Language use & design: conflicts & their significance | Prof Noam Chomsky

I don't need that, it's okay, thank you. I would like to discuss some questions about a topic that dates back to classical antiquity and is still quite obscure in many ways and has many important implications. I think we will try to highlight or at least indicate. the question is what is the fundamental nature of

language

what is it for what is it

design

ed for there is a simple classical formula dating back to Aristotle that

language

is healthy and has meaning which raises three questions at once what is sound what is meaning and what about the most neglected and most crucial question there has been much discussion about sound and now over the past millennia could - but it has known much consideration of questions of meaning how much a good debate is understood but virtually nothing about with presumably because it was It might as well be trivial simply by association, so a child sees a cow and someone says cow, an association is established between that thing over there and the word and out of that comes the meaning that doesn't survive much scrutiny, but even if it did, would not address the real issue that has to do with this, which has to do with the fact that the number of such associations, if you want to call them associations, is unlimited, so it cannot be established. from experience, that is the problem of breadth, it has very rarely been noticed in the entire history of thinking about language, from time to time Galileo was perhaps the first to point out the obvious fact that language, our linguistic capacity has infinite in scope, he described the alphabet as the greatest invention ever made because it allows us with 25 letters to express any thought that may come to our mind.

Note that he is not exactly accepting Aristotle's saying. That is a description of languages ​​that mean with sound, which is not exactly the same as sound with. The meaning of the fact differs in interesting ways, this is picked up shortly after by Descartes and, in fact, for Descartes it is the foundation, one of the foundations. of his dualistic science, an interesting and long history that is also mostly ignored in the history of philosophy, but I think it is quite crucial after that. a type of language that resumed again in the 20th century, in part because the concept that came to be understood by a few in the 1930s and 1940s was the development of theories of computability, among others, the notion of a universe finite.

The characterization of an infinite class is well understood and that allows us to ask what the nature of the sound meaning relationship would be. Whatever it may be, the basic answer has to be that there is some kind of what is called Jenner's procedure or computational procedure. finite that determines the structures and interpretations for an infinite range of categories of expressions and the interpretations have to be dual, one for sound and one for meaning, apart from that, for anyone who is not a mystic, this ability is internal to us, it is generally denied, but there are many mystics around, but it is clearly something internal to us, mainly to our brain, which means that indeed the capacity is indeed an organ of the body in the rather vague sense of organ that is conventionally used. in biology, some subsystem of the organism that has sufficient internal integrity to be studied on its own and interacts with other modules, subsystems of the system and the functioning of the organism, so it should not be controversial and, fortunately, not It is not at all, apart from those controversies, we have learned in recent years that the concept of sound is to limit the externalization of language the way in which it reaches the outside seems to be independent of the modality so it can be visual it can be signed can touch on a lot of interesting work on that and so on there seems to be some internal analytical capacity that is common to any form of external expression now that already suggests to us that perhaps Aristotle's saying should be reversed just as Galileo's observation does, maybe it should have meaning without sound, but some form of externalization will keep the sound here just for simplicity, but I mean any form of externalization, well, if it turns out that this distinction between whether languages ​​sound with meaning or whether meaning has sound , relates to many other issues, there is a debate about what is sometimes called the essential function of language.

To that notion in a minute there is a traditional view that is in fact that of Galileo that language is primarily an instrument of thought. The great 19th century linguist William Dwight Whitney expressed the traditional view this way, saying that language is audible, thought, the spoken instrumentality of thought, indicating. means that the sound of speech, any other externalization is a kind of secondary property of language, the fundamental property is the internal construction of an indefinite number of thoughts by this generative procedure, we would now say that it is different from a contemporary view that is so widespread which is virtually a The dogma, namely that this function of language is communication and that it arose from evolved communication systems, has not been studied, but I suspect that this modern view, which is in fact a dogma, simply It cannot be questioned, it is in philosophy.

Psychology and linguistics are probably a reflection of the control of associationism and behaviorism, they are 20th century doctrines that have very strict control, even those who fundamentally reject them accept them. I think it also relates to a very simplified view of modern evolutionary biology that is totally different from what evolutionary biologists believe, but it is also an interesting and widespread topic, someone else will leave it aside when analyzing the general question, the question What an organ is, what it is for, what its function is, is very far from clear, so I take any system. you like to say take the spine what is its function, well the function is to support the body to protect the nerves, produce blood cells to store calcium, that's what it does, what is its function, maybe all of them, pick one of somehow well, the weight.

One that is usually chosen is for evolutionary considerations, which of those various uses is how it evolved. You can make arguments like that about the spine, but you can't really make it about language. There is a huge literature that grows all the time. What is called the evolution of language, since libraries full of it now last mainly twenty or thirty years, which is very curious in several ways, that is one of the reasons why it is curious because the subject does not exist, the Languages ​​do not evolve, they change, but no. Evolve, that's quite different, evolution means change in the genetic basis of language, what is called universal grammar and contemporary terminology.

It's also interesting to compare the huge library of speculations and there are speculations about what is called evolution of language, which really means evolution of ability. For language that is compared to incomparably similar and simpler topics, such as the evolution of the communication system of bees, from any point of view, it is a much simpler question, but it is hardly studied in biology because it is recognized that it is too difficult, on the other hand, the evolution of language ability that is comparatively more difficult is just not right because the complexity of this is coupled with fossil evidence and so on, you know, that's a huge topic now, actually, it's knows a little about it, not much and what is known as suggestive.

I will return to what indicates that the only thing that is known with considerable confidence is that in the past, approximately fifty to eighty thousand years, since humans left Africa, our ancestors left Africa, there has been no evolution in the ability of the language, it has changed, it has remained identical and there is very solid evidence. That's why there is no detectable difference in language ability in any language in Papua New Guinea, unlike the tribe and you know, Dublin children are interchanged, they will grow up just as

their

society is and that seems to be true in the case of the cognitive.

Abilities in general, if there are group differences, are so subtle that they are practically undetectable, which tells us that something at least has not changed in about fifty thousand years or more, with less confidence. but some may suggest that if we go back fifty or a hundred thousand years there probably was no language at all. We look at the archaeological site where, of course, we don't have any fossil records, but if we look at the archaeological evidence there is a sudden jump in creative activity sometimes called a great leap forward by fellow anthropologists about seventy-five thousand one hundred thousand ago. years somewhere in that neighborhood and are complex tools complex social arrangements numerical development of a planetary representation you already know the celestial events, etc., it is generally plausibly assumed that this is connected with the emergence of language which, unlike language human, which differs radically in any dimension you can imagine, from another community of any communication system that exists. in other animals, primates, etc., these are some of the reasons why, of course, everyone would like to know something about the neural basis of language, but it is very difficult to explore the topic, one of the reasons is its disconnection , is not related to any other known system.

