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T h e G R E E N Y w o r l d D o m i n a t i o n T a s k F o r c e ,
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"Language Acquisition: Philosophical Variations on a Theme by Steven Pinker"
by Bob the Master of the World
----- GwD: The American Dream with a Twist -- of Lime ***** Issue #92 -----
----- release date: 01-03-01 ***** ISSN 1523-1585 -----
I. Introduction
Language acquisition, though seemingly a purely scientific phenomenon,
profoundly affects the way in which philosophers understand what sort of thing
language is and through what intellectual paradigm it might best be
comprehended. Does language, in both its acquisition and subsequent usage,
manifest some basic human instinct, such that human beings obtain it and employ
it before or without considering its pragmatic utility in reacting to their
environment? Or is language learned in response to some overwhelming
communicative need imposed on humanity by the circumstances in which they find
themselves, and, while perhaps augmenting the fundamental human constitution, is
not an "essential" ability, in the nebulous, ontological sense of the word, and
does not arise in the absence of external stimuli? Answers to these questions
could shed light on how linguistic rules arise, whether these rules constitute
language or should be thought of merely as ad hoc descriptions of an essential
unknowable natural process, and whether possessing language is an incidental or
essential feature of human beings, to name but a few queries of philosophical
import.
Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, has recently written an article entitled "Language Acquisition,"
soon to be published as a chapter in An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Second
Edition, Volume One (1) and presenting a well-detailed overview of, and
commentary on, the latest research that either directly contributes to the issue
of language acquisition or addresses concerns posed at the periphery of language
acquisition. Pinker attempts two separate tasks in this article: first, he
seeks to summarize the available scientific knowledge pertaining to language
acquisition; secondly, and perhaps more importantly, he then draws conclusions
from the established empirical facts illuminated by the first task.
Furthermore, in setting out the empirical data gleaned by cognitive science, he
also presents the paradigm through which he interprets the data, which
consequently has a bearing on the content and form of his subsequent inferences.
I do not seek to challenge the actual data presented by Pinker nor even his
commentary on that data; instead, I wish to elucidate the existence of possible
alternative interpretive paradigms as well as examine the validity of the
implications that Pinker constructs. In effect, as the title suggests, I desire
to simply bring out concerns and problems of philosophical interest that lie
dormant in Pinker's analysis, veiled under the well-meaning shroud of scientific
rhetoric. I will not attempt herein to investigate the entirety of "Language
Acquisition," given the antecedently constrained scope of this assignment and
the relative girth of that chapter, nor shall I dare to introduce or recommend a
rival account of the body of knowledge that constitutes language acquisition,
since I find Pinker's work, despite its need for philosophical emendation,
rather sound, well-considered, and reasonably well-supported by the empirical
observations of cognitive science. Instead, I will examine what I consider to
be the sections of greatest philosophical interest and those that incidentally
come closest to the paper topic on language acquisition that had been given to
the class, namely specific subsections of the sections entitled "The Biology of
Language Acquisition" and "Explaining Language Acquisition."
II. The Biology of Language Acquisition: Evolution of Language (2)
Pinker begins his discussion of language acquisition by examining the
adaptation of the human vocal tract to the "demands of speech" as a function of
evolutionary progress. Pinker relies on the evolutionary paradigm to initiate
his argument for an account of language that underscores its innate position in
the constitution of a human being. Yet, evolution can merely demonstrate a
correlation between a feature of humanity and its contribution to human
survival; it fails, at a purely scientific level, to manifest a causal
connection between some human need and the acquisition of a trait to satisfy
that need. The aforementioned trait might arise because of some other, less
obvious, evolutionary interest, or it might simply have been acquired for the
purposes of some future need rather than an existing one. Furthermore, one may
note that the structure of the human vocal tract and its consequent ability to
produce linguistic utterances may be entirely the product of evolutionary coin-
cidence; perhaps the peculiar shape of human vocal tracts has some other natural
function, of which language is merely important but subsidiary and unforeseen
consequence.
Pinker appears to assume that the design of the human vocal tract is optimal
for the use of spoken language, and this assumption is critical to his
establishment of the evolutionary link between the two. However, an alternative
design of the human vocal tract might facilitate speech to an even greater
degree; merely because the scientific community has not witnessed a more
efficient tract design does not mean that a more efficient one does not exist,
one that might even make a human being's relatively advanced tract construction
seem primitive and inefficient.
