Wow! I'm curious what readers more knowledgeable about these issues think.
Sorry, in the *20* years since it was published.
10 responses to “Behme v. Chomsky on the evolution of language”
-
The criticisms are not new, as the essay makes clear.
Chomsky's rationalism is ideological. He ignores data to defend a principle that's best described as a Talmudic moral imperative: that man is above all other animals and cut off from them by his ability to reason.He claims that his politics and his linguistics are separate but they're not.
The irony is that he'll be remembered as an empiricist, as a political journalist and reporter of fact. -
This state of affairs goes back several decades.
Those who consider themselves within the Chomskyan tradition take his words as close to axiomatic. Those who study the same subject area who don't consider themselves Chomskyans have a hard time finding the falsifiable claims in what he says and are dismissed with contempt by Chomsky himself and his followers.
Several books have been written about this phenomenon, for example "The Linguistics Wars" by Randy Allen Harris, or "Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates" by Goldsmith and Huck.
-
This isn't my area really, but there are some interesting discussions of Chomsky's odd views on the evolution of language in Pinker's "The Language Instinct" and (in more details) Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". As I recall, the basic point seems to be that Chomsky wants to think about the brain's innate language capability as something more like maths or physics than the kind of messy engineering that evolution might plausibly deliver.
-
Behme writes – "The premiss that 99% of language use is internal, if true, supports the
conclusion that communication is not the current function of language. But this
premiss implausibly implies that someone who is awake 16 hours a day uses
language only 58 seconds a day for communication. A much weaker claim (for
most people much of their language use is internal) might be true. But such a
claim would provide little support for Chomsky’s ‘argument’"words (or should I say, communication) fails me …
To have misunderstood Chomsky's point so completely – in that 99% refers to the 'number of things' the linguistic faculty does rather then the time it spends doing them – is perhaps representative of this article
-
Just in case anyone else is confused by comment 3 and the reference to 58 seconds – the article states "99.9%" not "99%". (I'm not being pedantic here, it's just that I was confused and so went looking. Hopefully this will save anyone from searching and breaking out a calculator.)
As to the substance of the article I'm afraid I am in no position to add anything.
-
Its probably worth pointing out that Chomsky, in the simple premise of an innate language faculty existing in the brain, could still be correct – regardless of the quality of speculation as to how this may have occurred which is criticised here.
-
I'm always a bit reluctant to criticise Chomsky, because I think he's still much more sophisticated than 99% of his critics. But my view is that he has gone off the rails a bit. I trace it to one specific idea. In his earlier work, he talks about universal grammar, but he says explicitly that the grammars which he and other linguists constructed were not models of human biological language systems; they were theoretical constructs designed to generate signals comparable to natural language. By the time he introduced minimalism, in the 90s, he had abandoned that theoretical hygiene, and began talking explicitly about the biology of specific elements within his grammar.
I'm not a specialist, though, just an interested reader.
-
Some may be interested in a review I just published of three recent books on the evolution of language and cognition: http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/64/10/946 .
I second the recommendations in Marc's comment.
-
I recommend looking through Norbert Horntein's excellent blog http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com wherein you'll find Behme interacting with some of Chomsky's ideas. Gives a flavor for the debate.
-
First, you misquote me, I did say 99.9% not 99%. Second, Chomsky refers to language use internal to the mind, to not being able to go a minute without talking to yourself. Would you be so kind to specify what 'the number of things the biological language faculty does' are? Especially of interest is the biology of this faculty. Since Dr. Leiter had asked specifically for comments of people who are more knowledgable on that subject than he is, I assume you have a detailed description of all the biological details that you can share?
Leave a Reply