Dueling Fodor interpretations

Bill Idsardi

Alex and Tobias from their post:

"The ground rule of (Fodorian) modularity is domain specificity: computational systems can only parse and compute units that belong to a proprietary vocabulary that is specific to the system at hand."

and

"Hence Hale & Reiss' statement that nothing can be parsed by the cognitive system that wasn't present at birth (or that the cognitive system does not already know) appears to be just incorrect. Saying that unknown stimulus can lead to cognitive categories everywhere except in phonology seems a position that is hard to defend."

I think both parties here are invoking Fodor, but with different emphases. Alex and Tobias are cleaving reasonably close to Fodor 1983 while Charles and Mark are continuing some points from Fodor 1980, 1998.

But Fodor is a little more circumspect than Alex and Tobias about intermodular information transfer:

Fodor 1983:46f: "the input systems are modules ... I imagine that within (and, quite possibly, across)[fn13] the traditional modes, there are highly specialized computational mechanisms in the business of generating hypotheses about the distal sources of proximal stimulations. The specialization of these mechanisms consists in constraints either on the range of information  they can access in the course of projecting such hypotheses, or in the range of distal properties they can project such hypotheses about, or, most usually, on both."

"[fn13] The "McGurk effect" provides fairly clear evidence for cross-modal linkages in at least one input system for the modularity of which there is independent evidence. McGurk has demonstrated that what are, to all intents and purposes, hallucinatory speech sounds can be induced when the subject is presented with a visual display of a speaker making vocal gestures appropriate to the production of those sounds. The suggestion is that (within, presumably, narrowly defined limits) mechanisms of phonetic analysis can be activated by -- and can apply to -- either acoustic or visual stimuli. It is of central importance to realize that the McGurk effect -- though cross-modal -- is itself domain specific -- viz., specific to language. A motion picture of a bouncing ball does not induce bump, bump, bump hallucinations. (I am indebted to Professor Alvin Liberman both for bringing McGurk's results to my attention and for his illuminating comments on their implications.)" [italics in original]

I think this quote deserves a slight qualification, as there is now quite a bit of evidence for multisensory integration in the superior temporal sulcus (e.g. Noesselt et al 2012). As for "bump, bump, bump", silent movies of people speaking don't induce McGurk effects either. The cross-modal effect is broader than Fodor thought too, as non-speech visual oscillations that occur in phase with auditory oscillations do enhance brain responses in auditory cortex (Jenkins et al 2011).

To restate my own view again, to the extent that the proximal is partially veridical with the distal, such computational mechanisms are substantive (both the elements and the relations between elements). The best versions of such computational mechanisms attempt to minimize both substance (the functions operate over a minimum number of variables about distal sources; they provide a compact encoding) and arbitrariness (the "dictionary" is as small as possible; it contains just the smallest fragments that can serve as a basis for the whole function; the encoding is compositional and minimizes discontinuities).

And here's Fodor on the impossibility of inventing concepts:

Fodor 1980:148: "Suppose we have a hypothetical organism for which, at the first stage, the form of logic instantiated is propositional logic. Suppose that at stage 2 the form of logic instantiated is first-order quantificational logic. ... Now we are going to try to get from stage 1 to stage 2 by a process of learning, that is, by a process of hypothesis formation and confirmation. Patently, it can't be done. Why? ... [Because] such a hypothesis can't be formulated with the conceptual apparatus available at stage 1; that is precisely the respect in which propositional logic is weaker than quantificational logic."

Fodor 1980:151: "... there is no such thing as a concept being invented ... It is not a theory of how you acquire concepts, but a theory of how the environment determines which parts of the conceptual mechanism in principle available to you are in fact exploited." [italics in original]

You can select or activate a latent ability on the basis of evidence and criteria (the first order analysis might be much more succinct than the propositional analysis) but you can't build first order logic solely out of the resources of propositional logic. You have to have first order logic already available to you in order for you to choose it.

References

Fodor JA 1980. On the impossibility of acquiring "more powerful" structures. Fixation of belief and concept acquisition. In M Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.) Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Harvard University Press. 142-162.

Fodor JA 1983. Modularity of Mind. MIT Press.

Fodor JA 1998. Concepts: Where Cognitive Science went Wrong. Oxford University Press.

Jenkins J, Rhone AE, Idsardi WJ, Simon JZ, Poeppel D 2011. The Elicitation of Audiovisual Steady-State Responses: Multi-Sensory Signal Congruity and Phase Effects. Brain Topography, 24(2), 134–148.

Noesselt T, Bergmann D, Heinze H-J, Münte T, Spence C 2012. Coding of multisensory temporal patterns in human superior temporal sulcus. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6, 64.

A new player has entered the game

Here is a guest post from Alex Chabot and Tobias Scheer picking up a thread from about a year ago now. Bill

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Alex Chabot & Tobias Scheer

What it is that is substance-free: computation and/or melodic primes

A late contribution to the debate...
In his post from April 12th, 2018, Veno has clarified his take on the status of melodic primes (features) in phonology (which is identical with the one exposed in the work by Hale & Reiss since 2000). The issue that gave rise to some misunderstanding and probably misconception about the kind of primes that Hale-Reiss-Volenec propose concerns their substance-free status: which aspect of them is actually substance-free and which one is not? This is relevant because the entire approach initiated by Hale & Reiss' 2000 LI paper has come to be known as substance-free.

Veno has thus made explicit that phonological features in his view are substance-laden, but that this substance does not bear on phonological computation. That is, phonological features bear phonetic labels ([labial], [coronal] etc.) in the phonology, but phonological computation ignores them and is able to turn any feature set into any other feature set in any context and its reverse. This is what may be called substance-free computation (i.e. computation that does not care for phonetics). At the same time, Veno explains, the phonetic information carried by the features in the phonology is used upon externalization (if we may borrow this word for phonological objects): it defines how features are pronounced (something called transduction by Hale-Reiss-Volenec, or phonetic implementation system PIS in Veno's post). That is, phonological [labial] makes sure that it comes out as something phonetically labial (rather than, say, dorsal). The correspondence between the phonological object and its phonetic exponent is thus firmly defined in the phonology - not by the PIS device.

The reason why Hale & Reiss (2003, 2008: 28ff) have always held that phonological features are substance-laden is learnability: they contend that cognitive categories cannot be established if the cognitive system does not know beforehand what kind of sensory input will come its way and relates to the particular category ("let's play cards"). Hence labiality, coronality etc. would be unparsable noise for the L1 learner did they not know at birth what labiality, coronality etc. is. Therefore, Hale-Reiss-Volenec conclude, substance-laden phonological features are universal and innate.

