Language use & design: conflicts & their significance | Prof Noam Chomsky

I don't need that okay thanks well I'd like to discuss some questions about a topic that goes back to classical antiquity has remains quite obscure in many ways and has many significant implications I think we shall try to bring out or at least indicate the question is what is the fundamental nature of language what's it for what is it designed for there's a simple classical formula goes back to Aristotle that language is sound with meaning that raises three questions at once what is sound what is meaning and what is with the the most neglected and most crucial question there's been a good deal of discussion of sound and now over the past several millennia could--but has known a lot of consideration of questions of meaning how much is understood one good debate but virtually nothing about with presumably because it was the same to be trivial simply by association so a child sees a cow and somebody says cow an association is set up between that thing over there and the word and out of that spins the meaning that doesn't survive much examination but even if it did it wouldn't begin to touch the real question which has to do with it which has to do with the fact that the number of associations of that kind if you want to call them associations is unbounded so it can't be set up by experience that's the width problem it's very rarely been noticed in the whole history of thinking about language occasionally it has Galileo was maybe the first to point out for the obvious fact that the language we our language capacity has infinite scope he described the alphabet as the greatest invention that had ever been made because it enables us with 25 letters to express any thought that might come to our minds notice that he's not accepting Aristotle's dictum exactly that's a description of languages meaning with sound which is not quite the same as sound with meaning fact differs in interesting ways this is picked up not long after by Descartes and in fact for Descartes it's the foundation one of the foundations of his dualistic science interesting and long story also mostly ignored in the history of philosophy but I think quite crucial after that a kind of languages it picks up again in the 20th century partly because the concept with came to be understood in few I well in the 1930s and 40s was the development of the theories of computability touring girl lien--a others the notion of a finite characterization of an infinite class became well understood and that makes it possible to ask ourselves what would be the nature of the sound meaning relationship whatever it is well the basic answer has to be that there's some kind of what's called Jenner's procedure or finite computational procedure that determines the structures and the interpretations for an infinite range of categories of expressions and the interpretations have to be dual one for sound one for meaning apart from that for anyone who is not a mystic this capacity is internal to us it's generally denied but a lot of mystics around but clearly it's something internal to us mostly our brains which means it's effectively the capacity is effectively an organ of the body in the rather loose sense of organ that's used conventionally in biology some subsystem of the organism that has enough internal integrity so it can be studied on its own and interacts with other such modules system subsystems and the functioning of the in the life of the organism so that should be uncontroversial and fortunately it isn't at all with those controversies aside well we've learned in recent years that the concept sound is to narrow the externalization of language the form in which it reaches the outside seems to be modality independent so it can be a visual it could be signed can be touch a lot of interesting work on that and so on there seems to be some internal analytic capacity that's common to any form of external expression now that already suggests to us that maybe Aristotle's dictum should be inverted just as Galileo's observation does maybe it should be meaning with not sound but some form of externalization will keep the sound here just for simplicity but I mean any form of externalization well if it turns it turns out that this distinction between whether languages sound with meaning or meaning with sound it bears on many other questions the there is debate over the what's sometimes called the essential function of language come back to that notion in a minute there's a traditional view which in fact is Galileo's that language is primarily an instrument of thought the great 19th century linguist William Dwight Whitney expressed the traditional conception this way he said language is audible thinking the spoken instrumentality of thought which indicate means that speech sound any other externalization is kind of a secondary property of language the fundamental property is the internal construction of indefinitely many thoughts by this generative procedure we'd now say that's different from a contemporary view which is so widespread as to be virtually a dogma namely that this function of language is communication and that grew out of the evolved out of communication systems as a matter hasn't been studied but I suspect that this modern view which is in fact a Dogma just can't question it is in philosophy psychology linguistics is probably a reflection of the grip of associationism and behaviorism it's a 20th century doctrines which have a very tight grip even those who reject them fundamentally accept them I think it also relates to a highly oversimplified view of the modern evolutionary biology which is totally different from what evolutionary biologists believe but it's also a widespread an interesting topic another one will put aside looking at the general question the question of what an organ is for what's its function is a very far from is far from clear I so take any anything system you like say take the spine what's its function well function is to hold the body up to protect the nerves to produce blood cells to store calcium that's what does so which one is its function maybe all of them are you pick one somehow well the weight one one is usually picked is by evolutionary considerations which which of those various uses is how it is the way it evolved you can give arguments like that about the spine but you can't really do it about language there's a huge literature growing all the time on what's called evolution of language as libraries full of it now last twenty or thirty years mainly which is very curious in something number of ways that's one reason it's curious because the topic doesn't exist the languages don't evolve they change but they don't evolve that's quite different evolution means change in the genetic basis for language what's called the universal grammar ug and contemporary terminology the it's also interesting to compare the huge library of speculations and there are speculations about what's called evolution of language really means evolution of the capacity for language that compare that with incomparably similar a simpler topics like an evolution of the communication system of bees by any measure that's far simpler question but it's barely studied in biology because it's recognised to be too hard on the other hand evolution of the language capacity which is comparably more difficult just not right because the complexity of it join a fossil evidence and so on you know that's a huge topic now actually a little bit is known about it not very much and what is known as suggestive I'll come back to what it indicates the the one one thing that is known with considerable confidence is that in the past roughly fifty to eighty thousand years since humans left Africa our ancestors left Africa there's been no evolution of the language capacity it's changed it stayed identical and there's very strong evidence for that there's no difference that's detectable in capacity for language any language in a Papua New Guinea unlike that the tribe and you know Dublin children are interchanged they're they'll grow up the way their society is and that seems to be true of cognitive capacities generally if there are group differences they're so subtle that they're virtually undetectable so that tells us that something at least the ug the language capacity hadn't changed hasn't evolved in roughly fifty thousand or more years the with less confidence but some you can suggest that if you go back another fifty or a hundred thousand years before that there probably wasn't any language at all there you look at the archaeological where of course we have no fossil effort for record but if you look at the archaeological evidence there is a sudden leap in creative activity sometimes called a great leap forward by fellow anthropologists roughly around seventy five thousand a hundred thousand years ago somewhere in that neighborhood and it's you know complex tools complex social arrangements numerical development of numeric a representation of planetary you know the celestial events and so on and so forth it's generally assumed sort of plausibly that's that that's connected with the emergence of language which differently with human language which differs radically along any dimension you can think of from other community from any communication system that exists in other animals primates and so on well these are among the reason of course everyone would like to know something about the neural basis for language but it's very difficult to explore the topic one reason is its disconnect it's unrelated to any other systems that are known so we know a lot about the human visual system but that's because the human visual system is quite similar to the visual systems