Noam Chomsky on Mind & Language

first question always is can you hear me in the back yeah okay actually a week ago I thought mother nature was going to continue with her antics and I'd have to come next spring but you made it the the title has a couple of presuppositions which I want to say something about one it's talking about other cognitive processes so it's assuming that the mind like the metal systems of mind brain is like everything else in the body it's a modular system with sub components dedicated sub components that have their own particular properties their own properties of growth and development and a functioning and that integrate with each other in the life of the organism and the modular approach to the mind assumes that mental systems are the same that's pretty uncontroversial the other presupposition is controversial it's that language is one of those systems when I talk about language and other cognitive systems or assuming that language exists as a separate system not just some kind of accidental connection of interaction of other systems that's highly controversial in fact it's a that language exists in the sense that can be an independent object of serious study is a distinctly a minority position and in fact has been for a century the which is kind of strange when you think about it because on the surface it seems entirely obvious if you consider a newborn infant let's say the infant is faced with the famous blooming buzzing confusion of William James and somehow and how incidentally is not known some in fact barely studied because it hasn't been recognized to be a problem though it is the infant somehow picks out of this complex collection of unorganized data some sub parts which are language related that's not it's not easy to figure out how that happens as I say it's barely been studied just beginning to be studied now so it picks out the intrud picks this out of the environment reflexively of course in fact we now know that that's going on even intrauterine to a certain extent and then continues again pretty much reflexively to pick up the capacities that you and I are now using and the so is very little evidence not only is the evidence is it scattered among other data but that for not much of what anyone knows there's almost no evidence at all that goes from the meaning of the simplest words when you look at them closely up to complex structures there and their interpretation I'll give a couple of examples but it's a pretty clear furthermore it's a humanly unique capacity so if an infant has a pet chimpanzee or songbird or kitten or whatever the animal can't doesn't even make the first step can't pick out of the environment language related data that's not because of sensory motor defects or deficiencies or differences even chimpanzee auditory system is pretty much the same as a human auditory system so much the same that it's recently been discovered it even picks out the distinctive features the kinds of fonts and features that play a role in language chimpanzee auditory system is somehow constructed so it specifically identifies those and the motor system really doesn't matter I mean the people learn language perfectly well a children learn language actually normally if they're exposed only to sign not to sound and if they use only sound sign the course of development is virtually identical in quite remarkable ways and in fact the length of the what sometimes called the externalization of language the way it goes through the sensory motor system it seems to be modality independent and of course say apes have the same visual system essentially the same capacity for motor action even more developed in some ways in humans so that can't be the problem it's got to be something about the internal computational system that's uniquely human but despite all these facts and they are glaringly obvious nevertheless it's this kind of dogma that language just can't be a separate system it's gotta be just a combination of other things common maybe to primate in fact it's if you take a look course in comparative terms across other organisms about the only known animal that even has any of the rudimentary properties of human language or certain kinds of songbirds and they're young billions of years away in terms of evolutionary history so whatever similarities they are has to be convergent not the common ancestry and so so there's something very special about language also it's pretty recent in the human line there's really no evidence for its existence there beyond maybe a hundred thousand years ago which is you know flick of an eye in evolutionary terms and many millions of years after the separation from the nearest species well despite all of this rich is glaringly obvious it has there is the kind of a doctrine that are pretty stat it's if you took votes and cognitive scientists today most most all agree with it that it can't be true I think it's a interesting case of denial of the obvious for which maybe psychologists might want to have something say but you can easily determine it from the literature also it goes way back so if we go back to the 1950s when the kind of work that I'll be talking about what sometimes called the generative Enterprise when it was sort of barely beginning actually a couple of graduate students at Harvard who didn't believe any of the they were highly skeptical of the standard behavioral science concepts of the time at that point the same view was just rampant so the leading the leading philosophers most influential philosopher who had aimed to say about these things was a very important philosopher Harvard W the Quine and his conception which was highly influential and not just in the Cambridge area but everywhere else as well was that language is just every language is just a fabric of sentences associated with one another and with stimuli by the mechanism of conditioned response so it's all within the framework of the radical behaviorism that was prevalent at the time that's a view that's almost incoherent I mean I can even tell whether some of the behaviors or sentences unless there's an independent concept of language but despite the incoherence and the complete lack of evidence in fact masses of contrary evidence this was a widely believed accepted view outside in the fields around linguistics there was no cognitive science at the time was just the early beginning in linguistics itself arrived similar view was held so it was a common standard view you can kind of read it in the major literature of the time was what was called the Bosnian view named after the famous anthropologist linguist Franz boas whether he believed it or not is another story it was called the Boas e'en view namely that languages can differ from one another in arbitrary ways and when you approach a new language to investigate you should do it without any preconceptions about what a language can be because they can all be entirely different actually that's the way I was taught in the late nineteen forty or fifty when I was stood the of course that would mean there is really no