo thought that the alphabet was the most dependence of human inventions because it could carry out this miracle of course because it was based on internal alphabet collection of symbols and it was manipulated and quite interesting investigations began of the nature of these processes while this was all forgotten during the structuralist and behaviorist period the whole tradition was forgotten and it was revived in the mid 1950s and without any awareness of the history that it was Arendt discovered later but it was revived with new tools so the company development of the theory of computation one of the great mathematical achievements in the 20th century Alan Turing girdle of the great mathematicians that made it very clear how a finite object like your brain or your laptop that would have the capacity to term in January to construct an infant unbounded number of structures structured expressions each of which can convey can constitute a certain thought and can be externalized usually in sound or some of the media that made it possible to begin to study the traditional problems of language that had been left hanging because they didn't have these concepts to study them in a direct and serious way to construct try to construct precise theories that would account for the knowledge that you and I have and largely share which makes it possible for us to communicate that's and the same was true in the study a vision was embedded in the case in the study of vision by a new technology that made it possible to discover what neurons are actually doing in the visual sectors of the brain they didn't do it with humans that would be unethical considered but it was considered ethical to work on cats and monkeys by implanting electrodes in their the part of the brain that picks up visual symbolism to discover exactly what they're doing and some pretty remarkable discoveries were made and in the case of language the problem is much harder that one reason is the systems are much more complex the other reason is there's no comparative evidence since language is a unique human property no analogs and other species which is striking fact in itself you can't study the monkeys and apes and cats and the organism any other organism to see to do the experiments that would not be permitted on humans EFT is much more indirect means as nevertheless there are advances in technology which make it possible to learn something about what the brain is doing when you and I are communicating but most of the work is just intensive study of a wide variety of type of AIRAID languages to see what they cannot understand the mechanisms that are carrying out this miraculous achievement that so amazed Galileo and others and I've quite a lot has been learned so for example if you go back to the 1950s it was standardly assumed in the straw Christmas tradition that languages could vary in almost arbitrary ways and that each language had to be studied on its own without preconceptions that's now known to be quite wrong turns out that as we proceed languages that look very different on the surface seem to have pretty much the same internal structure with meeting the same principles the way they compute thoughts and transmit them to the outside and fara matters been learned about these principles well the cognitive revolution deals with in principle with all cognitive capacities but the most far-reaching results have been in language vision to other areas mm-hmm okay let me now move on to ask you about what has been known as the Chomsky Piaget debate back in 1975 this was very interesting because Piaget brought to the table an approach to children's development particularly regarding language and other aspects of cognition that was different from the behaviorists but also regarded an interaction between the agent and its environment and on the other end back then you defended more in a theist or a nativist approach to those kinds of problems so could you tell us briefly maybe what were some of the biggest issues that were debated back then well the biggest issues were exactly what you just said is development of language capacity and other cognitive as it is a matter of following the fixed plan that's part of our genetic endowment that have modified of course by the environment so your genes don't determine whether you speak English or Spanish but is there a kind of a basically fixed plant plan that directs the child reflexively a child doesn't think about it any more than you think about growing growing arms but it sort of sketches out the make theme a basic plan of development that's the experience of modifying it around the edges or is there some process of the maturation of moving from stage to stage which that doesn't involve any innate genetically determined components and that was the core argument the debate but incidentally neither PHA or I regarded as debate the debate idea was created by the publishers it was supposed to be a conference bur he and I opened it with our own presentations and others came in gave their presentations I guess the publishers felt that they could sell the book better if they turned it into a debate but neither of us has approved of that but it was a discussion about many cognitive scientists some from piaces Institute barber Linda and hilde or another some from here friend Jerry Fodor was an active participant and a lot of interaction about the nature of these problems mm-hmm and wasn't it another issue that was brought to the table the one that had to do with modularity of mind and you and father if I'm not mistaken mistaken defended a position where you believe that the mind was composed of several different modules he with each of which had to deal with different cognitively these distinct problems correct that's great mm-hmm and would you say that those different modules were the result of natural selection and are mostly genetically determined or at least genetically based or not first of all we have to distinguish genetically determined from a product of natural selection okay remember Piaget in particular was very skeptical but natural selection won't together