of say monkeys and cats and rightly or wrongly we allow ourselves to carry out invasive experimentation with other organisms so you can learn about their visual systems that tells you something about ours so there's something about the neurophysiology of the human visual system is understood but that's not going to work for language there just are no other organisms so there's no other one to look at because there's no analogous system anywhere in the biological world there's kind of a very weak analogies you know with birds ants but evolutionarily so remote can't possibly tell you anything it's so the comparative study is out and we don't allow ourselves to do in face of experiments with humans you can think of all kinds of possible experiments that could teach you a lot as you can't carry them out so that means research in this domain has to be sophisticated and indirect some things are learned but not a lot nevertheless I think it is possible to say something about the essential function of language you know the core property of it but the way to do that the only way I know since comparative evidence is out and there were physiological evidence is limited there's some old mentioned some but there is a way to do it and that's to look into the way in which language into language design what kind of a system is it when you investigate its character and another way of approaching it is to compare is to consider questions of communicative efficiency of what would be in a system that is efficient for communication compare it with design of language and in particular compare it with questions of computational efficiency there's there is an assumption here the assumption is that however language developed it's satisfied it's a computational system so it satisfied general principles of computational efficiency which are not specifically linguistic or even biological maybe laws of nature so granting that assumption for which there's a good deal of evidence not only in this but in other domains we can ask about computational efficiency and communicative efficiency and ask how they interrelate well I think considerations of that that kind I'll barely have a chance to hint at them do suggest quite strongly that the traditional view is correct the language is an instrument of thought informally and that the modern dogmas about language and communication are just wrong communication isn't and as a use of language of course but this plenty of other uses as well and it's a secondary it's not really critical part of language and not significant particularly specific to language and communicating all kind of other way style of dress I come your hair and facial expressions innumerable ways to communicate language of course is one but nothing special about the connection well this these questions began to take a clear form approximately 60 years ago when there were the first serious efforts to try to actually construct generative procedures computational procedures that would meet the minimum condition required namely a generating an infinite array of unstructured of structured expressions which have an interpretation in these two interfaces as they're called meaning and externalization the sound as soon as those attempts were made some very puzzling phenomena were discovered that's commonly the case when you begin to look at some topic closely turns out that everything he believed was wrong actually that's the classic moment of the origins of modern science so for millennia scientists had believed that there are simple answers to the question why if you let go over rock it falls and if you release steam it rises they're going to their natural place and how two objects interact the through sympathies and antipathies how do you perceive a triangle is a triangle over there in a form Flitz through the air or gets into your brain and there's a triangle in there and so on for a range of questions these were the conclusions of the best scientists literally for millennia when Galileo and others began to be agreed to be puzzled about these phenomena instead of just accepting them it immediately turned out that all your intuitions are totally wrong you know the rest of the story that's how science starts that's how discovery starts and intelligent inquiry starts and any domain it's been very hard for this to penetrate the to the soft sciences and the humanities just isn't grasped right to the present day even in fields close to the sciences like in its demand computational cognitive science totally misunderstood but the ability to be puzzled is a pretty important one to try to cultivate it's the core property the thing that things had learned from infancy up through graduate school and Beyond well one puzzle about language that came to light about 60 years ago and is still very much debated and bears on the question I was raising it has to be very simple but rather curious fact so it takes say the sentence instinctively Eagles that fly swim and ask yourself what instinctively goes with well it goes with swim not with fly or similarly suppose you raise a question and you ask can Eagles that fly swim well it can goes with swim not with fly which is a curious fact because a computational procedure is involved which is quite complex there there is a minimal distance relation that is true of the actual linkage but it's minimal structural distance its distance it's the closest the two things that are closest to each other when you look into the structures and that's a computational complex computational problem on the other hand it worked the other way through proximity instead of structural distance it would be a trivial copy no problem you just check the closest verb to instinctively or to can and that's the one that's associated with that's elementary elementary computational problem but language doesn't use the simple computation it uses a complex one which ought to be puzzling and it is supposedly I think and in fact it's not just true of these examples that's true of every construction that's known in every language that's known so there's something far-reaching about it will this the general principle mineral search you know closest distance that's all over the place and language that probably it's just kind of a effect of the general property of mineral computation that I mentioned in this case there is some supporting evidence from neuroscience one of the most interesting experimental results in neuroscience has to do exactly with this it involves it's an expert it's work done in Milan the for those of your linguists the linguist involved as Andrea Mauro other biologists the they investigated the following paradigm take these speakers of German and and give them to nonsense languages invented languages one of which satisfies the properties of say Italian which they don't know and the other is designed to violate principles of universal grammar so in this connection take an invented language in which the you negate a sentence by putting the negative particle after the third word let's say the language doesn't a much more complex way with using structural distance well it turns out that for the case of the nonsense language that satisfies ug principles you get normal brain activation in the language areas for the case that violates ug principles like having negation as the third word in the sentence you get a lot of brain activation all over the place and people can ultimately solve the problem but it's evident that the teaching they're treating is a puzzle and not as a link not as a language problem there's also some evidence some of you may know this from observation of cognitively impaired but linguistically capable subjects neil Smith's work with his famous subject they did try experiments like this and compared with normals and you find for much the same thing well that yields a suggestion a possible explanation for the curious fact that a child reflexively uses structural distance minimizes structural distance and ignores the much more simple computational process of linear distance the assumption would be that linear order is simply not available to the language learner who is confronted with examples like the ones I mentioned rather the learner is guided by a ug principle a principle of language capacity which simply says there is no such thing as linear order it's just there's only structural properties and you have to minimize those and that conclusion has caused a lot of consternation in the cognitive sciences there's actually a small industry in computational cognitive science trying to demonstrate that you can get these results by a statistical analysis of massive amounts of data paper after paper on that every approach that's clear enough to look at fails irremediably furthermore it wouldn't make any difference if they worked because they're not dealing with the right question suppose you could show for the cases in English that I mentioned that you could somehow the child could learn this by statistical analysis of data which isn't totally impossible but suppose you could show it it would be totally meaningless because the question is why does language do it this way always not just for these cases but every case not just in English but in every language and why does no child ever make a mistake about it why is it basically reflexive and that question wouldn't be addressed even if impossibly some of these approaches work papers keep coming out about it and that's actually a good illustration of the unwillingness to be puzzled that has to be overcome if science is even beginning to take off well a more far-reaching thesis is that linear order is never available for computation in the core areas of language in syntax ends construction and semantic interpretation