tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post9075025119521505840..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: What's Chomsky Thinking NowNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger199125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-90934035131818912332014-05-15T14:21:31.508-07:002014-05-15T14:21:31.508-07:00http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.ca/2013/03/going...http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.ca/2013/03/going-postal.html<br /><br />http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.ca/2013/03/guest-post-jeffrey-watumull-on-postals.html<br /><br />Maxim Baruhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01889104131534548077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-42352723421762299172013-08-22T03:28:15.398-07:002013-08-22T03:28:15.398-07:00Yes, Alex made the point about carburetor. And Cho...Yes, Alex made the point about carburetor. And Chomsky doesn't believe in that kind of "radical concept nativism". He says it would be along the lines that Fodor suggested but "not as extreme as his position". I would think that Chomsky's position is more nuanced. Rational and Humanehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06056736917754589041noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-11837145446442184762013-08-18T13:48:41.321-07:002013-08-18T13:48:41.321-07:00I assume you mean the short exchange on p. 34. Wha...I assume you mean the short exchange on p. 34. What is at issue there is whether concepts are atomic. Chomsky does indeed disagree with Fodor on that. What Alex and i talked about was whether concepts are innate and on that point Chomsky and Fodor agree.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-30654181565567922592013-08-17T16:36:23.276-07:002013-08-17T16:36:23.276-07:00I just finished 'Science of Language' and ...I just finished 'Science of Language' and Chomsky makes it quite clear that he does NOT agree with Fodor on this. In fact he has made it quite clear over the years in various different places. So I wonder why the other poster would claim that he does. Quite strange. Rational and Humanehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06056736917754589041noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-88634980729444060082013-02-25T14:51:53.949-08:002013-02-25T14:51:53.949-08:00Continuing with this, I don't see any reason w...Continuing with this, I don't see any reason why calling lexical decompositions 'definitions' is any worse than calling the things that generative grammarians produce 'grammars'; arguably the same confusion of a branch of the publishing industry with something that a putatively scientific activity finds to be an aspect of certain organisms, but not one worth making a fuss over in our present level of limited understanding. Nobody but the outer fringe of methodological moaners has any problem with understanding the difference between publisher's grammars and generative grammars, and nobody gets into any substantive difficulty by applying the same term to both.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-38294768485402818552013-02-24T22:10:32.463-08:002013-02-24T22:10:32.463-08:00"so that my process of acquiring the concept ..."so that my process of acquiring the concept can't be understood in terms of learning via hypothesis testing." - I guess I am still failing to make heads or tails of Fodor, since hypothesis-testing seems to me to be exactly a way in which concepts of this nature can be acquired.<br /><br />Or is this hingeing on something such as the difference between dictionary definitions, composed of actual overt word-forms, and 'cognitive definitions', composed of 'concepts', frequently associated with but not identical to overt word-forms. For better or worse, I don't have time to re-read Concepts ATM.<br />AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-6488889955891415772013-02-24T20:12:45.103-08:002013-02-24T20:12:45.103-08:00@Avery, I don't think anyone suggested that al...@Avery, I don't think anyone suggested that all concepts must lack definitions because some do, so I'm not sure what you're getting at there. Fodor's position is that concepts don't have associated <i>content-constitutive</i> descriptions (i.e., definitions). As he explains over and over again in <i>Concepts</i>, this position is perfectly consistent with my acquiring the concept INTELTYE via the description "non-green bug with a vaguely fingerlike body and big hind legs for jumping plus four short front ones". The caveat is that the relation between this concept and this description is not a definitional one, so that my process of acquiring the concept can't be understood in terms of learning via hypothesis testing. But from a sociological point of view, it's no surprise on Fodor's account that different groups of people have different bug concepts which bear more-or-less transparent definitional relations to each other.<br /><br />I wasn't quite sure who was the target of your second paragraph, but I assume you're not suggesting that Fodor himself should stick with the term 'definition'. This seems like a bad idea, since a definition (by definition!) is content-constitutive, and Fodor is denying precisely that there are content-constitutive descriptions associated with (most) concepts. Maybe someone will come up with a new definitionist model of concept acquisition based on some new notion of definition, but vague hopes of future success don't cut much ice against presently-existing proposals.Alex Drummondhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04676457657606185543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-31840036084863362232013-02-24T14:24:30.853-08:002013-02-24T14:24:30.853-08:00@vkodytek: the words (or 'word types') in ...