We know a lot about the human visual system, but that's because the human visual system is quite similar to the visual system of, say, monkeys and cats, and, rightly or wrongly, we indulge in invasive experimentation on other organisms. so we can learn about your visual system. systems that tell you something about our own, so you understand something about the neurophysiology of the human visual system, but that's not going to work for language, there are simply no other organisms, so there is no other to look at because there is no There is no analogous system anywhere in the world.

In the biological world there is a kind of very weak analogies that you know with bird ants, but evolutionarily so remote I cannot tell you anything, so the comparative study is ruled out and we do not allow ourselves to do it in the face of experiments with humans, as you can imagine. of all kinds of possible experiments that could teach you a lot, since you can't carry them out, which means that research in this field has to be sophisticated and indirect. You learn some things, but not many. However, I think it is possible to say something. about the essential function of language, you know its core property, but the way to do it is the only way I know, since there is no comparative evidence and there was physiological evidence, it is limited, some ancient things have been mentioned, but there is a way to do it and that is to analyze the way in which the language

design

s the language, what type of system it is when you investigate its character and another way to approach it is to compare it and consider issues of communicative efficiency of what it would be in a system that is efficient. for communication, compare it to language design, and in particular compare it to issues of computational efficiency.

The assumption here is that however language develops, it is satisfied that it is a computational system, so it complies with general principles of computational efficiency that are not specifically linguistic. or even biological, perhaps laws of nature, so, admitting that assumption for which there is a large amount of evidence not only in this but in other domains, we can ask about computational efficiency and communicative efficiency and ask how they are They interrelate well. I think considerations of that kind. I will barely have a chance to hint at them, they suggest quite strongly that the traditional view is correct, that language is an instrument of informal thought and that modern dogmas about language and communication are simply incorrect, communication is not and as a use of language. of course, but this also has many other uses and is secondary, not really a critical part of language and not particularly significant, particularly specific to language and communication, all sorts of other forms, style of dress, I come your hair and facial expressions, countless ways of communicating language.

Of course, there is one, but there is nothing special about the connection. Well, these questions began to take a clear shape about 60 years ago, when there were the first serious efforts to try to build generative procedures, computational procedures that met the minimum required condition, that is, one generation. an infinite range of structured and unstructured expressions that have an interpretation in these two interfaces, as they are called meaning and externalization of sound. As soon as those attempts were made, some very puzzling phenomena were discovered, that is commonly the case when you start looking at some The subject turns out closely that everything he believed was wrong, actually that is the classic moment of the origins of modern science, so for millennia scientists hadIt is believed that there are simple answers to the question of why if you drop a rock it falls and why you release steam. it rises, they go to

their

natural place and how two objects interact through sympathies and antipathies, how you perceive a triangle, there is a triangle there in a shape, it flies through the air or enters your brain and there is a triangle there and so on.

After a series of questions, these were the conclusions of the best scientists for literally millennia, when Galileo and others began to agree to be puzzled by these phenomena instead of simply accepting them, it immediately turned out that all their intuitions are totally wrong. rest of the story this is how science begins, this is how discovery begins and intelligent research begins and any domain It has been very difficult for this to penetrate the soft sciences and the humanities are simply not understood to this day, even in fields close to the sciences, as in your claim, computational cognitive science is totally misunderstood, but the ability to be puzzled is a One quite important thing to try to cultivate is the central property, what things have learned from infancy to childhood. graduate school and beyond, well, an enigma about language that came to light about 60 years ago and is still debated a lot and is related to the question I was posing has to be a very simple but quite curious fact, so it you need to say the phrase instinctively Eagles that fly swim and ask yourself that instinctively goes well goes with swimming not with flying or similar, suppose you pose a question and ask, can Eagles? that fly swims well, it can go by swimming, not by flying, which is a curious fact because it is a computational procedure that is quite complex, there is a minimum distance relationship that is true for the real link, but it is a distance minimum structural, their distance is the closest are the two things that are closest to each other when you look at structures and that is a complex computational problem, on the other hand, it worked the other way around through proximity instead of structural distance, It would be a trivial copy, no problem, just check the verb closest to instinctively or to be able and that's the one associated with that elementary computational problem, but the language doesn't use simple calculus, it uses a complex one that should be baffling and supposedly is, I think, and in fact it is not just This is true for these examples, it is true for every construction that is known in every known language, so there is something powerful about it, this is the general principle of finding minerals, you know, the closer distance that's everywhere and the language, it's probably just kind of an effect. of the general property of mineral computing that I mentioned in this case there is some evidence to support it from neuroscience one of the most interesting experimental results in neuroscience has to do exactly with this implies that it is an expert it is a work done in Milan for those of you Linguists the linguist involved like Andrea Mauro other biologists who investigated the following paradigm take these German speakers and give them nonsense languages, invented languages, one of which satisfies the properties of Italian, which they do not know, and the other is designed to violate the principles of universal grammar, so in this sense, take an invented language in which a sentence is negated by putting the negative particle after the third word, let's say the language does not do this in a much more complex way With the use of structural distance, well, it turns out that for the case of nonsense language that satisfies the UG principles, you get normal brain activation in the language areas.

For the case that violates ug principles, like having negation as the third word in the sentence, you get a lot of brain activation everywhere and in people. Ultimately it may solve the problem, but clearly the teaching they are dealing with is a puzzle and not a link, not a language problem. There is also evidence that some of you may know this from observing cognitively impaired but linguistically capable subjects. The work of Neil Smith. with their famous subject they tried experiments like this and compared them with normal ones and found almost the same thing, which suggests a possible explanation for the curious fact that a child reflexively uses structural distance, minimizes structural distance and ignores structural distance much more simple.

In the computational process of linear distance, the assumption would be that linear order is simply not available to the learner of a language faced with examples like the ones I mentioned, but rather that the learner is guided by an ug principle, a principle of ability of language that simply says that there is no such thing as linear order, it's just that there are only structural properties and you have to minimize them and that conclusion has caused a lot of consternation in the cognitive sciences; In fact, there is a small industry in computational cognitive science trying to prove that you can get these results through statistical analysis of massive amounts of data, paper after paper, and every approach that is clear enough to analyze it fails hopelessly.

Also, it wouldn't make any difference if they worked because they don't address the right question, suppose you could show the cases. in English I mentioned that somehow the child could learn this through statistical analysis of data, which is not totally impossible, but suppose you could prove it, it wouldn't make any sense because the question is why does the language do it this way? always and not only. for these cases, but all cases, not just in English but in all languages, and why no child makes a mistake about it, why it is basically reflexive and that question would not be addressed even if, impossibly, some of these approaches working documents continue to appear. about it, and that's actually a good example of the unwillingness to be stumped that has to be overcome if science is even going to get off the ground.