there's actually considerable evidence for that in other domains too it seems that structural properties like say hierarchy play a role but order does not languages that have said almost mirror image word orders operate exactly the same way the this suggests that the linear order is only a peripheral part of the language system and you can understand why it's there the sensory motor system requires it so you can't speak in parallel let's say and you can't speak in structures you have to speak in a sequence of linear order of words so linear has to be imposed somewhere other arrangements but it looks like it's just a reflex of the sensorimotor system well one of the few things that's known about evolution with fear of confidence is that the sensorimotor system was around for hundreds of thousands of years before language ever emerged doesn't seem to be adapted to the language system apes for example of approximately the same auditory system as humans and even focus on the same kinds of cement phonetic features phonological features that are essential for human language but of course when they hear a language it's just noise they don't hear anything actually there's another striking curiosity that's almost never been studied again a failure to be puzzled as how come a an infant of one day old infant can pick out of all the noise around them some subpart which is language related it's a very tricky task if you think about it if some other even an organ ate let's say it was essentially the same auditory system its presented with the same noise it's just noise but for an infant it's not noise some scattered part of it is language related and that's reflexively picked up and goes on almost reflexively to gain the capabilities we're now using including such properties as the one I mentioned that you can't use linear order in the internal computations despite the computational simplicity of it well that suggests already that you should we should probably return to the traditional concept of language the concept that Galileo the cart and others expressed the Whitney articulated in the form I mentioned and particular and recognized that external ization all together is a peripheral part of the whole language system just reflecting accidental aspects of the sensorimotor system which we have to use for externalization and of course it would follow from that that particular uses of language like communication are even more peripheral and secondary to basic language and all the extensive speculation about evolution of language is just off the off the mark to begin with you can throw out the libraries for this reason alone actually there is evidence from some evidence from the limited evolutionary evidence around that that conclusions correct they want us time to go into that well if there were time I would there isn't I would go on to give some more complex examples which require a little more thought and attention but when you look into the more complex questions of somatic interpretation and communicative efficiency and what you can show pretty convincingly I think that that the design of language yields directly yields the basis for semantic interpretation but constructs problems for communication it mean it for it it introduces properties into the what is pronounced that it cause a lot of what are called parsing problems problems of perception and so on there's many examples of this in fact every case that won't have time to go into it but every case that's known of a conflict between communicative efficiency and computational efficiency that is best language design every single case that's known and there's quite a variety communicative efficiency is just disregarded it you know hands down always computational efficiency that is good design for semantic interpretation wins out and that tells you something like general the skip a lot of stuff this is no time that the suggest a part from the particular conclusion here that the modern dogmas are probably all off the wall that communication is not a fundamental part of language it's very peripheral along with other uses that the language is designed basically as an instrument of thought a result that it developed apparently very quickly some small rewiring of the brain and maybe you know a hundred thousand years ago which is nothing in evolutionary time simply provided the computational procedure simple computational procedure which yields the which answers the question with except that it modifies it in that the externalization part is secondary a matter of adapting it to a sensory motor system that was all around but kind of a more general point that I would kind of like to bring up and I won't go into but you can think about is that if you make it close attention to rather technical properties of the nature of language specific technical questions they can lead to conclusions that have quite far-reaching ramifications about the nature of our fundamental mental processes and the consequences of considerable significant I think for the Human Sciences even in their that currently barely developed form so let me stop there [Applause] are you asking a question about the way people think about it or about the modern dog more about the facts why the dogma exists yeah well I think as I said it hasn't been studied but I think it's probably obvious the 20th century underwent a shift of attitudes towards humans and their actions and so on basically associationism and then general behavioral ISM so you go back 50 years ago this second of psychology was called behavioral science sociology was behavioral science everything was behavioral science which is a very that's the time when I sort of was in grad school or I was one of a few people that this is pretty crazy even without knowing that any conclusions I mean to Cole say psychology behavioral science is like calling physics meter reading science because you know the data for physics is reading meters and that some of the data not all of it some of the data from for psychology is behavior not all of it but it means that looking at the field was a study of data not as a study of whatever the internal structures are and that just doesn't make any sense the combined with this was something else I write about this period computers were being developed actual working computers and it was widely believed and still is that sooner or later they'll be it was massive computers with very rapid processing and they can deal with huge amounts of data and carry out some statistical procedure on the data and something miraculous will come out it's still very widely believed and people are very misled by it in fact there's a there's something called the Turing test which you've probably heard about which every year there's a competition if you when it you get $100,000 to pass something called the Turing test a totally meaningless task it's it's it's supposed to show it can you show that machines think it's all based on a paper of Alan Turing's it was a great competition and one of the founders of computational science and an eight-page paper that he wrote in 1950 on what their machines can think but he starts off the paper by saying the question whether machines can think is too meaningless to deserve discussion that sentence has somehow been ignored in the entire literature and there's a good reason for it because you know to ask whether machines think is basically asking what kind of metaphor you like it's like asking the submarine swim well you know from a certain point of view you can say so from another point of view or not but it's not a meaningful question he put and he proposed this imitation game which is now called the Turing test but he proposed it for a different reason he said it'll be interesting that the idea is to see if he can construct a program that'll delude a blind observer you know one who doesn't see what's going on to not be able to distinguish the program from a person okay he says they'll be useful for trying to as a challenge to create bigger machines better machines okay maybe so that probably was but it doesn't say anything about whether machines can think in fact the whole idea of machines thinking is posed in a way which is almost designed to cause confusion I should say that the people who are confused by this are some of the most the leading philosophers the most influential philosophers and scientists and others is not a trivial thing I won't mention names but many of you for one thing a machine the computer itself is may be useful as a paperweight but it doesn't do anything what is doing anything is the program that you put into it okay so the real cook if you want to pose the meaningless question it should be controlling well what's a program a programs just a theory written in a crazy notation so that a machine can a computer can handle it so the question really is welcome this theory think in other words is this a theory of thinking well you know the answer is not unless you understand something about fear of thinking nothing's a theory of X just because it passes some meaningless test you know it's a theory of X if it gives you insight and understanding into the nature of X so the real question is are the theories that are written in these programs that giving us some insight into the nature of thinking I said you pose that question you know even bother with the prize because of course they're not not doing anything and these things combine the Association is psychology the behavioral turn in the human sciences the availability of data processing they all combined to lead to what in my view is just massive confusion in all the fields related to these topics that's probably the reason I mean you know you have to look at individuals and ask but I think if