Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind Revisted

Chomsky is lecturing on the history of philosophy of mind and sees "emergence" (that the brain should be taken as a whole) as a centuries old problem no one remembers being unanswerable.

https://youtu.be/yJp1-Od67-U?list=LLml9jcp4pNd3vTbJu2_yb8A

Language is a component of biology more or less on a par with vision or insect navigation. The best theories devised attribute computational capacities (rule following).

Rigidity Principle: if possible and other rules permit: interpret image motions as projections of rigid motion in three dimensions. Later work shows insight into mental computations.

Decision to study language as part of the world should be uncontroversial.

Assumption this is legitimate enterprise was rejected 50 years ago by all contemporary philosophy of language and mind is based on a rejection also computer model of mind.

Data is extracted from the mind and interpreted as linguistic experience. (no1 knows how its done.)

Expectations language is like everything else: determined from genetical state. Innateness hypothesis.

Biolinguistic approach takes mental faculties to be states of the organism.

Computational theories of cognitive capacities.

Biolinguistic approach wants to discover the relationship between psychological states and the world as described in other terms. How computational states are related to neurophysiological states. Find out how these states relate to the organism external world. Intentionality.

Investigation of the brain in these terms is sometimes called psychological contrasted with cells (physiological)

Minds are emergent properties of brains. Produced by principles that control lower level events. Principles that we don’t yet understand. Optimistic about overcoming gap between psychological and physiological accounts. “Researchers speak confidently about the solution to the brain-mind problem.”

Russell wrote that chemical laws cannot yet be reduced to physical laws. (In physics and chemistry it never took place…unification of unchanged chemistry with a radically revised physics.) State of understanding and achievement was far beyond anything that can be claimed for the brain and cognitive sciences today.

Priestly: Properties of mind arise from the organization of the organism itself. Properties “Mental” are results of the organic organization of the brain just as matter is possessed of powers of attraction and repulsion contrary to the founding principles of modern scientific revolution.

Hume: thought = a little agitation of the brain.

Brain must be considered a special organ designed to produce thought.

Darwin asked why thought (as a secretion of the brain) should be considered more wonderful than gravity (a property of matter).

Developed into a philosophy of “thinking matter.” God might have chosen to add a super-property to matter called thinking. (Locke).

Emergence is as unresolved as two centuries ago. (unaware of it being a revival. Unaware of it being an unavoidable truism.)

Newton destroyed physicalist conceptualist version of the universe.

Folk science: one conclusion of contemporary science: organisms develop a particular mode of constructing experience given the date of sense. No great chain of being. Insects of richer experience in certain ways of using it for action than humans do.

Lack of a positive determinite account of non-mental part of the world. Talk of “hard” part of mind-body problem is misleading at best. It’s posed in terms of questions that can’t even been given wrong answers. Given question: “what is it like to be me? (bat)” no bad answers, no good answers.

Formal semantic inquiries often take meaning of a question as the set of propositions that are answers to it. If that is at least a condition on meaning then it follows that if there are no sensible answers the question has no meaning.

Newton, Hume, Locke: motion has effects which we can in no way conceive of motion to produce. Hume’s puzzlement. William Petty: described springing or elastic motion as the hard rock in science. Obscurity was great. Voltaire (skeptical Newtonian): felt that impenetrable mysteries of motion proved god gave motion to matter. Hume said mysteries of nature will remain beyond our cognitive reach.

Back to emergence: development of an account of the non-mental world that can be unified.

One vision specialist (optimistic) how the brain combines responses of specialized cells to indicate a continuous vertical line (or how a line is distinguished from others) is a mystery that neurology has not yet solved or from others or from surroundings. “Neuroscience of higher cognitive processes is only beginning.” Beginning from a higher plane than Descartes but its still beginning. Fundamental properties are beyond even dreams of resolution.

Valuable information: how an organism plans, how a cockroach walks, or how someone reaches for a glass of water.

No one raises question of why someone executes one plan instead of another.