We believe that this take on melodic primes is misled (we talk about melodic primes since features are the regular currency, but there are also approaches that entertain bigger, holistic primes, called Elements. Everything that is said about features also applies to Elements). The alternative to which we subscribe is called radical substance-free phonology, where "radical" makes the difference with Hale-Reiss-Volenec: in this view both phonological computation and phonological primes are substance-free. That is, phonology is really self-contained in the Saussurian sense: no phonetic information is present (as opposed to: present but ignored). Melodic primes are thus alphas, betas and gammas: they assure contrast and infra-segmental decomposition that is necessary independently. They are related to phonetic values by the exact same spell-out procedure that is known from the syntax-phonology interface: vocabulary X is translated into vocabulary Y through a lexical access (Scheer 2014). Hence α ↔ labiality (instead of [labial] ↔ labiality).

1. Formulations

To start, the misunderstanding that Veno had the good idea to clarify was entertained by formulations like:

"[w]e understand distinctive features here as a particular kind of substance-free units of mental representation, neither articulatory nor acoustic in themselves, but rather having articulatory and acoustic correlates." Reiss & Volenec (2018: 253, emphasis in original)

Calling features substance-free when they are actually substance-laden is probably not a good idea. What is meant is that phonological computation is substance-free. But the quote talks about phonological units, not computation.

2. Incompatible with modularity

The ground rule of (Fodorian) modularity is domain specificity: computational systems can only parse and compute units that belong to a proprietary vocabulary that is specific to the system at hand. In Hale-Reiss-Volenec' view, phonological units are defined by extra-phonological (phonetic) properties, though. Hence given domain specificity phonology is unable to parse phonetically defined units such as [labial], [coronal] etc. Or else if "labial", "coronal" etc. are vocabulary items of the proprietary vocabulary used in phonological computation, this computation comprises both phonology and phonetics. Aside from the fact that there was enough  blurring these boundaries in the past two decades or so and that Hale-Reiss-Volenec have expressed themselves repeatedly in favour of a clear modular cut between phonetics and phonology, the architecture of their system  defines phonology and phonetics as two separate systems since it has a translational device (transduction, PIS) between them.

One concludes that phonological primes that are computed by phonological computation, but which bear phonetic labels (and in fact are not defined or differentiated by any other property), are a (modular) contradiction in terms.

To illustrate that, see what the equivalent would be in another linguistic module, (morpho‑)syntax: what would you say about syntactic primes such as number, animacy, person etc. which come along as "coronal", "labial" etc. without making any reference to number, animacy, person? That is, syntactic primes that are not defined by syntactic but by extra-syntactic (phonological) vocabulary? In this approach it would then be said that even though primes are defined by non-syntactic properties, they are syntactic in kind and undergo syntactic computation, which however ignores their non-syntactic properties.

This is but another way to state the common sense question prompted by a system where the only properties that phonological primes have are phonetic, but which are then ignored by phonological computation: what are the phonetic labels good for? They do not do any labour in the phonology, and they need to be actively ignored. Hale-Reiss-Volenec' answer was mentioned above: they exist because of learnability. This is what we address in the following point.

3. Learnability

Learnability concerns of substance-free melodic primes are addressed by Samuels (2012), Dresher (2018) and a number of contributions in Clements & Ridouane (2011). They are the focus of a recent ms by Odden (2019).

At a more general cognitive level, we know positively that the human brain/mind is perfectly able to make sense of sensory input that was never encountered and for sure is not innate. Making sense here means "transform a sensory input into cognitive categories". There are multiple examples of how electric impulses have been learned to be interpreted as either auditive or visual perception: cochlear implants on the one hand, so-called artificial vision, or bionic eye on the other hand. The same goes for production: mind-controlled prostheses are real. Hence Hale & Reiss' statement that nothing can be parsed by the cognitive system that wasn't present at birth (or that the cognitive system does not already know) appears to be just incorrect. Saying that unknown stimulus can lead to cognitive categories everywhere except in phonology seems a position that is hard to defend.

References

Clements, George N. & Rachid Ridouane (eds.) 2011. Where do Phonological Features come from? Cognitive, physical and developmental bases of distinctive speech categories. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Dresher, Elan 2018. Contrastive Hierarchy Theory and the Nature of Features. Proceedings of the 35th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 35: 18-29.

Hale, Mark & Charles Reiss 2000. Substance Abuse and Dysfunctionalism: Current Trends in Phonology. Linguistic Inquiry 31: 157-169.

Hale, Mark & Charles Reiss 2003. The Subset Principle in Phonology: Why the tabula can't be rasa. Journal of Linguistics 39: 219-244.

Hale, Mark & Charles Reiss 2008. The Phonological Enterprise. Oxford: OUP.

Odden, David 2019. Radical Substance Free Phonology and Feature Learning. Ms.

Reiss, Charles & Veno Volenec 2018. Cognitive Phonetics: The Transduction of Distinctive Features at the Phonology–Phonetics Interface. Biolinguistics 11: 251-294.

Samuels, Bridget 2012. The emergence of phonological forms. Towards a biolinguistic understanding of grammar: Essays on interfaces, edited by Anna Maria Di Sciullo, 193-213. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

What's innate?

Johan Bolhuis sent me a copy of a recent comment in TiCS(Priors in animal and artificial intelligence (henceforth Priors))on the utility of rich innate priors in cognition, both in actual animals and artificially in machines. Following Pinker, Priorsframes the issue in terms of the blank slate hypothesis (BSH) (tabula rasafor you Latin lovers). It puts the issue as follows (963):

Empiricists and nativists have clashed for centuries in understanding the architecture of the mind: the former as a tabula rasa, and the latter as a system designed prior to experience…The question, summarized in the debate between the nativist Gary Marcus and the pioneer of machine learning, Yann LeCun, is the following: shall we search for a unitary general learning principle able to flexibly adapt to all conditions, including novel ones, or structure artificial minds with driving assumptions, or priors, that orient learning and improve acquisition speed by imposing limiting biases?

Marcus’ paper (here) (whose philosophical framework Priorsuses as backdrop for its more particular discussion) relates BSH to the old innateness question, which it contends revolves around “trying to reduce the amount of innate machinery in a given system” (1). I want to discuss this way of putting things, and I will be a bit critical. But before diving in, I want to say that I really enjoyed both papers and I believe that they are very useful additions to the current discussion. They both make excellent points and I agree with almost all their content. However, I think that the way they framed the relevant issue, in terms of innateness and blank slates, is misleading and concedes too much to the Empiricist (E) side of the debate. 