you do you find something like that and it's right to the present it hasn't changed in the least yeah [Music] and so I'm just wondering so some linguistic things that we do practices that we engage that we've been trying to call linguistic are are speaking to one another also correcting each other's uses of language so if I pointed up the dog can I say look there's a lovely pigeon somebody will say that's not a duck so we try to get our language used to conform so we're all speaking the same it takes place but if you just think about it for a minute probably 99.9% of your use of language is internal it doesn't involve any other people so you can't it's it takes a tremendous act of will not to think to yourself in language it's almost impossible every minute of the day you're talking to yourself you're when you sleep you know doing the same thing now there are cases of the kind that you describe there are all kinds of uses of the system just like they're all kind of uses of this mine but it doesn't tell you much in fact if you really look closely this has not been studied there's another dog right here that's blocking the study of this it's a dog move that in the modern period actually goes back to pretty much decline and then it's picked up by John Cyril and others the idea that there can't be anything in the mind that is not available to introspection nothing be in the mind unless you it may not be conscious but it's got to be available to consciousness otherwise it's not in the mind that's a totally hopeless most of what goes on internally is completely beyond the level of introspection for example the the case that I mentioned I mean the principle which is pretty well established that linear order is not available for syntactic and semantic computation you can't introspect into that it's not conscious the same is true of just visual perception for example one of the most interesting results in the study of visual perception is a conclusion that came out of David Mars lab Shimon almonds principle what if it's called the rigidity principle this they were able to show that if you present a subject with two guests a cop to kiss the scopic presentations you know it's a screen with a couple of dots on it if you have successive presentations not many maybe three or four presentations of a few dots on the screen of what you perceive is a rigid object in motion okay that's pretty curious too in experience you don't have no experience with rigid objects throughout all of human history till very recently there weren't any rigid objects like your walk in the forest no rigid objects around and but somehow the system is probably true for other it hasn't really tested on other organisms it's hard to test what's probably true for Apes and cats and so on our system is just designed to impose rigid objects in motion on virtually no data and that by now the mathematical properties have been worked out the neurological properties less known but again you can't bring that to consciousness and I think the same is true of speaking to yourself try it sometime think about what you're actually doing when you talk to your what you call talking to yourself I think you'll find that what you're actually what's actually in your mind consciously is just fragments the little fragments flip by and out of those fragments you can suddenly construct the sentence in a meaningful sentence and that meaningful sentence is probably being constructed unconsciously beyond the level of consciousness internally by whatever these generous processes are and bits and pieces of it reach consciousness like a couple of fragments of phrases and that's what we call thinking to ourselves and by now that's you know that seems to be true in other domains too there's some minor famous experiments the livid experiments on the decision-making which have been widely misinterpreted but what was found was that if you decide to do something say I decided to pick this up milliseconds before I decide something's going on in the motor areas namely the the right you know organization of motion to pick it up well in the immediate conclusion was that was drawn from this as okay that shows there's no freedom of will and don't you Angeles or at what it shows is that everything that's going on is beyond the level of consciousness at which we know and every other domain - but as long as philosophy of mind is marine bound by this dogma that you can't go beyond what's available to consciousness or else is on the mind it's never gonna discover and I think and there's a whole collection and I think that Dogma too probably goes back to behaviorism I mean it's pretty clear in Cline's case it's quite they remember distinguishes it says actions can be in accord with principles or guided by principles that's all in accord with principles means like the planets following Kepler's laws it guided by principles means you formulate what you're going to do and then you do it and you say virtually all action doesn't fall in any of those category those categories and with John Searle that comes up is what he calls his association principle you know F dev has to be available to consciousness somehow before it can be attributed to the mind and a whole spins off a whole theory about rules and so on but that's just approaching these questions of your hands tied behind your back and I think the same is true of the considerations that you mentioned they're real but it's very peripheral to look to the use of language whether you think about if you were raised without an external language without the shared language your irregular to your desert island experiment what would happen there's actually some evidence about this there are the most striking evidence is studies there's a couple of studies of children who were found who's who who's deaf children who were whose parents had been indoctrinated into what's called the oralist tradition which is very common until pretty recently that is that deaf children should not be allowed to learn sign language because they have to be part of the general society so they have to learn how to lip read it just makes no sense at all by now at least sensible areas that's all been dropped but that was a major dogma for a long time and there were parents who were the one famous case of a couple of three cousins in Philadelphia who student have a lot of glycans worked on it three cousins who played together little kids have played together they were three were deaf their parents were so indoctrinated that they didn't even gesture to the kids because they didn't want them to be mislead into developing signs so when the kids were discovered it turned out that they were chattering to each other in a sign language which is a at the expected level of development for a three-year-old you know four-year-old same structures everything this so that essentially invented their own language I have no data actually this had been noticed much earlier by Eric Klinenberg who that one of the you know the person really founded modern biology of language he was a fellow we were friends back in grad school and at the time he was interested in language deficiencies so he went one of the things he did was visit the School for the Deaf the famous school for the deaf and blind and Boston Perkins Academy he went just to observe see what's going on and they were all strictly oralist you know that was the dogma but he noticed that if the teacher turned to the blackboard the kids would start signing to each other kind of things that kids do if the teacher isn't looking and obviously they had developed their own sign language and we're just using it when they weren't under control well you know in those days you couldn't publish anything like this because it was so counter to everything anyone believed so it never got published but since then when the topics become legitimate there's other discussions like that now let's take the case of someone who has no input at all okay there are a couple that's the wolf boy case well chances are very strong that the language capacity would never develop but that's normal I'm gonna take say the visual capacity remember in the case of vision we can study cats and monkeys and we know what happens so if you take say a kitten and in the first few weeks of life its deprived of structured visual stimuli so like that has a ping-pong ball orbs I all it gets is diffused light but nothing structure then the neurological basis for analyzing visual systems just degenerates it's the same there anymore so they're never gonna learn how to see and that's true of just about every capacity they tend to have what are called critical periods you know periods in which the capacity has to developer will never develop and again we don't do experiments with humans but if you did you'd probably find that there are indirect evidence to indicate that there are several critical periods in which if there's if the system is not stimulated somehow it's not gonna function I mean most of us have an experience with this for almost all adults there are individual differences but for most adults it's extremely hard to learn a second language infants do it reflexively and a ten-year-old will do it reflexively but for older people it's it's worked I mean if one of you were to go to a foreign like country with your 10 year old child you would discover that in a couple of weeks the kid is jabbering fluently and you're and he doesn't care and maybe the kid doesn't want to be there that experience but they just can't help it they just learned the light and speak the language like a sponge on the other hand the adult can study and take classes and work hard on it it's not easy and probably some critical period has been passed there is one case that's