These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
Wedding Biology and
Linguistics In the following years, a
number of psychologists, linguists and philosophers corroborated the overall
picture of Chomsky’s vision. The US linguist Ray
Jackendoff thinks that the human brain
contains innate linguistic knowledge and that the same argument can be extended
to all facets of human experience: all experience is constructed by
unconscious, genetically determined principles that operate in the brain. These same conclusions can be applied to
thought itself, i.e. to the task of building concepts. Concepts are constructed
by using some innate, genetically determined, machinery, a sort of
"universal grammar of concepts".
Language is but one aspect of a broader characteristic of the human
brain. According to the German
linguist Eric Lenneberg, language should be studied as an aspect of our biological nature, in
the same manner as anatomy. Chomsky's universal grammar is to be viewed as an underlying biological
framework for the growth of language. Genetic predisposition, growth and
development apply to language faculties just like to any other organ of the
body. Behavior in general is an
integral part of an organism's constitution. Another implication of the
standard theory (and particularly of its transformational component) is on the
structure of the mind. The
transformations can be seen as corresponding to mental processes, performed by
mental modules (as in Jerry Fodor's computational theory of the mind), each independent of the others
and each guided by elementary principles.
The Canadian
psychologist Steven Pinker believes that children are
"wired" to pay attention to certain patterns and to perform some
operations with words. All languages share common features, suggesting that
natural selection favored certain syntactic structures. Pinker identified fifteen modules
inside the human mind, organs that account for instincts that all humans share.
Our genetic program
specifies the existence and growth of the “language organs”, and those organs
include at least an idea of what a language is. These organs are roughly the
same for all humans, just like hands and eyes are roughly the same. This is why
two people can understand each other even if they are using sentences that the
other has never heard before. In biological words, the
universal grammar is the linguistic genotype. Its principles are invariant for
all languages. The values of some parameters can be "selected" by the
environment out of all valid values. This pseudo-Darwinian process is similar
to what happens with other growth processes. The model used by Gerald Edelman both in his study of the immune
system (the viruses select the appropriate antibodies out of those available)
and in his study of the brain (experience selects the useful neural connections
out of those available at birth) is quite similar. A disturbing consequence of
this theory is that our mental organs determine what we are capable of
communicating, just like our arms or legs determine what movements we are
capable of. Just like there are movements that our body cannot possibly make,
there are concepts that our language can never possibly communicate. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Language: Minds Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |