Seeking advice: in a general piece about Language, should this speculative explanation as to why the Universal Grammar Hypothesis has had such legs stay or be cut?
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It's a fun question to think about. And I like the argument. Although maybe a little one-sided? I suspect there is also a bias in the opposite more empiricist direction, and that some of the historical (or inter-subfield) dynamics are swings back and forward between these poles.
I then see the work cited at the end (including your own) as being an attempt to find the middle ground. My view of this is quite influenced by William James's pragmatism, and his framing of the history of philosophy as having this dynamic of intellectual personalities — neats vs scruffies
Definitely cut. If there is such a bias towards essentialism, why has the blank slate view of the human mind been so persistent in contexts other than language.
It's a bit reminiscent of the `empiricism is innate' explanation for why people think everything is best explained by generalizations over input data! I never found that particularly convincing as an argument (even though it came from my own `camp'). I'd say cut, unless you're aiming for polemic :)
Let me use my relative ignorance here as a strength & say I haven’t thought abt challenging UG for assuming it is unchanged along time (evo?). I think it’s a point worth having (perhaps cut much of the rest?).
I imagine how Chomskyans might answer it, but still they have more to defend here than cxn
intrigued. I'm not sure how UG vs UBG are differentiated by this unless there's observable evidence for a change in the human capacity for language which there doesn't seem to be (indeed, Berwick and Chomsky wrote a whole book about why UG is in a better position, though it was a bit tendentious!)
Yes nothing is observable currently (but who knows what neuroscience will bring). In principle, I think it’s harder to explain how a mutation to (classical) UG may happen & survive (how will comm work?) than that of grammars committing to less innateness.
Yeah, I think that’s maybe true. My own view is that UG is a particular architecture for connecting pre-existing capacities. Though I’ve never managed to make anything so austere actually work in my linguistic analyses of phenomena!
true, & neuroscience isn't going to help here: even if some sort of syntax module were detected (it hasn't been), that would not imply syntax was 'innate'
There's a visual word-form area of the brain (VWFA), active while reading, but no one thinks there's a universal or innate written language
Just to make clear: I agree neuroscience is not there yet, and that activation doesn’t mean innateness (some claim it doesn’t even mean functionality localization). But I don’t think it’s impossible in principle for neuroscience to inform us about it (one day far ahead)
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I imagine how Chomskyans might answer it, but still they have more to defend here than cxn
There's a visual word-form area of the brain (VWFA), active while reading, but no one thinks there's a universal or innate written language