so much so that a number of the distinguished biologists present Jacques Monod also echoed the laureates and biology were pretty much shocked by some of his positions actually some of what he proposed then does not sound that quite as exotic today as it did at the time because of discoveries and what have been called it's been called epigenetics and the way experience has some peripheral limited effects in complex ways on changing the nature of than a genetic endowment but his general anti-darwinian position is not suggestiveness then my case and also further and massimo Catelli who organized the meeting the MS biologists in fact Fodor in Fayette LA have just written a book recently called why Darwin was wrong in which they reviewed with many discoveries in recent years that which have shown that many natural processes take take place that are critical for evolution that over and above natural selection they even raise some questions about the nature of natural selection but I think we can concede that that's a critical element of evolution Darwin was marching right about that but there are many other ways in which the genetic the the genome the the arrangement of genes is the changes through genetic drift transposition of genes from one place to another or even from one organism to another lots of processes take place that yield the genetic endowment the bearer of the work of the particular organism it's it's its genotype so yes I think it's my few reasons I'm clear that there is a specific genetic endowment for language that's humans and whether organism has that's why as I mentioned before we can't do the kinds of comparative studies about language that you try with you can do with vision and other pretty much shared capacities and I don't there's no known explanation for that other than genetic endowment of course to find the basis in the genome for particular capacities is very difficult even for simple traits like height but same word nobody doubts it's genetically determined that to try to find the hundreds of genes involved in determining height is what biologists sometimes called fiendishly difficult problem so you're not something to be simple to find the genetic endowment for for language that's a huge problem but the fact that it's there I think is pretty well-established in fact that's why an infant two year old infant as an amazing acknowledge of language as you can discover by experiment even though it's at very little experience and why if you look at the my which development of infants it goes through a very fixed program development in fact a newborn infant already has some information about the language of its mother can identify the language of its mother as distinct from another language both speaking by a woman whose voice they've never heard of bilingual woman and by now let's the little bit that and then there's a regular series of progressions that the introduced through of courses modified by experience but it seems to be just similar to other genetic programs there have been efforts extensive efforts to try to elicit something like language behavior from other organisms usually Apes it's been a total failure they simply don't have the cognitive capacities that allow them to use the data that an infant uses just reflexively and that's also it has to be the basis for the fact that languages generally seem to be cast to the same mold in some deep sense you know they look on the surface to be very very I should say that this doctrine about the almost endless variation of languages was also held about organisms in the 1950s so a standard view among biologists was that organisms are so varied though that you just have to study each one basically on its own that's now known to be completely wrong that discoveries is recent years have shown that there very few types of organisms though they have deep properties that they all share and this it's even been suggested and taken seriously that there's a universal genome single fake Gino with slight modifications usually different organisms it's a picture somewhat like what seems to have been discovered about language over the years a lot of this is contentious and I want to suggest there's an overwhelming consensus about that it's the way the evidence looks to me increasingly and I don't see any I really see no series of primitives to this view okay but since you agree that we have at least certain aspects of our cognition that are genetically determined and you also agree for the most part with the modularity of mind position I've heard you criticizing several times the discipline of evolutionary psychology since those are basically two of its theoretical foundations why is that what do you think are its main forms well I don't criticize the discipline of evolutionary psychology I think it's a fine discipline effect I work my own work falls within it okay but it's the practice of evolutionary psychology that I think has to be viewed very carefully a good deal of the practice who makes enormous imaginative leaps on the basis of very scanty evidence jerry fodor for example the humanity does believe in modularity of mind as written scathingly about the practice of evolutionary psychology there is work that's significant in serious work on Ken's election on evolution of altruism Robert rivers work others but a good deal of it is pretty fanciful it's constructing possible stories on the base with have a lot of implications for human life was on the basis of very thin and dubious evidence so I think we have to be pretty cautious about it and just as you'd be caution about any fetal but in particular in this case but has to be very cautious because of the apparent implications for human life and human society that's a serious matter you can't just speculate wildly about that so your opinion is mostly that some of the conclusions that are drawn from the activity than in evolutionary psychology perhaps are not well supported by the evidence I think that's unfortunately true and as I say there is a fair amount of critical work on this filters written about it major biologist Richard Lewontin