Noam Chomsky - Asking the right questions

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers - Thomas Pynchon

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/rollawaythedew2 📅︎︎ Jan 14 2014 🗫︎ replies
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if the fog had settled in on the Boston Airport 10 minutes earlier you would have been had had a free afternoon we just got out in time a field of inquiry no matter what it is is established by some array of questions that we pose and as any researcher knows asking the right questions is often the hardest part of the task if you can do it you may have won more than half the battle the right questions are those that open up a program of inquiry that leads to insight into problems that are worth understanding there's no shortage of wrong questions and in fact they come in many varieties I'll return to some of them later on finding the right questions is harder often the right questions are very simple they invite us to become surprised about perfectly ordinary things things that we had taken for granted a classic example of this is the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century which essentially set off modern natural sciences if we are satisfied that an Apple falls to the ground because the ground is its natural place and things seek their natural place then the world will remain a complete mystery if we're willing to find the fact surprising and puzzling and the properties of the motion as well then the door is open to naturalistic inquiry in the modern sense particularly if we're willing to adopt what the physicist Steven Weinberg once called the Galilean style that is to search for hidden realities that lie behind the misleading and largely irrelevant flux of phenomena the 17th century also initiated revolution and psychology effect that's less known or what we nowadays some people nowadays call cognitive science and that revolution was also initiated by a crucial act of imagination of a rather similar sort in specifically by the unwillingness to be satisfied by certain obvious common sense accounts of ordinary things that had long been taken for granted so suppose I were to draw a triangle on a blackboard assuming there were one there and you would look at it or suppose for that matter that you look up here at where I'm standing what you would see in the case of the blackboard is a triangle a certain geometrical figure what you see when you look at me is a person a human being standing and speaking now there was a traditional explanation of the fact the explanation is that the object in front of you has a form and that form is transferred to your brain and it's implanted there so if you look at a cube and you see it then there's a cube in your brain now the major scientific contribution of de cartes was to dismiss this traditional explanation as nonsense and to insist that the phenomena merit a real explanation because they are in fact very puzzling why should you see a triangle when you look at the blackboard and why should you see a man then with hats when you look at something out the window and in the street he argued that that's a puzzling fact and one that demands explanation and also argued that the traditional explanation makes no sense for a whole variety of reasons the first reason is that there simply is no way for a form to float through the air and enter your brain and if you look at the bit card and other Cartesian writers there's lots of ridicule of this notion a second fact is that the stimulus which what's actually which are actually interacting with is highly impoverished so for example when you look up here what you're seeing is scattered fragments and the question is why do you interpret those scattered scattered fragments as a person or if you look at a two-dimensional presentation you might see it as a cube with depth and in fact the retinal image is any event two-dimensional but you see it as a cube with depth or there may just be a sequence of stimuli striking striking your eye as your eye scans corners and edges but you see it as a cube in modern experimental situations the obvious fact which it is is sharpened up and made even more striking so for example in an apparent motion experiment subject can actually be presented with two flashes of light and what the person may see under certain circumstances in fact will see is a line going from one point to another point with no break if there happens to be a barrier in the middle of may actually you can see a line going around a barrier although what's actually hitting the eye is just two points of light or if you're presented with four dots four points of light in succession what you may see is a rigid object in motion let's say a cube turning in space and so on in many cases in short the stimulus that's reaching you is highly impoverished but you're seeing something in considerable richness in the case of seeing a person it's even more apparent that a lot of richness is being assigned to the impoverished stimuli that are presented to you another related point is that the figure that you're presented with is typically a distorted image at best makes almost highly distorted as in the apparent motion experiments but at best it's a distorted image of what you actually see if you like so for example if you're looking at that triangle that I didn't write on the non-existent black what you would see is a triangle but what would be there would be something different it would be some sort of distorted figure let's say one line a little bit curved and two of the lines maybe not quite coming together or whatever but you don't see it as a perfect example of whatever crazy figure it is what you see it as is as a triangle or maybe if it's too bad as a distorted triangle and that raises questions to why what why do you do that why don't you see it as a perfect example of what it in fact is as I say the question becomes more dramatic if what's actually hitting your eye is points of light successive points of light furthermore all of this seems to be done pretty much without any experience descartes couldn't prove it but speculated plausibly that the same would be true an infant said if and if an infant with no experience were shown a distorted triangle what the infant would see is that at the store to triangle just like an adult wouldn't see a perfect instantiation of what is there although in real life you're never presented with things like triangles that's a physical impossibility David Hume a century later looking at the very same phenomena and drew the opposite conclusion from them he concluded that you have no concept of a straight line and you have no concept of a triangle the reason being exactly the same facts all your ever presented with our physical things which will never be a straight line and in fact if one of them by accident worried you couldn't tell it from a slightly bent line anyway so therefore he concluded you just don't have concepts like straight line and triangle and geometrical figure and so on well that's kind of a reductio and he in fact that followed from his assumptions about the way ideas were formed and infected to reductio ad absurdum of these assumptions and plainly do have a concept of a straight line and a triangle and they cart speculations about such an infant are in fact very well accurate as was sort of obvious at the time and as we now know it's kind of intriguing it's an interesting chapter of intellectual history that hymns reductive absurdum of his assumptions was interpreted in the subsequent period as a demonstration of his assumptions and the alternative and things went on from there de cartes obviously correct interpretation of the same phenomena was pretty much forgotten after some period and didn't enter into the modern sort of scientific tradition that's a chapter in intellectual history but it's fact again if you look at seeing looking at the you know what you interpret is men wearing hats walking around the street or person up here speaking the problem is even more complex why didn't you see those things as persons person is a very strange notion a person is what you see is something that has a kind of psychic persistence so for example if say my hair were to be chained combed in the opposite direction you would take it to be the same person on the other hand if say or let's say if if you look at a person on the person's arm is cut off or replaced by something else it's the same person on the other hand if the person's mind were replaced let's say by a brain transplant so that they had different memories and spoke a different language and so on presumably wouldn't be the same person it would be something else not the identity conditions would have been broken and that's the way you perceive things and that's the way you interpret them whether it's a geometrical figure or something more complex like a person and the question is why that's true it can't be that you were taught it in fact if you begin to look closely you don't even know what the properties are without a lot of work but those are all aspects of what makes the problem a very puzzling one and in fact Descartes was right these are extremely puzzling facts and the traditional explanations are completely hopeless Descartes went on to provide an answer a proposal it was a two-pronged proposal one aspect of it was a mechanistic theory of stimulation on the model of a blind man with a stick so if a blind man of the stick is poking at the parts of let's say a chair there'll be a succession of stimuli coming to the hand and it's that sequence of stimuli coming to the hand that are there relevant that evoke the concept the percept of the chair and on a card argued that the when you see a chair it's exactly the same thing the your eye scans the chair and there's actually physical contact because he held that there were small particles as if a rod extended from the charity or I and sort of pushed at it and there was accession of stimuli on the eye and you're exactly like the blind man with a stick you see a chair because that's what your mind does and that's the second part of the theory there's a mechanical theory of stimulation and a psychological theory the psychological theory was what we would nowadays call a computational representational theory of mind a picture which said that the line carries out certain computational processes and forms representations and it does it on the basis of rich innate structure so the you see a triangle or a chair or a person because the resources of your mind create those conceptions as exemplars for interpreting experience on the occasion of very scattered stimulation of the kind that you normally have the psychological theory then says in case the triangle that the mind has the principles of Euclidean geometry built into it and that's why you see the thing in front of you as a distorted triangle not as an exact example of what it is on the occasion of scattered or even sequential stimulations and the same would be true of person or anything else and the structure itself must be largely built in because it is essentially available independently of experience so it's not a par with whatever it is about an embryo that gets it to turn into a person rather than say a mouse on the occasion of nutritional inputs or that makes the embryo if it happens to be a human undergo puberty at some relatively fixed point in later life postnatal lot development rather than do something else that an organism might do it's got to be built in and it's whatever it is is the can be modified or maybe triggered by something that's happening in the environment and they cart argued the same is true essentially of mental life well that gives an answer to a problem sometimes called plato's problem and mainly the problem of how we're able to know so much and to perceive such richness in the world with so little evidence for any of it and why do we all do it more or less the same way even though all of us have scattered and different and accidentally different than highly deficient evidence and in fact the carts answer is pretty much along the lines of plato's answer at least partially the part that's in common is that the experience at most stimulates or awakens or sharpens internally determined mental structures very much in the way in which nutrition stimulates growth along a course that's determined by natural law guided by internal an internal program that would distinguish a person from a mouse now as far as we know they cut answer is largely correct principal at least not detail and it was amplified in quite interesting ways through the 17th century and little beyond it was then as I mentioned largely abandoned and in fact it was revived not very long ago by now it's essentially taken for granted in its essentials and a lot is known about the mechanisms that enter into these processes and explain the puzzling phenomenon at least partially so here we have another case where the right questions were finally asked after a long period and simple ordinary phenomena were regarded