such thing as language it's sort of anything that comes along the later on there were in the philosophical tradition more modern philosophy another standard view that developed while these pretty much remained was not but not universally anymore by the sixties and seventies beginning to change but a view that entered was and so it was developed also tracing back to coin and in fact with deep flutes in history of psychology is that any mental process anything you can't have a mental process at all unless it's accessible to consciousness may not be conscious but at least has to be accessible to consciousness that's a very widely held view in fact if you look over the history of psychology it's pretty hard to find anyone who questioned it even Freud in fact talked about the unconscious but he read Freud carefully he appears to have assumed that he's not a model of clarity but he seems to have assumed that whatever is unconscious can in principle be accessed by consciousness in fact that's what underlies the practice of psychoanalysis trying to bring things to consciousness very hard you might check to find anyone who believed that the process the mental processes are processes of thinking planning interpreting and so on know that they can't in fact to be inaccessible the consciousness although I think again the evidence is overwhelming that that's what they are almost entirely and in the case of language almost completely which is why you can't investigate a language by introspection you can look at the data but it's your of your own language but it's as foreign to you as it is to anyone else what's inside well the of the approaches to language at the time were what are called procedural you there were certain procedures of data analysis you applied them to a corpus of material and you could rearrange the material and put into organized form which again that's what theoretical linguistics was in fact the main theoretical book was called methods in theoretical and structural linguistics methods because that's all there is the European linguistics was approximately the same and that again has the same kind of framework of assumptions it follows from this and was believed that there can't be any real problems about language have any puzzles because we are doing is taking data and organizing it and unless you make a mistake or you have the wrong procedures it can't really be anything problematic it's there is a modern variant of this which is I mentioned is overwhelmingly dominates the cognitive sciences all returned to that well as I say it's kind of strange because of the not just for exotic reasons but because of the nature of what's obvious before our eyes but there's nothing novel about that now that's the way the sciences have developed so for example for one of the great turning point in the sciences was around the 17th century when scientists for the first time really allowed themselves to be puzzled about what looked like very simple things so for thousands of years the greatest scientists had a simple answer to some obvious fact obvious fact is that if say I pick up a cup of boiling water and hold my hand over it if I take my hand away the steam rises in if a let go the cup the cup falls so why does the cup fall and the steam rise well there's an answer given by an Aristotle they're seeking their natural place and for thousands of years that was considered a satisfactory answer and modern science actually begins when Galileo and later others agreed were able to convince themselves there's something puzzling about that why does that happen and as soon as those questions began to be asked and investigated it was very quickly discovered that all of our intuitions about how these things work are just false that's the intuition is about rate of fall and almost any other simple thing and it's at that point that it when it came to be discovered that what seemed to be obvious was compact not at all understood as at that moment that modern science starts and that often has yet to happen in the human sciences they think seem kind of obvious to us so we don't really question but if you can bring yourself to be puzzled about them you find that we really don't understand anything well those are the two presuppositions on going to assume except both namely that the mind is modular like everything else in the biological world every other thing in all organisms and that language exists as a separate module this but it shouldn't really be surprising that language and the mind should and the human intelligence should follow the biological norm as I mentioned language has itself as very special properties I'll mention some of them and the things that should have seen puzzling are very puzzling and still are when you look closely and it's a very recent development if you look at the evolutionary record of course we want to tape recordings but there's a lot of archaeological evidence and the archaeological evidence for the existence of language so implicates the existence of language is very modern maybe within a hundred thousand years or so and unique to humans it's not found in the other hominid branches Neanderthals for example who lived up till maybe thirty thousand years ago the insect still having the underfill chains but it seems to be various specifically human millions of years after the break from other organisms there is a huge literature by now just the last 20 years it's virgin on what's called evolution of language which is itself kind of curious evolution of language a very hard topic to study there is no direct evidence there's no comparative evidence nobody knows where to look for neurological evidence nevertheless is a library's full of books on it especially the last 20 years if you take much simpler topics there's almost no literature on them so take say the communication system of bees there's quite complex some scattered papers correctly nothing on it the reason is it's just understood to be too hard it's too hard to study the science is already study what's kind of right at the borders of understand for bees a study of evolution of the communication system of bees which is quite complex you all know about the waggle dance and that's everything who is far more easiest study there's about 500 species of being safe plenty of comparative evidence they have different communication systems as some appear to have no communication system they get along about as well as the others which raises some questions about what the function of those complicated systems is if anyway there's plenty of comparative evidence the brain is tiny it's the size of a grass seed maybe hundred thousand neurons miniscule is compared to the human brain very short gestation period a couple of days you can breed so on and so forth you can do any experiment you like you want to take them apart that's allowed you don't need consent forms or ethical issues or anything so it's a perfect organism to study as and humans are impossible to study in all of those dimensions and nevertheless there's almost nothing about it because of the