been actually studied carefully of a girl this called genie looking up the literature ge and I have to be careful about the literature because a lot of popular literary genre which is pure garbage but there's also some technical papers as a woman named Susan Curtis very good cognitive neuroscientist who worked with Jeannie and her papers tell the story straight what happened with Jeannie is that she was found when she was I think 13 years old as she was up in an attic not tied to a chair heard some psychotic parents and they would shove food in occasionally she could pick up the food needed but she had no they deprived they tried to deprive her of any external stimuli so nobody ever spoke to her you know that sort of thing when she was found of course she was rescued there were efforts to try to help her and Susan Curtis as the was the therapist actually took care of her and it looked for a while they were among other thing that she was turned out to be quite bright she could learn all kinds of things and she was she learned very quickly how to delude people you know she was apparently very manipulative she could make people think she was doing all kind of things which she wasn't doing and for a while they thought that she was acquiring language but it turned out to be an illusion she was acquiring ways of diluting the people around her into thinking she could use language about with closer to us as it turned out she could never overcome that barrier now you can't really be sure what that means because a kid has been raised in those circumstances is going to be totally psychotic so naturally so how much of this is just general psychosis how much is deterioration of the language faculty you can't tell to do that you'd have to do invasive experiments of the kind that you can imagine but we can't do so it's that's the country act is another kind of evidence that is quite interesting that has never been a it's a tick Helen Keller okay Helen Keller was extreme per unit of blind and deaf very fluent you know she wonderful writer you know all kind of interesting ideas no difficulty in expressing herself she learned what's claimed is that she learned by touch okay her teacher grants all of them you know spelled out words in her hand if it's leaked recently been discovered from photographs from that period that Helen Keller actually had invented a technique that is now using used for teaching the deafblind the technique is to put a hand on the face and your thumb is on the vocal cords you can tell if the vocal cords are moving and your fingers on the face you can see the way the face is moving so you got a minimal amount of theta but now that's been studied actually my wife worked on that at MIT and there are subjects who've learned this system who are pretty fluent they nobody's ever reached the Helen Keller level but it's pretty fluent which is pretty amazing itself this is almost no beta however there's something else that was discovered there were too few cases to publish anything about it but the few cases that worked they found that every case that was successful the person had lost sight and hearing after about 16 months 18 months old what happened these are case of spinal meningitis now it's curable something happen anywhere but that where there was a sudden loss of both speech and hearing hearing in sight and if there were more than roughly that age then they could gain a fair facility in Helen Keller was 20 months old when she lost sight in hearing and she gained you know perfect fluency but before that there weren't any successful cases well that suggests something it suggests that by say 18 months old kid ory knows the whole language they're not exhibiting the knowledge but anyone who's paid attention to children though that they know a lot more than they can exhibit you know they're understanding all kinds of things that they don't seem to be able to do anything and it's perfectly possible that by saying that age the child has actually acquired the major aspects of language and that the Sodoma that method that I mentioned is just kind of eliciting it you know eliciting something that's already inside now again if you could do direct experiments with humans you could test this but of course can you have to look at indirect evidence but that's I think the evidence points in that direction thank you that's a good question and I didn't hear who you were I'm sorry as your background linguistics yes well then you know there's a lot of work on it like Richard King's work on LCA for example all of the there are various ideas about how a structured system can be mapped into a linear system and what are the principles that do it and there's some quite interesting ideas pretty far-reaching but it's a real problem it's a real question and it's only been asked in recent years because you know that it was only recognized to be a problem in recent years now if you go back to Scizor and Bloomfield you know the great modern linguists they didn't see it as a problem the so first assure it's all Association you know and in fact the caesarian linguistics the near the concept of sentence sentences somewhere and boundary between a long and pole you know it doesn't fit anywhere for Bloomfield the language is just the collection of expressions that can be used in a speech community the same as for coin and it doesn't mean anything but as long as you look at the problems that way which is pretty much like the like scholastic physics you know sympathies and antipathies going to your natural place then you're never gonna see any problems it's when you start asking what it means for what kind of a set is it that's the expressions that can be used in a speech community when you start asking those questions that everything suddenly becomes very puzzling including this question which is a very live one today you know what is you know it raises all kinds of questions like how to japanese-english a yield linear order when they seem to have opposite structural orders there are two questions there some students at Trinity so I agree with you some of the rejection of this door well having extravasation of use as probably thought but and that was the opens up sort of an interesting now we have to think of a new way to have snap interpretation of semantic injure yeah because now we have one person who sort of also shared this view will be doing further though he sort of gave his Eastman same sort of in a couple of places naked earth he finds your news on semantics hustling is the world of excuses and sort of the specters I'm trying to say well the way to go back is by having informational semantics and then try to find some causal relation between world and representations I mean you've been advertising a couple of places that mental representation doesn't requirement representation off and I would you can say that man representation presentation also thank you with that too but I still share something about focus puzzlement at some point we have to have so if I use possibly what do you think about as well we're old friends for 50 years and we found each other's views puzzling for its reciprocal in fact when I mentioned about cows and the word cow I had your footer in mind his you if you know you know his view he says exactly what I said child sees a cow it's nobody says cow that sets up the connection and from then on the sight of the cow causes its causal relation of the mental image image or notion or whatever it is cow and if that simply does not stand up to examination as soon as you begin to look at words instantly this was pretty well understood in the 17th century so if you read the lock Hume the English plate nests others that they understood that the air can our concept of you like if of an object is not individuated by identifiable physical properties so you read lock on person for example this is persons they put in these terms but what he if you look at the kind of thought experiments Locke carried out with from what if you have two minds in same body that kind of thing what he's actually saying is that our concept of person is based on some notion like psychic continuity ok psychic continuity is not a physical property it's not something a physicist in discover it's something that we're imposing on the world it's like the rigidity principle in fact for Locke he says person is what he calls a forensic concept it carries with it notions like responsibilities and rights well you know physicists can't look at an object and say oh PS responsibilities and rights actually there's a this is known in the history of philosophy there's a recent book on it by Galen Strawson who brings up these things he unfortunately doesn't refer to the history about them because nobody knows it but the but that's correct and and that's just true of everything including Cal's also you can quickly make up simple thought experiments that show that notions like Cal are also based on psychic continuity among other properties in fact there's something a part of this is very familiar to everyone fairy tales infants have no problem understanding fairy tales that's easy you know but just think of the standard fairy tale you know the Wicked Witch cast a spell on the handsome prince and terms that turns him into a frog let's say for the rest of the story the prince has all the physical properties of a frog all of them then the beautiful princess kill kisses the frog becomes the handsome prince again that means it always was the prince didn't matter what its physical characteristics were because it's because what makes it a person is this strange property of psychic continuity that runs through the whole thing always and you can do the same there's similar stories with animals you know turned into something