My point will be a simple one: the relevant question is not how much innate machinery, but what kindof innate machinery. As Chomsky andQuine observed a long time ago, everyonewho discusses learning and cognition is waste deep in a lot of innate machinery. The reason is that learning without a learning mechanismis impossible. And if one has a learning mechanism in terms of which learning occurs, then that learning mechanism is not itself learned. And if it is note learned then it is innate. Or, to put this more simply, the mechanism that allows for learning is a precondition for learning and preconditions are fixed prior to that which they precondition. Hence all features of the learning mechanism are innate in the simple sense of not themselves being learned. This is a simple logical point, and all who discuss these issues are aware of this point. So the question is not, never has been, and never could not have been is there innate structure?Rather the question is, always has been and always will be what structure is innate?

Why is putting things in this way important? Because arguing about the amountof innate structure gives Eists the argumentative edge. Ockham like considerations will always favor using less machinery rather than more all things being equal. So putting things as the Marcus paper and Priorsdoes is to say that the Eist position is methodologically preferable to the Rationalist (R) one. Putting things in terms of what kinds of innate machinery is required (to solve a given learning problem), rather than how much considerably levels the methodological playing field. If both E and R conceptions require boatloads of innate machinery to get anywhere, then the question moves from whether innate structure is needed (as the BSH slyly implicates) to what sort is needed (which is the serious empirical question).

This said, let’s zero in on some specifics. What makes an approach Eist? There are two basic ingredients. The first important ingredient is associationism (Aism). This is the glue that holds “ideas” together. However, this is not all. There is a second important ingredient: perceptualism (Pism). Pism is the idea that all mental contents are effectively reducible to perceptual contents, which are themselves effectively reducible to sensory concepts (sensationalism (Sism)). 

This pair of claims lies at the center of Eist theories of mind. And the notion of the blank slate emphasizes the second. We find this reflected in a famous Eish slogan: “there is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses.” The Eish conception unites P/Sism with Aism to get to the conclusion that all mental contents are either primitive sensory/perceptual “ideas” or constructed out of sensory/perceptual input via association. The problems with Eism arise from both sources and revolve around two claims: the denial that mental concepts interrelate other than by association (they have no further interesting logical structure) and that all ideas are congeries of sensory perceptions. These two assumptions combine to provide a strong environmentalist approach to cognition wherein the structure of the environment largely shapes the contents of the mind through the probabilistic distributions of sensory/perceptual inputs. Rism denies bothclaims. It argues that association is not the fundamental conceptual glue that relates mental contents anddenies that all complex mental contents are combinations of sensory/perceptual inputs. To wax metaphorical, for Eists, only sensation can write on our mental blank slates and the greater the sensations the more vivid the images that appear. Rists think this is empirical bunk.

Note that this combination of cognitive assumptions has a third property. Given Eist assumptions, cognition is general purpose. If cognition is nothing but tracking the frequencies of sensory inputs then all cognition is of a piece, the only difference being the sensations/perceptions being tracked. There is no modularity or domain specificity beyond that afforded by the different sensory mechanisms, nor rules of “combination” beyond those tracking the differential exposure to some sensations over others. Thus for Eists, the domain generality of cognition is not an additional assumption. It is the consequence of Eisms two foundational premises.

Now, we actually know today that Eism will not work (actually, we knew this way back way back when). In particular, Pism/Sism was very thoroughly explored at the turn of the 20^thcentury and shown to be hopeless. There were vigorous attempts to reduce our conceptual contents to sense data. And these efforts completely failed! Pism/Sism, in other words, is a hopeless position. So hopeless, in fact, that the only place it still survives is in AI and certain parts of psychology. Deep Learning (DL), it seems, is the latest incarnation of P/Sism+Aism right now. BothPriorsand Marcus elegantly debunk DLs inflated pretentions by showing both that the assumptions are biologically untenable and that they are adhered to more in the PR discussions than in the practice of the parade cases meant to illustrate successful AI learners.[1] I refer you to their useful discussions. See especially their excellent points concerning how much actual learning in humans and animals is based on very little input (i.e. from a very limited number of examples). DL requires Big Data (BD) to be even remotely plausible. And this data must be quite carefully curated (i.e. supervised) to be of use. Both papers make the obvious point that much biological learning is done from very few example cases (sparse data) and is unsupervised (hence notcurated). This makes most of what DLers have “discovered” largely irrelevant as models for biologically plausible theories of cognition. Sadly, the two papers do notcome right out and say this, though they hint at it furiously. It seems that the political power of DL is such that frankly saying that this emperor is hardly clothed will not be well rewarded.[2]Hence, though the papers make this point, it is largely done in a way that bends over backwards to emphasize the virtues of DL and not appear to be critically shrill. IMO, there is a cost to this politeness.

One last point and I stop. Priorsmakes a cute observation, at least one that I never considered. Eists of the DL and connectionist variety loveplasticity. They want flexible minds/brains because these are what the combination of Aism and P/Sism entails.Priorsmakes the nice observation that if flexibility is understood as plasticity then plasticity is something that biology only values in smalldoses. Brains cease being plastic after a shortish critical period. This Priorsnotes implies that there is a biological cost of being relentlessly open minded. You can see why I might positively reverberate to this observation.

Ok, nuff said. The two papers are very good and are shortish as well. Priorsis perfect for anyone wanting to have a non human case to illustrate Rish themes in a class on language and mind. The Marcus piece is part of a series of excellent papers he has been putting out reviewing the hype behind DL and taking it down several pegs (though, again, I wish he were less charitable). From these papers and the references they cite, it strikes me that the hype that has surrounded DL is starting to wear thin. Call me a hopeless romantic, but maybe when the overheated PR dies down and it becomes clear that the problems the latest round of Eish accounts solved were not the central problems in cognition, we can return to some serious science.  

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[1]An aside: there is more than a passing similarity between the old attempts to reduce mental contents to sense data and the current fad in DL of trying to understand everything in terms of pixel distributional properties. History seems to constantly repeat; the first time as insight, the second time as a long con. Not surprisingly, the attempt to extract the notion “object” or “cat” from pixel distributions is no more successful today than were prior attempts to squeeze such notions from sense data. Ditto with algebraic structure from associations. It is really useful to appreciate how long we have known that Eism cannot be a serious basis for cognition. The failures Priorsand Marcus observe are not new ones, just the same old failures gussied up in technically spiffier garb.