recognition among biologists that is just too hard on the other hand the kind of tacit assumption that there can't really be much to language makes it a possible topic to study if you don't know anything about language and incidentally if you don't if you have quite confused notions about evolution there is a kind of a pop biology which is very widespread that assumes that evolutionary change that takes place in small steps and adds up and finally get complex things happening it was believed at one time not very long ago in fact nobody believes it anymore by now there's overwhelming evidence for what's called saltation you know sudden changes and it's even kind of understood why this has been understood in the biological sciences ever since at least the 60s and the 70s when after the discovery of the regulatory mechanisms cells that govern the action of genes that govern the action of other genes if you change the regulatory circus a little bit you get huge phenomenal differences and there's by now many examples of very small changes genetic changes that lead to substantial differences in what the organism is famous discussion back in the 1970s by housewife cub is one of the discoverers of these mechanisms in Nobel laureate who argued that if you you could change in his image was you could change an elephant to a fly by just changing the timing and organization of two regulatory circuits and that kind of that you can't prove yet but similar smaller results have definitely been shown so the idea that everything has to happen by small steps is out the window I might say that back in the 1950s and 60s in biology too it was generally assumed that organisms can vary in arbitrary ways so the next organism you look at you have to approach it quite differently from others without preconceptions that is totally out the window so much out the window that by now there are even proposals which are taken seriously one by a molecular biologist at Boston University that there may be a universal genome that is that all the Metazoa complex organisms that come from the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago that they're all fundamentally the same they all have a basically the same genome with slight variations and that doesn't look exotic anymore they may not may be true maybe not but it's not an exotic proposal given what's known now about conservation of genes neck's structures going all the way to bacteria up to humans and Simmel and deep homologies know very deep similarities and the way organisms are put together it's I think the same is true of language but it's much more controversial in this case well give you some illustrations from today I go back a couple of months there was a review article in the journal Science main journal scientific weekly American American Association for advancement of science by a well known under Oh cognitive neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute in the Netherlands he was reviewing several books on evolution of language the and he kind of dismissed most of them because they were tainted by a false assumption and namely the assumption that languages that language actually exists that is that there are rural systems specific language which determined the character of sound systems other externalization systems determine the structures and meanings of expressions how they're interpreted and that can't be its violates the dogma and in fact the in order to sort of established the point the editors added a photograph in the in the along with a journal article which is a photograph of three infants properly multiracial gotta be politically correct so three infants who seem to be more or less paying attention to one another and the sub the title says communication without syntax without rules so that shows that you can have communication without rules they could have had a picture of three bacteria which would have made the same point they also communicate without syntax but underlying this is a fundamental Dogma which is almost never questioned though it's almost certainly false and that is that language is just a system of communication there's every reason to believe that that's not true in fact again obvious reasons if you just introspect almost all of your use of language like 99% of it is internal you can't go for a minute without talking to yourself it takes a tremendous active will to stop talking to yourself well that's obviously not communication that's thinking and that's one with all the use of language in fact goes on all night unfortunately but an even interaction like interaction among people parts of it or communication but the large parts aren't to establish in social relations whatever nevertheless this Dogma is widely held and that leads to the assumption that you can understand something about language if you look at communication systems of other languages that's what underlies the all of the work on evolution of language you take a look at this work you find it's not about evolution of language all its speculations speculations of course about the evolution of communication - quite a different topic it's not a language and in fact then language is used for communication but so is everything else we do style address whatever and the large parts of language aren't use of language is only peripherally for communication but if you think of language as just being a system of communication then you can look at animal communication systems and you can see if you can draw some analogies or whatever actually you can't very much but at least it's it's not ridiculous if you look at the properties of language it's just instantly ridiculous even the ones that I met simple ones that I mentioned well the with regard to with regard to communicate itíll of the article incidentally is also revealing the title of the article is without social context question mark and what it's the point is to criticize the idea that you can study language without paying attention to the social context of its use well in fact if you're studying communication that's true would make much sense to study communication without looking at the circumstances of its use it's close to tautology on the other hand if the study of the mechanisms that enter into communication or that enter into other aspects of life and in other areas of the cognitive sciences and biology that's just taken for granted so for example if you study the structure of the digestive system you can do that and in fact you do do that without asking what happens when you have a Big Mac or something in fact that you dismiss you try to abstract away from that if you're studying in this insight mental psychological systems there's very good work on say object recognition by infants Elizabeth spell Q Renee by origin all others they look at the try to discover the mechanisms by experiment without social context they're not interested in they don't look at it when two kids are playing maybe you can but that's peripheral you try to abstract away from that and carry out experimental studies in a refined situation in