| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| tericee |
Posted - 01/07/2003 : 9:45:32 PM
I just noticed this article on the MIT website:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/005/focus/The_human_factor%2B.shtml
Here's a snippet:
There are few goals that will prove more enticing to researchers in the coming years than working out whether language truly is both innate in and unique to humans: Proving Chomsky's ideas of the 1960s have become a modern linguistic holy grail... Lieberman (a linguist at Brown University) believes the quest to prove a uniquely human language mechanism will fail. But what if it succeeds? The true import may be more emotional than scientific. For some it will mean that our hubris is justified, that we humans are as special as we think we are. But for others, it will mean something quite different: we'll never have a sophisticated conversation with an animal, and are therefore more alone in our own minds than we think.
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| 6 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| victorwootenfan |
Posted - 01/10/2003 : 3:47:37 PM
I gave my presentation today on anti-war on iraq. it went well, the problem was the teacher asked who was for or against the war. the tally was like 2 against, 9 for it, and 10 don't care's. pretty sad result, but i felt good doing a little part in educating people on the other side of the coin. |
| PJK |
Posted - 01/09/2003 : 3:37:44 PM
Whoa....Thanks, I didn't notice. I don't really pay attention to that, so it was! Yeah, they are neato numbers! hehehe....oh and now that you mention it, I will have to look and see if there is another little guitar there! hehehehe
Guess it only goes to show I write WAY TOO OFTEN !!!!! |
| victorwootenfan |
Posted - 01/09/2003 : 2:59:46 PM
I know! It's the only cool thing about my computer class! I give the presentation tommorrow!! Check it out that was your 1000 post and this is my 800th post. neato numbers! |
| PJK |
Posted - 01/08/2003 : 11:58:59 PM
Great!!! Let us know how it goes! I just love power point....lots of fun! |
| victorwootenfan |
Posted - 01/08/2003 : 10:37:56 PM
I'm doing a power point persentation in computer class on why we shouldn't go to war with Iraq and i'm quoting some things from Noam chomsky. i can't wait to do it this friday! |
| Fluffy |
Posted - 01/07/2003 : 11:39:06 PM
HOW TRUE, HOW TRUE!!
As links have a tendency to disappear, here is the story linked above for all to read:
The human factor
What makes our species unique? A linguist and two animal researchers band together to crack open an old chestnut.
By Christine Kenneally, 1/5/2003
OU'RE AN ANIMAL. You're a land-based mammal, a vertebrate, and a primate. Indeed, there are a thousand ways in which you resemble other animals. There are also a thousand ways in which you differ from them. Over the centuries scientists and natural philosophers have tried to draw lines in the sand between human and beast, only to watch the tide sweep in and wash each of these lines away.
Culture was once thought to be a particularly human trait. But careful observation of apes demonstrated that they have culture, too. Groups of chimps transmit learned behavior across generations; for example, some chimp groups clasp hands while they groom one another, while other groups go hands-free. Just this week, researchers at Duke University announced in the journal Science that some orangutang bands are in the habit of blowing a "raspberry" sound, like a goodnight kiss, before they go to sleep at night, while others retire more quietly.
Before culture, tool use was considered a distinctively human capacity. Again, merely watching other creatures shows that this is not the case. Chimpanzees crack nuts with a hammer and anvil; they also "fish" for ants with sticks. New Caledonian crows build tools from diverse materials like twigs, pieces of wire, and leaves, and each tool is cleverly specialized to its task. OK, they're not building jet engines. But the fact that even non-primates use tools proves that there's nothing distinctively human about the practice.
One of the last refuges of the species exceptionalist is language, and indeed, human language does seem to be unique. By combining some words with others, human beings can describe any object in the world or in our minds. We can harangue, persuade, and seduce without a touch. No other animal's communication system uses complicated syntax and a large set of words; we'd probably be talking to them already if they did. What remains controversial is this: Does our use of language stem from some innate mental capacity that only humans possess-as linguists inspired by MIT's Noam Chomsky tend to believe? Or do we talk the way we do simply because our brains happen to be bigger than those of animals - as scientists who question the innateness of human language suggest?