[2]Some influential voices are becoming far more critical. Shalizi (here) notes that much of DL is simply a repackaging of perceptrons (“extracting features from the environment which work in that environment to make a behaviorally-relevant classificationor prediction or immediate action”) and will have roughly the same limitations that perceptrons had (viz. “This sort of perception is fast, automatic, and tuned to very, very particular features of the environment… They generalize to more data from their training environment, but not to new environments…”).  Shalizi, like Marcus andPriors, locates the problems with these systems in their lack of “abstract, compositional, combinatorial understanding we (and other animals) show in manipulating our environment, in planning, in social interaction, and in the structure of language.” 

            In other words, DL is basically the same old stuff repackaged for the credulous “smart” technopilic shopper. You cannot keep selling perceptrons, so repackage and sell it as DeepLearning (the ‘deep’ here is, no doubt, the contribution of the marketing department). The fact is that the same stuff that was problematic before is problematic still. There is no way to “abstract” out compositional and combinatorial principles and structures from devices aimed to track “particular features of the environment.” 

The neural autonomy of syntax

Nothing does language like humans do language. This is not a hypothesis. It is a simple fact. Nonetheless, it is often either questioned or only reluctantly conceded. Therefore, I urge you to repeat the first sentence of this post three times before moving forward. It is both true and a truism. 

Let’s go further. The truth of this observation suggests the following non-trivial inference: there is something biologically special about humans that enables them (us) to be linguistically proficient andthis special mental power is linguistically specific. In other words, humans are uniquely cognitively endowed as a matter of biology when it comes to language and this biological gift is tailored to track some specific cognitive feature of language rather than (for example) being (just!) a general increase in (say)generalbrain power. On this view, the traditional GG conception stemming from Chomsky takes FL to be both species specific and domain specific. 

Before proceeding, let me at once note that these are independent specificity theses. I do this because every time I make this point, others insist in warning me that the fact mentioned in the first sentence does not imply the inference I just drew in the second paragraph. Quite right. In fact: 

It is logically possible that linguistic competence supervenes on no domain specific capacities but is still species specific in that only humans have (for example) sufficiently powerful general brains to be linguistically proficient. Say, for example, linguistic competence requires at least 500 units of cognitive power (CP) and only human brains can generate this much CP. However, modulo the extra CPs, the mental “programs” the CPs drive are the same as those that (at least some) other cognitive creatures enjoy, they just cannot drive them as fast or as far because of mileage restrictions imposed by low CP brains.

Similarly, it is logically possible that animals other than humans have domain specific linguistic powers. It is conceivable that apes, corvids, platypuses, manatees, and Portuguese water dogs all have brains that include FLs just like ours that are linguistically specific (e.g. syntax focused and not exercised in other cognitive endeavors). Were this so, then both they and we would have brains with specific linguistic sensitivities in virtue of having brains with linguistically bespoke wiring/circuitry or whatever specially tailored brain ware makes FL brains special. Of course, were I one of them I would keep this to myself as humans have the unfortunate tendency of dismembering anything that might yield scientific insight (or just might be tasty). If these other animals actually had an FL I am pretty sure some NIH scientist would be trying to figure out how to slice and dice their brains in order to figure out how its FL ticks.

So, both options are logically possible, but, the GG tradition stemming from Chomsky (and this includes yours truly, a fully paid up member of this tribe) has doubted that these logical options are live and that when it comes to language onlywe humans are built for it and what makes our cognitive profile special is a set of linguistically specific cognitive functions built into FL and dedicated to linguistic cognition. Or, to put this another way, FL has some special cognitive sauce that allows us to be as linguistically adept as we evidently are and we alone have minds/brains with this FL.

Nor do the exciting leaps of inference stop here. GG has gone even further out on the empirical limb and suggested that the bespoke property of FL that makes us linguistically special involves an autonomous SYNTAX (i.e. a syntax irreducible to either semantics or phonology and with its own special combinatoric properties). That’s right readers, syntax makes the linguistic world go round and only we got it and that’s why we are so linguistically special![1]Indeed, if a modern linguistic Ms or Mr Hillel were asked to sum up GG while standing on one foot s/he could do worse than say, only humans have syntax, all the rest is commentary.

This line of reasoning has been (and still is) considered very contentious. However, I recently ran across a paper by Campbell and Tyler (here, henceforth C&T) that argues for roughly this point (thx to Johan Bolhuis and William Matchin for sending it along). The paper has several interesting features, but perhaps the most intriguing (to me) is that Tyler is one of the authors. If memory serves, when I was growing up, Tyler was one of those who were very skeptical that there was anything cognitively special about language. Happily, it seems that times have changed.

C&T argues that brain localizes syntactic processing in the left frontotemporal lobe and “makes a strong case for the domain specificity of the frontotemporal syntax system and its autonomy from domain-general networks” (132). So, the paper argues for a neural version of the autonomy of syntax thesis. Let me say a few more words about it.

First, C&T notes that (of course) the syntax dedicated part of the brain regularly interacts with the non-syntactic domain general parts of the brain. However, the paper rightly notes that this does not argue against the claim that there is an autonomous syntactic system encoded in the brain. It merely means that finding it will be hard as this independence will often be obscured.  More particularly C&T says the activation of the domain general systems only arise “during task based language comprehension” (133). Tasks include having to make an acceptability judgment. When we focus on pure comprehension, however, without requiring any further “task” we find that “only the left-laterilized frontotemporal syntax system and auditory networks are activated” (133). Thus, the syntax system only links to the domain general ones during “overt task performance” and otherwise activates alone. C&T note that this implies that the syntactic system alone is sufficient for syntactic analysis during language comprehension.

Second, C&T argue that arguments against the neural autonomy of syntax rest on bad definitions of domain specificity. More particularly, according to C&T the benchmarks for autonomy in other studies beg the autonomy question by embedding a “task” in the measure and so “lead to the activation of additional domain-general regions” (133). As C&T notes, when such “tasks” are controlled for, we only find activation in the syntax region.

Third, the relevant notion of syntax is the one GGers know and love. For C&T takes syntax to be prime species specific feature of the brain and understands syntax in GGish terms to be implicated in “the construction of hierarchical syntactic structures.” C&T contrasts hierarchical relations with “adjacency relationships” which it claims “both human and non-human primates are sensitive to” (134). This is pretty much the conventional GG view and C&T endorses it.

