Chomsky says there are universal, physiologically-based manifestations which are universal across humans. That is not really demonstrates but would not be surprising any more than the universality of the human visual system (as well as individual variation).
He claims to have identified some such universals, and that they are relatively high level. THAT is a bold claim, hard both to verify or falsify. But in principle not absurd.
I don’t believe it, but I no longer mock him with the phrase “grammar gland”. There is some insight there.
We can also see this when brain areas are recruited for tasks they were not specifically designed for. For instance visual processing areas can be recruiited for other tasks in the blind.
So while there is specialisation in brain tissue, rather than there being circuits designed at a low level for certain cognitive tasks, it is more that the connectivity and kinds of neurons within an area are tuned to excel at a specific class of problems.
It is softer and more diffuse organ than a "grammar gland". Rather it is a kind of soil within the mind that permits the growth of certain kinds of cognitive structures. Rather than being computer like and existing prior to the input of data, it is merely a capability expressed by the tuning of an overall system.
Chomsky's universals in this view become rather less important. It is merely the statement that brain tissue is tuned in such a way that it encourages, among other things, certain specific kinds of linguistic structure.
It's similar to noticing that the human hand is good stirring soup and then describing it as a soup stirring organ. Yes the hand has properties that allow it to be easily used as a soup stirring organ, but those same properties make it useful for some other things as well.
If only I had one more upvote.
Hasn't there been a lot of recent work showing similar circuits between songbirds and humans that seem to have independently evolved?
Ah, but the above is a universal law, so it's self refuting!
Therefore, universal laws about human language are possible.
Checkmate, skeptics!
Anyone who actually thinks that is not just uncharitable, unproductively pedantic and arguing semantics, they're also wrong.
But OK, to satisfy them, we could say that, yes, universal laws about human language are indeed possible, and there is one such law. Let's label it "The Universal Law About Human Language".
It states
"The only universal law about human language is that there are no universal laws about human language (other than The Universal Law About Human Language)"
It even has recursion! (pun intended) So I guess us skeptics will also have to admit defeat that recursion is in fact universal...
I would happily grant there are more laws about human language. You could come up with all kinds of pointless truisms like "human languages facilitate communication" etc. No reasonable person would find much point in coming up with or debating "laws" like that. (but I'm sure there are plenty of "epistemologists" and "philosophers" who could debate them in minute detail until the end of time)
But Chomsky isn't claiming obvious truisms - he's claiming fairly detailed laws about universal grammar (and fairly detailed means through which they derive)
Critics point out such fairly strong claims need fairly strong, in your face evidence. The onus is on Chomsky to provide it. You don't get to turn around and shift the burden of proof on the critics and start arguing nonsense about how criticism of Chomsky's claims are "self refuting" or what have you.
I don't think its wrong to swing for the fences, after all, the wider the claim the easier it is to disprove.
Language is a human capacity, so in fact there MUST be universal laws that govern it (to be more specific, this is true of human languages; aliens could have entirely different languages, but for any particular alien species, there will have to be some laws of the structure of that species' language).
How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense.
That is not to say that the laws that Chomsky has identified must be correct. He could even be wrong about searching for universal laws at the level of grammar. But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
Why should there be a predetermined law? I have never understood this argument and no, I don't "see that the alternative actually makes no sense". I would like to see some facts that support it, something its followers have failed to delivered for how many decades now?
Still looking for those facts, are we?
All of this ends up with a huge combinatory explosion of possible ways to assign meaning to language, requiring a huge amount of examples and counter examples to actually learn a human language. Just look at the training corpuses of something like GPT-X to see the amount of information that is required to learn elements of a human langauge if you start without any assumptions.
However, we know for a fact that human children get many orders of magnitude less examples of languahe use before learning a language - far too little to actually rule out all other possible structures if they had started with 0 assumptions.
Adding to this, there are certain elements of language structure that are not commonly thought about that happen to work identically in all natural languages that have been studied, sucha s the fact that order of words in a sentence matters, or the way certain words are omitted when constructing embedded sentences (e.g. 'can eagles that fly swim?' always having 'can' refer to 'swim', never 'fly').
Anyway, this discussion is going nowhere. Notify me if there is other evidence apart from "I cannot imagine how the human brain can do that". As other people have written in a similar thread some months ago, this is pseudo-science.
From my own readings, I thought that there is very good evidence adults don't bother to correct children in a lot of cases, and that children ignore the corrections completely anyway. They also don't seem to make the kinds of mistakes that you'd expect.
A great summary of some of some research I've been reading on this is the paper [1]. Also Steven Pinker's early work [2] is fascinating and easy reading.
I would love to bring myself up to date though, if these things have changed lately. Any help appreciated.
[1] Gleitman & Newport paper The Invention of Language by Children - https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~gleitman/papers/Gleitman%20&%20Ne...
[2] Steven Pinker - Why the Child Holded the Baby Rabbits - http://socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/courses/readings/Pinker1995Ch5...
Couldn't agree more. It's barely even that, it's kind of just armchair philosophizing. (which is fun and often actually useful, but not sufficient to make claims about universal laws)
I disagree. There's a strong desire from a western scientific mindset that everything be possible to reduce and turned into laws and models, but that doesn't mean everything works like that. It's putting the cart before the horse.
> How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense.
This is just armchair philosophizing, reminds me a lot of "praxeology". And even if it was true, which I don't believe at all, that doesn't mean that he or anyone else can successfully identify and articulate them.
> But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
I don't see that at all and while I happily admit I'm not a linguist I'm sure there are countless actual linguists who would agree Chomsky is a bit of an emperor with no clothes.
I wouldn't think so either. That's what makes the claim, whether its right or wrong, interesting.
> And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws.
Well it sets a goal post and leads to further questions. Are there exceptions? Why are these features universal and not others? Why is any feature universal? If there are exceptions and they're rare what makes them different from the other cases? Etc.
> "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models"
If your model/abstraction doesn't differ from the ground truth as far as we know (or the proposer doesn't believe it does), what's the difference between that at claiming universality.
I'd claim that reality is just a model we don't yet know is wrong. For a long time we would say newtonian mechanics was universal. Now we say its a model that works at low velocity (relative to c). Was it wrong to claim universality back when we weren't aware of any counter examples?
Chomsky has been known to be wrong for decades. His real talent, if not genius, was pivoting away from linguistics while his reputation was still strong, and managing to preserve it despite his original claim to fame being thoroughly debunked.
You may or may not think Generative Grammar (or his more recent Minimalist program) is correct, but it's certainly not KNOWN to be wrong, and has yielded some insights. Has it changed over the years, of course, that's normal science. New data is found, new explanations are posited.
Further, Chomsky is still heavily and actively involved in linguistics. See his Feb 4th 2021 presentation [2] to eminent linguistics researchers in the field.
I'm not sure where this kind of comment comes from?
[1] http://www.ugr.es/~fmanjon/A%20Review%20of%20B%20%20F%20%20S...