In November, Chomsky himself addressed this debate when he co-published a paper in Science with Harvard biologists Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch. And when Chomksy speaks, people listen. Ever since he set forth his key thesis that language is a unique and innate property of the human mind in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" in 1965, Chomsky has dominated his field. But if his views on language are bold, his approach to the evolution of language has been rather cautious. To the frustration of admirers and critics alike, he has often sidestepped the heated debate over whether our language capacities are the result of natural selection. This article in Science, "The Faculty of Language: What Is it, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?", is Chomsky's first published paper on language evolution.
In the article, Chomsky endorses the comparative method used by Hauser and Fitch in their research at Harvard, which involves comparing humans and animals to see which elements of the human language systemanimals might also possess. The authors use their results to test various evolutionary arguments about the origins of language. If an animal seems to share an element of the language system with us, a common but now extinct ancestor may also have had that trait. If an accumulation of data shows that no other animal possesses a particular element, it can be inferred that this element is unique to humans.
For years, Chomsky's critics have complained that his theories have enjoyed great influence without being empirically testable. But Hauser and Fitch's studies on animals ranging from tamarin monkeys to swans make the idea of a uniquely human language mechanism testable in a way it hasn't been before. While the interdisciplinary marriage between biology and linguistics began more than 50 years ago, Hauser and Fitch point out, it hasn't yet been "fully consummated." Applying the comparative method to linguistic theory will move the field beyond "unproductive theoretical debate" and more firmly into the empirical domain.
A recent study by Hauser and Fitch, for example, clearly shows that humans aren't the only species with one aspect of language ability: rhythm. Tamarins, tiny primates that roam the forests of the Amazon basin, can tell the difference between languages like Japanese and Dutch based on different rhythmic cues. Of course, tamarins have no real need to distinguish between Japanese and Dutch. If we share a sensitivity to linguistic rhythm with these monkeys, then we probably didn't evolve that sensitivity for the specific purpose of understanding or producing speech, even though that's what we now use it for.
A classic 1980 study on vervet monkeys in Africa suggested that humans aren't the only species to use "words"-or at least, to employ distinct vocalizations that seem to refer to discrete entities. For example, when a vervet uttered one cry, dubbed eagle, its companions would scan the skies. At the cry for leopard, they would scramble to the top of a nearby tree. Since then, researchers also claim to have discovered animal "words" in use among other kinds of monkeys, as well as among meerkats, prairie dogs, dogs, and even chickens. But in their paper, Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch suggest that recent analysis casts doubt on the suggestion that these word-like cries are precursors to human words. It may be that they are truly referential only in the mind of the listener.
Chomksy and his co-authors distinguish the human from the nonhuman by proposing a two-part model of language, consisting of a broad faculty of language (FLB) and a narrow faculty of language (FLN). The broad faculty of language consists of features we share with other animals, such as the motor-sensory system-the collection of nerves, muscles, and organs that enable us to see, hear and touch the world around us and move within it. The physical characteristics we use to create and interpret speech, from our agility of tongue to our ability to interpret stress and pitch, have an analog in at least some other animals.
The broad faculty of language also includes what Hauser and colleagues call the conceptual-intentional system. This system is made up of a creature's knowledge of the world and its capacity to use that knowledge to form intentions and act upon them. Animals are not just unthinking bundles of nerves and muscle. Recent experiments have shown that they understand the world in complicated ways-some birds use the sky and landmarks to help them navigate complex paths; other animals, like monkeys, recognize and can use in varying degrees abstract ideas like color, number, and geometric relationships. Many different species can use mirrors to locate objects, and some, like chimps, bonobos, and orangutans, appear to recognize their own reflections. Chimpanzees even appear to have what psychologists call a theory of mind; that is, they can infer from a person's or a fellow chimp's actions what that creature is thinking-another capacity that has long been held to belong to humans alone.
By contrast, Chomsky and his coauthors argue that the narrow faculty of language is indeed uniquely human, and in its barest form, consists of a single syntactic mechanism, called recursion. Recursion is the process by which any sentence can be made infinitely long by being embedded in another sentence. "Chomsky thinks that Hauser thinks that Fitch thinks that language is unique" may be a long and ultimately pointless kind of sentence, but it can be made longer still by putting "Mary thinks that..." before it. This process of embedding could go on forever.
The fact that human brains can take a set of entities, like words, and create an open-ended pattern with them, like a sentence, makes human language limitless. Most important, this recursive mechanism allows us to express complicated thoughts. We're not just stuck at one level of observation or knowledge; we can see-and say-not just that "He knows," but that "She knows that he knows." Each level of recursion is a step upward in complexity.