And there is more. C&T endorses the Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch distinction between FLN and FLB. This is not surprising for once one adopts an autonomy of syntax thesis and appreciates the uniqueness of syntax in human minds/brains the distinction follows pretty quickly. Let me quote C&T (135):

In this brief overview, we have suggested that it is necessary to take a more nuanced view to differentiating domain-general and domain-specific components involved in language. While syntax seems to meet the criteria for domain-specificity….there are other key components in the wider language system which are domain-general in that they are also involved in a number of cognitive functions which do not involve language.

C&T has one last intriguing feature, at least for a GGer like me. The name ‘Chomsky’ or the terms ‘generative grammar’ are never mentioned, not even once (shades of Voldemort!). Quite clearly, the set of ideas that the paper explores presupposes the basic correctness of the Chomskyan generative enterprise. C&T arugues for a neural autonomy of syntax thesis and, in doing so, it relies on the main contours of the Chomsky/GG conception of FL. Yes, if C&T is correct it adds to this body of thought. But it clearly relies on it’s main claims and presupposes their essential correctness. A word to this effect would have been nice to see. That said, read the paper. Contrary to the assumptions of many, it argues that for a cog-neuro conception of the Chomsky conception of language. Even if it dares not speak his name.

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[1]I suspect that waggle dancing bees and dead reckoning insects also non verbally advance a cognitive exceptionalism thesis and preen accordingly.

The moral certainty of the existence of UG

This is a very long post. I was going to divide it in two and serve it tapas style, but I decided that this broke the flow. So instead I serve it up as a whole with the understanding that it is too long and probably too dense. To help you swallow what is on offer I spiced the serving up polemically (though I show unusual restraint in parts). To help you through it I thought I would offer up the two main punch lines.

First, it is virtually inconceivable that UG does not exist. It is as sure a bet as one can have and there are two reasons for this: (i) It is a very weak thesis and (ii) The data in its favor is both evident and overwhelming. So, does UG exist? No doubt yes. 

I address a second question and answer it.  Given that UG obviously exists why do so many think that this is a (at the very least a very very) controversial claim. The answer is that people who think that the UG hypothesis is either clearly false or at least way out there confuse two separate questions; the whether and the how. I explain what the difference is and argue that this confusion needs to be resisted. So properlyunderstood, that UG exists is a virtual certainty, though what exactly is in UG is rightly controversial. 

These are the main conclusions. Here is the long, very long, way too long, argument. 

Here is part 1.

0. The thesis and the argumentative roadmap

That humans are endowed with Universal Grammar (UG) is, I believe, true.  Indeed, I believe it is obviouslytrue. So obviously true that there are no reasonable intellectual grounds for denying it. Surprisingly (note bulge in cheek please), what I consider to be trivially and obviously the case is considered by many to be at best tendentious and at worst, false. But I assure you that I am right about this. In what follows, I will demonstrate that it is morally certainthat UG exists. 

Here’s the game plan.

First, I will review some robust facts about human linguistic facility and show how they together very strongly license the conclusion that something like UG must exist. I will observe that these facts’ robustness tracks their self-evidence.

Second, I will outline how something like UG is required to accommodate these facts. In the process, we will see that the claim that UG exists is actually quite weak, which is one reason why it is virtually certain to be true.

Third, I will identify a question that is often confused with the one that I take to be trivially true that is in fact notat all trivial and suggest that part of the contentiousness regarding UG’s existence revolves around confusing two related, yet very different, questions.

I will then end with a little sermonette.

1.The obvious facts

There are four big facts that motivate the generative enterprise:

1.     Species specificity: Nothing does language like humans do language, not even sorta kinda. 

2.     Linguistic creativity: “a mature native speaker can produce a new sentence on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them’ (Chomsky, Current Issues: 7). In other words, a native speaker of a given L has command over a discrete (and for all practical and theoretical purposes) infinity of differently interpreted linguistic expressions.

3.     Linguistic promiscuity: Any human child can acquire any language with native proficiency if placed in the appropriate speech community.

4.     Linguistic recency and stability: The human linguistic capacity to acquire a language with properties 2 and 3 is a relatively recent biological innovation (roughly 50-100 kya) and it its features have remained unchanged (indeed, linguistic promiscuity implies this).

These four facts have two salient properties. First, they (or at least the first three) are more or less obviously true. That’s why nobody will win a Nobel prize for “discovering” any of them. Here’s what I mean.

It is obvious that nothing does language remotely like humans do (humans are linguistically speaking qualitatively unique biologically). Humans are to language what fish are to swimming and birds to flying.  No other animals do it like we do. It’s not even close.[1]

Linguistic creativity in the sense of 2 is also self-evident. A moment’s reflection indicates that there is no apparent bound on the kinds of messages humans can linguistically express and there is no obvious upper bound on sentence complexity (length or depth). We regularly express and understand sentences never before encountered, and do so quickly and easily. There is for all practical and theoretical purposes an infinity of sentences over which a native speaker of a given language has command.

Third, absent pathology, any human can acquire this kind of unbounded linguistic capacity and does so in more or less the same way regardless of the language being acquired. So native speakers of English, German, Japanese, Swahili, ASL etc. acquire their native “tongues” (i.e. their language specific Gs) at more or less the same rate, make more or less the same kinds of “errors” on the way and end up with proficiencies within their respective native languages that are more or less the same. Further, so far as we can tell, any child regardless of ethnic, geographical, social, or racial background is able to acquire any language with equal ease. In short, there are no apparent biologically relevant group distinctions that distinguish humans with respect to the capacity to acquire a natural language.[2]

Last of all (and the least secure of the four facts cited), the kind of linguistic facility we find in humans is a recentish innovation in biological terms (ok, this last point is more tendentious, or at least the first part of it is (see below)). Using cultural proxies as evidence for the rise of language in the species (unfortunately utterances have a very short physical shelf life), we find these en masse in only the last 50-100,000 years.[3]Moreover, so far as we can tell, a child’s capacity to acquire any language is the same across the species. Thus, whatever the capacity to acquire human language consists in, it has remained stable in humans since it arose (i.e. once having “evolved” it has not evolved any further in any biologically identifiable sub-groups to differentially facilitate G acquisition by different biological subgroups).[4]

To repeat, these four facts (or 3.5 of the four facts) about human language and human linguistic capacity are (for the most part) very robust and easily observed.[5]  And given this, one reasonable intellectual project is to explain howthese factscouldhold. The claim that UG is a biologically endemic human property is a step towards explaining these facts. More specifically, it is hard to see how one couldexplain them without making an assumption analogous to this. Let’s unpack this claim.

2. The facts and FL/UG, part 1.

The four facts above can usefully serve as boundary conditions on any adequate theory of language. Let’s consider how.