as puzzling as indeed they are much like an apple falling from a tree and when you address them you set off a course of inquiry which can actually in some cases lead to understanding well the 17th century cognitive revolution raised similar questions about natural language it also found things that were puzzling and asked for explanations now there's a welter of confusion but out of it you can detect some pretty similar answers in many respects again the insights they were real were largely forgotten they were revived only fairly recently and exactly isn't in the case of vision they were revived in complete ignorance of the earlier history bits and pieces of which were running discovered later the history really was forgotten even in the scholarly literature in fact sometimes most strikingly in the scholarly scholarly literature the phenomena of language are puzzling in very much the same way and we quickly find that out as soon as we are willing to find simple facts surprising like the fall of an apple in fact the comment that I made about the word person already suggests some extremely surprising phenomena well take something parallel division take linguistic perception a signal hits your ear and you hear a sentence what you hear is a sentence say the sentence John is painting the house brown now the signal that you would that actually reaches your ear could be highly distorted typically is could be masked and all sorts of noise it could be interrupted it could be from what we call a different dialect meaning some other language that's close enough to yours so you can make contact with it not a determinant notion and what a model typically standardly be the case I mean it'd be an amazing miracle if any of you shared my language with its special features that come from having been brought up in a particular block in Northeast Philadelphia with a father came from the Ukraine and then you know travel to Boston later and whatever other crazy nonsense forms the way I talk it doesn't so you're hearing a distorted signal but if I say John is painting the house brown that's what you hear you hear it the way you understand it the way you would have said it well what you're creating in your mind what your mind is creating it's some sort of a complex representation some sort of a complex object which is a collection of properties a collection of phonetic and somatic and other structural properties that's a linguistic expression a collection of such properties you hear it as an in fact point by point the problem is similar to that of seeing a say a triangle you hear that noise that signal that distorted signal as a collection of properties which includes six words and to some of the words sound alike like the last two words house Brown sound alike they have therein actually a formal formal relationship called assonance they have the same vocalic nucleus if you made him a little more alike they would run like house and house and you here that expression is carrying with certain entailments so for example if John painted the house brown then John is applying paint to the exterior of the house not to its interior just kind of curious if he's painting if he's playing painted the interior he may be painting a room brown but he's not painting the house brown and you know that when you hear somebody say John's painting the house brown you want to find out if it's true you look outside not inside now how do you know and we can go on and I will in a moment how do you move all of these things well it's very much as in the case of say the triangle experience is utterly inadequate even the shallowest investigation will demonstrate that at peak periods of language acquisition children are picking up maybe a dozen words a day understanding them in this fashion meaning they're picking up words virtually on a single presentation experimental studies have shown that children will pick up the meanings of words to a very in a very restricted fashion with a lot of richness even if the words are presented even if they're in a period of language use where they don't produce sentences they just produce maybe two words which somebody will interpret as a sentence but they'll pick up the meanings of words from long expressions pretty complex expressions that they couldn't possibly produce nonsense words which are made up for you know to test it and so on and so forth but even apart from experiment the phenomenon is obvious enough if you're willing to be surprised at things like the fall of an Apple when you look at the acquisition of structural properties or semantic properties of bigger expressions long more complex expressions the whole problem deepens very very rapidly well there's only one plausible line of answer possible direction in which any of these things could be answered short of miracles and that's essentially the same as Descartes his reasoning carries over and in fact inquiry into these questions which begins with the recognition that they're pretty puzzling into these questions leads quite plausibly to psychological theory very similar to de cartes a theory which involves computational representational theories of the mind the linguistic expression that full collection of properties is evoked by scattered stimulation distorted from your point of view and you don't understand what your own mind produces on the occasion of that stimulation very much like seeing the triangle or seeing a person interpreting scattered stimuli in a rich and specific way and you can do it because that's the way you're constructed you can do it for the same reason that as an embryo you move to grow into a person and not a mouse part of the brain is a set of properties we don't know hardly know where to look but presume that they're they're not in the arm so part of the brain is a collection of structures or elements of some kind which we can call the language faculty it has an initial state determined by your biological nature much the way most everything else about you is and that initial state becomes a particularly egde under the impact of the triggering effect and partially modifying effect of rather limited experience much as the embryo becomes a person through the impact of nutrition if you're willing to be puzzled about simple things you will have a plausible research program for naturalistic inquiry you have a potential science which can give answers or these partial answers to the questions that immediately arise it's worth knowing noticing that it was only quite recently that these questions were regarded as puzzling if you go back 40 years ago saying the standard view was that the problem about language is why it takes much experience to drive it into a child given that it's so utterly trivial the problem was supposed to be one of over learning why does it take years and years for these trivial things to get into the child's mind and the assumption was well we understand very well how it's done it's all done by conditioning and it's a collection of habits and habits structures and so on and that is about as plausible as the idea that an Apple falls to the ground because that's its natural place or the idea that you see a triangle because the form of the triangle implants itself in your brain even the most minimal inquiry into the facts demolishes that picture instantly nevertheless it was the almost universally held picture and in fact in all of the thousands of years of quite fruitful inquiry into language and it's an old old subject it's apart from a few blips here and there like the 17th century it's only quite recently that these problems will regard it as puzzling and problematic and were seriously addressed well what kind of questions do arise if you're willing to face them first question is what in fact is the computational representational system and one the state that the language faculty attains second question is what is the biologically determined initial state what's the nature how does the language faculty start off by virtue of the given program which is apparently very similar across the species very slight differences as far as we know so we can ignore them for the sake of of the discussion without anything problematic at least in this context a third question that arises is how the computational representation is how the computational representational system is put to use in ordinary human actions actions like say articulating your thoughts or referring the cats or telling stories or interpreting what you hear and so on normal things that people do obviously uses this system but in what way does it use them another question you can ask is what is the nature of the interstate transitions how do you get from the initial state of the language faculty to successive States finally apparently to a highly stable state after which there isn't very much change maybe around puberty what kind of role does experience play in triggering these changes and maybe partially modifying them there are further questions there's a question that you might call the unification question a complex system like the brain can be studied from many different perspectives at many different levels you can study the brain in terms of say atoms or molecules or cells or cell assemblies or neural networks or computational representational systems at any of those levels you may or may not be able to construct a true theory about what the brain is and what it's doing if you can construct a theoretical explanatory account which merits certain degree of faith you can then ask the unification question how do these various levels of inquiry relate to one another well from now there's really only one well grounded theory as far as things like language are concerned and that's the those are the computational representational theories we assume essentially on faith that there's going to be an account of all of this in terms of say atoms ourselves with a much greater leap of faith when they assume that what's involved in all of this is neurons and networks of neurons not say the vascular system although there's plenty of blood flowing around in the brain a lot more than one might expect enough to lend some credibility to Aristotle's thesis that the purpose of the brain is the cool of blood still we tend to assume with a huge leap of faith and basically no evidence that the neurological structures not the vascular ones are somehow implicated in all of the is there is incidentally a kind of a common slogan in the so called cognitive sciences which runs something says that the mental is the neurophysiological at a higher level so you don't have to be scared about the mental where the mental includes things like computational representational systems well that slogan has the story backwards at least from the point of view of the Natural Sciences from point of view of the Natural Sciences what we ought to say is we want to have a tentative hypothesis recognizing there's very little evidence for it and the tentative hypothesis would be that the neurophysiological is the mental at a lower level lower in quotes where the moodle is the only one we have any faith about from the point of view of the criteria of science at least because it really does have a reasonably rich structure of explanatory theory that accounts for things that would be the realistic approach and one might even hope that the theories that the theoretical apparatus theoretical perspective that does seem to have reasonable grounding in empirical fact and explanatory wealth that it may provide the guidelines for inquiry into what it is about the brain that makes it have these properties possibly along the lines of say chemistry in the 19th century which studied things in the world from a rather abstract point of view like valence and periodic table and organic molecules and so on and so forth the physics of the day couldn't the unification problem was wide open nobody knew how that related to the physics of the day and in fact it turned out it didn't relate to the physics of the day because the physics was completely deficient and had to be radically revised in order to accommodate those properties that could turn out to be the case here - or it could turn out to be the case that we have something on the model of say genetics about 40 years ago or it turned out you could do something like reduction instead of what you might call expansion has happened in the chemistry physics case or there might be something else there's a unification problem and you never know in advance how it's going to be settled if at all at least if you're following the principles of the nature of naturalistic inquiry the principles of the sciences well what kinds of things do we find out if we try to address these questions let's for simplicity keep to this sentence this linguistic expression John is painting the house Brown which recall as a certain array of phonetic and somatic and other properties well what we find out is that some properties of that expression are universal which means they're unlearned others are particular or language particular