@vkodytek: the words (or 'word types') in language arguably don't 'refer to things' in any simple way ('kinds of things' is a different matter, but there could be debates about the existence of kinds, I suppose). But expressions composed of those words (ie instances of combinations of words) surely do refer, if the word 'refer' means anything at all. But reference is produced by words in a situation.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-20646134856395427102013-02-24T14:13:18.767-08:002013-02-24T14:13:18.767-08:00@christina I don't think we can tell what is i...@christina I don't think we can tell what is innate vs learned from the input at this point, but we can remove a lot of stuff from the list of 'plausibly innate'. Color and related concepts (all the unimodal sensory concepts would be my contention, vigorously rejected by AW) I think can be taken off this list due to the existence of algorithms for training neural networks for recognizing them. For the grasshoppers, some of the plausibly innate ones would be:<br /><br /> thing, living, living thing (AW has the last as a composite of the first two, I wouldn't bet a whole lot of $$$ on that)<br /><br /> kind of<br /><br /> move (part of jumping and walking)<br /><br /> touch (part of 'grab')<br /><br /> body<br /><br /> part of (legs etc are part of body)<br /><br />To be removed from the plausiby innate list, a concept much either be a) defined in terms of things that are on it b) get a creditable procedure for being learned from the input.<br /><br />Folk vs scientific terminology is another issue, and the gaps between rural people who can distinguish more species from urban who don't etc. is another problem. I suspect that the Arrernte don't distinguish the mantises from the stick insects because they're not interested in either - they think they are poisonous and will give you a headeache if you touch them (the big ones can deliver a painful bite or pinch). The Aussie students in my semantics class last week mostly seemed to know the differences between grasshoppers, katydids, mantises and stick insects.<br />AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-4575383502521531362013-02-24T13:52:01.857-08:002013-02-24T13:52:01.857-08:00@alex, yes there need to be some undefined concept...@alex, yes there need to be some undefined concepts, but that some concepts are undefined does not mean that they all are. So the Wierzbickian story about the bugs would be that the definitions (called 'explications' in that approach) start of with the info 'a kind of living thing', which deals with the standard problems about robot grasshoppers, and probably twin earth ones as well, given some additional fiddling (plus, we don't know how indigenous Australians would react to twin earth scenarios).<br /><br />A further point is that the concept of 'definition' developed by philosophers and that segment of the publishing industry that produces dictionaries might well need some serious adjustment to work as a theory of how brains connect words to the world as they encounter it, such that a new term is called for, but it would surely be sensible to stick with the familiar terminology until we have some idea of what the needed adjustments are. Does *anybody* who works on lexical semantics find Fodor's line even remotely useful? <br /><br />Chomsky is better; his 'tea story' I think is useful. Along the lines that there is a large but limited number of processes that take water as input, and produce something that is mostly composed of H20 as output, and some of them have standard names (tea, whiskey), but if they don't, they're just water (the stuff that comes out of the tap in Cambridge MA).AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-82501726458821098752013-02-24T03:45:09.926-08:002013-02-24T03:45:09.926-08:00The above promised passage has been now added to t...The above promised passage has been now added to the review: <br />http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001592Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-37996350011524050932013-02-24T03:42:51.041-08:002013-02-24T03:42:51.041-08:00just an update that by now i have added a section ...just an update that by now i have added a section to my review that deals with the ambiguity issue you first drew attention to: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001592Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-27417847921263312532013-02-23T16:37:40.892-08:002013-02-23T16:37:40.892-08:00I think you make an excellent case for why work on...I think you make an excellent case for why work on early acquisition is so important: do we really 'come equipped' [so to speak] with the kinds of concepts you mention or do we learn them from the input? <br /><br />Also how many of the distinctions we as linguists or philosophers can think up are actually meaningful for the average person [e.g. how many people will just think 'yucky thing' when they see an inteltye? Is it really true that we all have the exact same concepts for even 'river'? Or is there just enough overlap that we can use them as tools? <br /><br />We probably have by now heard most of the theoretical arguments for both sides but in the end, as Chomsky says, 'these are empirical questions'Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-28221896080420367332013-02-23T14:03:51.369-08:002013-02-23T14:03:51.369-08:00@Avery. It's not really an embarrassment to Fo...