To be fair to Chomsky, one reason why his linguistics has had so much impact is he was there at the right time--some were trying to look beyond structuralism and behaviourism, and here was a guy who was arguing his approach to linguistics would prove more deeply 'explanatory'. Take a lot of fields in American academia that expanded after WW II and you see key figures emerge, with much of their influence and popularity based on what amounts to urban legends derived from an important paper or book published in the 1950s or 1960s. Chomsky is perhaps the best example. Most didn't read his books on linguistics but everyone cited him. I guess his egoism was that he thought if he could turn an entire generation off of Skinner, he could also convince them their empire was evil.
Getting back to the linguistics and evolution aspect, I think C Cox was attempting to make anti-evolution arguments along the lines Chomsky might himself make (there was a major set of exchanges between Chomsky and Pinker--I think Pinker has to be one of the least original/most influential linguists of our times, while Chomsky consistently attempted to change the terms of how linguistics was discussed and that has to be called a form of originality). If you look back at the Haskins laboratory stuff I was citing at the beginning of the thread, it could be fit into Chomsky's view--that language ability emerges from the development of other abilities, which is why the gestural origins people are now deeply interested in mirror neuron research. Also, it's interesting that Chomsky should latch onto 'recursion' as the only thing unique about human language that separates it from other animal communication, since gestural approaches to the origin of language also agree with this. And recursion starts with the manual gesture capacities of humans. You could have a 'phonology' without phones; that is to say, you could have sub-lexical units of language that are not based on vocal gestures, but you still need some way to account for how recursion is built into language. So you might start with some sort of sub-lexical unit based on manual gestures converging on human vocal abilities (which surpass apes) but are, in turn, surpassed by mocking birds. In which case we need to look more than ever at the evolutionary development of the brain and things like mirror neurons. At any rate, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Noam_Chomsky#Criticisms_of_Chomsky_as_a_linguist Resistance to Modern Theories of Language Evolution Steven Pinker criticizes Chomsky as being "militantly agnostic" about how language might have evolved, and says that Chomsky has become "increasingly hostile to the very idea that language evolved for communication".[6] Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form.... [W]e conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process. [Pinker and Bloom 1990, p. 707] Chomsky's alleged resistance to the idea of language being purely a product of natural selection is also criticized by Daniel Dennett: "The language organ, Chomsky thought, was not an adaptation, but ... a mystery, or a hopeful monster." Dennett continues that Chomsky must consider language to be a spandrel, such as proposed by Stephen Jay Gould: "who in return has avidly endorsed Chomsky's view that language didn't really evolve but just rather suddenly arrived, an inexplicable gift, at best a byproduct of the enlargement of the human brain." Dennett says that "these two authorities" (Chomsky and Gould) are "supporting each other over an abyss." [7] John Maynard Smith, while expressing his deep admiration for Chomsky, shared Dennett's views on this matter in a review, saying, "I [...] find Chomsky's views on evolution completely baffling. If the ability to learn a language is innate, it is genetically programmed, and must have evolved. But Chomsky refuses to think about how this might have happened."[8] Chomsky has countered that he doesn't deny that language could have evolved by natural selection for communication, merely that he doesn't believe that this is at all self-evident, and he doesn't believe that there is any convincing evidence that this must be so. In his paper on this subject with biologists Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch, Chomsky argued that other plausible scenarios (such as sexual selection) are equally capable of explaining the evolution of language, while hypothesizing that recursion is the only property of language unique to human beings: We submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and in the narrow sense (FLN). FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. We further argue that FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of communication (for example, number, navigation, and social relations).[9] This response has been challenged by Pinker and linguist Ray Jackendoff, who describe Chomsky's recursion-only hypothesis as "extremely unclear".[10] We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution.We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals’ communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.’s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky’s conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility. [Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005] _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