A more far-reaching thesis is that linear order is never available for computation in the core areas of language where syntax ends construction and semantic interpretation, in fact there is considerable evidence that in other domains it also appears that structural properties such as For example, hierarchy plays a role, but order does not. Languages ​​that have said that word order is almost a mirror image operate in exactly the same way, this suggests that the linear order is just a peripheral part of the language system and you can understand why it is there. The sensory motor system requires it, so you can't talk in parallel, say, and you can't talk in structures, you have to talk in a sequence.

The linear order of words is linear, so other arrangements must be imposed somewhere. , but it seems that it is only a reflection of the sensorimotor system. Well, one of the few things known about evolution with fear of trust is that the sensorimotor system existed for hundreds of thousands. from years before language emerged does not appear to be adapted to the linguistic system of apes, for example, from roughly the same auditory system as humans and even focuses on the same types of cement phonetic features, phonological features that are essential for human language, but of course when you hear a language, it's just noise, you don't hear anything, in reality, there is another surprising curiosity that has almost never been studied again, and it doesn't surprise you to know how it is that a one-day-old baby can distinguish between all the noise around them. some subpart that is related to language, it is a very complicated task if you think about it, if some other, even an organ, ate, let's say it was essentially the same auditory system, it is presented with the same noise, it is just noise, but for a baby it is not noise, something scattered. some of this is language related and that is picked up reflexively and continued almost reflexively to get the capabilities we are now using, including properties like the one I mentioned about not being able to use linear order in internal calculations despite the simplicity Well, that already suggests that we should probably go back to the traditional concept of language, the concept that Galileo the cart and others expressed, that Whitney articulated in the way that I mentioned and in particular and recognized that externalization altogether is a peripheral part of the The entire linguistic system simply reflects accidental aspects of the sensorimotor system that we have to use for externalization, and of course it follows that particular uses of language like communication are even more peripheral and secondary to basic language and all the extensive speculation. about the evolution of language.

The language is out of place to begin with, you can rule out libraries for this reason alone, in fact there is some evidence from the limited evolutionary evidence around that the conclusions are correct, they want us to have time to delve into that well. if there were If not, I would go on to give some more complex examples that require a little more thought and attention, but when you look at the more complex issues of somatic interpretation and communicative efficiency and what you can show quite convincingly, I think that the Language design directly produces the basis for semantic interpretation but builds problems for communication, that is, it introduces properties in what is pronounced, which causes many so-called problems of analysis, problems of perception, etc., there are many examples of This, in fact, all the cases that will not have time to analyze them, but all the cases that are known of a conflict between communicative efficiency and computational efficiency, which is the best language design, every case that is known and there is a great variety of communicative efficiency is just If you ignore it, you know, without a doubt, computational efficiency always wins, which is a good design for semantic interpretation, and that tells you something like, in general, leaving out a lot of things.

This is not the time to suggest a part of the particular conclusion here that modern dogmas are probably misplaced that communication is not a fundamental part of language, it is very peripheral along with other uses, that language is basically designed as an instrument of thought, as a result of a little rewiring of the brain apparently developing very quickly and perhaps you already know. One hundred thousand years ago, which is nothing in evolutionary time, he simply provided the computational procedure that produces the one that answers the question, except that he modifies it in the sense that the externalization part is secondary.

It's a matter of adapting it to a sensory motor system that was all over the place, but it was a more general point that I would like to mention and I won't go into it, but what you can think of is that if you pay close attention to the rather technical properties of the nature of specific technical language questions that can lead to conclusions that have far-reaching ramifications on the nature of our fundamental mental processes and the consequences of considerable consequences, I believe, for the Human Sciences, even in their currently barely developed form, so Let me stop, are you asking a question? question about the way people think about it or about the modern dog more about the facts of why the dogma exists yeah well I think like I said it hasn't been studied but I think it's probably obvious that the century XX experienced a change in attitude towards humans. and their actions and so on, basically associationism and then general behavioral ISM, so go back 50 years ago, this second of psychology was called behavioral science, sociology was behavioral science, everything was behavioral science, which is a time in the one I was in graduate school at.

In school or I was one of the few people that this is pretty crazy even without knowing that whatever conclusion I want to come to Cole says that psychology, behavioral science is like calling physics meter reading science because you know that Physics data is meter readings and some of the data, not all, some of the psychology data is behavior, not all, but it means that looking at the field was a study of data, not a study of whatever. be the internal structures, and that just doesn't make any sense. Combined with this, was another thing I wrote about in this period: computers that actually worked were being developed and it was widely believed, and still is believed, that sooner or later they will be, they will be massive computers with very fast processing and that can handle large quantities. we collect data and perform some statistical procedure on the data and something miraculous will come out;

It is still widely believed and people are very deceived by it. In fact, there's something called the Turing test, which you've probably heard of and is done every year. a competition if you get $100,000 to pass something called the Turing test a totally meaningless task it's supposed to prove it can you prove that machinesDo you think everything is based on an article by Alan Turing? She was a great competitor and one of the founders of computer science and an eight-page article she wrote in 1950 about what her machines can think, but she begins the article by saying that the question of whether machines can think is too insignificant to deserve discussion; that sentence has somehow been ignored in the entire literature and there's a good reason for it because you know asking if machines think is basically asking what kind of metaphor you like is like asking the submarine to swim well, you know from a certain point of view, you can say it from another point of view. or not, but it's not a significant question, he formulated and proposed this imitation game which is now called the Turing test, but he proposed it for a different reason, he said it will be interesting that the idea is to see if you can build a program. that will fool a blind observer, you know, someone who doesn't see what's going on won't be able to tell a person's program, okay, he says they will be useful in trying to create bigger machines, better machines, as a challenge, okay . perhaps so, but it says nothing about whether machines can think, in fact the whole idea of ​​machines thinking is put forward in a way that is almost designed to cause confusion.

I must say that the people who are confused by this are some of the most prominent philosophers, the most influential philosophers and scientists and others, it is not a trivial thing. I won't mention names, but many of you, to begin with, a machine, the computer itself, may be useful as a paperweight, but it is no good. whatever it's doinganything is the program you put in it, okay, so the real cook, if you want to ask a meaningless question, should have a good handle on what a program is, a program, just a theory written in crazy notation to that a machine can, a computer can handle it. so the question is really welcome this theory think in other words is this a theory of thinking well you know the answer is no unless you understand something about the fear of thinking nothing is a theory of X just because it passes some meaningless test you know that It is a theory of I said you raise that question, you know, you even bother with the prize because of course they're not doing anything and these things come together: the association is psychology, the behavioral turn in the human sciences, the availability of data processing, it all combined to lead to what, in my opinion, is simply massive confusion in all related fields. to these topics that's probably why I mean, you know you have to look at people and ask, but I think if you do you find something like that and it's correct to the present, it hasn't changed in the slightest, yeah , and that's why I am.