@Avery. It's not really an embarrassment to Fodor's account that some concepts appear to have definitions, because a key part of his analysis in the original <i>Concepts</i> book was that people could "lock on" to concepts via definitions. So, different groups of people can lock onto different subsets of the animal kingdom via different definitions. They key point is that the definitions aren't constitutive of the content of the relevant concepts. So the belief that an inteltye is in front of you is not the same thing as the belief that a non-green bug with a vaguely fingerlike body and big hind legs for jumping plus four short front ones is in front of you.<br /><br />Fodor's point regarding induction applies just as strongly to your examples as to the standard examples, as far as I can see. You can't test the hypothesis that an inteltye has a fingerlike body unless you already have the concepts FINGER, *-LIKE, FINGER-LIKE, BODY and FINGER-LIKE BODY.Alex Drummondhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04676457657606185543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-85672826392103208452013-02-23T06:51:46.095-08:002013-02-23T06:51:46.095-08:00According to Science of Language [and also 'Of...According to Science of Language [and also 'Of Minds and Language' Chomsky takes it seriously. And according to a couple of talks I went to that left his audience open-mouthed in disbelief McGilvray takes it seriously. Have a look at his appendix XII in SoL and some of the work of his own he references...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-13694955057164739722013-02-23T06:01:09.602-08:002013-02-23T06:01:09.602-08:00Susan Carey's recentish book "The Origin ...Susan Carey's recentish book "The Origin of Concepts" is worth reading if anyone here still believes in Fodor-ian radical concept nativism. <br /><br />I am a little surprised that it is still taken seriously -- most people (apart from Fodor) take it more as a reductio than as an actual empirical claim that humans have an innate concept of 'carburetor'.Alex Clarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04634767958690153584noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-13688682734832812652013-02-23T04:12:02.533-08:002013-02-23T04:12:02.533-08:00"He says that while animals refer to external..."He says that while animals refer to external objects or internal physical states (”I’m hungry”), language (or most of it) doesn’t."<br /><br />It is true that in language we do not have the stimulus response correlation attributed to animal [communication?] here (I say 'here' because there is now some evidence that it is not even the case for all animal communication systems). This is not a new insight but was forcefully put forward in Chomsky's criticism of Skinner and behaviourism. Virtually everyone accepts that there are important differences between language and animal communication so I am not sure why Chomsky keeps repeating this uncontroversial point as if he had to battle a hostile army of Skinnerians. <br /><br />putting this aside: only because not everything in human language can be accounted for by the kind of interaction with the external world Avery aludes to does not mean NOTHING can. I am not aware of any philosophers who currently hold a pure referentialist account of meaning and most of the more sophisticated accounts have a way to deal with the fact that we cannot get all meaning from 'the outside world'. Given the names Chomsky lists in his attacks against 'referentialist accounts' I have to assume that he rejects all of them. And I have to go by what he says about his own account not by what I think he 'should have said' or what he could possibly have meant. Many people have attacked his view on this issue [again Norbert may know more details than me] and Chomsky has defended himself. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-50942160495894426422013-02-23T03:49:36.106-08:002013-02-23T03:49:36.106-08:00Michael Ramscar & his coworkers also have an a...Michael Ramscar & his coworkers also have an approach to learning classifications like this based on 'Feature-Label-Order' which also manages PoS problems by maximizing predictive value, & they also have experiments.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-82594969652750531772013-02-23T03:39:36.413-08:002013-02-23T03:39:36.413-08:00Think of 'reference' as shorthand for &quo...Think of 'reference' as shorthand for "a propensity to classify items that is induced by the speakers' internal representations of the shape, color etc that distinguish the various kinds of creatures." So, my first paragraph says that people are disinclined to accept classification systems that put things into two classes at once (in the absence of clear evidence that it's necessary, as with the 'pet'/'wild animal' divide that overlaps the taxonomic divisions, superordinate taxons, etc. (so the Arrernte have 'arne' for 'tree/bush' (no difference), alongside of species names for all the individual species (of trees and other plants; not of insects, as far as I could make out).<br /><br />In that part of the world, under the original conditions, if your classifications based on appearance don't provide good predictions of dispositions, you don't stay alive very long, so I guess that's a kind of 'externalism', but not one I'd be inclined to dismiss.