Pinker concludes by observing that "the evolutionary selective advantages
for language must have been very large to outweigh such a disadvantage [the
"sacrifice of efficiency for breathing, swallowing, and chewing"]." (3) In this
claim, Pinker assumes that the ability to produce audible sounds necessitated a
"sacrifice of efficiency," when in fact the efficient functioning of both
abilities might be perfectly compatible; the current human vocal tract design
may be deficient for this very reason, insofar as it hampers those other
essential human functions.
Furthermore, Pinker suggests that language caused what he perceives to be
the human vocal tract's manifest inefficiencies. Pinker seems to imply that the
need for language altered the vocal tract design through evolution instead of
the design itself antecedently allowing the production of aural utterances; in
essence, Pinker chooses one possible line of causation, from language to
biology, instead of an equally plausible and possible one, from biology to
language. Pinker does not provide evidence to support his interpretation over
the rival account nor does there appear to be a justifiable way to arbitrate
between the conflicting views. Since human beings already possess language and
an anatomy that provides for the production of language, how can we come to know
which one caused the other, if any causal connection between the two actually
exists, an empirical fact that currently lacks conclusive confirmation?
Pinker continues by discussing recent efforts to locate language in our
closest biological relatives, the primates. He maintains that, in this effort,
one must keep in mind that "the scientific question is whether the chimps'
abilities are homologous to human language." (4) Why, one might ask, should
this question be the relevant one? Pinker denies that an analogous system to
our linguistic system, meaning one that possesses a similar function, should be
permitted to be subsumed under the category of language. Why should analogy be
rejected as a criterion for categorization? Airplanes are radically different
from automobiles, in the same sort of way that the wings of bats are different
from the "wings" of gliding rodents (Pinker denies that the latter are truly
wings), since, in both examples, the entities in question reflect "a different
evolutionary history." (5) However, do we not take both airplanes and
automobiles to satisfy the basic definition of a vehicle, despite their overt
dissimilarities? The definition provided for "vehicle" by The Random House
Dictionary of the English Language yields the following: "any means in or by
which someone travels or something is carried or conveyed." By this definition,
even the legs of animals would count as vehicles, though they evince no apparent
homology whatsoever with automobiles. Analogy in function in the case of
vehicles seems to provide for equal satisfaction of the definition; why might
the case not be the same for language, however different the methods of
communication of chimps and human beings might appear to be? Also, it seems
relevant to remark that the speech of chimps and human beings appears to differ
only as a matter of degree and not of kind, the speech of chimps being
noticeably less complex than the speech of human beings but retaining the atomic
form of short sounds.
Furthermore, Pinker appears to arbitrarily appoint one thing as the
paradigmatic satisfier of a definition to the exclusion of another and by which
that other should be compared against for satisfaction; he takes the
communication of humans to be this ultimate satisfier and consequently rejects
that which is not homologous to human communication. Why might not the
rudimentary communication of animals be taken as the "default" empirical
satisfaction of the term "language"? By what right or through what means does
human communication acquire this exalted status? Pinker provides no
justification for judging what is or is not a language against the standard of
human communication. Thus, not only does he promote homology as the criterion
for categorization to the exclusion of the more common-sense criterion of
analogy, he further takes it as given that, for anything to count as a language,
it must be in agreement, not merely analogously but also and necessarily
homologously, with the communication peculiar to human beings.
Pinker observes a common scientific belief that human beings developed
language out of evolutionary need yet assumes that chimps are incapable of
producing a linguistic system as complex as that of human beings. Perhaps
chimps and other primates never needed, as a matter of evolution, to develop
anything beyond their rudimentary system of communication. The current
simplicity of the speech of chimps does not by itself preclude their future
ability to advance their system beyond this primitive state. Given an
evolutionary impetus, chimps and other primates might develop more sophisticated
speech but perhaps not otherwise. This scenario would account for the
documented failure of scientists' efforts to recreate human speech in chimps.
Furthermore, why should we assume that our language represents the only kind of
language? Perhaps chimps cannot learn human language because that language was
designed precisely for human beings and not chimps; scientists have attempted to
make chimps speak a human language rather than a chimp language and consequently
should not be surprised by their failure. This attempt seems analogous in its
futility to the project of getting a baby duck to swim by attaching fins to it.
