Re: built-in rules

["David B. Kronenfeld" kfeld@xxxxxxxx]

In regard to language and hard-wiring.

At 06:26 AM 5/25/2005, David Auerbach wrote:

I have no idea what you mean by "(or ontological)".
 If you go look at the nice popular expositions (like The Atoms of
Language) you'll see that what is "hard-wired" is a language faculty that
specifies underlying, quite abstract rules, of grammar.


OR "what is 'hard-wired'" is a disposition to learn in a certain
manner--say, what some psychologists speak of as "constructivist"--which
learners leaping to apparent regularities, trying them out and attending to
the feedback, and then incorporating those that pan out in an emerging
structure. And relevant here is the fact that we are an intensely social
species--with a strong (apparently biological !) disposition to attend
really carefully to each other and to try an read meaning in each other's
actions, noises, looks, and speech.


The notion that we are born with "hard-wired" grammatical rules--vs., say,
some ways of understanding action coupled with some dispositions about
representing action in thought and communication--is open to
argument. And, maybe "vs." other approaches as well. The approach to
"learning" embodied in many Transformationalist discussions is naive; there
is much more out there than the behaviorism which often has gotten used as
a kind of 'straw man'.


There also exists a problem with what one means by "hard-wired": ranging
from result> all the way to . Until ideas
like "innate" are tied to actual biological mechanisms--and until the
action of those biological mechanisms is understood--attributions of
regularities to hard-wiring have a kind of "deus ex machina" quality that
rings a little specious.


 Local exposure (not "learning" in any interesting sense*) sets switches
determining which of a limited number of languages that brain will
settle on. That's mostly about syntax, settling some very basic issues
that determine whether your speaking Spanish or Chinese.


A limited "number"--or a limited set of types ? There exist examples such
as American Sign Language (ASL: deaf signing in USA) which do push the
envelope a bit--though there certainly do exist real limits on the range of
variability--and suggest that some of the regularities we see in spoken
language represent responses to functional properties of the medium.


There are also some nice experiments showing that the phoneme set is
present pre-verbally in 3-month old kids.
 And, of course, as I said in a earlier email on this, the particular
sound-meaning correlations (berliner,etc.) are arbitrary; it's the rules
that aren't. A language just like English except that potato means apple
and apple means potato *is* English (for these purposes).


The head-nod thing is a nice example of the difference between an abstract
feature being hardwired versus some local determination of its
realization. Hypothesis: what is hard-wired is that some pair of simple
head movements will end up expressing yes/no. I have no idea if that
hypothesis is correct (I could give a just-so story about it to make it
plausible, but so could you), but it is consistent with the data and yet
makes head-shakes hardwired in the requisite sense.



David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103
On May 25, 2005, at 3:17 AM, flash wrote:


snip snip


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