<br /><br />AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-73482464987828499472013-02-23T02:53:21.364-08:002013-02-23T02:53:21.364-08:00What Chomsky says is a bit different, at least as ...What Chomsky says is a bit different, at least as far as I understand him. He says that while animals refer to external objects or internal physical states (”I’m hungry”), language (or most of it) doesn’t. It’s true that most of language elaborates on internal conceptualizations of the external world. Indeed, if our language strictly referred only to external objects, there could hardly be, for example, any Platonist.VilemKodytekhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13161547663393188912noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-78177630630875201772013-02-23T02:35:51.775-08:002013-02-23T02:35:51.775-08:00Note that your first paragraph presupposes externa...Note that your first paragraph presupposes externalism and that words refer to external objects. This is the view Chomsky explicitly rejects for reasons he seems to find very convincing (some of them he discusses in Science of Language). Again, that is not a position I agree with but one Chomsky has consistently defended over a long time (Norbert may know exactly for how long)Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-60932203047778814862013-02-23T01:42:55.378-08:002013-02-23T01:42:55.378-08:00PoS is a problem that doesn't arise in this in...PoS is a problem that doesn't arise in this instance, for one of at least two reasons. One possibility is the old no-overlap principle, saying that terms by default don't overlap in reference. The other is Bayesian fit vs complexity; you see a few things called grasshoppers and find the best balance between complexity of description and the fact that various other things, such as butterflies and beetles, aren't called grasshoppers.<br /><br />Bayesian is better, I think, because it implies that you could a few bugs were, say, iltywiltywe, without leaping to the conclusion that butterflies were also that. But, as many people would correctly point out, you need to have a definite description language for bug body shapes (and perhaps other features, such as locomotory styles) to flesh this out properly - Marr's ideas seem like an excellent starting point (and Anna's ideas about defining shapes seem to be working better than I expected them to when she started doing it).AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-71203182665870384442013-02-23T00:52:22.293-08:002013-02-23T00:52:22.293-08:00I agree that this is a problem for internalism/inn...I agree that this is a problem for internalism/innatism. <br /><br />Also note, that if Chomsky is right that the main function of language is 'expressing my thought'/'enabling inner dialogue', and language is no more important for 'communication' than haircut or anything else we do [as he claims in Science of Language], we also have a coordination problem. To express my thought it does not matter which of the plethora of grasshopper terms [fascinating info BTW!] I use; I know which one I mean. Same for you. So why would we use the SAME term? <br /><br />Input can't explain it because of the massive poverty of stimulus. Communication can't explain it because language is used in communication just like haircut [what exact haircut would communicate "Hey I'm cool" - well have a look at a bunch of teenagers...]. Even innatism can no longer help you because even IF we have all exactly the same innate lexicon which never changes we still have the labeling problem: why would you and I use the same label for a concept if communication is not what keeps pressure on us doing just that? <br /><br />I think if you take internalism/innatism seriously there are a lot of bullets to bite. Chomsky or Fodor might be willing to bite them all but I'd bow out very early...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-60167904657497241942013-02-22T20:12:44.449-08:002013-02-22T20:12:44.449-08:00So I'd take the basic facts about insect class...So I'd take the basic facts about insect classification in English vs Arrernte (Central Australia) as a straightforward embarassment to Fodor's position. So for example our 'grasshopper' corresponds roughly to their 'inteltye' (don't even dream of trying to pronounce this stuff unless you've been there), except that green grasshoppers fall under a different term 'nwekepeltherre', which also covers our 'katydids'. So 'inteltye' appear to be bugs with vaguely fingerlike bodies and big hind legs for jumping, plus four short front ones, unless they are green, in which case they are nwekepelhtherre. The round vs blade-like distinction that we register with 'katydid' doesn't seem to matter in their terminology. Pushing on with the finger-like body crowd, their 'iltywiltwye' covers both praying mantisses and stick insects, whose common characteristic is at least 4 long walking legs; the difference between the mantises and the stick insects being that the former have robust front 'arms' for grabbing things, while the stick insects just have 2 more walking legs.<br /><br />The point of this ramble being that if you look at a corner of the vocabulary in detail, and compare across languages, it's often easy to see how the various concepts are related to each other by what are basically definitional differences; if Fodor wanted to say that all of the six distinct insect concepts I enumerated above are innate, with different ones activated in different cultures, he can, but a definitional account seems much more plausible, to me at least, supposing that shapes can be done either Marr's way or Anna Wierzbicka's way, and the color aspects of it probably by neural networks (Wierzbicka is very wierd on colors).AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-72183801499895216072013-02-22T15:31:58.181-08:002013-02-22T15:31:58.181-08:00Yes. I favor the mutation story because it seems t...Yes. I favor the mutation story because it seems to me that it goes some ways to explaining why this only happened once. However, Chomsky conjectured that it did happen before. Birds. That was the topic of my post on minimal birds. Note that there is likely more than one miracle anyhow, we know next to nothing about lexicalizarion, another thing humans do orders of magnitude better than other mammals. Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.com