> Subject: Re: Alex, Washoe, and "Next of Kin" by Fouts On Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:07:28 -0500, "Christopher D. Green" wrote:
Disclaimer: although I have looked at some of these issues in detail over the past few decades, I don't have the kind of command of the literature that I would like to address some of the issues raised here. That being said, perhaps I can still add something. > I must confess that I have not read Fouts' book. When I was interested > in this topic, I paid much more attention to Kanzi and Sue > Savage-Rumbaugh (partly because one of my philosopher colleagues here at > York worked with them for a while, and so he was the one on whom I honed > my opinions of this topic). The problem appears to be that even the most > rigorous studies of ape language never seem to disentangle syntax from > pragmatics. Without providing a theory of language, it is not clear what to make of such a statement. Perhaps the strongest characterization of Chomsky's theory is that it is a syntax driven account of language that in its early forms relied upon syntactical relationships instead of, say, semantic relations (the latter line of inquiry was helped along by some of Chomsky's students and colleagues though Chomsky himself did not see the merit of such work - see Harris' "The Linguistic Wars" which is listed in the references of the Green & Vervacke paper cited below). However, I think that many researchers have gone beyond such a limited conception of language -- just ask a sociolinguist. Language has structure but syntax may be critical in only some situations and semantic and pragmatic and other factors may be more critical. Consider, would a purely syntactic account of language describe why the following utterance has the structure (?) that it has: "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." -George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002 from: http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms2002.htm I defy any syntactically oriented linguist to deduce the rules used to create this and other utterances provided by the source without citing all of them as the result of "temporary" factors the contribute to dysfluencies. One wonders how far apart such utterances are from the linguistic productions of primates (or is such a question unfair to primates?)? Chomsky's contribution to the study of syntax has once been described as the application of automata theory to a linguistics that was primarily descriptive (automata theory is the mathematical theory of computation which in its most familiar form has given rise to the "rule and symbol" cognitive architectures represented by the computer metaphor of information processing, instantiated in the "modal model" of memory by Atkinson & Shiffrin, the problem solving approach of Simon and Newell and many others until that other computational metaphor, that is, neural networks/connectionism, re-emerged in the 1980s). One can claim that such a theoretical framework "defines" the nature of language, making syntactic issues paramount but where is the warrant that states that this is indeed the correct nature of language in contrast to only providing a tentative theoretical framework which will ultimately have to be rejected in favor of a better, more powerful theory of language? > For instance, if you asked Kanzi to put the keys in the > fridge, he would do it. But so would any creature that could understand > he symbols for "keys" "fridge" and "in." You don't need syntax. There is > only one way that keys, fridges, and "in" can *practically* go together. > I always wanted to know what would happen if you told Kanzi to put the > fridge in the keys. Would he freeze and look at you funny, like any > human over the age of three would? Or would he happily put the keys in > the fridge? Actually, there is a book by Joel Wallman called /Aping > Language/ (1992) that went through the Kanzi protocols, picking out the > very small number of sentences that were not pragmatically constrained > in this way. His conclusion was that Kanzi's behavior was essentially > random in such instances. I haven't read Wallman's book but given that it is so difficulty for behavior to be random, my first concern would be whether Wallman really wants to say that Kanzi's productions had no structure. Is he really saying that in the absence of pragmatic constraints, each word/concept in an utterance has an equal probability of occurring in each position of the utterance? How many instances of each specific utterance did he use (questions of represenativeness and power to detect statistical pattern become relevant, especially if he is relying upon a small corpus of producations). I guess that I'll have to look at the book and the data (if it is available for independent analysis) to see if Kanzi's utterance are truly independent or have some statistical structure that is not acknowledged as being syntactic. I must admit that I'm curious why the above passage seems to indicate that if pragmatic constraints are present, syntactic constraints (however defined) are not present? > Thus, like Chomsky, I have no doubt that these are very smart animals > who can acquire a small set of lexical symbols, and will figure out what > you want them to do as best they can. But do they have our innate > capacity to abduce grammar from the linguistic environment around us? > Not a chance. Sorry to beat a dead horse but what do you mean by "grammar"? The last time I bothered to look at linguistic theories, there were at least a half dozen theories of syntax. Why choose Chomsky's version? Also, I would just like to briefly focus on the following paragraph from the Green & Vervaeke (1997) paper: |It seems that many of those who were opposed to a formal theory |of grammar in the 1960s (and their students) are still opposed to it |today, but continue to trot out the same old critiques without bothering |to keep up with new developments. Some have argued that Chomsky's |continuous revision of his theory makes him impossible to "pin down," |and imply that he is engaged in some sort of ruse to keep his critics |"off balance." A close reading of the revisions, however, shows them |to be well-motivated by and large, and indicative of a progressive |research programme, in Lakatos' (1970) sense. We take his modifications, |far from being some sort of ruse, to be simply good scientific practice; |a practice that more psychological theoreticians should consider adopting. For a contrary view which may help to explain why many psycholinguists have moved on to other issues in the psychology of language, such as memory-based accounts of language, see the following: Reber, Arthur S. (1987). The rise and (surprisingly rapid) fall of psycholinguistics. _Synthese_ 72 (1987) 325-339 ABSTRACT. Psycholinguistics re-emerged in an almost explosive fashion during the 1950s and 1960s. It then underwent an equally abrupt decline as an independent sub-discipline. This paper charts this fall and identifies five general factors which, it is argued, were responsible for its demise. These are: (a) an uncompromisingly strong version of nativism; (b) a growing isolation of psycholinguistics from the body psychology; (c) a preference for formal theory over empirical data; (d) several abrupt modifications in the "Standard Theory" in linguistics; and (e) a failure to appreciate the strong commitment to functionalism that characterizes experimental psychology. In short, what looked like a revolution two decades ago turned out to be merely a local reformation that occurred along side of and largely independent from the real revolution in the cognitive sciences. (NOTE: other articles in this issue of Synthese are relevant to how psycholinguistics was being viewed/evaluated at the end of the 1980s). I understand that the Green & Vervacke paper might be in response to the issues raised in the Reber paper though Reber is not cited in it. From my own experience is assisting in running the Psycholinguistics Circle at NYU, by the 1990s psychologists were less and less interested in Chomsky and purely syntactic approaches to language, Instead, their concerns brought them back to the mainstream of cognitive psychology though others (such a Steve Pinker) continued to cling to some of aspects of the Chomskyan tradition (e.g., aspects of nativism). > Or, to use my favorite of Chomsky's analogies: Can humans fly? Yes, in > fact at every Olympic Games humans fly about the same distance your > average chicken can fly. We call it the Long Jump. But the mechanisms by > which humans and chickens "fly" are so wildly different that it makes > almost no sense to even pose the question. Chickens, inept as they are, > fly in essentially the same way that eagles do. Humans, on the other > hand, use their quite different abilities to reach approximately the > same level of achievement as a low-level bird, but it makes little sense > to call it flying. Mutatis Mutandis for chimps and language. Perhaps because it is an example by Chomsky, it misses the point. I think that Chomsky is in some ways like Skinner, both hold beliefs about the nature of language and behavior that seem to be impervious to alternative beliefs or conceptions. Chomsky will probably go to the grave thinking that syntax is the only way of defining language (similar to Skinner's belief that only behavior should be used to define the focus of psychology) and this quaint notion will be superseded by other, more powerful conceptions about the nature of language. -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] > If you happen to care what I think about all this in more detail, have a > look at a 1997 chapter a wrote with John Vervaeke called "But What Have > You Done for Us Lately?: Some Recent Perspectives on Linguistic > Nativism" at http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/innate.htm > ---