I'm just wondering, some linguistic things that we do, practices that we do that we've been trying to call linguistic are talking to each other and also correcting each other's uses of language, so if I point to the dog, can I say look, there's a lovely dove? Someone will say that that is not a duck, so we try to adjust our language so that we all speak the same. This happens, but if you think about it for a minute, probably 99.9% of your language use is internal. You don't involve other people, so you can't, it takes a tremendous act of will not to think about the language.

It is almost impossible for you to be talking to yourself every minute of the day. When you sleep, you know, doing the same thing. The same thing now there are cases of the type you describe, there are all kinds of uses of the system, just like all kinds of uses of this mine, but in fact, it doesn't tell you much if you really look closely, this has not been studied, there is another dog right here that is blocking the study of this. It's a dog move that in the modern period actually declines again and then John Cyril and others take up the idea that there can be nothing in the mind that is not available for introspection, nothing will be in the mind unless you can not to be conscious, but it has to be available to consciousness, otherwise it is not in the mind, that is totally useless.

Most of what happens internally is completely beyond the level of introspection, for example, in the case I mentioned, I am referring to the principle that is quite well established that linear order is not available for syntactic and semantic calculation, You cannot introspect in the sense that you are not conscious, the same goes for visual perception, for example, one. One of the most interesting results in the study of visual perception is a conclusion that emerged from David Mars' laboratory. Shimon almond principle. What if it is called the rigidity principle? They were able to prove that if you present a guy with two guests, there's a cop to kiss. scopic presentations you know that it is a screen with a couple of points if you have successive presentations not many maybe three or four presentations of a few points on the screen of what you perceive is a rigid object in motion well, that is also quite curious in experience: you have no experience with rigid objects throughout the entire history of humanity, until very recently there were no rigid objects like your walk in the forest, there were no rigid objects around, and in some ways the system is probably true for others, it has not been. actually tested in other organisms, it's hard to prove what is probably true for apes and cats etc., our system is simply designed to impose rigid moving objects with virtually no data and that by now the mathematical properties have been worked out, the least known neurological properties. but again, you can't bring that into consciousness and I think the same applies to talking to yourself, try it sometime, think about what you're really doing when you talk to your, what you call talking to yourself, I think you'll find it. what you really are, what is really in your mind consciously are just fragments, the little fragments pass by and from those fragments, suddenly you can build the sentence into a meaningful sentence and that meaningful sentence is probably being built unconsciously beyond the level of consciousness internally by Whatever these generous processes are, fragments of them come to consciousness as a couple of fragments of sentences and that is what we call thinking to ourselves and by now you know that that seems to be true in other domains as well, There are some famous minor experiments, the livid ones. experiments on decision making that have been widely misunderstood, but what was discovered was that if you decide to do something, for example, I decided to take this milliseconds before deciding that something is happening in the motor areas, that is, the correct organization of the motion.

To understand it well, the immediate conclusion was that it was taken from this that it is good, that shows that there is no freedom of will and isn't that right, Angels? or what it shows is that everything that is happening is beyond the level of consciousness in which we are. we know and all the other domains, but as long as the philosophy of mind is subject to this dogma that you cannot go beyond what is available to consciousness or what is in the mind, it will never be discovered and I think that there is a whole collection and I think the dogma also probably goes back to behaviorism.

I mean, it's pretty clear in Cline's case. That's pretty much what they remember. Distinguish. She says that actions can be in accordance with principles or guided by principles. Everything is according to principles. It means like the planets that followed Kepler's laws. By principles means that you formulate what you're going to do and then you do it and you say that virtually all actions don't fall into any of those categories and with John Searle comes what he calls the principle of association from him, you know? F dev has to be available to consciousness in some way before it can be attributed to the mind and all of that generates a whole theory about rules and so on, but that's just addressing these questions about your hands tied behind your back and I think that same is true.

Of the considerations you mentioned are real, but it's very peripheral to look at language use, whether you think if you were raised without external language, without shared language, you are irregular in your desert island experiment, what would happen there? The most surprising evidence about this is the studies. There are a couple of studies of children that were found. Children should not be allowed to learn sign language because they have to be part of mainstream society, so they have to learn to read lips. It just doesn't make any sense at this point, at least in sensitive areas that have been abandoned, but were a major problem. dogma for a long time and there were parents who were the famous case of a couple of three cousins ​​in Philadelphia whose students had a lot of glycans three cousins ​​who played together worked on it the little children played together they were three they were deaf their parents were so indoctrinated that not even They didn't even gesture at the children because they didn't want to be tricked into developing signs, so when they discovered the children it turned out that they were chatting with each other in sign language which is an expected level of development for a three-year-old. , you know, a four-year-old structured all of this in a way that essentially invented his own language.

I have no data. Actually, Eric Klinenberg had noticed it much earlier, who was one of you. I know the person who really founded modern language biology. He was a classmate, we were friends in graduate school and at the time he was interested in language impairments, so one of the things he did was visit the School for the Deaf, the famous school for the deaf and blind and Boston Perkins Academy was just to observe what was going on and they were all strictly oral, you know, that was the dogma, but they noticed that if the teacher turned to the blackboard, the kids would start signing to each other. things that kids do if the teacher isn't looking and they had obviously developed their own sign language and we only used it when they weren't under control, well in those days you couldn't publish anything like this because it was so contrary to everything that everyone believed it was never published, but since then, when the topics become legitimate, there are other discussions like that.

Now let's take the case of someone who has no input. Well, there are a couple, that is the case of the wolf boy. They are so strong that language ability would never develop, but that is normal. I'm going to take, let's say, visual ability. Remember that in the case of vision we can study cats and monkeys and we know what happens, so if you take, say, a kitten and in the first few weeks of life it is deprived of structured visual stimuli, so it has ball orbs ping pong. The only thing you receive is diffuse light but nothing structured, then the neurological basis for analyzing the visual systems simply degenerates, it is already the same there, so I will never learn to see and that is true for almost all abilities that tend to have the so-called critical periods.

You know, the periods in which the ability has to develop will never develop and, again, we don't do human experiments, but if you did. You would probably find that there is indirect evidence that there are several critical periods where if the system is not stimulated in some way it will not work. I mean, most of us have an experience with this, for almost all adults there are individual differences. but for most adults it is extremely difficult to learn a second language, babies do it reflexively and a ten year old will do it reflexively, but for older people it works, I mean if one of you were to a foreign country with his A 10 year old you would find that in a couple of weeks the child is chattering fluently and he doesn't care and maybe the child doesn't want to be there in that experience, but they just can't help it.