they are selected by experience from some innately determined set of options which turns out to be rather narrow set so on a phonetic side it's a universal property of that expression that the vowel of the word house is shorter than the value of the word Brown then the quality of the vowel within some range is language particular so for me it's the same as the vowel of hat and for you it may be some other vowel and then rough range the turning to say somatic properties and one is the one I mentioned the brown house has a brown exterior not interior that appears to be Universal property not just of that word but a whole big category of words roughly container words including ones that we made invent so it's true words like box or airplane or igloo or into or spherical cube or whatever you might choose to consider if you're painting a spherical cube brown you're giving it a brown exterior not interior that's appears to be Universal property a particular property is the one that distinguishes the word house from the word home so in English say if I I go after work I go home if I was talking Hebrew I would go to the house if you take a closer look you find a good deal more complexity determined by the computational representational systems and in fact really determined by their innate fixed structure so consider again the fact that the exterior surface of the house or any similar word is somehow distinguished that carries over to a lot of other things if you see the house you're seeing its exterior surface we can't see this building from here although we could see the building let's say if a piece of it was say I was in an airplane now I guess case you could see Frankie sitting inside and you can see the airplane if say you can look out the window and see the wing then you can see the exterior surface or if there was a more outside and was reflecting the exterior surface you could see the the house or the building or the airplane or the igloo or the spherical cube or whatever so basically these things are our geometrical entities exterior surfaces which are a strange way to look at things but that's the way we look at such that's such that's the way we use that's that's the nature of these conceptions that we use to talk about things on the other hand the house is not just its exterior surface that is a geometrical entity so for example suppose that say Peter and Mary are equidistant from the exterior surface but Peter is inside the house and Mary's outside the house well not Peter the one inside is definitely not near the house Mary could be near the house depending on what the current conditions on nearness is similarly our similarly the house has chairs inside it not outside it so the house involves its exterior surface and its interior however the interior is very abstractly conceived so for example if I fill the house with cheese or say I move the walls it's the same house on the other hand if I clean the house I made interacting only with things in the interior space so the house is conceived as an exterior surface and an abstract interior space with quite complex properties of course all this time the house itself is a concrete object and we know that perfectly well the house can be made of bricks or wood and a wooden house doesn't have is not one with a wooden exterior in contrast to a brown house which is one with a brown exterior we can look at a house from both of those perspectives at once so a brown wooden house has a brown exterior looking at the house abstractly as a geometrical surface but it has a woman it's made of wood taking the concrete perspective if my house used to be in Philadelphia but it's now in Boston then a certain physical object was moved in contrast if my home was to be in Philadelphia and is now in Boston then no physical object was moved although my home is also concrete so my home is made of bricks or wood or whatever it's some physical structure houses concrete in quite a different way my home can be the house in which I live or the town or the country or the universe that's not true of house though they're both concrete now that house home distinction has numerous consequences I can go home but I can't go house I can live in a brown house I can't live in a brown home in many languages the counterpart of the word home is essentially an adverb which is pretty much the sense in encase in English to all these are aspects of our concept of house and that wherever we look we find exactly the same thing so whether something is say a desk rather than a table or a hard bed depends on such things as the intentions of its designer or the ways in which people intend to use it or take say a book a book is a perfectly concrete object you can refer to books that way you can say so for example this book weighs five pounds or you can refer to books from abstract perspective you can ask who wrote the book which is not some physical object or even he wrote the book in his head but then he forgot about it or you can refer to a book from both perspectives simultaneously you can say the book he wrote weighs five pounds or the book he is writing would weigh five pounds if he were to finish it let's say and it were to get published and the same is true again wherever you looked so take a city like for example London London isn't a fiction it's something non fictional but when you consider it as London that is through the perspective of a city name a particular kind of linguistic expression then you get a very curious properties so London could be completely destroyed and it could be rebuilt up the Thames in a thousand years and it would still be London under some circumstances you can regard London with or without regard for its population so from one point of view it's the same city if all the people desert it from another point of view you can say that London has come to have a harsher feel to it through the thatcher years which is a comment on how people act and live and to such perspectives on london can fit quite differently into a system of beliefs that yields of the puzzles of the philosophical literature puzzles that might very well dissolve incidentally if we abandon some of the assumptions on which they're based such as the assumption that there is a relation of reference holding between words and moans or that there is a common language in which from which those words are drawn on assumptions which are very far from obvious I should say in fact don't even seem coherent well even in these trivial examples we see that the internal conditions on meaning are rich and complex and unsuspected in fact barely noon the most elaborate dictionaries don't even dream of such subtleties these concepts are acquired by the child and there are full richness and any possible explanation for that must be that they were already there there are only marginal modifications of the kind Illustrated and I stress again that these are very trivial examples when you look at prior examples it becomes even more obvious these are some of the notions that seem most concrete but they're already often a domain of quite considerable complexity predetermined complexity now there seems at first glance at least to be something kind of paradoxical in these conclusions so take houses and homes again they're concrete though they're concrete things houses and homes but they're concrete in quite different ways from another point of view also we consider them to be quite abstract so again abstract in very different ways it's not that we have confused ideas or inconsistent beliefs about houses and/or homes or igloos or boxes or spherical cubes or whatever rather lexical items provide us with a certain perspective for viewing what we take to be the things in the world or for that matter from the constructions of our mind what we conceive in other ways they're kind of like filters or lenses they provide a certain way of looking at things and thinking about the products of our minds the terms themselves do not refer but people can use them to refer to things viewing them from a particular point of view through a particular lens if you like that's a point of view which is quite remote from that of the Natural Sciences which seek to divest their concepts of all of these parochial human interests and concerns as far as possible well these are trivial cases we move beyond lexical structure the conclusions about the richness of the initial state of the language faculty and it's apparently special structure are reinforced very considerably so to take such expressions as say he thinks John as a genius and compare it with John thinks he is a genius in the first case him you take he to be somebody other than John in the second case he could very well be John he thinks John is a genius versus John thinks he's a genius well that's not the effect of lunar order for example in the sentence his mother thinks John is a genius you can again take he on his to be referring to John and typically you would so there's some kind of structural conditions that determine what you might call referential dependence whether a pronoun can pick up its reference the way you use it to refer from some non phrase in the sentence now the principles underlying those facts appear to be universal at least in large measure and will perceive them they yield rich conditions on somatic interpretations on intrinsic connections of meaning long expressions including incidentally analytic connections furthermore in this domain you begin to have theoretical results of some depth which pretty surprising consequences so the same principles appear to play a significant role in yielding the semantic properties of expressions that are superficially quite unlike these take say the sentence John is too clever to expect anyone to talk to Bill and ask yourself who's doing the expecting the non expecting well it's John John is too clever for John to expect anyone to talk to Bill John is expecting no one to talk to bill suppose you take the same sentence and you drop the final word John is too clever to expect anyone to talk to well then everything changes then you're talking to John and it's no longer John who's doing the expecting it's somebody other than John and that same property holds for a huge class of other constructions and it seems that the principles that explain those curious interpretations are pretty much the same principles as the ones that deal with referential dependence as in the examples before well at this point you're reaching to quite non-trivial properties of the computational representational system phenomena that looked totally dis OSI ated can be accounted for on the basis of simple and pre elegant and pretty far-reaching principles which interact to yield some quite complicated results at that point one is really warning something about the nature of the language faculty well I won't proceed with our examples but that's what you get into as soon as you take the question seriously and try to give answers to them instead of waving your hands about over learning and habits and forms flying through the air and things falling to their natural place and so on what kinds of conclusion conclusions does one reach from this inquiry well there are number of plausible results one of them is that a language consists of two different parts one is the computational representational system the other is a lexicon a collection of things like house and London and so on the computational system takes an array of items from the lexicon and it converts it into a linguistic expression like John is painting the house brown or John is too clever to expect anyone to talk to with its full array of phonetic and semantic and other properties and if that's the case there are going to be two acquisition problems this problem of accounting for the growth of the computational system and accounting for the growth of the lexicon and these two problems look in some ways different as far as the computational representational system is concerned it's possible but the answer to the problem is trivial that is that there's only one that the initial state of the language faculty only has one instantiation there's only one possible computational representational system and in this respect only one language the with regard to the lexicon on it can't be quite like that but it may be surprisingly close to it one part of the company of the lexicon is concepts like say house and person and desk and so on and it may be that these are fixed that they don't allow much or maybe even anything in the way of variation and somehow given although we don't know a lot about the principles that enter into into them the selection of them of course will be language specific so we've selected in childhood house and others have selected igloo but the properties of these expressions are remarkably similar and what's similar about them is apparently predetermined beyond that there's what's sometimes called sorcery in arbitrariness after so sewer that is you can pair up concepts and phonetic sound representations in arbitrary ways that's the sort