and then turn back into themselves and so on and I children have no problems with that that's that perfectly straightforward because their concepts are simply not based on physical properties um of course in part they are like you don't distinguish you know say a cow and a house or something but it's only a small part of it most of their concepts even of the simplest notions are pretty much like the rigidity principle you see them a certain way because of the way you interpret the world and you can't get that by association and causality so I think Jerry's approach is and every it's not just him everyone's is hopeless from the start in fact I think if you look closely you I think you find that in a human language there really is no referent no notion of reference or denotation there's a ways of interpreting the world based on our internal conceptual systems but they do not set up a relationship between an internal symbol like a word and some mind independent entity which was what reference your denotation would have to be and in fact feel it is your philosophy no some of the famous conundrums have to do with this so it takes a the ship of thesis yeah the dark story story is that a thesis on a ship in the ocean and variants of it any one of the boards rots throws the board over word overboard replaces it by a different board this keeps going until finally every board has been replaced and it's still the ship of theseus although all the physical properties have changed well that the conundrum comes when you add say that there's somebody on the shore who's picking up the old boards and putting them back together and rebuilds the original ship which one is the ship of theses nobody has an answer Eric and the reason is our cognitive systems are not designed so they can deal with a question like that actually I tried this out with my a ridiculously small sample of my grandchildren once made me watch some space program Star Trek or something where they have there's device on the spaceship in which a person can go into it and be transported somehow reconstructed on another planet okay so nobody has any problem with that but then I asked them what would happen if the person who was reconstructed on the other planet was still in the box that he went into which one would be the person that's the ship of theseus they were kind of stuck with that they thought about it had different answers but basically had no answer and I think if you look at Crick these puzzle it's pretty much the same the puzzle dissolves if you don't assume that there is an entity a mind independent entity that words like London or had RFC and so on are referring to but if there is no such relation in language then the puzzle can't be formulated and of course they're gonna be questions you can't answer like which is that you know which is the ship or who's the person which is the person in the box but there's no reason why you should be able to answer them why should our cognitive systems be developed so that any question you come up with we have an intuitive answer to no they're not those are the traditional puzzles and to find out why they're unanswerable we have to look into the nature of our conceptual systems and I think it's here that ideas like say Jerry's just found her right at the beginning because there are no there is no way of all they try enemies that any word you can think of no matter how simple you'll find that it it's the concept is individuated by non physical properties bhakti this was noticed by Aristotle Aristotle talks about it he talks about it in metaphysical terms so he asks what's a house you know what's the definition of house he's not doesn't say the definition of the word house the definition of the thing this is in the metaphysics and he says the definition of house is a combination of matter and form okay so the matter is you know board and bricks and stuff like that and the form is what it's used for what the design is things like that which are you know this was all later reconstructed in the 17th century and mr. melodical terms these is the cognitive structures without Aristotle's metaphysics anymore matter and form but the basic idea is right that what constitutes a concept for us is some combination of things we perceive and constructions that we impose on it by our complicated cognitive systems for which things like a psychic continuity and design and use and so on are critical now if there's something that looks like a house say but it's used to distort books it's a library it's not a house then this holds of every term you can think of River tree almost everything maybe everything everything has been looked I closed up so you started sometimes at me I'm the three juniors and then you probably need you to pour your explanation there are certain semantic structures in the head and one of the things that rotation your while communication is use of language it's not essential but I was not very many be aware you think that communication can become essential when we've got other people involved so when when you make twenty cooperate with each other outside when I see someone's facial expression as a smile and it's beautiful and I say and then I ask myself well are they smiling to me because they breathe with one same perhaps they're smiley happy because maybe what I'm saying is like a ridiculous or there are only possibilities for how it how I interpret it they're smart how I interpret their there's fun and said that becomes essential for me to kind of totally ask them is this what you mean by your smile what you're saying or perhaps you're right if no once we once therefore there people arrive to you want to cooperate with and we won't understand well here you're using what do they mean and pull crisis sense what do they intended it's not really meaning its intention yeah he tried to unite them but I don't think that works but here is a clear case of that's normal and interaction with other people or even what you read you try to figure out what's intended you don't pay much attention to the literal meaning of the expression of course that gives you a hint but you're really trying to figure out what's going on in the person's mind were they trying to convey and that's a pretty tricky operation you know but and a lot of things come into play you know background assumptions where the person's coming from intellectually what are your shared beliefs Isis I said it's a it's a complicated as social action which of course it takes place all the time and a language is part of it but notice that the literal meaning of expressions well as you say is only one piece of the puzzle I mean if the person's talking Swahili you can't do this but if the person's talking English language you know you can instinctively and reflexively you know no thought grasp the literal meaning that's one factor and that enters into you're trying to determine what the intention is but the kinds of things I was talking about just are the stuff that's going on reflexively the literal meaning and there that's quite interesting properties and I think even the look at the literal meaning shows that communication and other language uses are a peripheral of the system doesn't mean they're unimportant just maybe they're very important for human life incidentally I think communication is a bad word for this kind of social interaction I mean if communication is supposed to have some meaning it has to do with translation of information but most of our interaction with other people isn't transmission of information like you know you talking to somebody at a party let's say you're you know trying to transmit information doing all kinds of things or you're standing at a it's very hard for people to be near each other and not to talk if you want to really embarrass people that put them in a closed room and ask them not to talk to each other I mean it's it's very threatening you just can't do it you know try it sometimes so you kind of forced to talk to the people you don't have to bust up you talk to the person who's next to you but you're not conveying information you're just maintaining some kind of social interaction that's comfortable so I don't think it should be even those things should be called communication it's again the idea of using communication comes from this kind of instrumentalist approach to this study of psychology and sociology everything has to be for some you know purpose there's no other to achieve something but most of our use of language even with other people isn't achieving anything more than maintaining a pleasant social conditions you know so there are two questions here the lady in the second row about modularity of mind some of the ideas and particularly the structural properties of the linguistic system may be works available for those individuals who don't have language for whatever reason who fail to develop if they're competent is there a cognitive first of all about modularity we have to make a distinction between the two interpretations that concept the one that's common use actually is Jerry's Jerry photos is he's talking about modularity of processing systems so it's the input systems that are modular he's arguing and it would have to be extended to output systems of course according to him the what he calls the central systems have to be unstructured coiny and isotropic so there can't be any structure to the input systems that does set up a problem so for example why do you hear English and speak English why don't you hear English and speak Japanese and if the systems are unconnected why is that the case well there has to be structure for the end for the central systems and here you get a different notion of modularity a notion of modularity that's more related to acquisition