Will is beyond serious empirical inquiry. Newton: seeking “subtle spirit that lies hidden in all bodies and that might without absurdity account for their properties of attraction and repulsion, the nature and effects of light, sensation, the way members of animal bodies move at the command of the will.” These are comparable mysteries for Newton.

If we restrict ourselves to mechanisms. Randy Galisstel: we clearly don’t know how the nervous system computes or even the foundations of our ability to compute even for small set of arithmetic and logical operation that are fundamental to any operation.

Hans Lucas Teuber: review of perception and neuro-physiology: “it may seem strange to begin with the claim that there is no adequate definition of perception and to end with the admission that we lack a neuro-physiological theory.” This was the most that could be said. He outlined a standard way to move towards addressing the problem of unification. His purpose in reviewing the phenomena was because this may suggest directions in which the neural bases of perception should proceed. (By clairifying assumptions these neural bases must satisfy.) This is a classic approach. Restriction of science to more modest goals (intelligibility of theories rather than the world.)

Another consequence of Newton’s demolition of hopes of Galilean revolution (for a mechanical conception of the world). Recognition that scientific inquiry will have to be local in its expectations. Overarching unification may take place over the long term in ways that can’t be anticipated.

Joseph Black set tone: chemical affinity be received as a first principle which we cannot explain any more than Newton could explain gravitation. Let us defer accounting for it until we have established a body of doctrine as Newton has established concerning gravitation. Chemistry proceeded this way separating itself from physics. Physics followed Newton

Newton: nature will be comfortable to herself and very simple. Observing a few general principles of attraction and repulsion that relate the elementary particles of which all matter is constituted. The way different buildings can be constructed of the same bricks.

The goal was to understand, quantify, reduce the whole of nature to simple laws.

Thoroughly Newtonian task of reducing everything mathematically.

By end of 1800s fields of interest of chemists and physics became distinct. Chemistry concerned with a world consisting of 90-odd material elements with many and varied physical properties while physicists handled a more nebulous mathematical world of energy and waves.

Chemists developed a rich body of doctrine achieving chemistry’s triumphs in isolation from newly emerging science of physics. Isolation ended only recently in a completely unanticipated way not by reduction but by unifying a radically revised physics with the bodies of doctrine chemistry accumulated.

We can’t know if this is a task of brain and mind that we need to undergo.

Parallels between debates concerning realities of chemistry up to unification and current debates in philosophy of mind about reality of the constructions of psychological approaches.

Chemistry-Physics debate was totally pointless based on serious misunderstanding.

We simply have no grasp of reality other than what our best explanatory theories can provide.

If they happen to be computational, ok. That’s reality.

Although unknown, shift of perspective brought about by cognitive revolution recapitulated first cognitive revolution of 17th century. Focus on vision and language, adopting bio linguistic approach.

Shifting from phenomena to inner mechanisms. Shift still leaves us a long way from problems of action.

Humbolt’s problem: infinite use of finite means. Couldn’t be posed until the middle of 20th century. Important to be aware that despite progress in understanding means of infinite use, the question of how they are used is scarcely address, it was that question that was the fundamental one for Descartes and Humbolt. Not addressed for insects or humans.

Limited genetic differences between use and apes suggest we might’ve all descended from a small breeding group maybe 100,000 years ago. Humans are basically identical from an outside biologist.

Biolinguistic approach is called “norm these days in neuroscience. The modular view of learning, that is the conclusion that in all animals learning is based on specialized mechanisms, instincts to learn in specific ways, organs within the brain perform specific kinds of computation in accordance with specific design. Apart from extremely hostile environments the organs change state under the triggering of external factors more or less reflexively in accordance with internal design.” That’s the process of learning although growth might be a better term.

Language fits that pattern. Each attainable state is a computational system that determines, generates infinitely many expressions. Each is a store of sound and meaning accessed by performance system. Process of I language result from interplay of several factors, one internal experience which selects among the options permitted by initial state. Second is intital state itself product of evolution. Third is general properties of organic systems incorporating efficient computation and determining the faculty of language.