of trivial part of language variation there's also variation among what are called grammatical elements things like say case so if you study Latin you got to memorize all sorts of paradigms and you know where you use what the form of the accusative case is and fourth declension and all that kind of business and similarly with verbal inflections and so on and there's some difference among languages in this respect so I mean be learning English you have to do all that stuff or so you think actually chances are that English is very much like Latin in this respect and maybe all languages are very much alike in this respect and the only difference between them is what comes out the mouth so that's very likely that the Latin type systems in fact are there in English it's just that they're all done by mental computation that pretty much the same often far-reaching consequences that the systems have in languages where you see them hear them come out the mouth but it's just that the mental computations feed the articulatory apparatus at a different point in the computational system hence you get what appear to be very different languages although from the point of view of us a rational Martian the differences would be pretty trivial just what comes out the mouth not what's going on in the internal computations if that's the case then the differences among language would reduce to some of the lexical selections the caesarian arbitrariness choices in grammatical elements which may vary largely have to do with what is articulated not what is computed of course very small differences in an intricate computation then only one computational system only one technique for converting all of this into expressions with a rich array of properties and then some differences on the phonetics I'd notice until you'd expect more possibility of difference in the phonetic side of the system than in any of the others and the reason is that it's only the sound side of the system that you actually get very much evidence about not all that much but at least some at least you hear the signals the rest of it you all just have to basically make up and since you have to basically make it up it must be that most of it is built-in so you'd expect more variation on the sound side and on the caesarian arbitrariness where you do get direct evidence that on most of the other things in fact anything i've been talking about and that appears to be the case again going back to the Martian scientist if the Martian scientist approached humans the way we approach say fruit flies the Martian scientist would presumably conclude that they're basically all identical the languages they speak are all the same there are some marginal variations like there might be some differences in the fruit flies in a sample which you'll overlook for the purposes the experiment that looks closer to reality than one might have anticipated not many years ago even it noticed that very small changes in an intricate system can you would appear to be substantial phenomenal differences but they may be highly misleading they may be just different modifications of the essentially same thing and that looks very largely true well another thing that you find and must find is that language is embedded languages just some kind of mental computation some computational properties of the brain computational representational properties of the brain and it's embedded in performance systems at least in humans these are systems which use all of these resources for various human actions things like articulating your thoughts or for interpreting what you hear or for talking about cats or for telling jokes or whatever else you do with these things the reason it makes sense to call these computational systems language is because of the performance systems in which they're embedded in principle if might be biologically impossible but in principle there could be another organism which would have the very same language that you do this very same internal system but would use it as instructions for locomotion just embedded in different performance systems in that case we wouldn't want to call our language the language in other words is a real thing it's a state of the brain we assume and such that real thing could be integrated in different kind of systems ours happens to be integrated in a system for articulating thoughts and referring to cats and interpreting what you hear and hence the study of all of this is languages or integrated in something else we couldn't call it that it's even conceivable that some other organism has this system completely and there just aren't any performant systems that access it so the organism has the capacity for light has language in fact just no way to access it and you'd have to find that out in some other ways not more indirect fashion that's why no means an absurd possibility but it probably isn't the prevailing systems appear to be of two different categories there are unknown receptive systems on the other hand there are productive systems the receptive systems take a signal in a collection of an array of circumstances they have access to the language they produce an expression or linguistic expression so you're you hear a signal John is painting the house brown and the particular circumstances you ruin your perception says you're receptive system accessing the computation your interpretation of that expression with its sound and other properties that the problem of investigating this is beyond inquiry but you can proceed to some idealizations that may make some sense the standard idealization is to assume that there's what's called a parser which just takes the signal forgetting about the circumstances accesses the language and produces the structural description on that occasion it's also typically assumed that the parsers invariant that is it's the same for all languages and it doesn't grow the way language grows in childhood the main reason for assuming that is ignorance nothing much is known about parsers so you make the simplest assumption which is there's only one and it never changes if in fact the whole idea of a parse the existence of a parser is much more questionable than the existence of the language that it accesses that's almost almost hard it's very hard to imagine that that's not true the use almost incoherent to question that on the other hand a parser might very well not exist there might not be any part of the brain that just acts it uses signals accesses linguistic knowledge disregard circumstances and comes out with an interpretation it's a guess that such a thing exists May there are lots of other it's commonly commonly the opposite is assumed very commonly assumed that the parser is uncontroversial the problematic part is the so-called competence the language if you think it through it's just the opposite at least again on scientific grounds there are other assumptions about parsers which are common but don't withstand even the slightest inquiry for example it's commonly argued and you can find this all of the literature including the linguistic literature that parsing is what's called is easing and quick you do it very fast and very easily so therefore the language must be very well designed for parsing some and in fact the criterion for a theory of language must be that it explained this fact that you can parse so quickly you do it so fast in fact almost instantaneously when you listen to what I say the problem with that thesis is it's just flatly false empirically parsing is extremely difficult very often and often quite impossible and there's whole categories of expressions which are well known and which are studied precisely for this reason other given various kinds of names like garden path sentences or Center embedded expressions and all sorts of others in fact even ones like the one I gave you John is too clever to expect anyone to talk to people often find that rather slow parsing it takes time to figure out what it means parsing is anything but easy and quick and it's often what's called wrong being what the perceptual apparatus produces is different from what the language tells you is the actual structure of the sentence anyone who's taught elementary logic is familiar with this give people even professional mathematicians sentences that have a negation and a disjunction in them and their parsing goes out of whack this is so extreme that even some of the common idioms of our language our interpreters many interpreted as meaning the opposite of what they literally mean so if two airplanes come close and almost hit we call it an illness but I think it true in your spare time and you'll notice that it's an ear hit if it was and your miss they hit but just any even the slightest introduction of something negative and our parsing apparatus collapses when we look at more complex structures it's off the wall so pressing is anything but easy and quick it's very often very difficult and often in fact impossible so how come we can communicate so readily well we just use the parts of language that are readily parsed some parts of this system are in fact very easily parsed those are the ones we lose and those are the ones that since other people are just like us they have any trouble with them so certain parts of the language are usable and the parts that are usable are used and that's it like pathologies beyond the tautology there's nothing to say about this as to the idea that languages world is mined for parsing and not only it's hard to say that it's false because it's not even clear that it's meaningful to talk about what a biological system is designed for or adapted to presupposes some gives some promissory notes that can't be filled it assumes you go and talk about what a system is well adapted to if you had some space of possible systems and of possible functions and some metric that said pick an arbitrary system out of there and an arbitrary function and there's such-and-such a likelihood that they'll be adapted to one another and if you could show that the system you have in mind say the kidney your language is has AHA you know is more is better adapted than a pair of systems and functions picked at random if you can go through those steps you could talk about when systems are well adapted but that's all fantasy can't talk about any of these things so it's not cool anything to say that a system is well adapted to a function at least in any useful sense in an event if he can make some sense of that it's not going to turn out that language is well adapted to the system of the function of communication because it isn't you only use the scattered parts of it that have that property turning to the matter of production there's very little to say this was in fact a crucial point in Cartesian philosophy in fact the criterion of mind was held to be one of the major criteria of mind was held to be the capacity to produce linguistic expressions to express thoughts in the manner in which humans do it and that was held to be outside the bounds of mechanical explanation and the general idea and may very well be sound anyway there's nothing much to say about it except at the level of sound structure there are other questions for example the unification question the relation of the well-grounded computational representational systems to cells or conceivably neuronal networks or whatever is the right array of mechanisms that pretty well lies in the future there are questions about evolution of such systems that's there it's doubtful that the questions are even being put in the right way anyway there's nothing to say about as far as I know well that's a kind of a quick tour through some of the right questions or what seem to me the right questions right because they lead us to inquiry that provides insight into matters that are worth understanding and do it in the naturalistic style with the rational exploit expectation of ultimate ultimate integration into the Natural Sciences maybe by modifying some of their assumptions as in the past there are also plenty of wrong questions that lead more where for all sorts of reasons to mention a few possible reasons some of the wrong questions are wrong because they're just premature you just don't understand enough to know how to proceed so or perhaps you could imagine how to perceive but inquiry is barred in other ways the unification problems like that the problem of relating computational representational systems to the brain sciences not enough is known about how the brain what mechanisms you don't even know what mechanisms of the brain would look for pretty much at this point maybe study if computational representational systems will provide some guidance on that but right now it's questions up in the dark and to the extent that you can think of ways of studying it you can't carry out the methods so you're not going to carry out say ablation experiments and so on interestingly there are on your intrusive methods which are giving some kind of intriguing results relationships between event-related potentials electrical activity