than processing so given all the noise and confusion around you how do things get sorted out into different systems well that's where the internal system of modularity arise and I think that's where your question comes so what are the connections between if any between the internal linguistic system and other cognitive systems it's it's an interesting question and the waited there are other language is you every group of humans that's ever been discovered has essentially the same like same kind of language but there are other there are other common properties that are found like music just but I think every society that's know the you know uncontacted so-called primitive you know hunter-gatherer tribes they always have some kind of music of drumming whatever it may be I think they almost always have a dance that seems to be universal these things just have no function at all you know like what's ask for but the children pick it up instantly kind of automatically every society has it you could ask the question whether another thing that every known society has is arithmetic all capacity know that there's a lot of misleading information about that that's often claimed that aboriginal groups don't have arithmetic that's based on the fact that they don't have number of words or they may have number of words that only go to three or four or something but this was studied carefully by a really outstanding linguist Ken Hale about 40 years ago he's one of the founders of Australian linguistics and he did study languages which don't have number of words but he found that the people first of all they have other ways of expressing numbers like maybe they don't have the word five but they could go like that and other ways of doing he also found that if these people are introduced into a market system they start selling and buying they can do all the computations immediately so they must have the whole number system and the same that appears to be true about color systems like a lot of the system is well known that there are languages that don't have color words sometimes beyond black and white but as he found with the australian aboriginal groups they have other ways of expressing it so they may not have read that they can say blood like you know and so the whole conceptual system wall seems to be there the arithmetic is particularly interesting because where that comes from is is an old problem after that goes back to the origins of evolutionary theories of Darwin and Wallace puzzled about the fact that all humans they did know all the data but they were right that all humans have arithmetic will capacity and that's a puzzle for them because it wasn't selected it's never been used so there was no selection in fact the using the earth medical system is very recent and very restricted to small groups of people but everybody's got it so where to come from Wallace in fact thought that there has to be some other process in evolution beyond natural selection Darwin didn't like that so they debated it what I think the answer in all these cases has to be that these things are kind of piggybacking on systems that are already there for some reason in the case of arithmetic if you look closely at language design at the computational the elementary computational Princip that enter into the generative procedure that they actually yield arithmetic if you take those procedures and you take a system with one element and the lexicon call it one it yields arithmetic so it could arithmetic just could be you know piggybacking on the system that's already there but what about music there is work some interesting work trying to show that the basic properties of musical systems are similar to the structural properties of linguistic systems is quite interesting work on that maybe that'll come out dance you could try this a female some Goodman tried to do something with dance but I think these are really good question so the question you have to ask where do these things come from in the case of language we have no idea where it came from but you can imagine a way in which it could have evolved suddenly it's a slight rewiring of the brain that maybe the other things just spin off them maybe there's some other origin it's a good question but in order to study you have to accept the notion of modularity that is not used in the philosophical literature not in put modularity but rather central modularity and that's what's explicitly denied by Fodor and implicitly denied quite generally dr. Chomsky and I am a student of linguistics in UCD my third year one of the things about you mentioned that the cow I was reminded I went to a coffee shop just before I arrived here but somebody's looking for the toilet door and they were indicated to her to a bookshelf citizen or so in a sense I'm surrounded by doors in useful building so that idea that for the door is assumed to be that it looks like something else but still as a function in tourism tourism to Eureka yeah but I was interested as well the idea that I believe he wasn't use before the cost conceptual metaphors which we should use so the matter as well that is almost become away which ideas are as far as through political systems so that so there are what sounds like serious questions about whether the language depends on thought or thought depends on language but in order to study those questions you have to clarify what you mean by language and what you mean by thought and the fact is there's very little to say about thought except insofar as thought is expressed in language which undercuts the investigation we have to find a way to think about the thought that's language independent and that's not easy I mean you could do it in other domains like you know imagery visual domains how do you find your way home at night things like that well it's some kind of thought a lot of it can't be expressed in language but this is no theory of thought and until there's a kind of some kind of a theory of thought that's independent of language it's gonna be very very hard to even pose the questions so it's a traditional question and but it's one of those questions which I don't think we're in a position to formulate because we don't understand we mean by thought this is where the misinterpretations of touring play a role so it's a good question is I don't have a baby farm with formulated yet I think we have time for one more question Paul L burn every Paul you will introduce your perspective what diagnosis it was since a media story I marry mr. College in London I'd like to ask you about something that you said in response to a question a couple of questions back maybe about words not having real-world a reference [Music] as well what effector to point out is that some of those cases seem to be cases that are not accessible or not easily accessible to consciousness service that Walter Woodhouse you pointed out will be strange features orbit both now and in your writings but I think it takes you know someone to point out those kinds of pictures before people realized about with other examples though I think the ordinance or you know the words to say the facts that these phrases don't have real-world reference seems more easily accessible so another sentence of yours I think ago seemed like the bank moved across the room after burning down yeah which seems at first like a perfectly straightforward sentence a little more or less because throughout the training of of events but then when you reflect on it for just a second you think that's funny you know there can be nothing no real object could have a burn down and then cross the road which is the point any example so so my question is these four the last kind of examples how is it that we are able to use those Simmons's so easily to convey a truth because it seems on the first inspection at least that you know if a sentence either asserts or presupposes the existence of an object that does not exist and then he did many of these cases cannot exist it seems unlikely should either just a current false or they should come out actually I should mention that Paul is the only person who writes on Maddox who takes any of this seriously so it's unique but I think what it means is just that most of what we do is unreflective it's it's kind of like a seeing a rigid object in motion when there's we're seeing the moon illusion or understanding other people we have the slightest idea how we do it we can't introspect into our own behavior any more than we can introspect into falling bodies I mean it's just intuitively obvious that if you have two two objects of different mass they're the one with a larger mass is going to fall faster this turns out to be false but that's if we can't introspect into something as simple as say falling bodies or why some things fall others rise how can we hope to introspect into anything as complicated as what the human mind is doing you've got to study it from the outside of the way you study other things and when you do it's very hard there are illusions about one of the main illusions in the goes through all of intellectual history is that somehow the ourself we ourselves ought to be the easiest thing to study because we can look into what's going on so say you know Tom Nagel asks what it's like to be a bat and that we can give the answer but try answering the question what it's like to be me I don't think anybody can answer that question either at least I can it's you can't pose questions like that they don't mean anything we to figure out what it's like to be me or a bat or a nematode or no matter how simple it is is a hard scientific question and to ask what it's like to be a person even yourself is maybe that one of the hardest questions you can write novels about it write poetry