Kseniya Romasheva, 0-7.15

There are no such studies. All studies show what everybody knows in advance that the amount of data available for language acquisition is extremely small. This notion of poverty of stimulus ….what I call the imatness highposes. Everyone believes in poverty of stimulus non for language, but for everything. I mean, what turned the certain embryo once upon a time that turned into my granddaughter, ok. Why didn’t it turn into a warm, let’s say. I mean, is it because of the nutritional input? You know, there are different nutritional input to the cell have turned to the warm …

You know, nobody even takes these questions seriously, they are so idiotic. What is assumed automatically by every scientist is what’s called poverty of the stimulus in the case of language, it’s considered controversially in the case of human mental faculties, but taken for granted without any discussion throughout rest of biology because it’s so obvious. How can it possibly be that the … is based on earlier … late input for environment, because it isn’t. and virtually no, but easy to demonstrate, that the things …child do have a statistical level … on the point of noise in actual discourse, the point is so obvious, nothing to discuss about it, everyone agrees, that there is poverty in the stimulus and the only question is … the initial state, that in fact … and then takes that experience and almost instanteniously and reflexibely

Kseniya Romasheva, 0-7.15

Almost exactly 35 years ago I had the opportunity to give several lectures here, same auditorium, I think, on the topic “Language and mind”. And quite a lot has been learned in the end of intervening years about language and the brain, ? the mind and the sense in which I use the term then the term mind and mental and such terms and those lectures. Pardon? Thank you. I will continue to use them now. Always nice to have a friend in the audience. Using these terms as just descriptive terms for the certain aspects of the world, pretty much on a par with such descriptive terms as a chemical or optical, electrical and so on, these terms used to focus attention on particular aspects of the world that seem to have rather integrated character and to be worth-considering for a special investigation, without any allusions that they cut nature at the joints. In those earlier lectures I took for granted that human language can reasonably be studied as part of the world, specifically as property of human organism, mostly the brain and for convenience I’ll keep to that. Both then and now I’m adapting what Lyle Jenkins in a recent book calls “The Biolinguistic perspective”, that’s the framework within which we approach the language I’m considering developed about fifty years ago. Also for convenience I’ll use the term language to refer to human language, that’s a specific biological system, there’s no meaningful question as to whether the communication system of bees or what might be taught apes or mathematics or music, as to whether it’s not question, as to whether these are languages, or whether airplanes really fly or submarines really swim or whether computers think or translate languages or other comparably meaningless questions, many of them based on misinterpretation of important paper by Alan Touraine.\, over fifty years ago, 1950, which is pointed a large, to my mind, mostly misguided and literature explicitly despite Touring’s very explicit ? not to pursue that direction which has apparently been overlooked. From the Biolinguistic Perspective language is a component of human biology, more or less on a par with mammalian vision or insect navigation and other systems for which the best theories that have been devised attribute computational capacities of some kind what’s informal usage sometimes called rule following, so, for example, contemporary text on vision describes the circle rigidity principle, it’s formulated about fifty years ago, as follows if it’s possible and other rules permit interpret image motions as projections of rigid motions in three dimensions. In this case later work provided substantial inside into the mental computations that seem to be involved and when the visual system follows these rules in informal terminology. Even for simple organisms that’s not slight task, great many issues remain on result in these areas which are quite obscure even for insects. The decision to study language as part of the world in this sense should be in my view uncontroversial but it has nothing on a contrary the assumption ? enterprise was rejected pretty forcefully fifty years ago and continues to be rejected, virtually all of contemporary philosophy of language and mind is based on rejection of the assumption, one of the same ? what’s called the computer model of mind that underlines the good deal of theoretical cognitive science, denied in this case not only for a language but for mental faculties generally, it’s explicitly denied in the technical linguistic literature what are called ? accounts of language and also in a different way denied by the conceptualism that was devised by the same authors and accurately attributed to many linguists including me. It’s also apparently denied by many sociolinguists, it’s incomparable with structure of behavioral approaches to language, it’s, little to my surprise, rejected by current studies of language by leading neuroscientists, most notably Terence Dicken in recent work, which has been favourably received by eminent biologists again little to my surprise. The approach therefore seems to be controversial but I think the appearances are misleading, a more careful look will show, I think, that the basic assumptions are tacitly adapted even by those who strenuously reject them and indeed have to be adapted even for coherence.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1026