The first, species specificity, implies that there is something special about humans that allows them to be linguistically proficient in the unique way that they are. We can name the source of that proficiency: humans (and most likely onlyhumans) have a faculty of language (FL) capable of meeting the computational exigencies peculiar to language. Were humans biologically equipped with UG then the fact that humans are to language what flying is to birds and swimming is to fish (and you can add endlessly to this list (e.g. echo location is to bats, hopping is to kangaroos…) would follow. Note, this does notexplain why onlyhumans seem to be so linguistically proficient (nor does it explain how specifically the proficiency operates (see below)). We must make the further assumption that whatever the biological underpinnings that support human linguistic proficiency is developed uniquely richly in humans. So whatever FL is, whatever its properties, humans have one and other animals do not and were this so then it would explain why humans are uniquely linguistically proficient in the way they are. And given that humans areuniquely linguistically proficient (i.e. given that nothing does language like humans do) licenses the supposition that humans have FLs while other animals do not, though what exactly “having an FL” comprises is as yet undetermined. All the first fact entails is that there is somethinglinguistically relevant that is uniquely human, not that everything that pertains to language is the special property of humans.[6]This is a very weak claim, based firmly on a pretty evident fact.

Linguistic productivity implies that native speakers acquire Gs (recursive /procedures or rules) able to generate an unbounded number of distinct linguistic objects that native speakers can use to express their thoughts and to understand the expressions that other native speakers utter.[7]How does it imply this? 

Linguistic productivity is the observation that humans can use and understand an unbounded number of linguistic expressions (many/most of which are novel). In other words, a natural language comprises a discrete infinity of distinct expression and a native speaker of that language can effortlessly use and understand an unbounded number of them. This implies that a native speaker’s facility in a particular language involves acquiring rules that together can finitelyspecify the expressions of that language. Or to put this another way, the observed unboundedcapacity must rest on some finiterecursive capacity (i.e. rules that apply repeatedly) for unbounded capacities are not physically realizable in any other way. So, the physical realizability of an infinite capacity implies that what is actually physically realized is some finite specification of that capacity which underlies the unbounded manifestations of that capacity.

It is noteworthy that so far as we can tell only humans are linguistic creative. Thus, when we observe that nothing does language like humans do, part of what we are observing is that no other animal appears to have a system analogous to the linguistic system that humans have: one capable of effortlessly deploying a discrete infinity of expressions that couples a meaning to an articulation.[8]Given this, a key part of human linguistic proficiency consists in having a grammar (G) (i.e. rules that repeatedly apply to their outputs) of a particular language able to generate (i.e. specify) an unbounded number of discretely different linguistic expressions linked to a specific meaning and articulation (i.e. “sound”).[9]

If we combine this conclusion with fact (1), we get to the conclusion that part of what makes humans biologically unique is a species capacity to acquire Gs of the kind that we do. Or, to put this another way, linguistic creativity is a big part of what makes humans linguistically special. It’s (part of) what we do that other animals don’t do. As Gs undergird linguistic creativity, then the capacity to acquire Gs like ours is (part of) what makes humans linguistically special. Again: that nothing does language like we do is self-evident. That we are linguistically creative is as well. Together these two observations support the inference that (part of) what makes us special is the capacity to become linguistically creative, to acquire a G.

(3), linguistic promiscuity, implies that all human Gs have something in common; they are all acquirable by humans and any human can acquire anyone of them. This strongly supports the conclusion that there are some properties P that all humans have that allow them to acquire human Gs in the effortless reflexive way that they do. In other words, the capacity to acquire Gs is reasonably seen as the same across the species (just like the capacity to fly is seen to be the same across eagles and the capacity to swim is seen to be roughly the same across tuna) and a (indeed, the) standard way of accounting for such species wide capacities is to ground them in the biology of the species. If that is good enough for eagles and flying and tuna and swimming it is good enough for humans and language.[10]

So here is a reasonable (‘ineluctable’ is probably a better adjective here, but I am being very concessive so as not to annoy anyone (hah!)) conclusion from the enumerated obvious facts: humans (and only humans) come biologically equipped with a capacity to acquire human Gs (an FL) which (partially) undergirds native speakers’ capacities to produce and understand linguistic expressions creatively (i.e. novel expressions the native speaker has never before encountered). 

3. The facts and LF/UG, part 2.

Indeed, cursory inspection of the obvious facts allows us to say a bit more: (i) we know that the linguistic data available to the child during the course of G acquisition vastly underdetermines the kinds of Gs that we know humans can acquire thus (ii) it must be the case that some of the limits on the acquirable Gs reflect “the general character his [the acquirers NH] learning capacity rather that the particular course of his experience” (Chomsky, Current Issues; 112). (1), (2), (3) together with (i), (ii) very strongly license the conclusion that FL consists in part of language specific capacities that enable humans to acquire some kinds of Gs more easily than others (and, perhaps, some not at all). In other words, the class of humanly possible Gs is a subset of the class of logically possible Gs and FL is able to discriminate between the two classes.

Here’s another way of saying this. Assume that FL is a cognitive structure made up of various kinds of cognitive operations and general principles. Let’s call the linguo-centric aspect of FL, “UG.” More specifically, UG consists of those features of FL that are linguistically specific, in contrast to those features of FL that are part of human or biological cognition more generally. Note that this allows for FL to have features that are notUGish. What the above considerations support is the conclusion that there are somefeatures of FL that are linguistically proprietary. In other words, the UG part of FL is not null.[11]Or, somefeatures of FL are biologically special in humans, in particular (at least) whatever it is that circumscribes the restricted class of Gs that comprise the human Gs. 

The fourth fact, that human linguistic capacity is a relatively recent biological innovation, implies more about the “size” of UG: (4) implies that the UG part of FL is rather restricted. In other words, though there are somecognitively unique features of FL that enable humans to acquire the Gs that they do (i.e. UG is not empty), FL contains many mental operations that it shares with other cognitive capacities and that are likely also not human specific (i.e. shared across species). In other words, though UG has content, muchof FL consists of operations and conditions not unique to FL.[12]

This forth fact highlights why the claim that UG exists should be treated as remarkably anodyne. The claim is veryweak. The claim is that there are somefewaspects of FL that are linguistically dedicated (i.e. UG) but that most of FL is comprised of operations, primitives and conditions that are cognitively/computationally general. Moreover, the weakness of the claim implies that its denial is correspondingly strong. In particular, the denial that UG exists must show thatallof FL is domain general and this requires addressing the host of phenomena that linguists have unearthed over the last 60 years and showing that they can be accounted for without invoking any linguistically proprietary features. 

