Eugene, List,
Thank you, Eugene! It is necessary to exactly distinguish, which parts of behaviour and intelligence are influenced by culture, and which not. One should not infer from differences regarding spatial orientation and awareness of specific environmental events (snakes, caimans) to social capabilities, predispositions, and behaviours.
Regarding language: What about body language, especially facial _expression_? It is the same with all humans, the remotest and most isolated ones too. You go visit a stone age tribe in Papua-New Guinea, who never have met other people before, and you can communicate with them using hands, feet, and facial expressions. And they love their babies too, and bury their deceased ones (ok, they eat their brains, which we don´t do, and sometimes they shoot each other with arrows, unlike us who kill each other by social marginalisation with poverty, but that is details cherry picking).
I wish, more experts such as you would intervene and put things right. Sociology and development psychology exists for centuries now. There is no justified space for ethnopluralism in a serious discussion I say.
Best,
Helmut
08. August 2018 um 23:00 Uhr
"Eugene Halton" <eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu>
"Eugene Halton" <eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu>
John quoted the statement from an earlier article I believe:
> “Early infancy is a critical time for establishing the biology of a healthy mind. You’re not born with a social brain, you grow one.”
This statement seems to me to be patently false. Not only are there socialization processes between the developing fetus and the mother's voice in utero, but the human infant is born already with a social and communicative brain.
Colwyn Trevathan and Steven Malloch's research on what they term communicative musicality shows that the newborn infant very quickly begins to engage in dialogical banter with the mother. The banter from the infant has the quality, phrasing, call and response timing, and narrative of music. It is all coming from the subcortical brain of the newborn, because the upper brain connections have not yet been made.
That bantering interaction provides a basis for the later dialogical interaction out of which language will develop.
Gene H
On Wed, Aug 8, 2018, 1:45 PM John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> wrote:
On 8/8/2018 8:41 AM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
> if you see our species [homo sapiens] as a kind of 'black slate'
Both of the articles cited are contributions to the nature/nurture
debates that have been going on for centuries. Neither one said
that the infant's mind or brain is a "blank slate" at birth.
> our species is not born with innate knowledge and requires a long
> nurturance period. And our type of socialization requires language.
> So- how do you get away from the notion that the requirement for
> language is innate?
You need large numbers of researchers exploring the issues from
many points of view. And as Peirce said, do not block the way
of inquiry. Chomsky, for example, has spent the past 40 years in
blocking attempts to disprove his hypotheses from 60 years ago.
For example, consider "our type of socialization requires language."
That's true. But what kind of language? What kind of socialization?
And what aspects of each are required or optional?
Dan E. shows how a language and culture that developed in centuries
of isolation from "our type of socialization" can be radically
different from "our kind of language".
It's unethical to deprive infants of various stimuli to see what
happens, but there are naturally occurring situations that create
variations. For an example from the other article:
> So a child’s brain will develop differently depending on how
> attentive her parents are, whether she lives in poverty, and
> which culture she grows up in.
>
> “Early infancy is a critical time for establishing the biology
> of a healthy mind. You’re not born with a social brain, you
> grow one.”
Another kind of study addresses the issues of infants raised
by parents with two different native languages, spoken and
signed. (Not surprisingly, the study was done in Canada.)
See below.
John
_______________________________________________________________
From slide 14 of http://jfsowa.com/talks/vrmind.pdf
A study of bilingual infants whose parents speak or sign different
languages: *
● All six combinations of four languages: English, French, American
Sign Language (ASL), and Langue des Signes Québécoise (LSQ).
● Monolingual and bilingual babies go through the same stages and
at the same ages for both spoken and signed languages.
● Hearing babies born to profoundly deaf parents babble with their
hands, but not vocally.
● Babies bilingual in a spoken and a signed language babble in both
modalities – vocally and with their hands.
● And they express themselves with equal fluency in their spoken and
signed language at every stage of development.
The same brain areas that support spoken languages support
signed languages, but other areas are also involved. **
* Laura-Ann Petitto (2005) http://petitto.net/pubs/published
** R. Campbell, M. MacSweeney, & D. Waters (2007) Sign language
and the brain: A review.
https://academic.oup.com/jdsde/article/13/1/3/500594
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