I just learned the light and speak the language like a sponge, on the other hand, the adult can study, take classes and work hard at it, it is not easy and probably some critical period has passed. There is one case that has actually been carefully studied of a girl. This is called genius searching for literature and I have to be careful with literature because there are many popular literary genres that are pure garbage, but there are also some technical articles like the one by a woman called Susan Curtis, a very good cognitive neuroscientist who worked with Jeannie and The newspapers tell the story directly: what happened to Jeannie is that they found her when she was, I think, 13 years old, when she was in an attic, not tied to a chair, she listened to psychotic parents and they gave her food from time to time She needed food, but she didn't have it, they deprived her, they tried to deprive her of any external stimulation, so no one ever talked to her, you know, that kind of thing when they found her, of course, they rescued her, there were efforts to try to help herher and Susan Curtis.

It was the therapist who really looked after her and for a while it seemed that, among other things, she turned out to be quite brilliant. She could learn all kinds of things and learned very quickly how to fool people. She was apparently very manipulative, she could make people think she was doing all kinds of things that she wasn't doing and for a while they thought she was acquiring language, but it turned out to be an illusion, she was acquiring ways of diluting to the people around him. She made him think that she could use the language with people closer to us, as it turned out that she would never be able to overcome that barrier.

Now you can't be sure what that means, because a child raised in those circumstances will be totally psychotic, so naturally. So how much of this is just general psychosis? How much is the deterioration of the language faculty? that you can't say that you would have to do invasive experiments of the kind you can imagine, but we can't do it, that's the The country act is another type of evidence that is quite interesting and has never been a tick. Helen Keller, okay, Helen Keller was extreme by blind and deaf unit, very fluent, you know, she is a wonderful writer, you know all kinds of interesting ideas, there is no difficulty in expressing. she learned herself what they say is that she learned by touch, okay, her teacher grants everyone, you know, she spelled words on her hand if she leaked recently.

It was discovered from photographs from that period that Helen Keller had actually invented a technique that is now used. To teach deafblind people, the technique consists of putting one hand on the face and the thumb on the vocal cords. You can tell if the vocal cords are moving and with your fingers on the face you can see the way the face is moving, so you have a minimal amount of theta, but now that it's been studied, my wife actually worked on it. at MIT and there are guys who have learned this system who are pretty fluent, no one has reached Helen Keller's level, but she is pretty fluent, which is pretty amazing in itself.

There is almost no beta version, however, something else was discovered, there were very few cases. They did not publish anything about it, but in the few cases that worked, they discovered that in all the cases that were successful, the person had lost their sight and hearing. after approximately 16 months 18 months. What happened? These are cases of spinal meningitis. Now it is curable. Something happens anywhere but there. there was a sudden loss of both speech and hearing, sight and if there were more than that age then they could get fair facility. Helen Keller was 20 months old when she lost her sight and hearing and gained, you know, perfect fluency, but before that there was no successful case, that suggests something: it suggests that, say, an 18-month-old knows the whole language. , they are not exhibiting knowledge, but anyone who has paid attention to children thinks they know much more than they do. can show that you know that they are understanding all kinds of things that they don't seem to be able to do anything and it is perfectly possible that by saying that age the child has acquired the main aspects of language and that Sodom that method What I mentioned is simply to provoke it, you know, trigger something that's already inside now again.

If you could do direct experiments on humans, you could prove this, but of course you may have to look at indirect evidence? But I think the evidence points in that direction. Thanks, that's a good question and I didn't hear who you were. Sorry, for your linguistic knowledge. Yeah, well, so you know there's a lot of work on this, like Richard King's work on LCA, for example, there are several ideas. about how a structured system can be mapped onto a linear system and what are the principles that do that and there are some pretty interesting and powerful ideas, but it's a real problem, it's a real question and it's only been raised in the last few years. because you already know. which was only recognized as a problem in the last few years, if you go back to Scizor and Bloomfield, you know the great modern linguists, they didn't see it as a problem, so first make sure that everything is an association, you know, and of fact, the cesarean section.

Linguistics, the close concept of sentences somewhere and the boundary between a long pole and one, you know, doesn't fit anywhere. For Bloomfield, language is just the collection of expressions that can be used in a speech community just like for currencies, and it doesn't mean anything, but as long as you look at problems that way, which is very similar to scholastic physics. , you know the likes and dislikes that go to your natural place, then you will never see any problem, that's when you start asking what it is. it means what kind of set it is, those are the expressions that can be used in a community of speakers when you start asking those questions that suddenly everything becomes very perplexing, including this question that is very alive today, you know what, you know which raises all sorts of questions like how Japanese-English produces a linear order when they seem to have opposite structural orders.

There are two questions, some Trinity students, so I agree with you on part of the rejection of this door, as it probably has an extravasation of use. I thought, but and that's what opened up something interesting, now we have to think of a new way to have a quick interpretation of semantic damage, yes, because now we have a person who also shared this point of view and will do more, although in some way mode gave his Eastman the same in a couple of places on the bare earth and finds his news about semantics. The world of excuses and the kind of spectrums that I'm trying to say well, the way to get back is to have informational semantics and then try it. to find some causal relationship between the world and representations, I mean, you've been announcing a couple of places where mental representation doesn't require representation and I'd like to say that the man's representation presentation thanks you too, but I still share something.

About the approach, sometime we have to have perplexity, so if I use possibly, what do you think too? We have been old friends for 50 years and found each other's opinions disconcerting because of their mutuality, in fact, when I mentioned cows and the word. cow I had your footer in mind, he is you, if you know, you know his point of view, he says exactly what I said, the boy sees a cow, no one says cow, which makes the connection and from there on , the sight of the cow causes its causal relation to the mental image image or notion or whatever cow is and if that just doesn't stand up to scrutiny as soon as you start looking at the words instantly, this was understood quite well in the 19th century.

XVII, so if you read Hume's lock, the English plate nests others who understood that air can be our concept of you as if of an object is not individuated by identifiable physical properties, so you read lock the person, for For example, these are the people who put it in these terms, but what if you look at the kind of thought experiments that Locke carried out about what happens if you have two minds in the same body, that kind of thing, which is actually saying is that our concept of person is based on some notion like psychic continuity, okay, psychic continuity is not a physical property, it is not something that the physicist discovers that it is something that we are imposing on the world, it is like the principle of rigidity, in fact, for Locke he says that person is what he calls a forensic concept that carries notions like responsibilities and rights, well, you know, physicists can't look at an object and say oh PS, responsibilities and rights, actually, this is known in the history of philosophy, there is a recent book about it by Galen Strawson that mentions these things, unfortunately it does not refer to the history about them because nobody knows, but but that is correct and that is true for everything, including the Cal.