which there's no social context that's the way you study it automatically like anything the sciences take one of the major discoveries of study of perception one of the most interesting principles that was discovered was Shima almonds what's called rigidity principle is a pretty surprising fact it turns out that if a person is presented with tickets to scopic images you know just dots in a screen a few dots maybe three or four dots on a screen and you have several presentations of it what you see what you perceive is a rigid object in motion that's the structure that you impose on the sequence of a few dots on a screen that's the rigidity principle which is a pretty remarkable discovery but has absolutely nothing to do with social context again this is not even real objects it's looking at the Kista scopic images like most of the study of vision so in effect throughout the biological sciences just as in chemistry or physics all of this is taken for granted but in the study of language and higher human mental processes this considered something to be something wrong with this you just can't approach it in the manner of the sciences the so take just take a concrete examples of these things in the way so I won't write in the blackboard but the simple enough so you can keep it in mind so to take an actual sentence say of English take the sentence they wonder if they wonder if the mechanics fix the car okay and suppose you want to ask a question about how many cars there were you can say how many cars did they wonder if the mechanics fixed I suppose you want to ask a question about the mechanics well then it comes out how many mechanics do you wonder if fix the car well is plainly something wrong with that you can't say that has a perfectly good meaning fine thought just can't express it in language and that generalizes very widely as principles that underlie at that extended and all sorts of other constructions but did you do you have to study that in a social context or in a condition of communication it could it possibly be learned I mean did you have evidence that you're not allowed to say that or you can't say it of course not I mean this is just something like the rigidity principle it's some property of the system which if you're willing to reach the stage of say Galileo if you want to enter into modern science you should be puzzled about and it's a typical example myriad examples of that kind and any one of them illustrates the fact if you want to understand anything about the properties of language you're going to have to study it the way the sciences are pursued even the cognitive sciences in other domains but that's contrary to the dogmas well what's developed out of this is in modern cognitive science is a very strange concept of scientific inquiry it's it's not true of say the study of vision like spell key by our own momen and others but it is true of the especially the computational cognitive sciences which have the merit that the proposals are clear enough so you can actually investigate them they're not just hand waving but everything happens like to other primates they actually have models that you can investigate which is good and what you can show is they fail a hundred percent totally and it doesn't make any difference because they succeed in terms of a new conception of science which dominates the computational cognitive sciences the idea that science is a matter of developing models that matter more or less approximate data usually Bayesian methods of statistical analysis and basic methods have the nice property that whatever the data is you can find the Bayesian Alice that will fit it you just have to fake the right priors and so on and so forth not exactly fitted but kind of come close this is never done in the sciences so for example if someone is studying SEBI communication you know say the waggle dance of some species of bees they don't proceed by taking videotapes massive videotapes of bees swarming and then do a statistical analysis of them you know Bayesian analysis and from which you could get a pretty good prediction of what's going to happen the next time bee swarm that's absolutely no interest to be scientists and quite rightly if you apply for an NSF grant to study it they'll laugh at you on the other hand if you apply for NSF grant to do the same thing with corpus a collection of spoken language you can't get it right off that's considered very sophisticated or say physics if trying to study physics you don't take videotapes of what's happening outside the window you know leaves blowing around and so on and do an analysis of them and get you know pretty good massive collection you get a pretty good prediction of what's going to happen tomorrow when you look out the window a prediction that's way better than any little physicist can give in fact they can't give you any prediction at all and they don't care about but the sciences just aren't done like that the only thing that is done like that is particular branches of the computational and other cognitive sciences that deal with higher mental faculties language in particular and there's a criterion of success the criterion of success is you get a little better each time you have more data you know more complicated Bayesian analysis more sophisticated methods and you get a little to the data as I say in any other domain this would simply be ridiculed but it is the criterion of success and the computational cognitive sciences novel approach you can find it in all the major journals all the time and but only for language not even for something as close to languages say a numerical calculation so for example suppose you want to study the rather interesting fact in fact very surprising and puzzling fact that all humans have a capacity for a numerical computation that they understand the number system that's incidentally a fact that did puzzle the scientists who created the modern theory revolution Darwin and Wallace they were kind of struck by the fact that all humans that didn't experiment with the business recognizer was true that all humans have comprehend the number system which is very surprising from their point of view because it couldn't have been selected it's barely been used in the whole history of humans a small group of humans mostly pretty modern and still small have you know made use of the system but for most of almost entire human history in fact most humans in their day it just never never used it all they could handle small numbers but so can Apes and they could handle what's called numerosity you know knowing that a hundred things is more than 80 things but not the particular characteristics of the digital number system you know the principles of multiplication or addition and so on so where to come from a big puzzle for them if it wasn't selected how come it's there in fact Darwin and Wallace had a dispute over this co-founders of theory of evolution and Wallace argued that there has to be some principle in evolution apart from natural election to account for this mystery and Darwin didn't agree with that