Let me beat this point good and dead. To argue that UG does not exist  (i.e. that there is nothingcognitively special about human cognition that allows them to acquire and use the kinds of languages that have the specific propertiesthat they in fact have) requires demonstrating that no UG principles are required to explain why human Gs are restricted to having the special properties they have been empiricallyshown to have by legions of (well, many) linguists over the last 60 years. Nobody has come close to even addressing this issue (even the hand waving has been perfunctory), let alone showing that it holds. But absent such a demonstration, claims that UG is null (i.e. that there is nothing cognitively special about humans wrt language) is windy (and intellectually irresponsible) BS. That UG skepticism is considered a respectable intellectual position indicates more about the sad state of intellectual debate than anything about the plausibility of the arguments allegedly undergirding this skepticism. 

In sum, arguing that UG is null and that its apparent effects can all be accounted for using general cognitive and computational principles is a very tall order given the wealth of intricate, and subtle and specific(in the biologist’s sense) grammatical phenomena that Generative Grammar has unearthed over the last 60 years of linguistic investigation. Not surprisingly, nothing like this has been attempted, let alone successfully accomplished.

Nor should one be sanguine that it is possible. As noted, nothing does language like humans do and this lends prima faciesupport to the idea that there is somethingcognitively special about humans with respect to language that allows for this. What seems generally unappreciated is that this is a very weak claimgiven the basic evident facts and so showing that it is incorrect will prove to be very challenging. At the very least, isolating one or two linguistic phenomena and successfully demonstrating that they do not require specialized linguistic apparatus fails to come to terms with the challenge. And this is a logical point. Proving an existential statement to be incorrect takes a lot of work, virtually none of which has been tried, let alone successfully done.[13]

Note, that this has a somewhat surprising polemical consequence. UG skeptics like to think of themselves as defending common sense and eschewing a radical and highly implausible claim (linguistic nativism) that requires a lot of evidence to even be entertained. But on fact the state of play is the exact opposite. Skeptics are advancing a very bold claim given the obvious facts concerning humans and language. They are contending that there isnothingcognitively special about humans wrt this capacity. This is a logical possibility. But it is a very strong claim and requires a lot of hard work to establish. The weak claim is that there is something special about humans. The skeptics have it completely backwards, which, come to think of it, may account for the fact that they have done so little (nothing really) to demonstrate that their claim is even mildly plausible.

4.  The hard question is often confused with the easy one

The argument outlined above is often taken to be very controversial and highly speculative. As should be clear at this point, it isn’t. That humans have an FL with some unique UGish features is a trivial conclusion from very obvious facts. This should not be up for debate. What then should be? 

What is controversial, and rightly so, is what exactly UG consists in.What exactlyis the linguistically special cognitive content of UG? This is quite definitely NOTobvious and this is what linguists (and others interested in language and its cognitive and biological underpinnings) are (or should be) trying to figure out. I would argue that linguists have a pretty good working (i.e. effective) theory of FL/UG and have promising leads on its fundamental properties, though this is not the topic of this post. But, and I really want to emphasize this, even if many/most of the details are wrong the basic conclusion that humans have an FL with some UGish touches is virtually certain to be right. To repeat,thatFL is a human biological endowment with some proprietary linguistic features is (or should be) uncontroversial, even if whatFL consists in and what its UGish linguistic proprietary features are isn’t.[14]  

In a rational world (and boy do I hope that there is one that is reasonably accessible from our own), there should also be consensus around a second point: how to go about refuting the claim that UG exists. Given that the claim is weak (indeed veryweak) and (pretty directly) reflects some very basic evident facts, proving it wrong requires getting deep into the details of specificclaims and showing that they can be derived without UGish assumptions. So, for example, if someone (e.g. Chomsky) argues that hierarchical recursion or structure dependence is a UG property of FL then arguing that it is not requires showing how to reduce these specificproperties of human grammars to generalfeatures of cognition.[15]Details will matter. Absent these, arguments against UG should carry little weight. Recall, there are obvious facts that point to somethingspecial about language in humans. Arguing against this must establish that there is nothing cognitively special about language and this means that allof its specific properties can be reduced/explained in more general terms. In my opinion, once this truism is embraced the conclusion that humans are biologically endowed with an FL with language specific UG properties will quickly become the conventional wisdom (and posts like this one will seem incomprehensible to our intellectual descendants (I pray for that day!)).[16]

5.  The sermonette

Let me end with a small nod to 17^thand 18^thcentury discussions about skepticism. Thinkers of this era distinguished logical certainty from moral certainty. Something is logically certain iff its negation is logically false (i.e. only logical truths can be logically certain). Given this criteria, not surprisingly, virtually nothing is certain. Nonetheless, we can and do judge many propositions more or less certain that are neither tautologies nor contradictions. Those things that enjoy a high degree of certainty but are not logically certain are morallycertain. In other words, it is worth a sizable bet with long odds given. My claim is the following: that FL with UG touches exists is morally certain. That there is a species specific dedicated capacity based on someintrinsic linguistically specific computational capacities is as close to a sure thing as we can have. We can even be more specific: some of the “specialness” will relate to the distinctive computational properties that human Gs have. Of course, this might, logically speaking, be wrong, but only in the way that our bet that birds are built to fly might be wrong, or fish are built to swim might be. In other words, though it is a logical possibility that it is wrong, there is a moral certainty that it is not. 

Here, in other words, is the current state of play. Maybe there is nothing special about birds that allow them to fly (maybe as Chomsky once wryly suggested, eagles are just very good jumpers). Maybe fish swim like I do only more so (i.e. fish are to Michael Phelps what Phelps is to me). Maybe. And maybe you are interested in this beautiful bridge in NYC that I have to sell you. That FL/UG exists is a moral certainty. The interesting question is what’s in it, not if it’s there.

Why do I mention this? Because in my experience, discussions in and about linguistics often tend to run the whether/that and the what/howquestions together. This is quite obvious in discussions of the Poverty of Stimulus (PoS). It is pretty easy to establish that/whethera given phenomenon is subject to PoS, i.e. that there is not enough data in the PLD to fix a given mature capacity. But this does not mean that any given solution for that problem is correct. Nonetheless, many regularly conclude that becausea proposed solution is imperfect (or worse) that there is no PoS problem at all and that FL/UG is unnecessary. But this is a non-sequitur. Whether something has a PoS profile is independent of whether any of the extant proposed solutions are viable. 