of the brain and surprisingly subtle aspects of linguistic structure and maybe maybe something will be learned about all this but at the moment it's mostly it's it's premature or at least there are also problems which are of the kind that are often called too many variable problems like the problem of determining the course of a falling feather or just about any phenomenon of ordinary life so for example the actual state of say John's language faculty is not worth studying that some weird jumble of systems reflecting the accidental course of his history about as interesting as the course of the feather how John interprets what Peter has in mind when Peter says something or other in particular circumstances that's also so rich in relevant factors that it's not worth studying like most phenomena of ordinary life there are other questions that just fall beyond the scope of the system under investigation so suppose you're studying you're enough to take an undergraduate physics and you're in a mechanic's class and you're doing an experiment rolling a ball down an inclined plane and the lab manual you know has a prediction that if take that amount of time you roll down so somebody falsifies the prediction by reaching over and picking up the ball and throwing it out the window well that didn't count for something reason it was the person who threw the ball out the window was outside the system so you didn't refute physics by that experiment actually to answer the question why you didn't refute physics is not so trivial you might want to think about it but we assume that you didn't the system is somehow closed and things outside it even physical mechanisms like people outside it they don't count and there are a lot of questions like that they're not easy to sharpen up but we just recognize them often at least if you want to account for say which linguistic expressions are amusing or verifiable or refer to cats or something like that that's just outside the scope of the system I'm like reaching over and throwing a ball out of a window when you try to refute a mechanics experiment in this domain you often find questions that don't have general answers though they might very well have answers relative to specific circumstances usually to specific human interests and concerns trouble is these can vary in every imaginable way so there's nothing of any generality to to say about them take say the idea of John and Bill speaking the same language well under particular conditions we with an answer to that so I could say if somebody in the audience that person that I speak the same language but somebody in Tokyo we don't speak the same language the problem is there's no general answer to that question it's like the question is Boston or New York well from my point of view no you know if you live in London maybe yes there's no right answer to whether Boston is near New York or does John look like Bill from certain points of view yes from certain points of view no these aren't questions that have answers or could have answers there are no idealization x' there are no natural categories there are no natural neighborhoods if you like those are just highly interest relative questions perfectly usable and fixed circumstances but trouble is circumstances can vary in every conceivable fashion notions like common language or public language that people know or as often claim that people partially know that makes to talk about that makes about as much sense as an effort to determine objective height categories or neighborhoods or look-alikes or something like that sometimes it's argued in the literature that you have to assume a common public language or you can't account for the possibility of communication that's just a fallacy in order to account for the fact that John and Bill look alike you don't have to postulate a common form that they both share and to account for the fact that John can sometimes interpret what bill says you don't have to postulate any mystical concept like a common language that they both share or maybe partially know or anything like that let them seem to make any sense at all very likely although here the territory is more obscure the same is true of the notion of reference that is a relationship that holds the allegedly between words and things so for example what the word suppose you ask what the word water or house or London or one of these things refers to looks as though that question is meaningless without further specification of circumstances you can say that words are used to refer and in fact used to refer in a manner determined by their internal semantics from a particular perspective or a vantage point say as a person or as a house or as a desk or as London or something like that but it doesn't seem to make any sense to ask general questions about the reference of a word or a phrase abstracted from those conditions or about reference and its nature as if it were something like looking alike and its nature or being near in its nature if that's true and it does look to be true then it will also make no sense to seek some notion of content which is understood as a property of an expression that fixes its reference that's been a major topic of the philosophy of language since Fraga but it's not so clear that there's an actual topic there also it wouldn't make sense to ask what's the meaning of a word just as we can't ask what's the sound of a word this a word has a sound in particular circumstances and occasions but there's no such thing as the sound of a word and it's not clear that there's anything more to say about the meaning of a word though the properties of the uses the the articulate the sound articulations and the uses in a variety of human actions those are very narrowly fixed by which internal properties of the kind that I've indicated you can talk about how a word is used to prefer or how it's used to pronounce but it's not at all clear that it makes any sense to ask about its meaning or its sound or its reference or anything like that now a good deal of the modern study of language relies on such notions as common public language or reference or content and so on and that in fact includes much work a lot of work of great sophistication a lot of work which in fact eliminating in many ways nevertheless the reliance on these notions in my view is much too uncritical and it's not at all clear what would remain if what seemed to be quite dubious props are kicked away now there are other categories of wrong questions that are worth noting for example you can ask pointless questions using technical concepts that no longer lack any clear sense so you know how much phlogiston is there in that fire over there are questions about vital force or questions about material body those are all terms that at one stage of science had a certain meaning they fit into a quasi explanatory schemes but they no longer do and you can't make any sense out of sentences questions like our computational representational systems material unless you somehow resurrect these abandoned notions are there are also problems of what's sometimes called epistemic now business humans are we assume biological organisms not angels and as such there is going to be certain they have certain capacities which are fixed they may be very rich like the language faculty very rich faculties enable you to do very many things but they also exclude very many things mainly the ones that don't conform to those rich faculties and whatever faculties of the mind are involved and say doing scientific inquiry or solving problems and so on there's only two possibilities either they're so vacuous that we can never do anything or their structure in which case there are a lot of things we can't do and other things we can do well that's true of every organism we know so for example rats can do some things well but by that very token other things badly and if we're part of the natural world the same is true of us which means that there will be questions that are poseable that are behind our intellectual grasp though some differently organized intelligence might have no problem within just as we can deal with some of the problems that rats can't face because they know the right concepts in principle no that means there's got to be some assuming we're part of natural world there will be some notion of epistemic boundedness there will be some pure mysteries just you can may pose the question but can't do much about it like a rat trying to run a prime lumber maze within the domain of I will know what those bounds are although conceivably you could learn about them there's nothing self contradictory and assuming that we might even come to understand those bounds within the domain of reasonable questions there is a naturalistic approach that doesn't appear to raise any questions of principle at least beyond those of the Natural Sciences generally and has some sometimes far-reaching sometimes surprising results about human language faculty about its nature about its acquisition about some of the ways in which the mechanisms are available and sometimes put to use these so far at least progress along these lines has mostly been at the computation representational level and entirely there are many questions that we can formulate but we can begin to answer some of them are doubtless quite real which don't understand enough some are perhaps only apparently real maybe pseudo questions on a par with how the things work or why do they happen questions that have the form of questions but only indicate areas of inquiry and there are many different kinds of mentioned a few one has to somehow be able to avoid those and identify and focus on the real questions the ones that yield a successful productive line of research inquiry we know of some cases there are others where we remain pretty much in the domain of mystery you I think there's a mics around if anybody wants to there and there three back yeah I see the University of North Carolina I just wanted to ask you whether you have any evidence that the lexicon is in fact distinct from the mental computational representational complex or our lexical representations also computational are the is the lexicon separate from the computational apparatus well it depends I think it's not so much a question as a matter of bookkeeping the it's all computational representational okay but the question is whether the computational representational system falls into two radically different categories in terms of its properties and its characteristics and so on and that seems to be the case that is the lexicon seems to have it does have computational properties but they look very different from those of the which call sometimes called syntax now there are some real questions there at some very interesting questions for example take a take a word like say shell as in John shell the books meaning John put the books on the Shelf doesn't literally name that but it means something kind of close to that shelve is a word and the question is as the in the real world the world in your head and in my head is does our computational system reach into the lexicon pull out the word shelve stick it in the position of in that position or does it take some much more abstract representation and form John shelfie book and there's evidence of the latter kind in that case interesting and subtle evidence so in that kind of sense some of the things that we might in advance think of as being a lexicon we might have we're on Glee place maybe they aren't in the lexicon but it does seem that we're FS seem very plausible to believe there is a fundamental conceptual distinction between an array of elements they're to be picked out and a computational procedure which picks them out and does things with them what's in that array that's open to question for example does it include the word shell does it include the word break as in John broke the window or is that formed by some operation and similarly for lots of other cases so it's short the choice of what's in it is not entirely clear by any means but the conceptual distinction looks reasonably clear and that in the sense that there just isn't any other coherent account of what goes on yeah I'd like to ask you a less technical question perhaps the plunge tell us anything about language to puns Coons for example if I said professor Chomsky doesn't like my language you know are you referring to maybe the curses I've heaped on somebody or the language I'm using or the particular language I speak or whatever do these occur in all languages or some and particularly I'm wondering if there's any significance to why some people like them and some people hate them those are all perfectly real questions but over there they have the form of questions let me say but it's not clear that they are yet real questions I mean so like one could ask would observations of the moon taken from Jupiter be useful evidence about physics maybe you know let's try it you've got to show that it is there's no way of knowing in advance what kind of phenomena are