but he absolutely he had no alternative suggestion remained a mystery it has remained a mystery up to the present the likely answer which we can now begin to perceive is that if you look at the actual mechanisms of language if there's any time I may get to them with something about them but if you get if you take a look at them carefully it turns out that if you simplify them radically they in fact yield the number system so it's very likely that the number system just kind of piggyback those language if you have a language however that develop evolve you just get the number system as a free gift by simplifying the language actually reducing the lexicon the collection of words to one element then the basic computational principles do give you a model of a number system which may very well be where it comes from which would just true overcome the mystery well let's go on this I'll go back to Enfield again is useful collection of standard beliefs he argues that language doesn't exist because it is entirely grounded in a constellation of cognitive capacities that each taken separately has other functions as well so it exists in the sense that say today's weather exists I mean yeah it does exist but it's not a topic of scientific study it's just a constellation of other factors that operate independently and the argument is that that's true of language there isn't a particle of evidence through this but it's almost universally held in the cognitive science it's not totally but very widely and in fact as soon as you look at the simplest thing you see it can't be true so for example the infant acquisition of language or the one example that I mentioned how is that a constellation after that how can what you know about that follow from the interaction of other cognitive processes and if so how and if somebody makes this proposal in the sciences at least they'd be expected to give some evidence for look at some simple cases but not in the cognitive sciences it's enough to wave your hands at it mention one well-known thesis in the study of acquisition of language and one of the main figures in the field is Michael Tomasello those of you in the field or women are familiar with this and his view is that language is just a structured inventory of linguistic constructions acquired by processes common to primates and others which are kind of obscure so there's interrogative constructions and passive constructions and you just acquire them they could be any other way just kind of accidental in this way and there's nothing more to say about them also notice that it would have to be finite obviously it's not finite languages unbounded so how does it become infinite well that's just more hand waving going back to Enfield talking about the evolution of the system he says there are well-developed gradualist evolutionary arguments to support the conclusion that there's no such thing as language except as a complex of independent cognitive processes notice the notion gradualist that's a reflection of the mythology about evolution that still maintained Outsiders biology some in evolutionary biology everyone knows that's false but outside the field even as close as no cognitive neuroscience it still assumed that somehow everything has to be gradualist they're well known that that's not true but it's kind of what you learn in high school and people believe it and this in the sciences too and he's particularly too upset about what he calls the Salvation estar Gyu man is selfish earnest that the transition from finite to infinite was not gradualist so natural language is clearly infinite there's no bound on the number of expressions that you can in principle produce and understand just as there's no bound on the collection of triples of numbers X Y Z where Z is the product of x and y and in principle yet enough time and energy and so on you could calculate it well language is the same so how you get from finite to incident well the fact that that's salvation is not gradualist is about as controversial as the fact that two plus two equals four there's no logically possible alternative it has to be salvations but the fact that it is is incompatible with a gradualist conceptions no in a rational field when you have some conception and you have something that shows it's logically impossible you give up the conception but in a field that's dominated by dogmas many of them ancient dogmas what to do is denies logically the fact even if they're just logical truths and that's unfortunately pretty common well what do we actually know that evolution of language not very much in fact but the little bit that is known is highly suggestive one thing we know which is kind of surprising if you're willing to be puzzled by simple things is that all humans have the same capacity for language now you all humans haven't been studied but a lot of linguistic groups have been studied and there are no known group differences there are individual differences but they're found in all groups so for example if you take an infant from a tribe in Papua New Guinea that hasn't had contact with other humans her you know tens of thousands of years and you bring it to Boston that's child's raised here it'll be just like you same linguistic capacities same cognitive capacities going to become a quantum physicist and so on and conversely you take a instance from here put it in Papua New Guinea same thing happens and in fact as far as is known there are either no or very much at most very marginal differences among human groups in cognitive capacities also altogether but in linguistics capacities there so if they exist if so mind minut you can't find them by present methods of very marginal at most well humans we all descend from a fairly small group that left Africa maybe fifty thousand years ago something like that and that what that means is for the past fifty thousand years there's been zero evolution none has been change the change is not evolution no the fact that we're different from hunter-gatherers in our cultures and size and everything else that's those are signs of change but not evolution if there is evolution it's very superficial the things like say skin color hair like things like that but not in fundamental human capacities as far as anyone can tell so that's 50 thousand years with no evolution at all which is striking that means that whatever for language whatever evolved was kind of rigid never changed again it you know of course languages differ but that's not evolution that's just something else like the Norman Conquest changed English enormous Lee it made it kind of like French but that's not evolution if languages change the way they do say by the effective teenage jargon or something very big effect on language James it's not evolution it's just changes that take place within a fixed system and the system seems to be pretty rigid for 50 at least fifty thousand years well if you go back about fifty thousand years before that you just find no evidence that language even existed the evidence and it's commonly accepted by Paulo anthropologists that