about it or something but you can't get a discursive account just can't answer the question and I think we can't hope to answer the kinds of questions that you're talking about just by introspection somehow when people use the word Bank let's say they automatically understand what you just brought out and they don't find it confusing unless you point out to them look this technically doesn't make any sense and then you get things like secret keys puzzles but the puzzles arise because you're trying to present in a rational form that's you know somehow objective things that are handled by totally different way yeah well I think I think we have to set up two different systems there's error many different systems in fact I think there's a probably a high level of modularity in the mind one of our capacities they call it a science forming capacity which every one every that has in some fashion is to try to make sense of our experience in a coherent way I mean Russell once pointed out that the only thing we're really confident about is their own immediate experience and the rest of inquiry including all of science is to try to give some coherent account of what this experience is and I think that's basically right this science farming capacity which children use to make sense of the world members tribe Jews and so on as it's just a different one it's also trying to make sense of the use of language so for example when you a child let's say if present you know Piaget tintype experiment where you know something moves and something else move the child will automatically set up the content and invisible contact between them you know there's got to be some invisible mechanical thing that's causing them to interact because that's just the way we see the world that in fact that's a major event in the history of science it was when Newton showed that doesn't work when he demonstrated that evil was called in the mechanical philosophy the assumptions about the nature of the world that were made by every great scientist you know go they of oddments Descartes though again to everyone and Newton himself he believed it and that's why he regarded his discoveries an absurdity that no person with any scientific understanding could pay any attention to but they just happened to be true that you can't have a mechanical universe that you have said what he and others regarded as a kind of alcohol property action without content can't happen and our intuitive way of understanding the world just happens to be different from the way the world appears when we apply our science forming capacities to it that was a wrenching moment you know in fact changed the whole nature of science so for Galileo of the great scientists of the early modern period the goal of science was to show that the world is intelligible post Newton it changed that took a long time for it to sink in but basically changed we give up the hope of understanding the world but we just try to understand theories about the world which is totally different that's when you get you know apparent contradictions like Hume who understood this pointed out that Newton's the greatest achievement was to show that there are mysteries which we will never comprehend he was referring to things like action without contact interaction with content on the other hand to get modern scientists and philosophers like David Deutsch David Abraham many others affect generally who condemned what's called mysterion ISM there's yet that is there are things that we cannot comprehend that's a damn tenet lots of others this is some kind of pathology this in principle we can understand anything well what they're claiming is something quite they already internalized the change of the conception of science from trying to discover an intelligible world given up by the time Newton's discoveries sank in to trying to discover intelligible theories and maybe we can develop an intelligible theory about anything ever you know about almost anything maybe anything you can think of but that doesn't mean that the world's gonna be intelligible so mysterion is of just almost has to be true and it was proven by a in fact though he didn't like it he thought it was absurd that Hume recognized that recognize look it's true what can we do with it Locke recognized so luck you know one of his great insights was you know what's called Locke suggestion in the history of philosophy that he said that just as there are he putted the theological framework where we can extract it from that what he said is just as God added to matter properties which we cannot comprehend like action at a distance so God might have superadded to matter a Faculty of thinking it's the hypothesis of thinking matter which was it kind of opened up the possibility of really having a scientific psychology dropped for a couple of centuries but that's it basically that you have to try to figure out well what is the property of whatever's in there that allows thinking but I think that gets right back to your question we can with their scientific capacities we can look at this and say hey there's something really wrong here we have to have another system for describing it which doesn't have these internal contradictions and that's just a different system than what we call common sense our ordinary ways of looking at things and within the that system you can devote in fact you try to develop a notion of reference so in say physics or linguistics or any other kind of organized inquiry you you hope that the entities that you construct mental entities that you construct symbolic entities you hope that they actually pick out something that exists in the world so if you scientists think they found the Higgs boson they would like to believe that there is a Higgs boson out there you know and if linguist talk about phonemes they'd like to say you do something real that's a phony but that's a totally different notion from the ones in our ordinary language in fact this leads to a lot of problems in contemporary philosophy I think I like take the whole twin earth discussions or the idea that you know the water is h2o all of those discussions they're just mixing up two different systems you can ask whether water is h2o in natural language say English because it doesn't have the word h2o that's from another system you can't ask whether water is h2o in chemistry because it doesn't have the word water and of course chemists use it informally but they have h2o and not water there's no if you actually look at what water is in human language it's a very complex notion doesn't any do h2o of course but soap even you can't pose the questions that are discussed in the between Earth literature because of mixing two quite distinct systems it's kind of curious because the the philosophers who develop these systems believe something that comes from quietens it gets done and so on that you can that words don't have meaning except inside a language okay well if you believe that then if you mix up to two languages it's got to be incoherent yeah and you'll get what looks like a sentence water is h2o but water is getting its meaning from English and h2o is getting its meaning from chemistry and chemistry is a system which at least strives to have reference that's the whole point of science and English is a system of done strive to do anything it's just it's just like walking it's what it is yeah that doesn't happen I have reference thank you very much we'd not only have used all the time allocated to this session without going beyond it and thank you professor Chomsky for your generosity in answering all the questions I think the apartment like officially to make a presentation to you at that stage and then we'll convey our thanks as a group I would like to thank professor Chomsky for this wonderful occasion and thank you for coming and this is a book of our treasures in the Academy believes of our actually here but also we have many treasures which are and the national museums and and so on and you will be interested that so much of it has to do with natural philosophy in the chemistry and so on but there are very many beautiful things and very thank you thank you very much [Music] [Applause]

Channel: UCD - University College Dublin

Views: 153,195

Rating: 4.7508574 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Chomsky, Linguistics, Language, University College Dublin, Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, UCD School of Philosophy, UCD - University College Dublin, myucd

Id: iR_NmkkMmO8

Length: 108min 2sec (6482 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the video. Brilliant talk.

[u/dnew]

I liked Dijkstra's take on it. "The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

[u/Crossfox17]

I don't see how this is particularly insightful. I also find Chomsky's nitpicking annoying. It is the machine that thinks, not the program. The program is the thought, or rather, thought is a kind of program. Does the brain think? I don't see how anyone could say no. Thoughts don't think themselves, and by the same token, programs don't compute themselves.

The brain is analogous to a computer. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the brain is a computer. Thinking is computing. It is the firing of electric impulses. Whether or not these electronic impulses are fired biologically or mechanically by a computer is irrelevant.

It may not be possible for a computer as we know it to perform in exactly the same way as a biological brain, but it can certainly perform the same tasks.

[u/yakushi12345]

The alternatives seem to be

1. machines with certain designs are capable of thought
2. there is something 'special' that makes humans able to think that isn't reducible to material or structure of the brain.