Alina Mansurova 7:15 – 15:00

I gonna put aside this interesting topic of contemporary intellectual history and I’ll simply assume that language can be studied as a part of the world, I’ll continue another … to pursue the biolinguistic approach that took a shape half a century ago heavily influenced by ethology, comparative psychology and intensively pursued then along quite few different paths including much of the world that claims to reject the approach. Assuming that, it can scarcely be denied that some internal state is responsible for the fact that I speak and understand some variety of what’s loosely called English, but not say Hindi or Swahili. To borrow and, in fact, adapt traditional term we can call this a state, whatever it is, it is internal to me, a state that a human faculty of language, primarily, a state of the brain. We can call each such state an internalized language, technical literature often calls them I-language for simplicity or qualité ... It should also be uncontroversial that the faculty of language has an initial state, part of biological endowment which permits a certain range of options, the attainable I-languages. The faculty of language, then is a special property that enables my granddaughter but not her pet kitten or chimpanzee to attain a specific i-language, an exposure to appropriate data, data which her mind in some obscure way is able to extract from the booming, buzzing confusion and to interpret as linguistic experience … like test, nobody knows how it’s done, obviously is. More accurately every enfant acquires a complex of such states that complication put aside. The expectation that language is like everything else in the organic world and therefore is based on genetically determined initial state that distinguishes my granddaughter from her pets, that assumption has been called the Innateness hypothesis. And there is substantial literature debating the validity of the Innateness hypothesis. The literature has a curious character: there are lots of condemnations of hypothesis but it’s never formulated. And nobody defends it. It’s alleged advocates … they have no idea what the hypothesis is, everyone has summed Innateness hypothesis concerning language al least everyone who is interested in difference between an enfant and, say, her pets. Furthermore, the invented term, the Innateness hypothesis, is completely meaningless; there is no specific Innateness hypothesis rather there are various hypothesis about what might be the initial genetically determined state. This hypotheses are, of course, constantly changing as more as learned or should be obvious, confusion about these matters has reached such extreme level that it’s becoming hard even to unravel, put all that aside. The biolinguistic approach takes mental faculties to be states of the organism in particular, internal languages or i-languages, that are states of the faculty of language, all focus on language but most of what follows they should call as well other cognitive faculties and in fact for simpler organisms, say a B-communication or navigation, for example. Well, when we adopt this approach, several questions arise at once. The central one is to determine the nature of the initial unattained states, and, though, the matter again appears to be controversial, I know of no serious alternatives to the thesis that these are substantial measure computational states, whether we have in mind insect navigation or what you gonna doing right now. Again that’s held to be controversial, since there’re no alternative ideas, I don’t understand why. It’s held to be controversial for humans, it’s not held to be controversial for, let’s say, insect navigation, but the question is about the same. Investigation of the brain in these terms sometimes called psychological and it’s contrasted with investigation in terms of cells or chemical processes, electrical activity and so on, that’s called physiological. These are again terms of convenience … many sharp boundaries, chemistry and physics were distinguished in pretty much similar way not very long ago. So, the formulas involving complex molecules that we now study at school, these were pretty recently considered to be … merely classificatory symbols that summarize the observed course of reaction, the ultimate nature of the molecular groupings was held to be unsolvable and the actual arrangements of atoms within a molecule even means anything, was never to be read into the formulas, according to … history of chemistry. Kekulé, whose structural chemistry paved the way to eventual unification of chemistry and physics, he doubted that absolute constitution of organic molecules could ever be given, his own models, his analysis of valency and so on … to have only instrumental interpretation as calculating devices. The, actually, large part of physics is understood in the same way by prominent scientists, including the molecular theory of gases, even bores model of the atom, only a few years before physics and chemistry were united in … chemical bond, America’s first Nobel Prize winning chemist dismissed talk about the real nature of chemical bonds as in his terms metaphysical trouble, this was nothing more that a very crude method of representing certain known facts about chemical reactions, a mode of representation only, just a calculating device.

Korchagina Anna, TPL – 10.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1018