sometime in that narrow window there was something that sometimes Jared Diamond called a great leap forward there's a short period in which is a sudden explosion of complex artifacts complex social structures symbolic behavior representational art taken calculation of astronomical events like you know phases of the moon and so on all of this happened at least in the archaeological record very brief period maybe roughly 75,000 years ago you can double the numbers if you like or triple them and nothing much changes that's because these numbers are also small but from an evolutionary point of view they don't matter and again that's millions of years after the separation from other organs or other surviving organisms the well that seems pretty clear and it's highly suggestive about the nature of language one critical property of language crucial property in fact the core property of language is that each language consists of at its root of some mechanism it's called a generative process a mechanism which constructs an infinite array of structured expressions which have interpretations at in two systems two interfaces they're called sensory motor system for making noises or signs or whatever and thought systems for thinking planning interpretation and so on each of these structure expressions has to be mapped into those two systems on that and it's unbounded as I said this it's also digital like like the numbers but there's a five-word sentence six word sentences no five and a half word sentence and it goes on indefinitely as long as you have patience time and so on and virtually everything that's produced is actually novel in your own experience maybe in history the language because the state the size of these sets is so astronomical that you just keep producing new things well that's the most elementary property of language not stuck around nine to five around 1950 a generative processes like that were understood from mathematical point of view they really hadn't been in the past but you know algorithms called reviewing a kind of program that you can write for your laptop let's say these things began to be understood and understood very well so it's possible to ask of what kind of a generative process could have these properties well how could such a notice that it came at the part given the limited evolutionary evidence it must have happened pretty suddenly that's a very brief window so presumably what happened it's hard to think of an alternative is that in some small group these are hunter-gatherer societies remember like a hundred people or something in some small group wandering around Africa somewhere some individual underwent a slight mutation which led to a small rewiring of the brain which provided a generative procedure now mutations take place in individuals not in groups so it would have been one person who was lucky enough maybe unlucky enough to undergo this mutation and that mutation provided a Jenner a generative procedure but remember it was one in person hence there's no possibility of communication if this generative procedure produced structures that were linked to pre-existing conceptual systems that individual could think that could plan it could interpret interpret and so on well that presumably yield some selectional advantage a mutation can be transferred to offspring usually is partially at least and that means over time there might have been enough people in this small group so that somebody would have gotten the idea that it's a it might be useful to externalize it to map this internal system into a something that can be perceived by others maybe sound maybe sign you know maybe tactile whatever it might be well that process of externalization is a very tricky one the internal system that developed notice would have had no selectional pressures couldn't have it's just something that happened internally so therefore it would have developed solely in terms of natural law it would be something like a snowflake just takes on a perfect form because there's there's no external pressures on it so you'd expect an internal system to develop which is kind of like a snowflake perfect in some sense and since these are computational systems what that would presumably mean is that it's it's computationally efficient it meets perfect conditions of computational complexity well a certain amount is known about computational complexity enough to set very strict conditions on what that might be like so what we would predict if if we're investigating language is that there's an internal system perfect in a sense that is as computationally efficient as a system as this guy can be which connects to the two interfaces one of them the interface the mapping to the thought thought systems ken has no external forces acting on it so that ought to be perfect - and also invariant wouldn't change because there's no pressures on the other hand the mapping to the sensorimotor system is quite complex sensory motor system has been been around for hundreds of thousands of years pretty good evidence for them and it had nothing to do with the internal system so the finding the connection between the internal system and the data produced by the sensory motor system that's a complex cognitive problem and you can you can't expect it will be solved in many different ways and in fact it is that's the task faced by every infant an infant gets some data from the sensory motor system has to figure out how to map it to what may very well be a virtually invariant and maybe perfectly doesn't design the internal system of syntax and semantics and as far as we know but at one of the pretty hot via you know overwhelmingly I mean the facts about language that are getting better and better established as research condition continues is that while the externalization systems very enormous lis and are pretty complex the internal system the syntax and semantics they seem close to invariant which is to be expected because there's very little evidence for them they're very much like that one example that I gave you have most no evidence for so they must follow from rigid principles which are there because they're computationally efficient and then may not have changed for let's say seventy five thousand years whatever they certainly haven't changed for fifty thousand years well when you study a language what do you study you study the external is it externalization you learn the sounds if you learn the arbitrary word meaning associations not quite arbitrary but somewhat you learn the irregular verbs you learn the order of words things like that those are all parts of external ization you don't learn the syntax and semantics semantics if one thing nobody can teach it to you because barely understood for another thing you know it already it's part of your nature and the same is true of the child acquiring language that's roughly the these are the general facts that we observe they fit pretty well to this story this picture and that looks like the direction in which linguistic inquiry or to go and it is internal to what's called the