Other animals may have a rich understanding of the world but no way to convey it. It was when humans connected their internal understandings with a means to express them-when they began using recursion to communicate -that they gained their unique form of language. "When those things got married," says Hauser, "the world was changed."
Chomsky has been talking about the construction of infinitely long recursive sentences from the beginning. He has also long emphasized a kindred notion that recursion probably goes beyond language and is vital to human cognition more broadly. After all, as the Science article points out, recursion is characteristic of the number system as well as the grammatical system. Just as "Mary thinks that..." could be added to any sentence, "2 x" could be added to any equation, no matter how long it already is.
But where did this capacity come from? If recursion isn't specific to language, then it's possible that our brain's ability to use recursion did not first evolve in order to improve our ability to communicate. Perhaps, Chomsky and his coauthors say, it was initially used for navigating social relationships and was then co-opted by language. Chimpanzees have highly complicated social systems; so they must remember-without the help of language-who among them is dominant and who is not. Prelinguistic humans may have faced similar challenges and solved them with mental recursion. Chomksy, Hauser, and Fitch do not suggest when these abilities may have first come together to create language, but one popular theory suggests it may have been sometime in the last 50,000 to 100,000 years.
Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch further suggest that certain components of the faculty of language may have arisen as spandrels, a term first used by Stephen Jay Gould to mean a byproduct rather than an end product of natural selection. In this scenario, language may be what makes us special, but its creation was no more purposeful or adaptive than a poodle's floppy ears.
Steven Pinker, a psychologist and linguist at MIT and the well-known author of "The Language Instinct," describes himself as basically sympathetic to the idea of a narrow and broad faculty of language, but he finds the notion of language as a spandrel "quite eccentric." "If language was really just a by-product," says Pinker, "one wonders why there would be such an amazingly good fit between it and the rest of what makes us so unique"-for example, the fact that we learn a lot, know a lot, and are a highly social species.
Other researchers are more critical of the Chomskian position in general. Philip Lieberman, a linguist at Brown University who has written many books on language evolution, questions the notion that recursion itself is distinctively human. Lieberman believes that motor control, rather than an abstract mental mechanism, is the foundation of recursion. In his view, walking is fundamentally related to talking. "When we take a step, we execute a sequence of discrete motor commands that are each represented in the brain by a pattern-generator," he says. "We could reiterate a novel sequence of steps if we dance on to eternity-producing novel dance 'sentences' that had the same property as the infinitely long sentences that linguists take to be the mark of creativity of human language."
Rather than being a recent innovation without precedent in animal behavior, basic recursion in this model is an ancient trait common to many animals. After all, neural circuits that regulate walking, manual movements, and speech share common brain structures in humans. These structures are in the subcortical basal ganglia, antique parts of the brain that were present in the first mammal, and go back as far as our reptilian forebears.
Irene Maxine Pepperberg, a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab who has taught a language-like code to an African gray parrot named Alex, also suspects that recursion has more ancient roots. She describes Alex as "a creature whose connections with humans likely go back to the dinosaurs," and points out that he can comprehend and respond to sentences that use recursion. Experiments with dolphins and sea-lions have shown similar abilities.
According to Hauser, these animals have never been shown to produce recursion. But this, says Pepperberg, may just be a matter of time. As any parent knows, understanding language comes before speaking, so whether animals will one day become capable of producing recursive statements remains to be seen.
It's going to be a while before the mounting evidence for and against these theories can be called conclusive. A complete definition of language has been notoriously elusive, and the field of language evolution is not one burdened by empirical evidence. There are no nouns trapped in amber, and ancient recursive sentences don't fossilize. "The fossil record is too limited, too weak," says Hauser. "The only way to get at these answers is comparative."
There are few goals that will prove more enticing to researchers in the coming years than working out whether language truly is both innate in and unique to humans: Proving Chomsky's ideas of the 1960s have become a modern linguistic holy grail. Lieberman believes the quest to prove a uniquely human language mechanism will fail. But what if it succeeds? The true import may be more emotional than scientific. For some it will mean that our hubris is justified, that we humans are as special as we think we are. But for others, it will mean something quite different: we'll never have a sophisticated conversation with an animal, and are therefore more alone in our own minds than we think.
This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 1/5/2003. |
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