useful evidence things become useful evidence when somebody can figure out what to do about them as far as puns are concerned notice that they have to do with language use not with language itself you can't really ask whether every language has puns you can only ask whether every language user has does use puns or whether every language user has the capacity to use funds puns if that capacity has probably awakened the answer to the second question is probably yes the answer the first one's probably no it's not clear what we learn from that what makes something upon might or might not be illuminating you'll only know when somebody gives the answer like any other kind of phenomenon under a theory of universal languages in which all languages are essentially the same how would you approach the traditional claim that in in every language there are certain words that are considered to be untranslatable and that sometimes there are entire works of literature such as the Quran which are considered to be untranslatable well you can't really answer that because the notion of translatable doesn't mean anything it's a little bit like the notion refer at what level are you translating something properly like when you hear me say John is painting the house Brown and you're interpreting what I say are you giving a translation or a different interpretation there's no answer to that question that's like is London near Cambridge you know the question only has answers relative to certain specific human concerns relative to certain kinds of human concerns a sentence in one language in say my language may or may not be translatable into your language I may have different associations I may embed it in a different array of interests and understanding and so on but we have no question so you can't give an answer I don't know are certain things that you can give answers to there are other questions which where the which just aren't answerable for the kinds of reasons I mentioned you similar you couldn't say whether they're like answering the question what makes a feather fall on a particular course or even worse questions than that when people talk about translate ability they're talking about cultural wealth at a level that goes way beyond this discussion I want to say that I always had trouble when I was growing up learning the difference between Elson and home so I don't know if I got it in one pass alright yup I doubt that very much frankly I wanted you cut you kind of a during your talk you'd assimilated a theory that the stimulus is impoverished and we have to construct it internally to Descartes and referred in passing to behaviorism and plug that I sort of had the opposite sort of take on the issue that that you know why why is it taking so why is it takes so much stimulus to sort of get for a child to learn the concepts linguistic concepts and I was wondering if you would comment on say other theories of the that involve rich stimuli I'm thinking of ecological real Gibson's ecological realism and why is it not as naturalistic approach why is it not naturalistic to look for properties in the environment say properties environment that would correspond to a container object instead of saying that that structure is in the in a language faculty well the problem with that is that you can it's pert you can probably will say that houses those things in the environment have all the properties that I mentioned that's true houses are the physical thing out there is from one is at on the one it has the property of eliciting a point of view which says you're just an exterior surface and it has the property of eliciting the point of view that says you're an exterior surface plus a distinguished interior with abstract properties and has all of those properties must have in fact it has exactly the properties that enabled me to think about it in that way but the trouble is it also has every other array of properties now has a new array of properties you like if I design a different organism that decides to look at a house with a distinguished interior surface the you know some other property you know the exterior plus things ten feet away has that property to so you're back to the question why do I pick out that set of properties and the only answer to that short of you know design intervention has got to be that it's coming from inside me so we're back to the same theory there's only the appearance of a different approach there that's self delusion there seems to be an assumption underlying your theory of natural language that there is a close link between the signifier and the signified that I guess to use your analogy to Dakar that when you and I both look at this figure we both see a perfect triangle that you're not seeing a triangle and I'm seeing a square one thing that I'm interested in if you if you do agree that this is an assumption that underlines the that underlies this why do you make that assumption because it's true and also I mean it's overwhelmingly supported but not you know it's not always true in every possible case but in the case of in de cartes case you know look at the triangle it's true but you can demonstrate it in the laboratory how do you respond them to say post structural theories to come from a radically different assumption well if I understood what they were talking about I guess I could respond but not understanding what they're talking about most of the time I can't respond and if somebody can make a coherent can present to me I mean I won't say that I don't understand anything I mean there are some things that I read and they kind of evoke images and associations in my mind that I can sort of make up a story and say well it probably means that it usually turns out to be something pretty obvious such as the fact that your interpretation of a text depends on you know all sorts of things that you're bringing to it or that the environment you know that the history is bringing to it and so on and so forth sure that's obvious when I try to understand something to try to form something obvious I can't find it maybe that's my defect like maybe I'm lacking a gene or something but anyway when I read it that's what happens I should also say that I have you know there are a lot of things in the world I don't understand so for example if I pick up a latest issue of the Physical Review and I read one of the articles in it or you know some set theory journal I'm not going to understand that either but there's a radical difference between these cases in the case of the physical review first of all I know that if I made the effort I could get to understand it and I know what course to undertake to get closer and closer to understanding it I've done it in cases which I happen to be interested in furthermore I know that I can go to my friend in the physics department and say look this looks like total gibberish to me explain it to me at my level of ignorance and stupidity so that I'll be able to understand that he can do that you know on the other hand when I try this with a page of Derrida nobody can explain to me what it means and I don't know what process to go through to get it to the other than just words spitting around on the page so maybe it's some more variety of human intellectual achievement that goes beyond quantum physics and set theory and all these other things but anyhow it does look qualitatively different to that as I say hey that's my defect that's why I can't answer the questions dr. Tomsky if I understand correctly your you hypothesize the natural language that kind of functionality in the brain and what we actually speak is a kind of a simple epiphenomena on top of that and that the actual language is more complex and rich than we actually ever use do you have any hypothesis and how all this excess capacity came to be there yeah so and it just seems to be a fact that our language capacities involve I mean some things just seem to be factually correct say that there are garden path sentences there are sentences which are aligned the mechanisms of our mind assign to them a certain set of properties but when we perceive the sentence we don't our interpretive capacity doesn't doesn't assign them those properties we have to go through some other course of inquiry using our scientific capacities and so on to notice that discrepancy there seem to be things like that and that just looks well-established so why did it happen you know why did we get this system that's like asking how we got anything else why'd we get a circulatory system why do we have arms you know very virtually nothing is known about those questions I mean you know there's things known at the very you know there's something known about why a mixture of simple gases with an electrical spark going through it can ultimately turn into something remotely like a not really like but the beginnings of a bacterium I'm at that level some things are understood and they understood because the physical laws involved are more or less grass there are things understood some of things understood about the basic forms that exist in you in life you know bilateral symmetry you know there's some biophysical things that are understood more or less but when you ask why particular organs exist you can't say any you can say some weak things you can say that things won't be around if they're harmful to reproduction because then they'll die off through natural selection that you can say and you can say a few other things you can say some things about population genetics and so on but you can't say anything much about these topics and in fact you know I don't think serious evolutionary biologists have any doubts about this if you want to get a good picture of it from the point of view of one of the best I have a look at Richard Lewontin x' article on the evolution of cognition in the third volume of the Encyclopedia of cognitive sciences that was published edited by Daniel Ashur's and other people by published by MIT press a year or so ago where he goes on to give I think a very plausible argument as to why not only do we know nothing about the evolution of cognition but it's not even clear that there's a question there that we can ask seriously I mean the reason why we have the kinds of systems we do in the brain is probably because that's the way physics works you know as he says pretty reasonably for all we know when the brain reaches a certain level of maybe you know the brain may have gotten very big in order to do things like to take a semi joke which he gives the cool of blood no and it could have been a thermo regulator it's not impossible like Aristotle thought that the brain was a thermal regulator cool the blood that's why you got so much blood flowing around when it reached a certain scale and complexity because of the way physics works and biology works and so on it just had certain properties and one of those properties could have been you know sort of ability to solve some kind of problems or a language capacity or something else if cognitive capacities are like other things in the biological world that's probably the right kind of answer now you know once some of those capacities were around it's conceivable that they contributed to differential reproduction in which case you wouldn't and have more individuals around with those properties but as he points out even that isn't very reasonable I mean if you remember that most of human evolution was sort of small hunter-gatherer societies you know little groups of people who are sort of foraging around than the for food and trying to avoid saber-toothed Tigers and things like that and as Lawton points out and if you want to consider you can construct all kind of fairy tales and stories about this he says well how about the following fairy tale how about the one that says that you were more likely to live and hence reproduce if you were dumber and less imaginative now this is he points out there's some plausibility to that I mean if you've got a group of hunter-gatherers and one of them happens to be courageous and you know imaginative and he wants to try to see where that saber-toothed tiger is going and so on he'll probably hit he's more likely to get killed now his presence in the tribe really helped the tribe survive but his genes are going to be transmitted because he's more likely to get killed the ones were more likely to survive or the Windsors cleverly sitting at home and waiting for him to kill the tiger and bring in the food so maybe there's selection for stupidity and for lack of imagination and so on so that then you get the opposite of the development of cognitive development as he points out that's as good a fairy tale as any other you know and then in fact in this domain we really are talking about fairy tale the richness you describe in language that sounds like it's something that's in in the logical system and what's in the brain is an imperfect ability to follow that the brain has developed all sorts of capacities many of which are never put to use I mean we just know that for a fact um let's say take the