Darci Thompson and Alan Turing: one example is Christopher Cherniak: biologist and M.D. minimization of wire length should produce the best of all possible brains. Trying to explain neural anatomy of nematodes (one of simplist and best studied organisms). Fact that the brain is as far forward as possible in the body axis. Show that’s a property of efficient computation. You can trace back to Galileo intuition that nature is perfect: task of scientist to discover in what sense this is true.

However obscure the intuition is “nature’s drive to the beautiful” has been a guiding theme of modern science since its modern origins in Galileo. Hard to say what it is but that it’s a guiding intuition is not in doubt.

Biologists think differently about the objects of their inquiry. Very commonly they adopt Jacob’s idea of tinkerer, does the best it can with the materials at hand, often a rotten job, as human intelligence seems to be keen on demonstrating about itself.

Gabriel Dover: Biology is a strange and messy business and perfection is the last word one could use to describe how organisms work, particularly for anything produced by natural selection though only partly and to an extend that can’t be quantified.

We don’t know which intuition is more accurate, Jacob or Galileo. We will not known until we know the answer.

Dover: We are nowhere near revealing our deepest ignorance in the biological world around us. For those who seek to give scientific respectability to complex behavioral phenomena in humans that we cannot begin to investigate seriously is a sign of intellectual laziness at best and shameless ignorance at worst when confronting issues of massive complexity which far exceed the reach of contemporary science.

Long term goal of investigating third factor: role of general properties of organisms determining properties of language and states it can attain: internal languages was formulated in early days or bio linguistic turn but was considered unfeasible. Shifted to experience and initial state. Descriptive and Explanatory Adequacy.

Earliest attempt to replace structuralist accounts of language by generative rule systems revealed quickly little was known about sound, meaning, and structure of language. Rather in the days when people assumed that bodies fall to their natural place.

One of hardest steps in development of science is the first one: to be puzzled at what’s considered normal.

You can attain an I language without much experience but the initial state is crucial because we know kids can have a language they share with others.

40s years of research have been driven by the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The tension between search for true theories of I languages (the attained state) and a true theory of the invariant initial state. The initial state has been called universal grammar. The search for descriptive adequacy (true theory of Hungarian) is a complex intricate theories of particular constructions in particular language. Explanatory adequacy seeks to find the common ground from which existing languages and all possible others arise given the data that are structured as experience by operations of the initial states.

First proposals in 50s: initial state provides a format for rule systems and their organization and a procedure for selecting one instantiation of one format over the other in terms of its success in capturing authentic linguistics generalizations.

Rules themselves are adaptations of informal traditional notions which had proven utterly inadequate when subjected to close examination. Rules for forming relative clauses in hungarian or passives in Japanese. General approach offered a kind of solution to core problem of the study of language. Logical problem of language acquisition: how does the initial state map constructed experience to the final state.

Seek valid general principles that can be abstracted from particular grammars and attributed to universal grammar leaving a residue that might be more manageable.

Possible resolution was reach 20 years ago: crystallization of the picture of language: marked a sharp break from a long and rich tradition: principles and parameters: dispenses entirely with the core notions of traditional grammar (notions like grammatical construction or grammatical rule).

From this point of view categories like relative clause or passive construction are real enough but only as taxonomic artifacts. i.e. “aquatic organisms” (eel, dolphin, some bacteria, trout) is a category but not a biological category. The phenomenal properties of these artifacts result from the interactions of invariant principles of the initial states with parameters (finite number) fixed in one or another way.

There are only finitely many possible human languages apart from idiosyncrasies and choice of lexical items (even these sharply constrained).

That means the problem of unfeasible search is eliminated. (a major conclusion). The conception has been applied to different languages of every known kind. Lead to many new questions never before thought of. It’s an approach, not a theory. Within the approach there are many theories.

P&P: Mark Baker atoms of language. Mohawk and English: very different but same.

Progress to goals of descriptive and explanatory adequacy has been great.