Stephen Gould have written critical assessments of it and I think a lot of what they say is well found it on the wanton in particular well known evolutionary biologist has strongly argued that we should be careful about what he calls just so stories like Kipling was making up nice stories about animals or humans based on some often just metaphoric relationship to what might have happened in evolution where we really have no knowledge of how it happened it's very hard evolutions are hard field you can't just wave your hand and say this happened because of natural selection doesn't mean actually to find the actual mechanisms is no small and the actual processes that took place is no small problem in the case of in fact it's kind of interesting to take a look at what is studied and what isn't study tells you a lot so take honeybees they have a very elaborate a communicative system the famous waggle dance so for some species of bees the bees will fly away from I've wander around some of them I'll hit a flower they'll take good directly back to the hive which was actually called a beeline because they go straight back to the life which is no not a simple task humans can't do it when they come back to the hive they perform a certain kind of dance they wave their wings around on a certain way but that informs the other bees in the hive of the direction the height and the distance and the quality of the flowers so it was a pretty tricky communication systems been studied quite well the neurophysiology of it is not at all understood I mean it's obviously genetically determined but nobody can find the genes what about the evolution of this system well I just think about it there's hundreds of species they differ a little bit some have no don't have this dance at all sometimes variants of it bees have a tiny brain it's about the size of a grass see you can do any experiment you want just stick electrodes in anything you think of ethical conditions it's almost no study of it because it's very hard I'll come to humans in comparably more difficult huge brain can't do experiments no comparative one species no comparative studies the huge literature on evolution of language that already tells you that we're moving into an area of deep speculation I mean it's not that you can't say anything about evolution languages written a book about it too few things you can say but it's an immensely difficult topic as compared with the evolution of B communication which is understood by biologists to be a very hard problem you can barely study if you try to google it on the internet you'll find some scattered studies but not much because it's part that tells you something about studying evolution mm-hmm so let me ask you now about debate that he went back in 1971 with Michel Foucault and I would like to focus mostly on the first part of it that was about human nature from an epistemological perspective that I guess you had very dissimilar views there I think that Foucault focused mostly on how the kinds of social environments and cultural environments that we nabbit basically are responsible for constructing our cognition but again I think that you brought to the table a more in atheist perspective is that correct that's correct although frankly I don't think there's an issue I mean human nature humans are organisms just like bees or Apes or dogs every organism has a genetically determined major I have dogs okay the dogs can do certain things which I can't do but they can't do certain things that I can do that's not because of their experience that's just because that's the way they're designed and the way arm design again that's their major no if there is a kind of a in my view rather mystical belief that yes we have a nature but it's only responsible for physical characteristics when we move to our cultural mental cognitive characteristics it's just somehow comes from somewhere else I mean there's no basis in science history experience anywhere to countenance that view I wouldn't sit when you hear people say even serious people humans have no nature only a history that can't be correct if you didn't have a fundamental cognitive nature you couldn't understand anything well you would just be some hopeless amoeboid like creatures and wandering around aimlessly even to have experience requires a fundamental nature so when I look at this screen I see a person why don't why do I see a person why not just a lot of the colors and the shapes they're round and every young infant also sees a person that's because we have an internal nature that provides our experience when you see you see the moon rising why do you see the moon rising why not just an array of colors and shapes that has no form that I don't know if the dog sees a moon rising probably not even the simplest datum simplest part of experience is already constructed that by the mind that was understood in the 17th century if much more evidence for it today so at every aspect of their the cognition their mental life our social life it's based crucian must be based crucially on elements of our nature now that doesn't mean that experience doesn't have an effect of course as a huge effect so for example take an issue that's very much alive today the crucial question about the nature of our society should people be slaves obeying the order of a master okay is that legitimate Welland so should we accept totalitarian state which controls and orders the actions and even the thinking of its citizens and we would all say no to that but while we say no to it we accept it that's what our business is not take any business say to enterprise now the worker goes in in the morning and until that worker leaves in the evening their slave they're controlled to a level that goes way beyond what anything wouldn't would imagine in a totalitarian state so for example the Stalin let's say that didn't control when people were allowed to go to the bathroom for 15 minutes for five minutes didn't control when people were allowed to talk to each other what clothes they had to wear that all of this happens in every business all the time so heartlessness is the