Several people made very interesting observations about my offhand characterization of the implications of Noam Chomsky's work on language. I know from nothing about this subject and if I misunderstood Chomsky, it is on me, not on him. But if I got him correctly and you simply disagree with him, do not look to me to defend his views. I would not know how to begin. As a lifelong anarchist, I am simply slavishly appealing to his authority. I figure I could do worse.
You can certainly do worse!
ReplyDeleteAs a professional linguist/philosopher/cognitive scientist myself, and one who went to a pretty Chomskyan department to carry out their graduate study, I can perhaps provide some context.
The claim that the language faculty arose through a single mutation in the human species, as opposed to a gradual process, is very controversial indeed and not widely accepted. But there is no consensus on how language evolved in our species anyway and this is unlikely to change any time soon (and by the way, there seems to be little reason to consider different populations of homo sapiens when it comes to Chomsky's single mutation hypothesis, given what we know about the genetic and cognitive make-up of our species).
The claim that all languages are underlain by the same sort of principles and rules (Universal Grammar, the initial state of the language faculty, and not quite the same thing as what used to be called deep structure) is also contested but has received far more support than the previous claim. In fact, I would say that it is the most-widely accepted view in the field. It is important to stress, though, that this is a claim about the initial state - that is, from birth - of the language faculty. The mature, adult state of an individual's language faculty varies from person to person, even within nominally the same language, but even in this case what is universal is far more important than the differences, which are not as dramatic as sometimes claimed to be (or assumed to be, in fact).
What shouldn't be controversial at all is the claim that natural language is a property of our species only. Other animal species certainly make use of communication systems and vocalisations, but these are very different in kind to human speech (and I should add that 'speech' is not the same thing as 'language', or the language faculty, which is what linguists study).
The interesting bit, and I think this is the point that properly connects to the discussion of the last few entries on this blog, is whether the presence of language in our species signals higher-level cognitive skills (categorisation, reasoning, the understanding of ironic discourse a previous entry here discussed, etc.), and if so, to what extent. I think most people in CogSci would agree that language is a central feature of human cognition - an instrument of thought, as Chomsky puts it sometimes - even though much of the thought we carry out in a daily basis doesn't necessarily have to be conducted in language and Chomsky himself allows for non-linguistic thinking processes - perhaps in a so-called language-of-thought of the kind Jerry Fodor argued for, a view I have defended in various publications myself. And to repeat myself, the key is to work out what sort of reasoning/cognitive skills would have been realised at specific times in history given local conditions/pressures. Makes sense?
The general scientific consensus is that Neanderthals were a separate species from homo sapiens, despite the evidence that they interbred.\
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-neanderthals-same-species-as-us.html
If Chomsky is correct that the ability to speak is due to a mutation which is unique to homo sapiens, then Neanderthals as a separate species would not share that mutation and therefore not have the ability to speak and develop language.
However, there is evidence to indicate that Neanderthals did have the capacity to speak.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/neanderthals-could-talk-like-humans-study-suggests/
In fact, given that they interbred, this would make sense. (Genetic analyses indicate that many currently living homo sapiens have varying traces of Neanderthal DNA.)