You can also quickly invent simple thought experiments that show that notions like Cal's also rely on psychic continuity, among other properties. In fact, there is something about this that is very familiar to everyone. fairy tales babies have no problem understanding fairy tales, that's easy you know, but just think about the standard fairy tale, you know, the Wicked Witch cast a spell on the handsome prince and terms that make him In a frog, let's say that for the rest of the story, the prince has all the physical properties of a frog, all of them. Then the beautiful princess kills, kisses the frog, and becomes the handsome prince again.

That means he was always the prince. It didn't matter. whatever their physical characteristics were because it is because what makes them a person is this strange property of psychic continuity that runs through everything always and you can do the same thing, there are similar stories with animals that you know became something and then they become themselves and so on, and I, the children, have no problem with that, it's perfectly simple. because their concepts are just not based on physical properties um, of course, part of it is like you don't distinguish, you know, let's say a cow and a house or something, but it's just a small part of most of their concepts, even the simplest notions. are very similar to the rigidity principle: you see them a certain way because of the way you interpret the world and you can't get that by association and causality, so I think Jerry's approach is, and it's not just him, that of everyone is useless from the beginning.

In fact, I think if you look closely, I think you'll find that in a human language there's really no referent, there's no notion of reference or denotation, there are ways of interpreting the world based on our internal conceptual systems, but they don't establish a relationship. between an internal symbol like a word and some mind-independent entity, which was the reference that would have to be your denotation and, in fact, you feel that it is your philosophy. No, some of the famous riddles have to do with this, so a thesis ship is needed, yes. The dark story is that a thesis about a ship in the ocean and its variants any of the boards rots throws the board overboard replaces it with a different board this continues until finally all the boards have been replaced and it remains the The ship of Theseus, although all the physical properties have changed, the enigma arises when you add that there is someone on the shore who is collecting the old planks, putting them back together and rebuilding the original ship, which is the thesis ship that no one has . one answer Eric and the reason is that our cognitive systems are not designed to be able to answer a question like that.

I actually tried this on a ridiculously small sample of my grandchildren, one time they made me watch a Star Trek space show or something. there is a device on the spaceship that a person can enter and be transported somehow reconstructed on another planet, okay, no one has a problem with that, but then I asked them what would happen if the person who was reconstructed on the other planet was still in the box that it came in, what would be the person that is Theseus' ship that they were trapped with, that they thought about it, it had different answers but it basically had no answer and I think if you look at Crick, these riddles They are more or less the same.

In the same way, the puzzle dissolves if it is not assumed that there is an entity, a mind-independent entity that words like London or had RFC etc. refer to, but if there is no such relationship in the language, then the puzzle can't be formulated and Of course, there will be questions that you won't be able to answer, like knowing what the ship is or who the person is, what the person is in the box, but there's no reason why you should be able to answer them. Why our cognitive? Systems will be developed so that any question that occurs to us we have an intuitive answer to no, they are not, those are the traditional riddles and to discover why they have no answer we have to analyze the nature of our conceptual systems and I think this is where ideas like saying that Jerry found it right at the beginning because there is no way for everyone to prove enemies that any word you can think of, no matter how simple, you will find that it is the concept is individuated by non-physical properties bhakti this was noted by Aristotle Aristotle he talks about it, he talks about it in metaphysical terms, then he asks what a house is, you know what the definition of a house is, he's not, he doesn't say the definition of the word house, the definition of the thing. this is in metaphysics and he says the definition of house is a combination of matter and form, so the thing is you know boards and bricks and things like that and form is what is used for design, things like that are you know that all this was later rebuilt in the 17th century and mr. melodic terms these are the cognitive structures without Aristotle's metaphysics they no longer have matter or form, but the basic idea is correct that what constitutes a concept for us is a combination of things that we perceive and constructions that we impose on it through our complicated systems cognitive for which things like a psychic continuity, a design, a use, etc., are fundamental now if there is something that looks like a house, let's say, but is used to distort books, it is a library, notIt's a house, so this applies to every term you can think of.

River Tree, almost everything, maybe. everything has been reviewed. I closed it, so sometimes you started seeing me. I'm the three young people and then you probably need to give your explanation. There are certain semantic structures in your head and one of the things that rotate as you communicate is usage. of language is not essential, but I was not very aware that you think that communication can become essential when we have other people involved, so when you do twenty cooperate with each other outside when I see someone's facial expression like a smile and it's beautiful and I say and then I wonder well they're smiling at me because they breathe with themselves maybe they're smiling happily because maybe what I'm saying is kind of ridiculous or there's just possibilities how I interpret it they're smart the way I interpret it is funny and they said which becomes essential for me to ask them completely, is this what you mean with your smile, what you are saying or maybe you are right if not, once, once, therefore, there are people. get to you want to cooperate and we won't understand you well here you are using what they mean and pulling the crisis sense what they intended doesn't really mean their intention yes you tried to join them but I don't think that works but here is a clear case of that that is normal and the interaction with other people or even with what you read you try to discover what is intended, you do not pay much attention to the literal meaning of the expression, of course, that gives you a clue, but we are really trying to discover what is happening in the mind of the person you are trying to convey and that is a fairly complicated operation, but many things come into play.

You know, background assumptions about where the person is coming from intellectually. What are their common points? Isis Beliefs I said that it is a complicated social action that of course happens all the time and a language is part of it, but notice that the literal meaning of expressions, as you say, is only one piece of the puzzle, I mean, if the person speak Swahili, you can't do this, but if the person speaks English, you know you can instinctively and reflexively, you don't know, grasp the literal meaning, that's a factor and that comes into play. You're trying to determine what the intention is, but the kind of things I was talking about are things that happen reflectively in the literal meaning and there are quite interesting properties and I think even looking at the literal meaning shows that communication and other uses of language They are peripheral to the system, it does not mean that they are not important, it just means that they may be very important for human life.

By the way, I think that communication is a bad word for this type of social interaction, that is, if communication is supposed to have any which means it has to do with the translation of information, but most of our interaction with other people is not transmission of information like when you talk to someone at a party, let's say you are trying to transmit information by doing all kinds of things or you are standing in a place where it's very difficult for people to be close to each other and not talk if you really want to embarrass people by putting them in a closed room and asking them not to talk to each other, I mean, it's very threatening to you .

I just can't do it, you know, try it sometimes, so you force yourself to talk to people, you don't have to burst out, you talk to the person next to you, but you're not conveying information, you're just maintaining. some kind of social interaction that is comfortable, so I don't think it should be, even those things shouldn't be called communication. Again, the idea of ​​using communication comes from this kind of instrumentalist approach in this study of psychology and sociology, everything has to be for some. you know, purpose, there is no other to achieve something, but most of our use of language, even with other people, achieves nothing more than maintaining pleasant social conditions, you know, so there are two questions here, the lady of the second row on the modularity of the mind.