Similarly with evolutionary qualms regarding rich UGs: that something like island effects fall under the purview of FL/UG is, IMO, virtually uncontestable. What the relevant mechanisms are and how they got into FL/UG is a related but separable issue. I want to walk this back a bit: that some proposal runs afoul of Darwin’s Problem (or Plato’s) is a good reason for re-thinking it. But, this is a reason for rethinking the proposed specific mechanism, it is not a reason to reject the claim that FL has internal structure of a partially UGish nature. Confusing questions for one another leads to baby/bathwater problems, so don’t do it!

So what’s the take home message: we can know that something is so without knowing how it is so. We know that FL has a UGish component by considering very simple evident facts. These simple evident facts do not suffice to reveal the fine structure of FL/UG but not knowing what the latter is does not undermine the former conclusion that it exists. Different questions, different data, different arguments. Keeping this in mind will help us avoid taking three or more steps backwards for every one or two steps forward.

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[1]A recent vigorous discussion of this uniqueness can be found in Laland 2017.

[2]Note that this is the case even ifwe allow (which we shouldn’t, btw) that some language specific Gs are not recursive. What is at issue is not whether every human G is recursive but whether every human has the capacity to acquire a recursive G. The fact that some G that has been acquired is not so is not evidence that the underlying capacity does not exist. Everett has catapulted himself to stardom on the basis of this elementary confusion. Quite amazing if you think about it.

[3]The real problem with the claim that FL arose recently is that it is unclear how closely the cultural proxies used supervene on a linguistic capacity like ours. Is unbounded recursion the secret sauce behind elaborate burial rituals or fancy jewelry, or is it something else (e.g. displacement (Everett) or communicability (see here)). We really do not know. What we know is that the kinds of cultural artifacts that we (strongly) believe supervene on something like our linguistic practices are of relatively recent vintage. We also know that some big shots who study this think that it can be traced to a pretty sudden emergence of “language” about 50-100 kya. That’s it. And this is a pretty weak reed upon which to ground interesting claims. But that’s what we have and so we do what we must.

[4]For reasons that elude me this fact seems to be little discussed in the EvoLang literature. Say you believe that the capacity to acquire a G (aka UG) did slowly and gradually evolve over millennia. Then the fact of Promiscuity implies that it stoppedevolving before humans went their separate ways (after leaving Africa). But why should it have stopped? Why slow evolution until time X and nothing further after? Did the forces making for the evolution simply disappear? Perhaps. The game then would be to identify the relevant pressures and then argue that these pressures evaporate at time X for whatever reason. Nobody to my knowledge has attempted this. Indeed, nobody to my knowledge has even addressed the issue. But clearly ifpromiscuity is right (and there is no currently persuasive reason to think that different kids acquire different Gs qualitatively differently (though this is logically possible)) then the gradualist have a Lucyesque obligation (“some esplaining to do”) to address this fact. Otherwise promiscuity constitutes a prima facie good reason for thinking that gradualism is problematic.

[5]Interestingly, the least robust fact is the one that underlies the program that tries to reducethe linguistic specificity of FL (see discussion below). There is a curious tension between two assumptions that critics of UG like to simultaneously hold: (i) UG doesn’t exist and all that we think of as linguistically specific can be traced to the operation of mechanisms of general cognition/computation and (ii) FL has gradually emerged over a very long time span. Why are these in tension? Because the main reason for the long time span is to explain how the obvious idiosyncrasies of the human capacity for language could have gradually evolved despite its specific uniquenesses. But (i) denies that there is anything really unique. But if so, the long time span is not required and we expect to see inchoate “language” in animals (and plants?) all around us. But we really don’t. Not even a little. So either language really is different and maybe a long gradual mode of evolution might explain how this might have happened (though there is NOTHING on the market today that offers any enlightening suggestions) or there is nothing really cognitively different about language and so Darwinian gradualism is not really required to explain what we see. At any case, it seems odd that opponents of UG like to grab onto to both ends of a (mildly) inconsistent stick.

[6]Note that we have not concluded here that FL is linguistically proprietary. We return to this question below. 

[7]Observe the claim is that acquiring a G is necessary to linguistic competence, not that it is sufficient. Factors other than G competence are causally relevant to our linguistic proficiency. 

[8]We can go further: we have no evidence that other animals have anything like the grammatical capacities evident in humans even abstracting away from the meaning with “sound” pairing. This, despite the fact, that animals have some pretty fancy computational capacities (dead reckoning, navigation, probability estimation) that implicate some pretty fancy (perhaps even recursive) computational powers. 

[9]The scare quotes are there to remind the reader that natural languages can be signed as well as spoken.

[10]Note that pointing to uniformity of capacity as a species property does not deny that some humans might be more linguistically adept than others, any more than saying that eagles/tuna capacity to fly/swim implies that all eagles are equally adept fliers or all tuna equally accomplished swimmers.

[11]Note that this is a very weak claim. I return to this below.

[12]Even those features that are shared across cognitive domains and with other species likely have been retrofit to “deal with language” in bespoke ways. So the claim is that FL contains features that are qualitatively unique (call these UG) and those that are qualitatively similar to what we find in other animals (i.e. general principles of computation and cognition). 

[13]I should point out, that in my opinion there have been virtually no successful demonstrations showing that key features that linguists have argued to be properties of UG are in fact explicable using non-linguistically proprietary assumptions. But even if this assessment is incorrect, the logic still stands. The very likely existence of UG rests in part on what a modest claim it actually is. It is the UG skeptics that are making strong baseless assertions, not UG proponents. I suspect that this point will be considered wildly counterintuitive which is why I am writing this post.

[14]This is very like the mathematical distinction between an existence proof vs a constructive proof. We often have proofs that something is the case without knowing what that something is.

[15]So too with other purported UG features (e.g. the Binding Theory, the ECP, Island effects, etc. See (http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-shortish-whig-history-of-gg-part-3.html) for a list of some plausible UGish characteristics of FL).

[16]Again, this does not mean that most of FL is UGish, only that some part is. The Minimalist Program (MP), a program that has generated remarkable hostility from those hostile to the claim that UG exists aims to reduce what is linguistically proprietary to FL to a minimum. That at least is the ambition. Thus, if MP succeeds then the “size” of UG will be pretty small. In my view, MP has been quite a successful program, but there are still many plausible UG features that remain unexplained except by deploying linguistically specific cognitive powers.  That said, I am personally optimistic that what we know about FL can be reduced so that only a smallish UG core remains. If I were interested in showing that UG does not exist and that FL is entirely comprised of cognitively/computationally general operations and principles, I would become a devotee of MP for this, if successful, would reduce the target requiring explanation in non-linguistically specific terms.