Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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| Quote (Kristine @ Feb. 15 2007,00:57) | | So much for language being irreducibly complex. |
We chortle at the suggestion, but ideas that are essentially equivalent to IC were actually batted around by linguists after Chomsky. Chomsky himself took an anti-evolutionary position. Although he believed that the underlying structure of human language is innate, he did not accept that it was a product of natural selection. Instead, he asserted that the human mind possesses an emergent, irreducible essence, and argued that few if any other genetic configurations could support this essence:
"In studying the evolution of mind, we cannot guess to what extent there are physically possible alternatives to, say, transformational generative grammar, for an organism meeting certain other physical conditions characteristic of humans. Conceivably, there are none—or very few—in which case talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point.…When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the “human essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man and that are inseparable from any critical phase of human existence, personal or social." (From Language and Mind, 1972, p. 98)
Others, like Bickerton, have taken similar positions: Bickerton early argued that syntaxes simpler than those of contemporary complexity would not have functioned. So he proposed an essentially saltationist view of the evolution of language. He later abandoned that position, however (because it was blown out of the water.)
All this was fiercely opposed and, in my opinion, refuted by Pinker and Bloom (beginning with their 1990 BBS article "Natural Language and Natural Selection") and many others, who have no difficulty imagining earlier, simpler forms of syntax that embody fewer rules than does contemporary human language.
But the notion did get some serious play.
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
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