Some of the ideas and particularly the structural properties of the linguistic system may be jobs available to those individuals who do not have a language for whatever reason and who fail to develop if they are competent. Is there a cognitive answer about modularity first? make a distinction between the two interpretations of that concept, the one that is in common use is actually Jerry's photos of Jerry. He is talking about the modularity of processing systems, so what he is arguing is that input systems are modular and of course it would have to extend to output systems accordingly.

For him, what he calls core systems have to be unstructured, monetary and isotropic, so there can be no structure in the input systems that poses a problem. So, for example, why do you listen to and speak English? Why not? I hear English and speak Japanese and if the systems are not connected, why is that? There has to be a structure at the end for the core systems and here you get a different notion of modularity, a notion of modularity that is more related to acquisition than processing. Given all the noise and confusion around you, how are things classified in different systems?

That's where the internal system of modularity comes in, and I think that's where your question comes from: what are the connections, if any, between the internal linguistic system and other cognitive systems? systems is an interesting question and I expected that there are other languages, every group of humans that has ever been discovered has essentially the same type of language but there are other common properties that are found like music, but I believe all societies that know The isolated ones, the so-called primitive ones, you know, hunter-gatherer tribes, they always have some kind of drum music, whatever it is.

I think they almost always have a dance that seems to be universal. These things simply have no function. not at all, you know what is asked, but children grasp it instantly, automatically, every society has it. You might ask if another thing every known society has is arithmetic. All capacity knows that there is a lot of misleading information about that. It is often claimed that Aboriginal groups do not have arithmetic, which is based on the fact that they do not have a word count or may have a word count that only goes up to three or four or something, but this was carefully studied. by a truly outstanding linguist.

Ken Hale about 40 years ago was one of the founders of Australian linguistics and he studied languages ​​that don't have word numbers, but he discovered that people, first of all, have other ways of expressing numbers, which maybe they don't have. the word five but you could say like this and other ways to do it. He also discovered that if these people are introduced into a market system, they start selling and buying, they can do all the calculations immediately, so they must have the integer system and the same thing. That seems to be true about color systems, like much of the system.

It is well known that there are languages ​​that do not have color words sometimes beyond black and white, but as he discovered with the Australian Aboriginal groups, they have other ways of expressing it. they may not have read that they can say blood as they already know, so the whole conceptual system wall seems to be there. Arithmetic is particularly interesting because where that comes from is an old problem after that goes back to the origins of Darwin's evolutionary theories and Wallace were baffled by the fact that all humans knew all the facts, but they were right that all humans have arithmetic will capacity and that is an enigma to them because it was not selected, it was never used, so in fact there was no selection.

The use of the Earth medical system is very recent and very restricted to small groups of people, but everyone has it, so where does it come from? Wallace actually thought that there had to be some other process in evolution beyond natural selection. Darwin didn't like that. They debated it, which I think the answer in all of these cases has to be that these things are piggybacking on systems that already exist for some reason in the case of arithmetic, if you look closely at the design of the language in the elementary computational principle . that go into the generative procedure that actually produce arithmetic if you take those procedures and you take a system with one element and the lexicon calls it one, it produces arithmetic, so it could be arithmetic, you know, taking advantage of the system that's already there, but what about the music?

There is some interesting work that attempts to show that the basic properties of musical systems are similar to the structural properties of linguistic systems. It is quite an interesting work on which perhaps dance will emerge. You could try it with a woman Goodman tried. do something with dance, but I think these are very good questions, so the question you have to ask is where do these things come from? In the case of language, we have no idea where it came from, but you can imagine the way it might have come from. evolved suddenly it is a slight rewiring of the brain that maybe the other things are simply derived from them maybe there is some other origin is a good question, but to study you have to accept the notion of modularity that is not used in philosophical literature, no in put modularity but central modularity and that is what Fodor explicitly denies and implicitly denies in general dr.

Chomsky and I'm a linguistics student at UCD my third year one of the things you mentioned the cow reminded me that I went to a cafe just before I got here but someone is looking for the bathroom door and they pointed it out to you. for a bookshelf citizen or something, in a sense, I'm surrounded by doors in a useful building, so the idea of ​​the door is supposed to look like something else, but it's still a function in Eureka tourism, yeah , but I was interested. as well as the idea that I think it was not used before the cost of conceptual metaphors that we should use, so it has also almost become strange what ideas are as far away as across political systems, so there is what They sound like serious questions. about whether language depends on thought or whether thought depends on language, but to study these questions it is necessary to clarify what is meant by language and what is meant by thought, and the fact is that there is very little to say about thought, except To the extent that thought is expressed in language that undermines inquiry, we have to find a way of thinking about thought that is independent of language, and that is not easy.

I mean, you could do it in other domains, like the visual domains of images, how do you find your way home at night? So, well, it is a kind of thinking, much of it cannot be expressed in language, but this is not a theory of thought and until there is some kind of theory of thought that is independent of language, it will be very, very difficult I even pose the questions, so it's a traditional question, but it's one of those questions that I don't think we're in a position to ask because we don't understand what we mean by thought.

This is where bad touring performances play a role. so it's a good question: I don't have a baby farm formulated yet. I think we have time for one more question. Paul L burns every Paul, you will present your perspective on what diagnosis was, as a story in the media I married mr. University of London. I'd like to ask you about something you said in response to a question a couple of questions ago, perhaps about words that don't have a reference to the real world and what effect to point out is that some of those cases seem like there will be cases that are not accessible or are not easily accessible to the service of consciousness that Walter Woodhouse you pointed out, they will be strange features that orbit both now and in his writings, but I think it takes someone to know someone to point out those kinds of images before people notice.

However, I think other examples of the ordinance or you know the words to say the facts that these phrases have no reference in the real world seem more easily accessible, which is why I think another sentence of yours makes it seem like the bench is moving across the room after catching fire. Yeah, what at first seems like a perfectly simple phrase, sort of because throughout the training of events, but then when you think about it for a second, you think it's funny, you know there can't be anything, no real object could burn. Go down and then cross the street, which is the point of any example, so my question is these four, the last type of examples, how is it that we can use those Simmons so easily to convey a truth because it seems at least at first inspection? that you know if a sentence asserts or presupposes the existence of an object that does not exist and then it did, many of these cases cannot exist, it seems unlikely that it is just a false stream or that they will actually come to light.