generative enterprise but quite separate from beliefs and doctrines in the cognitive sciences especially the computational cognitive sciences and I stress again it's a kind of a harsh judgment and I don't have time to talk about it that there are literally no results in the computational cognitive science with regard the language the huge literature that if you look closely the only results are in terms of this a novel concept of scientific inquiry that I mentioned and which has to do with matching data not known in any other field even in cognitive psychology well there's there's a lot to say about this piece get laid so I just make one final point any computational system whatever it is has to have sort sort of atoms of computation you know minimal elements that are operated on by the computational principles the silane system you program for your laptop any computational procedure so it has to be true of language those are roughly word like first approximation not really so we take word words first approximation to be the minimal atomic elements well where do they come from here's something else that one should be puzzled about how our words related to the external world the word likes a cow or person or table or river or anyone you pick there's a Dogma about this as there is in most things connected with my language the dogma is what's called the referential is Dogma a child learns the word cow because it sees a cow somebody says cow and an association is established between the cow and the word and that's the meaning of the word again the simplest invest investigations show that this is totally false it's it's interesting it's pretty much true for it may be completely true for animal communication every animal communication system that's known consists of atoms but finite number of them of course which let's say which are tied to particularly particular mind-independent event events that a physicist could describe so say a monkey vervet monkey may have say five calls one of them is we we call it a warning call it's connected to the leaves moving in the trees vervets please leave it leaves moving the trees it emits this coal and other vervets run away or could be I'm hungry you know some hormonal change which is identifiable and as far as is known that's what animal communication systems are like it's completely false for human language there are no mind independent properties properties that would be identified by a physicist that Carly with the words and our constitute their meanings what they're referred to in fact the meanings of what words really just give kind of perspectives cognitive perspectives that you can employ in discussing and referring to the world there's no kind of good examples but it's literally true couragous to everything actually this was pretty well understood in the 17th and 18th century that's been interesting work on it's mostly forgotten well that raises a very serious problem for one thing it's a problem where these things come from but how do they get into it must be that their internal every child knows them you know learn them can't learn them very complex formula gether they're invariant they're about if they're different in various languages with very minor differences and how did they evolve that's a total mystery in fact such such a deep mystery that it's very possible that they'll never be any insight into it well let me stop there well we would like to thank professor Chomsky very very much for this opportunity to come to speak for us this evening and we will open the floor for a few questions so if you'd like to raise your hand I can give you the microphone any questions Thank You professor uh my name is Frank over here sorry okay hey yeah you talked you were critical of what you call gradualism an evolution of you were critical of what you called gradualism in evolution and how people think that uh happens slowly over time and then you talked about how 50,000 years ago compared to now we've changed relatively little I was just curious how how that works they seem like contradictory ideas to me I was just curious what you meant by that Wow what but but but why nothing changed in 50,000 years well you said we haven't really changed that much barely yeah but then you uh I feel like that is evidence of gradualism and I feel like you were critical of graduate against gradualism it goes against gradual yeah if you know there's just constant evolutionary change small changes why should have stopped somewhere before fifty thousand years ago on the other hand if what happened in human cognition is that some rigid system were developed suddenly for reasons having to do with not natural law a mutation or rewiring the brain computational complexity and so on but then there's no reason to expect it to change maybe it will change someday with another mutation but there's no reason to expect the small changes this doesn't prove that evolution is not gradualist it's just consistent with the view that it isn't which we know anyway Thank You professor for your very generous talk um should a kind of a reflection I sort of it um so I was interested in one comment you made about that kind of conscious and unconscious processes and how the kind of the functional aspect of your proposal is is more or less non conscious whereas there's a of a conscious component which is like our everyday lived experience which is not kind of going to be being able to introspect upon this functional system so I was wondering more on a philosophical know what how exactly we're supposed to think about phenomenal experience and kind of conscious experience in terms of its relationship to functional relationships like you are specifically your linguistic proposal but then also other domain specific proposals like perception there are those who don't believe that perception ISM is you know module modular domain specific that it's embodied or something to that effect so I want to feed any proposed reflections on this kind of research now and how this relates to kind of our phenomenal lived experience well it's a visual perception which is relatively uncontroversial and take the one example that I gave the rigidity principle okay when when you're looking at that sequence of the Kista scopic presentations you perceive a rigid object and motor in motion you can't prevent yourself from perceiving that that's what you perceive period which are actually the stimuli that are actually reaching your your your eyes your retina are just a series of as few as three or four presentations on it to Kista scope you know screen with lights of each of which has several dots on it well you have no way of introspecting into them your phenomenal experience is a rigid object in motion but the stimuli that are hitting the retina are a very small number of presentations of a few dots you can't introspect into that the in fact it's a that's why it's a discovery you know it's kind of like the discovery of the chemical structure of you know coal coal or something you can't introspect into it so the phenomenal descriptions you know that