take another capacity which is more or less well understood the number faculty that's you know that's simplest like the language faculty you got to know what a number is in order to anything about numbers how does a child know that after it's taught the count is six but there's going to be another one you know why did it end there let's say and you know how do you have the capacities that enable you to comprehend what a prime number is if you get that four well those capacities whatever there are they can't be learned because you just think through the logic of it you can't learn an already have them the usual story but those capacities were present in the human species long before they were ever used in fact there are human societies today and their entire Witcher have the same genes we do in every relevant respect which in their entire hundreds of thousands of years of history have never used it although you can quickly evoke the capacity and those species as soon as you present you know you sort of give them right stimulations so these capacities are just sitting there you know waiting I mean why are they there well probably because they're piggybacking on some other capacity like it's been argued that they're piggybacking on the language capacity I'm going to curious fact about languages it has this odd property of discreet infinity it's a digits and infinite digital system which is extremely rare in the biological world so it and that's like the number faculty so maybe the number of faculty is just kind of an abstraction from the linguistic faculty that doesn't look at it's complicated properties and just looks at its basic structure well that's a nice fairytale maybe true and if so you'd have a number of faculty around long you know without any without ever being used and there could be lots of other faculties like that I mean the chances are just none kind of grounds of biological plausibility that if there is a faculty sitting there that would contribute to reproductive success if you used it chances are it will be used and that's just on grounds of plausibility you know over a couple hundred thousand years somebody would have tried it and they would have succeeded and so on and so forth but that's about the level of what you can say in these area a little while ago a fairly well-known neural network person whose name escapes me now came here and compared rule-based systems to what he did not using a chemistry physics analogy but an analogy and I'm not an astronomer but something about an older mathematics for figuring out orbits that was fairly accurate but it didn't really describe the physics of what happened to a newer mathematics that's more accurate and actually showing that really happened that's I know it's a pretty big and vague question but if any kind of answer to that well on no network systems I mean there's nothing general to say I mean it's like any other mathematical conception you can just ask does it you know does it doesn't neuron that does the particular neural network very abstract notion question is does it does it abstract from this physical thing above your neck properties relevant to some particular question that's what you asked so in fact you ask the same question about it that you asked about any computational representational system us suppose somebody says well I think the representations of the brain are in first-order predicate calculus using the notations of coins mathematical logic okay that's an empirical hypothesis and then you can't ask a general question you can just say well is it true let's ask whether it's true and the same about some particular neural network proposal now in the there are some areas where which I don't have enough knowledge about to make judgments like some aspects of you know peripheral visual perception were people whose judgment I trust tells me that these models have some success there is nothing to talk about in the case of language as far as I know there's nothing there's simply nothing to talk about you know that you can't point to something but that has any success so you can't know whether there's any point to pursuing this or not maybe there is a point nobody's figured out how to do it or maybe there's no point but it has no prior plausibility you know it's based on the assumption that this particular way of abstracting from physical systems is a good way well you know there are endless numbers of ways of abstracting from physical systems and in fact as I mentioned we don't even wear even at all sure that we know what properties of these physical systems are the relevant ones to pick out for abstraction so what you can do is look at someone's particular proposal I mean I really actually don't agree with him but the point he was making that I wondered if you had a response to was he felt that then his mathematics were very closely modeling what was really happening in the brain and that made them somehow superior to a model that didn't have that well legitimacy could know that you you could be right he could be wrong but the only way to answer the question is to have a look at his mathematics to see what the explanatory formwork is and what the empirical successes are that's the question in the case as far as language is concerned I don't know of anything to look at yeah I'm just looking for some illumination on one point where you were saying that the idea of a shared language is unnecessary I sort of hit a wall on that let's say you need do we have a shared language it would it would seem so why would are you and I do you and I look alike in certain aspects a well we have a shared language in certain aspects - okay and the trouble is there's no you know there's no topology of those aspects that means anything so it's it's more like what we think of as shared a language we don't really think of it would be just aspects of the thing that you call why would you sell things as being near each other - relative to particular interests we think of things as being near each other like you know I have live in Lexington in the next town over is Arlington and I think of Arlington as being here Lexington but there's no answer to the question is Arlington your Lexington it depends on your interest at the moment but now from the point of view if we have the purpose of getting along pretty well without too much trouble you and I share the same language because we're going to be able to do it if there's somebody out there who's native languages Japanese and he starts talking Japanese to me I'm not going to be able to do it so from a point of view of that particular human interest we can impose a kind of metric on the system if we like pick some other interest you'll do it differently it's very much like being here I mean suppose I ask the question is John almost home there isn't any answer to that in general question is relative to what interest so these things are just on a sliding scale and don't fall neatly into categories something I'm going neatly aren't going to any categories okay there are like hype categories I mean people differ in height you know all over place if your interest is putting together a professional basketball team then you might say well there's two categories you know above seven feet and below seven feet or something but if you have some other interest you'll do it differently there's no answer to the question what are the height categories it's just a not a sensible question and the same is true about common languages now we get easily diluted about that because there are things around like oceans and conquests and national TV and so on which impose you know which do impose a kind of topology if you like but you know that's has nothing to do with the nature of the language faculty if you go to parts of the world where these factors haven't operated quite the same you just get any mess you like I do understand that a little better now thank you yeah oh right yes the hope nation doubt they are saying uh maybe uh trees are not analogical like you said my lease is excellent me hit and I can find some other examples in Chinese you see if I say he almost didn't come to the same as he almost didn't he almost can versus he almost didn't come notice again it was negation and yes standard a negative type ya means that they express the same thing and also that's illogical so how to deal with this phenomenon in your competition mental conditional system to deal with we just observe it it's like dealing with the fact that you know that you're standing next to a chair it's just the fact I mean we can kind of explain it I can explain the fact that you're standing there you wanted to say something now when we explain this partially on the grounds that are interpretive mechanisms simply block when they're faced with certain kinds of semantic structures and we can find some of those blockages like the presence of anything of a in any way a negative character like the word mess is a typical case try try to ask both suppose that you go somewhere every Christmas let's say you go home every Christmas and you usually see some friend of yours and you didn't see me last year and this year and you want to say I kind of expected you to see you last year and I didn't do you say I missed seeing you last year or I missed not seeing you last year nobody knows the answer to that question I mean there's gotta be an answer it's determined by the semantics of our language but nobody get out and we sort of and the reason is that words like Miss have a sort of a negative aspect to them and which is not well equipped to compute debt that's why students that's why people have such a rotten time doing proposition propositional calculus is one of the hardest things to do this most elementary part of mathematics absolutely trivial you can construct an algorithm with children you know solve every problem in principia mathematica a fraction of a second but try and give it to a professional mathematician they have a horrible time with it we're not well equipped to do those problems just like rats aren't well equipped to run mazes if another question hmm I still remember your famous sense like a colorless green ideas sleep furiously and many people claims that it is syntactic right but this mentally wrong makes no sense but a cadastre that is politically right if you say it in an appropriate context like if somebody asks me what I didn't do to you tonight I just posit colors cooing ideas lips fiercely you can use in all kind of ways for example it could be a code which says drop the bomb tomorrow that would be perfectly correct usage of it and there's nothing you know any the human action could possibly have any all sorts of ranges of any signal that we can produce could be used for all kinds of purposes depending on tacit agreement sir explicit agreements and so on the question is what are the properties of that expression where all the properties of that expression in fact see here incidentally is a case where the unification problem actually the unification issue actually provides some insight from a computational representational point of view there are some theories which tell you what the properties of that expression are when we look at evoked potentials it turns out that again some correlations so expressions of that type that's interesting that tells us that you know from two different points of view looking at the brain we find a categorization that comes out the same that's interesting but the general question you know is it a sentence of the language that is no meaning I mean you know there's probably good sense in which an expression of Chinese is a sentence of English if you would I don't know a word of Chinese but if you were to say something in Chinese using my language capacity I would have signed a certain interpretation to it automatically for example I would distinguish it from the screeching of a door now suppose that there's a guy over here whose language is Swahili and he listens to you that person will assign probably a different interpretation to it okay which means that his language and my language each assigned some interpretation to a sentence of Chinese namely with whatever properties it has I have to clarification questions I wanted to ask the first is about the nature of the language universals as you define them I'm a little bit unclear on ease and I was hoping you could answer this question about how we are to interpret them as laws no language laws this is an example you gave you said that in the two sentences he thinks John is a genius and John thinks he is a genius that in the second one key the pronoun can refer also to the subject whereas in the first one the pronoun he cannot refer to John referentially dependent on the subject my accident happened to refer to the same person but it's not our intention in using it to have he to assign he the reference of Junon and he thinks that John is intelligent all right al seems to be universal all right that's okay now do you feel that if I were to create some sort of environment for a language user where