More Denton: Chomsky's new book negative review (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 02, 2016, 01:59 (2949 days ago) @ dhw

A review of Chomsky's new book which takes a negative slant:-https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078294-why-only-us-the-language-paradox/-"In Why Only Us, Chomsky and Berwick argue that this pared- down version of universal grammar is what would have enabled early humans to make the evolutionary jump from language-less creatures to the loquacious beings of the Upper Palaeolithic, some 40,000 years ago. This, in turn, would have resulted in the unheralded rich cultural explosion around that time, including cave art, jewelry and ritual burials.-"Their argument goes like this. As our capability for grammar is genetically programmed, and as no other species has language, it stands to reason that language emerged fairly suddenly, in one fell swoop, because of a random mutation. This is what the authors refer to as the “gambler's-eye view” in contrast to a “gene's-eye view” of evolution. The sudden appearance of language occurred perhaps no more than 80,000 years ago, just before modern humans engaged in an out-of-Africa dispersion.-***-"Developmental and cognitive psychologists now have a clearer sense of the ways in which conceptual and linguistic learning works. A human infant seems to have a range of both primate and species-specific learning mechanisms and abilities that enable the acquisition of language. The emerging consensus is that language acquisition can occur without an innate blueprint for grammar.-***-"In short, as language exists only in our species, without precedent elsewhere, then it did not evolve from some simpler form of communication. Hence, it must have evolved fairly quickly and in one discontinuous jump. As the hallmark of language is a simple, computational syntax-engine, then, so the argument goes, this sort of species-specific event is not at all improbable.-"However, this ultimately paints Homo sapiens, a species no more than about 200,000 years old, into a corner. Modern humans become an evolutionary curiosity, isolated from the 2.8-million-year evolutionary trajectory of the genus that led to us. It also amounts to a highly selective and partial presentation of the recent research literature.-***- "Indeed, the book attempts to make a virtue of disagreeing with almost everyone on how language evolved. To see language bucking the kind of gradual evolutionary change that Darwin proposed is surely a controversial perspective.-***-"The reader is asked to swallow the following unlikely implication of their logic: language didn't evolve for communication, but rather for internal thought. If language did evolve as a chance mutation, without precedent, then it first emerged in one individual. And what is the value of language as a communicative tool when there is no one else to talk to? Hence, the evolutionary advantage of language, once it emerged, must have been for something else: assisting thought.-***-"Ultimately, the reader is left with a paradox: the evolutionary view entailed by Chomsky's stripped down, minimalistic universal grammar calls into question the very account of language Berwick and Chomsky attempt to provide us with.-Comment: The reviewer is pro-Darwin and Chomsky's view is really not, suggesting a saltation.