Chimps may not be able to learn our language, but such inability does not imply
that they might not be able to learn another language of some sort, a language
particularly suited to their unique constitution.
III. Explaining Language Acquisition: Learnability Theory
In this section, Pinker proffers a method for understanding language
acquisition through an application of the learnability theory, a branch of
theoretical computer science that provides for the circumstances in which and by
which learning may be said to have successfully occurred. Pinker realizes that
learning a language possesses a difficulty common to all "'induction problems',
[in that] there are an infinite number of hypotheses consistent with any finite
sample of environmental information." (6) Pinker believes that it is "the role
of negative evidence" (7) that reduces the "infinite number" of possible
grammatical sentences into a finite set that becomes a communal language.
Pinker takes negative evidence to occur when "human children...[are] corrected
every time they speak ungrammatically" (8); the problem arises because of the
fact that children are not typically corrected on every single occasion of
ungrammatical utterance. Pinker asserts, correctly, it seems, that this
situation never obtains, and, consequently, some other explanation is necessary
to account for the development of the speech of children into the standardized
speech of adult members of a linguistic community, one that focuses on some sort
of internal grammatical mechanism.
Yet, it seems that negative evidence might exist in a different form and
consequently obviate the scientific need to look inward for an explanation of
proper language development in children. Children learn language not only
through direct communication but also, and primarily, through observing the
linguistic interactions between adults. Given their possible and even frequent
possession of a superset of the language used in their community, children might
perceive that the superfluous elements of their language are not used, and hence
not endorsed, by the adults whose speech patterns they perceive. In such a way,
after repeated exposure to the conversations of adults and the absence of the
child's linguistic excesses in those conversations, the child might comprehend
that those extra utterances of his contrivance are not accepted in the
mainstream language and gradually eliminate them from his speech, wishing to
mimic his linguistic exemplars as much as possible in the aim of correct speech.
This account, which seems plausible on the face of it, would only require the
standard mechanism by which children learn that a dog is not a cat, by
repeatedly perceiving that only certain entities are called "dogs" while certain
dissimilar entities are called "cats" and consequently learning the correct
application of those words. Pinker appears to be too eager to discount the
model of language acquisition as simply a subset of general learning in favor of
postulating a separate internal mechanism specifically designed for language
acquisition. Why does he choose this route, which appears at first glance to be
the more difficult path, given the enormous difficulties associated in defending
the existence of innate mental constructs? Pinker's acceptance of an internal
linguistic mechanism might have the unfortunate consequence of allowing him to
appeal to innate structures as first options for solutions to any kind of mental
phenomenon, such answers being easier to construct than through the often
difficult task of locating the source of whatever phenomenon is in question in
the external world; this approach becomes problematic insofar as explanations
that center in the working of inner processes seem more difficult to confirm or
disprove than empirical explanations and therefore are of lesser scientific
value, despite the relative ease with which they might be produced. Such a
perspective may yield a certain kind of scientific complacency in which
scientists immediately turn to innate mechanisms as soon as any kind of
difficulty is encountered in finding an external, empirical solution. I do not
wish to assert herein that Pinker is wrong; in fact, he continues throughout the
rest of "Language Acquisition" to demonstrate the plausibility and probability
of his account. I do wish to contend, however, that this perspective on
language acquisition may be a slippery slope in which scientific investigation
yields to scientific speculation and consequently loses a great deal of its
potential for and utility in the advancement of knowledge.
IV. Conclusion
I may be criticized for not covering, in the commentary above, the breadth
of Pinker's article, nor even its essential contentions. However, I do not
believe such criticism is just, for I consider myself justified in examining
those issues that I feel require philosophical elaboration and on which I had
something meaningful to say. A large portion of "Language Acquisition" is
concerned merely with presenting the accumulated empirical data for a given
hypothesis, and with such I could do little in the way of philosophical
commentary. I have sought herein only the modest goal of illuminating some of
Pinker's assumptions as well as challenging some of these assumptions for their
lack of adequate justification in the hopes of encouraging further rumination on
his work.
-----
-=[Footnotes]=-
1. Edited by L. R. Gleitman, M. Liberman, and D. N. Osherson and soon to be
published by the MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I discovered
Pinker's article at the following URL:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/pinker.langacq.html
2. For convenience, the section headings of this essay will correspond to the
sections of "Language Acquisition" on which they comment.
3. Pinker, 3.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, 9.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
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