I should mention that Paul is the only person writing about Maddox whoIt takes all of this seriously, so it's unique, but I think what it means is that most of what we do is thoughtless, it's like seeing a rigid object in motion when we're looking. moon illusion or understanding other people, we have the slightest idea how we do it, we can't introspect our own behavior any more than we can introspect falling bodies, I mean, it's intuitively obvious that if you have two objects of different mass they are the ones that have a greater mass and will fall faster, this turns out to be false, but if we cannot introspect something as simple as, for example, bodies that fall or why some things fall, others rise, how do we Can we hope to introspect?

Anything as complicated as what the human mind does, you have to study it from outside the way you study other things and when you do that it's very difficult, there are illusions about one of the main illusions that runs through the entire intellectual world. The story is that in some ways we ourselves should be the easiest thing to study because we can investigate what's happening, so let's say Tom Nagel asks what it's like to be a bat and we can give him the answer, but try to answer the question. what it's like to be me I don't think anyone can answer that question either, at least I can, you can't ask questions like that, they don't mean anything, we have to find out what it's like to be me or a bat or a nematode or no matter how simple it is. a difficult scientific question and asking what it is like to be a person, even oneself, is perhaps one of the most difficult questions.

You can write novels about it, write poetry about it or something, but you can. If I don't get a discursive explanation, I just can't answer the question and I think we can't hope to answer the kind of questions you're talking about just by introspection, somehow when people use the word Bank, let's say they automatically understand what what did you just do. brought out and it's not confusing to them unless you tell them look, this technically doesn't make any sense and then you get things like secret key puzzles, but the puzzles come about because you're trying to present them in a rational way that's you know, of in some ways, objective things that are handled totally differently, yes, well, I think we have to set up two different systems, there are bugs, many different systems, in fact, I think there is probably a high level of modularity in the mind, a of our capabilities.

They call it a science-forming capacity that everyone has in some way is trying to make sense of our experience in a coherent way. I mean, Russell once pointed out that the only thing we're really sure of is your own immediate experience. and the rest of the research, including all science, is trying to give a coherent explanation of what this experience is and I think that's basically right, this ability to cultivate science that children use to make sense of members of the Jewish tribe of the world, etc., since it is just a different one, it also tries to make sense of the use of language, for example, when you are a child, let's say that, if you are around, you know about Piaget's typography experiment in the that you know that something moves and another thing moves theThe child will automatically set the content and invisible contact between them.

You know there has to be some invisible mechanical thing that makes them interact because that's how we see the world. In fact, that is an important event in the history of science. when Newton showed that that doesn't work when he showed that evil was called in mechanical philosophy the assumptions about the nature of the world that were made by all the great scientists you know, they are rare Descartes, although again for everyone and Newton himself he believed and that is why he considered his discoveries as an absurdity to which no person with any scientific knowledge could pay attention, but it turned out to be true that you cannot have a mechanical universe of which what he and others considered to be a species has been said.

The action of the property of alcohol without content cannot happen and our intuitive way of understanding the world turns out to be different from the way the world appears when we apply our scientific training capabilities to it. It was a heartbreaking moment, you know, it actually changed everything. nature of science, so for Galileo of the great scientists of the early modern period the goal of science was to show that the world is intelligible after Newton changed, it took a long time to assimilate it but basically it changed, we lose hope of We understand the world, but we are simply trying to understand theories about the world, which are totally different.

That's when you discover apparent contradictions, as Hume, who understood this, pointed out that Newton's greatest achievement was to show that there are mysteries we will never understand. I was referring to things like contactless action, interaction with content, on the other hand, to make modern scientists and philosophers like David Deutsch, David Abraham, many others generally affect and condemned what is called the ISM mystery , there are still things we cannot understand, that is a curse. principle of many others this is some kind of pathology this in principle we can understand anything well what they claim is something quite already internalized the change in the conception of science by trying to discover an intelligible world abandoned by Newton's discoveries I immersed myself in the attempt to discover intelligible theories and maybe we can develop an intelligible theory about anything you know about almost anything, maybe anything you can think of, but that doesn't mean that the world is going to be intelligible, so the mystery It's almost necessary. be true and it was demonstrated by a fact, although he didn't like it, he thought it was absurd for Hume to recognize that recognition, look, it's true, what can we do with that?

Locke recognized it, so lucky, you know, one of his great ideas was, you know. What is called Locke's suggestion in the history of philosophy is that he said that as there are, he laid down the theological framework from which we can extract it. What he said is that God added properties to matter that we cannot understand, such as action at a distance. God could have added to matter a faculty of thought; It's the thinking-matter hypothesis, which opened up the possibility of really abandoning a scientific psychology for a couple of centuries, but that's basically what you have to try to figure out right.

What is the property of what is there that allows us to think? But I think going back to your question, we can with your scientific capabilities we can look at this and say, hey, there's something really wrong here, we have to have another system to describe it. it doesn't have these internal contradictions and that is simply a different system than what we call common sense, our ordinary ways of seeing things and within that system you can engage, in fact, you try to develop a notion of reference, for example, physical or linguistic . or any other type of organized research, you expect the entities that you construct, mental entities that you construct, symbolic entities, you expect them to actually select something that exists in the world, so if you scientists believe that you found the boson of Higgs, they would like I think there is a Higgs boson out there, you know, and if linguists talk about phonemes, they would like to say that you do something real, that is false, but that is a totally different notion than our language common, in fact, this leads to many things. of the problems in contemporary philosophy I think I like to take all the discussions about the twin earth or the idea that you know water is water.

All those discussions are simply mixing up two different systems. You can ask if water is water in natural language. Say English. because it does not have the word h2o that is from another system you cannot ask if water is h2o in chemistry because it does not have the word water and of course chemists use it informally but they have h2o and not water there is no yes in reality, if you look at it What is water in human language, is a very complex notion, it does not work for water, of course, but not even you can ask the questions that are discussed in the literature between the Earth because two quite different systems are mixed .

It's funny because the philosophers who develop these systems believe that something that comes from calms down, becomes done, etc., that words have no meaning except within a language. Okay, if you believe that, then if you mix up to two languages. it has to be incoherent, yes, and you will get what looks like a sentence, water is h2o, but water gets its meaning from English and h2o gets its meaning from chemistry and chemistry is a system that at least strives to have a reference , that's the whole thing. The point of science and English is a system of fact, striving to do anything, it's just like walking, it is what it is, yeah, that doesn't happen.

I have references. Thank you so much. Not only would we have used all the time allotted for this. session without going any further and thank you Professor Chomsky for his generosity in answering all the questions. I think the apartment would like to officially make a presentation to you at that time and then we will pass on our thanks as a group. I would like to thank the teacher. Chomsky for this wonderful occasion and thank you for coming and this is a book about our treasures at the Academy, he believes that we are here, but we also have many treasures that are in the national museums, etc., and you will be very interested.

That's what he has to do with natural philosophy in chemistry and so on, but there are many beautiful things and thank you very much, thank you very much.