they're useful but they're useful as data they tell you very little about what's going on so it's kind of like everything else in the world where you have data but it didn't tell you much about what's going on but that requires that's why you have to take courses in physics and chemistry and so on because the data isn't transcript isn't transparent and it's hard for people to deal with but the same is true of our conscious lives I mean we tend to take for granted kind of like just normal but that we can understand everything about ours ourselves fact we don't understand anything about ourselves it's just it's even harder than understanding how chemistry works because it's so much more complex yet that's that's the crucial step that the human sciences really have not taken taken yet for the most part that was taken in the Natural Sciences around the 17th century just the willingness to be puzzled about things that look obvious like what could be more obvious than if I fact it if I let go of a cup it goes down instead of up well you know Galileo was willing to be puzzled about that that's why you take physics courses before that all you had to be told as things are going to their natural place and it's a big psychological step even in studying the external world even greater and studying ourselves because there we sort of feel that we know everything what's conscious must be what there is and in the in philosophy modern philosophy it's it's kind of a principle it happened to be John Searle who I was quoting but it's a widely accepted principle that nothing can be a mental process unless it's accessible to consciousness and as I mentioned if you look over the intellectual history it's very hard to find anyone who departed from this view okay well um take time for one more question because it's getting late and something over here a tree is doing it yes professor um you mentioned the the problems behind the referential Dogma would you say that we are in a if we reject that are we in a situation that that Quine maybe puts us in with the sorry are we in a situation similar to coins indeterminacy of translation would you would you say that's where we're left well Quine accepted the dogma but that's not surprising because long as everybody does today - yeah his his idea his doctrine of indeterminacy was in fact based on assuming this so if you take his framework that there's nothing but Association and conditioning how do how do you know to take his example when you hear a word let's say rabbit this is the case when a child hears the word rabbit how does it know that the word is referring to the that animal running around sorry and not to some part of the animal because if you see the animal running around its leg is also running around so how does the child know that it's not the leg and how does it not know in fact that the word does refer to some disconnected object like the leg of this one that's a standard problem of induction it's humans problem of induction and as Hugh Munder stood but his successors don't seem to understand there's no way to solve that problem Hume himself contrary to what you may learn in a philosophy course was a rationalist not an empiricist he took for granted and says that the only way you can solve the problem of induction is by what he calls an animal instinct means there must be some internal structure in your mind that leads you to a particular answer because there's no way to get it by induction and that I think is correct and I think the same is be true about Cline's the Gallagher no rabbit the child gets the right right answer because they're built to get the right answer and the right answer is not a in the case of sake rabbit you can easily show that what a child understands to be a rabbit is not something physically identifiable kind of guessing your ages but to say my grandchildren probably about you afraid when they were kids the story that they liked about a baby donkey named Sylvester and socially note the baby donkey somehow has turned into a rock and for the rest of the story it's trying to convince convince its parents that it's not a rock it's their baby donkey and since children's stories always end happily something happens and it ends up then it's a baby donkey again everybody's happy but the interesting fact is that every child understands that that thing that has all the physical properties of Iraq is in fact so and the reason is and this was in fact noticed by John Locke that people in fact animals are individuated by properties like psychic continuity okay you the same if you there's some psychic continuity no matter how you change physically that's the standard fairy tale you know you know the evil witch turns the handsome prince into a frog and has all the properties of a frog until til the beautiful princess comes and kisses the Frog he's an some witch you have some forensic again well again every kid knows that it's always the prince because it has the property of psychic psychic continuity actually a lot of science fiction is based on this but it's even true of the children's stories well that alone tells you right away that what individuals objects is not a collection of physical properties but some complex mental structure that we oppose on them look like psychic continuity and human didn't think about that lock in fact did but I should say human recognized that was true that we don't identify words by physical properties but it runs across the whole collection of words you can't find a word so simple that it doesn't have those properties actually in the Natural Sciences what you try to do is to concoct you invent concepts which do have those properties so when you invent the concept say no electron or something you intend it to be physically identifiable you don't want it to have its meaning change by what's in your head that's the whole point so it's a kind of a norm for the sciences but it's not true of human language and that goes back to coins example the solution to his problems essentially essentially Humes Humes solution to the problem of induction no solution except you're built to pick things up to structure the world in a certain way so that's the way to do it well thank you so much professor for giving us some insight into your area of expertise we like to present to you a small token of our appreciation and we'd love to have you back any time you'd have us so ladies and gentlemen professor Noam Chomsky you

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, Noam Chomsky, Chomsky, Linguistics, Cognitive Processes, Thought, Mind, Cognition, Concepts, Epistemology, Ontology, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Language, Cognitive Science, Computation, Semantics, Psychology, Analytic Philosophy, Generative Linguistics, History of Linguistics, Metalinguistics, Generative Grammar, Universal Grammar, Reference, Theory of Reference, Cognitive Linguistics, Human Language, Language Acquisition, Concept Acquisition, Formalism

Id: 3DBDUlDA3t0

Length: 74min 33sec (4473 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2013