Ekaterina Zemlyanuchina

1.12.21 – 1.20.00

Professor Chomsky has agreed to take a couple of questions that were submitted by the audience. Though these questions were submitted at the beginning of the lecture they may not have a part of what was covered today, it might be a sneak preview of tomorrow. Do you still believe that the human language faculty evolved all at once in a sudden evolutionary leap; does this conflict with the general finding that evolution is gradual?

This idea sometimes I call the monster-mutation was invented as far as I’m aware by Elizabeth Bates, and has been repeated by many other people, it’s been attributed to me for some reasons and …why . I’ve never said a word about it and have no idea whether it’s true, nor anyone know anything about these topics in general; why it was invented, why it was attributed to me, you can try to figure out. The fact that matter is no one knows anything about these things, even for much simpler questions. For example, one well-known fact about biological organisms is that all … bacteria: they all seem to have essentially the same body right, the same body forms, and it’s now a kind of understood how that works certainly regulatory genes, mastered genes have been discovered that create the forms and it is run through the whole organic world of animals. Well, very recent work … just few weeks ago, show laboratory experimental work that shows how this might have happened in one monster mutation. Well ok, maybe, maybe not. This recent work about the evolution of the human brain in Article and Science a couple of weeks ago suggesting in fact that one small mutation took place which certainly lead to explosion of brain cells. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. You say this matters, I just repeat what is in the technical literature. But why this conception was attributed to me is a total mystery as far as I know.

I hope that it is not the same … ‘Do you still question’ again. Do you still view language as a self-contained module that is independent from other cognitive systems? Wouldn’t it be simple to assume that language ability is granted/grounded in the same cognitive mechanisms as other forms of human condition?

I take for granded, that the human … whether the visual system is distinct from other systems of the body, of course it isn’t; or say the immune system - of course it is not distinct from the rest of the body, like you can’t cut the immune system out and leave the rest of the body. It’s impossible. Every subsystem of the body, which is isolated for a particular inquiry is isolated because it has a kind of an integrated character and you can think … . It doesn’t mean that it’s a little box, that you couldn’t pull out. So, the immune system is in every cell, but it’s still the system. And presumably the same is about language faculty, I mean it brings together many different components, which come from all over the place, as for example, the language faculty makes essential use of the delicate architecture of the bones in the middle ear, ok, terrific for wonderfully designed for understanding language, of course, they evolved for reasons … nothing to do with language, they evolved from the fact that the scrolls of early mammals about a 60million years ago were getting bigger and … bigger bone in a reptilian joe started migrate for mechanical reasons apparently …middle ear … great for language.

And the same is true, it could/ I mean the computational principles, that are … of language. And we might discover that those are the same computational principles that are used by insects for navigation. If we did that the fascinating discovery would mean that it’s one of the things that was recruited perform the language faculty. The idea, that the language faculty is isolated from other card of cognitive systems just makes no sense at all, it can’t be. I mean, we use the language faculty to express our thoughts, to think to ourselves, to communicate, to have communicated attitudes to perceive the world. Of course, it’s integrated with the entire collection of cognitive faculties and other faculties. Again, the interesting question that should be asked about that question is why it says: do I still believe. Nobody could possibly believe this. There is a huge mythology about these things, which has been developed, it’s kind of characteristic of studies of human higher mental faculties. And their persued at a level of irrationality …. If the sciences, the hard sciences had effects centuries ago, the hard sciences were dealt in the similar way, but we should be able to escape from.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 812