I consistently violated this universal rule and made the reference of the pronoun dependent on the name would that person evolve in such a way or would they acquire the language in such a way that they would use this they would substitute the ruler are you saying that this is a rule that in fact we couldn't really answer that if you think about it you already know you know that rule without any experience you will be it's not that as a child you try to do it the wrong way and your mother said that's not the way we do it okay but if I tried to make my child do it the wrong way would they grow up being able to desert you could probably raise your child to speak propositional calculus you know I mean it won't be it may be you can raise your child not to you it's language faculty but to use other faculties of mine the second question I had was about your budget you could raise you know you could raise a child to crawl instead of walk I didn't say walk on four-legged or instead of walk and probably couldn't maybe would end up doing that and lose the fascinating walk just with me using that family I wanted to ask you about the performance structures versus a language and you said that someone could have a language but not have the performance structures with which to manifest it in principle idea I would rather doubt that that's biologically possible but you know you could you could imagine as a conceptual possibility so usually a sharp distinction between language and language usage which would almost account for sort of innate ISM where somebody who never had any sort of capacity could still have a language but we all accept that I mean that's not even a question so for example suppose that suppose that say I have a stroke let's say and I completely lose the ability to use English I can't say a word I can't understand the thing okay that happens and suppose that the effects of the stroke are overcome let's say by drug or just through time and so on and in the peer in which the effects are gonna overcome I don't hear anything I had no experience well if they're successfully overcome the effects of this drug procedure I think the right kind of drug or something I hope which blonde in fact even happens recover my ability to use English I now let's look at me during the period when I didn't have the ability did I have knowledge of English well the answer has got to be yes otherwise how come as the effects of the stroke receded or I took the drug I ended up knowing English and not Japanese and having experience during that period so how come it came out elvish not Japanese whereas if it had been my monolinguals Japanese friend had the stroke under the same circumstances he would have ended up knowing English those are real things were not inventing them well what can i that notes during the period it was neither of us had any ability whatsoever we both had some sort of cognitive system namely a cognitive system that we couldn't use at all and later we regained the capacity to use it and not sure that we already had it well suppose we have another guy he has a stroke and he never recovers but let's say autopsy shows those were some sophisticated brain science of the future autopsy shows that that guy has all the same brain structures that I do in the relevant parts of the language faculty well it would be only reasonable to assume that that person retained the knowledge too that we would have absolutely no empirical evidence for it from behavior that's just normal science is hard to think of an alternative account of this in fact I think we're always we just automatically assume it what we say is that no in ordinary language we say that you know you're the people with the stroke know the language but they can't use it and they may be able to access that knowledge as the effects of the stroke recede in which case they will be able to use it furthermore that ordinary description seems almost forced on us unless again you resort to miracles I mean you have the account attempt the problem with explaining why I recover English and my friend over there recovers Japanese even though neither of us has any evidence why didn't it work out the other way around I recover Japanese and he recover English I should say that this issues come up in the philosophical literature people like say I think any human victims die answer various types of wanted to crown that knowledge is ability have given some very strange answers to this kind of question which in fact and want to inventing a new kind of ability different from the usual kind which is invested with all the properties of knowledge that doesn't get us anywhere yes sir I would dumb over here I would like to ask a question like know if there's any evidence that the the real the world can influence or inform or change the actual or the phenomenological for example or for instance the can the signifiers we use to stand for the the spoken signifiers we use to stand for the noise dog makes um actually inform the noise that we hear that the dog makes you know very good I mean may very well be true like it may be that you know we hear roosters saying cockadoodledoo and some other language they hear him saying cuckoo Riku maybe you could even show that in an experiment but I would I don't know of any experimental results but I would imagine it would be true thank you very much um every time I hear about your assertion that certain principles of language are innate I can't get over my response that that seems an explanation of sorts of last resort and I keep wanting to think to think to say instead that we have not yet figured out how we can extract those principles from experience and that's a common reaction and I think it's an interesting fact that people have that reaction so it's very in fact what you're saying is very characteristic and it's an interesting fact about the intellectual culture which goes back hundreds of years and notice that you have I assume we would have a very different reaction to say let me ask you the following question suppose that as far as I'm aware nobody knows anything about the biological factors involved in puberty okay I suppose that somebody comes along and says and also as far as I'm aware every embryo in every developmental biologist assumes that puberty is basically programmed I mean it'll happen or you know when it'll happen can effect be affected by a nutritional level or something and so on suppose somebody came along and said well that's an explanation of last resort it really results from peer pressure but we just haven't figured it out yet I mean it really results from the fact that you know the these young people ten years old see their friends going through puberty and they want to be like everyone else that's why they're doing it okay well you know that's conceivable now the point is when you make that proposal everybody laughs when you make the comprable pros a proposal about anything sort of above the neck to put it metaphorically everyone thinks is very reasonable now the question is what's the difference why do we think it's ridiculous in one case and plausible in the other case as far as more of the evidence about the same in fact the evidence for an eighth structure is probably better for things above the neck because there were not a total ignorance you actually have some four strong proposals about the innate principles and some explanatory force to them too so by the standards of the sciences at least we have more reason to believe in the innate principles of both of the neck and below the neck and in fact they also did in 17th century the one case that I mentioned if you go through it works marking messing about they card and Hume as an example of that now there were some phenomena around everyone agreed on a phenomenon there was very strong evidence by the criteria the science Sciences to take take arts solution that it's you need that's why it happens nevertheless the long-term consequences were acceptance of Joan's solution with its self reputation that we don't have the concept of a straight line now I think that reflects that same strange intuition that people have above the neck will insist that everything's got to be experience below the neck we're quite willing to accept the idea that everything is the way any rational person would think if you have things that happen without information it must be coming from inside and I think the question is why the dualism well if there were any rational support for it you could look at that argument but there isn't any what it comes down to is exactly the feeling that you express and that's the standard opinion so we have to ask a question about irrational attitudes why this particular irrational attitude that's what it is and you could have various speculations about it and not my extra Frank opinion is that it's a reflection of a kind of something which also showed up in traditional dualism so I mean as humans it's very natural to think of people as having a mind and a body which are separate and the problem that had to connect them you know traditional non body dualism was very commonsensical I think it's probably is the way we taught to think about people that's why we would someone as being the same person if their body underwent all you know what we call their body will underwent all sorts of changes but we will think of them as a different person if you rang coded their brains and they had somebody else's memories and language and thoughts and so on okay that's just the way we look at people and it's very hard to get out of it just like it's very hard to look at the Sun setting and to tell to tell yourself it's not setting the Earth's turning I mean you sort of know that at some level but there's no way for you to look at that and stop seeing it as the Sun setting you just can't and I think when we look at people it's extremely hard for us to look at them and not see them as Minds inside bodies well traditional dualism metaphysical dualism collapsed for scientific reasons but that doesn't mean we can get out of our skins we still look at people this way and I think we're as replace traditional dualism is a kind of an epistemological dualism which comes out pretty much like this it says below the neck I mean that metaphorically like you know on the things that people call physical we're willing to pursue the methods of the sciences and if they lead us to conclude that things are internally programmed we'll accept it above the neck we're going to be completely irrational we're going to insist on what we would never dream of in the case of things that are fall on our side of the intuitive boundary physical and I think that's probably correct I don't see any other way of explaining this strange phenomenon for the last hundred to several hundred years that the very that even that the very same kind of evidence in fact even better evidence then that which would make us laugh about puberty and peer pressure has made people think we can't do that in the case of mental activity if there's another explanation oh not but I think we're in the domain of trying to account for irrational human beliefs is that it does seem to me that when I ask linguists this question I really appreciate your full answer because very often I get the answer if you won't even accept what I say that far then we have no grounds to continue to discuss you the right answer now why should you accept what any linguist says for that matter with any physicist says I mean if a physicist if you asked let's take my hypothetical story about you know opening up this month's Physical Review and my looking at an article which looks to me like gibberish and I go over to the physics department and I ask some friends over there tell me what it's about if he just says look take my word for it then I don't trust him I mean I may decide he's a postmodern theorists you know if what he tells me is if he does what in fact he can do you know find my level of ignorance and give me some account at my level of ignorance which will introduce me to what's going on and even explain to me a plausible way in which I could go further then we're in business and I think you would have the same reaction to those linguists I don't think all this stuff is that deep you know it's not physics it's much simpler than that and it seems to me the you know it should be possible to give answers at the level of understanding of anybody I mean I've talked about these topics in junior high
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Channel: infiniteinfiniteinfi
Views: 46,375
Rating: 4.901031 out of 5
Keywords: Question (Quotation Subject), Philosophy, Science, Logic, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mind, Brain, Neurology, Computational, Intellectual, Dualism, Word, Text, Lexicon, Grammar, Syntax, Language, Neurons, Genetics, System, Assumption, Experiment, Understand
Id: yGs-4h0wQj4
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Length: 118min 17sec (7097 seconds)
Published: Thu Aug 09 2012
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