Re: built-in rules

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

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. 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.
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:
> To the philosophers among us,
>
> To those who think that language is hard-wired in the brain (or
> ontological), is it hard-wired in the brain (or ontological) that
> extending the middle finger is offensive in the US, but in Britain one
> spreads the index and middle fingers?
>
> Is it hard-wired in the brain (or ontological) that shaking the head
> left-&-right means 'no' in Europe but 'yes' in India. 'Yes' and 'no'
> are
> pretty basic; you'd think they would be the same everywhere, if they
> were hard-wired.
>
> Is it hard-wired in the brain (or ontological) that 'I am cold' means I
> am cold in English, but 'I am callous' in German? If you mean 'I am
> cold' you have to say 'mir ist kalt'--dative in German. Are nominative,
> accusative, dative, genitive, (cases in general), hard-wired in the
> brain (or ontological)? Is it hard-wired in the brain (or ontological)
> that some languages have more cases than others (Attic Greek, for
> example)?
>
> Is it hard-wired in the brain (or ontological) that 'I am a Berliner'
> mean that I come from Berlin, whereas 'Ich bin ein Berliner' means that
> I am a jelly donut?
> There is nothing ontological corresponding to a subjunctive
> conditional,
> since, ex hypothesi, it _didn't_ happen.
>
> Flash