labor contract legitimate well if you go back in history you have different views on this so in the early Industrial Revolution American workers were very militant Marianna opposed their view was if you work in a if you work for a wage instead of under your own control you're just a slave love to you leading figures in the Enlightenment believes this the bill humph LeNoble was one of the great figures in the Enlightenment also a great linguist in the humanistic founder of the modern research university but one of the founders of classical liberalism his view which was not unusual was that as he put it if an artisan creates a beautiful object on command we will admire what he does but we will despise what he is namely an automaton controlled by someone else obeying orders and it's not a free human being that view was held that was actually a slogan of the Republican Party in the mid 19th century Abraham Lincoln believed it was a big struggle today about whether in fact even the most elementary structures of our social organization have any legitimacy or whether they should be dismantled justly slavery was okay this is a critical question has to do with their it's often argued that it's just part of our nature to want to be subordinated to hierarchical structures that control us very commonly or that's the way our nature is we have to have this same arguments were made about slavery the blacks are just genetically they didn't say genetically in those days they're designed by their nature maybe by God but to be taught to pick cotton in their back said it to be that's the way they're happy unfair to them anything else similar arguments are made today about you know about the struck the basic structures of our economy so there are real issues live issues about what our nature is and what does it what is it proper waived for our nature what kind of social organization would be appropriate for our intrinsic nature to flourish there's a serious questions science doesn't tell us that evolutionary psychology doesn't experience tells us some things history tells us things we can think about it in various ways but it's just a kind of a truism that everything about us is a some kind of combination of our intrinsic nature and the environment social personal other aspects of the environment in which we develop and though this part those parts are controllable we can change them sir the person is interested in constructing a better world working for what's called the common good it will be very considered with these issues so yeah so let me just ask you one last question before we go regarding what you were just saying in terms of trying to find out what kind of social organization would allow for us to better express our human nature and to flourish I think that another issue that he was so debated with Foucault had to do with creativity so is that one of the things that we have to keep in mind I mean to allow for people to be creative when trying to devise a better system of social and political organization I think I'll go back to the landfill humboldt again he regarded the essence of human nature as being the desire to inquire and create you see it in young children they're very inquisitive they want to understand everything they want to make new things and so on it's sort of beaten out of them by the educational system but it ought to be I think it should be a proper educational system should be nourishing it and allowing these qualities to flourish and that's actually what happens in decent progressive education systems but much much of the system is devastating so take the reigning system now on the United States which is called teach to test you have to teach in the schools in third grade you have to teach them what they can use to pass a test that's way better than here that's a way to ensure that people understand nothing go nowhere we've all had the experience of taking a course in school which was of no we talk very badly we had no interest work hard enough to pass the test two weeks later he forgot with the course was about everybody said that experience we've also had for lucky had the experience of being in environments where your instinctive a tendency to seek to inquire and grade is nurtured opportunities are often encouraged we know these of the consequences are quite different well I think that holds for society in general it's one reason why I think it's that's dramatically opposed to human nature to have social institutions in which people spend much of their waking lives basically as slaves okay so dr. Chomsky I guess that we've already arrived at our time limit unfortunately and again again it was a real pleasure to have you on the show and thank you a lot for taking the time to come and it was a real pleasure to talk to you and to meet so thank you very much enjoy the opportunity hello everybody thank you for watching this interview until the end as you might have noticed I've been putting out regular interviews with academics and intellectuals from a variety of hilts so to keep the channel sustainable I would like to ask you to please visit my patreon page and to consider making a pledge there and the amount even just $1 would already be a great help otherwise and if you like what I'm doing please share it leave a like and hit the subscription button I would also like to give a huge thank you to my patrons and PayPal supporters Karen litzke and Blanchett / alga Larson la Carrera Chantal Salinas Francis Ford and Fredrik Sunday Bryan Rivera Luca Stefaniuk Sergio country and Yanni Hannon and Ricardo Vladimiro Craig Hill John Connors Adam Castle Vega giddy Olaf Alex Jonathan Vissel David Diaz and nyan cat jakob clink we dr. 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Channel: The Dissenter

Views: 12,856

Keywords: The Dissenter, Noam Chomsky, human nature, psychology, cognitive science, cognitive revolution, Jean Piaget, nativism, constructivism, modularity of mind, evolutionary psychology, Michel Foucault, epistemology, creativity

Id: HD7Fz0m51eg

Length: 40min 26sec (2426 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 28 2019