How children pick up a language: not instinct (Humans)

by dhw, Sunday, June 12, 2016, 12:42 (3085 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The author presents a long article saying Chomsky is wrong, but he makes one fatal mistake. He believes in Neo-Darwinism gradualism, not saltation, and that colors his argument. The rest of his discussion is reasonable: - https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-in-there-is-no-language-instinct?utm_source=Aeon... - I agree that it's a mistake, but it's not fatal. As usual, this discussion boils down to definitions. All communicative organisms have some form of language, and the tools they use can be vocal, chemical, gestural etc. Human language is unique to humans, just as ant language is unique to ants. Our language is mainly vocal, and like so many other of our inherited characteristics, it has evolved beyond all recognition from its beginnings - the vocalizations of our ape ancestors. In its complexity it is the equivalent of the skyscraper compared to the gorilla's bed. I would suggest that the key to human language lies in the following:
 
QUOTE: “It might have begun as a sophisticated gestural system, for example, only later progressing to its vocal manifestations. But surely the most profound spur on the road to speech would have been the development of our instinct for co operation. By this, I don't mean to say that we always get on. But we do almost always recognise other humans as minded creatures, like us, who have thoughts and feelings that we can attempt to influence.” - I think the author has both hit and missed the point: ALL language, from individual cells to humans, must stem from cooperation of some sort, since it is always a means of communication. My suggestion is that the human level of consciousness has almost infinitely expanded the subject matter to be communicated. A small range of sounds could not encompass the concepts they had to convey. For the range to expand, the physical tools also had to expand, and this may have been the spur to the anatomical changes that enabled us to make new sounds. (We must remember that writing is a much later addition to our language tools.) Using my favoured hypothesis: the inventive mechanism (intelligence) of the cell communities would have reorganized the vocal mechanisms in response to the need for greater complexity of sound. 
 
As for Chomsky, I agree totally with the author: "Chomsky's idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong.” But we have discussed this before (e.g. my post of 9 May on this thread).