Noam Chomsky: Language and Other Cognitive Processes

uh, the first question is always: can you hear me in the back? Yes that's fine. Actually, a week ago I thought M

other

Nature was going to continue her shenanigans and that she would have to come next spring, but we made it. The title has a couple. of presuppositions about which I want to say something, it is about

other

cognitive

processes

, so the mind, like the metal systems, the mind, the brain, is supposed to be like everything else in the body, it is a modular system with dedicated subcomponents, subcomponents that have their own particular subcomponents. properties their own properties of growth and development and functioning and that they integrate with each other in the life of the organism and the modular approach to Mind assumes that mental systems are the same.

I think that's pretty uncontroversial, the other presupposition is controversial, is that

language

is one of those systems, when I talk about

language

and other

cognitive

systems, we assume that language exists as a separate system, not just some kind of accidental connection interaction of other systems. That's very controversial, in fact, that language existing in the sense that it can be an independent object of serious study is clearly a minority position and in fact has been for a century which is a bit strange when you think about it because in The surface seems completely obvious if you consider a newborn in baby let's say the baby faces William James' famous blooming and buzzing confusion and somehow and by the way it is not known, in fact, some have barely been studied because they are not known. has acknowledged that it is a problem, even though it is the baby. it somehow selects from this complex collection of unorganized data some subparts that are related to language, that's not easy to figure out how that happens, as I say, it's barely been studied, it's just starting to be studied now, so it selects the baby . it selects this from the environment reflexively of course, in fact we now know that that is happening even in the womb to some extent and then continues again almost reflexively so that U picks up the capabilities that you and I are using now and it does.

So with very little evidence, not only is the evidence scattered among other data, but for M much of what anyone knows, there is almost no evidence at all ranging from the meaning of the simplest words when you look at them closely to complex structures. interpretation and I'll give a couple of examples, but it's pretty clear, plus it's a unique human ability, so if a baby has a pet chimpanzee, a songbird, a kitten or anything that the animal can't, neither Even taking the first step, it cannot extract language-related data from the environment that is not due to defects or deficiencies or sensorimotor differences, even the auditory system of a chimpanzee is practically the same as the human auditory system, so similar that it has been recently discovered. it even selects for distinctive features, the types of sound features that play a role in language.

The chimpanzee's auditory system is somehow built to identify them specifically and the motor system doesn't really matter. I mean, people learn language perfectly well. Children learn language. In fact, normally, if they are exposed only to signs, not sounds, and if they use only sound signs, the course of development is virtually identical in quite remarkable ways, and in fact, Lang is what is sometimes called externalization. of language. through the sensory motor system appears to be independent of modality, uh, and of course apes have the same visual system, essentially the same capacity for motor action, even more developed in some respects than humans, so that's not It may be the problem it needs to be.

There is something about the internal computing system that is uniquely human, but despite all of these glaringly obvious facts, there is a kind of dogma that language simply cannot be a separate system, it has to just be a combination of others. common things, perhaps. for primates, uh, in fact, it's if you look comparatively at other organisms, the only known animal that even has any of the rudimentary properties of human language are certain types of songbirds and they're billions of years away. distance. In terms of evolutionary history, any similarity there has to be convergence, not common ancestry, so there is something very special about the language.

Also, it's fairly recent in the human line, there's really no evidence of its existence beyond 100,000 years ago, which it is. you know, in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms and many millions of years after the separation of the closest species, well, despite all this, which again is glaringly obvious, there is a kind of Doctrine, it's nice if you take it. votes and among cognitive scientists today almost everyone would agree with that, uh, that can't be true. I think it's an interesting case of denial of the obvious, so maybe psychologists want to have something to say, but it can be easily determined. of literature, uh, it goes back a long time too, so if we go back to the 1950s, when the kind of work I'm going to talk about, what's sometimes called the Generative Enterprise, when it was just starting out, actually was a couple of graduate students at Harvard, who didn't believe in any of that, they were very skeptical of the standard behavioral science concepts of the time at the time, the same view was widespread, so the leading philosopher, the most influential philosopher, had something to say about these things. was a very important philosopher at Harvard WV Quin and his conception, which was very influential and not only in the Cambridge area but also everywhere, was that language language is simply every language is just a tissue of sentences associated with each other. and with stimuli by the conditioned response mechanism, all this was within the framework of the radical behaviorism that prevailed at that time, it is a vision that is almost incoherent.

I mean, how can you even know if some of the behaviors are sentences unless there is a language-independent concept? but despite the consistency and complete lack of evidence, in fact there is a great deal of contrary evidence, this was a widely accepted view outside of linguistics related fields, there was no such thing as cognitive science at the time it was just beginning, In linguistics itself, a quite similar view is held to be a common standard view, which can be read in the most important literature of the time, was what was called the Boian view, named after the famous linguist anthropologist that France brag about whether he believed it or not is another story, but it was called The Boasian View, meaning that languages ​​can differ from each other in arbitrary ways and when you approach a new language to investigate you should do so without any preconceived ideas about what it is. which can be a language because they can all be completely different, actually that's the way it was taught to me in the late 1940s and early 1950s when I was a student and of course that would mean that in reality there is no language, it is something like anything that arises, uh, uh, later, there was in the philosophical tradition.

More modern philosophy, another standard view that developed while these practically remain, was no longer universal in the '60s and '70s, is beginning to change, but a view that came in was and in some ways developed also going back to currency and, in fact, with deep roots in the history of psychology is that any mental process, anything that cannot have a mental process at all unless it is accessible to Consciousness may not be conscious, but at least it has to be accessible. to Consciousness, that is a very widespread view in In fact, if you look back at the history of psychology, it is quite difficult to find anyone who questions it, even Freud talked about the unconscious, but if you read Freud carefully, he seems to have assumed which is not a model of clarity, but seems to have It was assumed that, in principle, Consciousness can access anything that is unconscious.

In fact, that is what underlies the practice of psychoanalysis. Try to bring things to Consciousness. It is very difficult. You could check it out to find someone who believed that the process, the mental

processes

, are thought planning processes. interpretation, etc., which may in fact be inaccessible to Consciousness, although I think the evidence is overwhelming that that is what they are almost completely and, in the case of language, almost completely, so it cannot be investigate a language through introspection. You can look at the data, but it's your own language, but it's as far away for you as it is for anyone else.

What's inside is fine. The approaches to language at that time were what was called procedural. There were certain data analysis procedures. you applied them to a corpus of material and you could rearrange the material and put it into an organized form, which again that's what Theoretical Linguistics was, in fact the main theoretical book was called Methods in Methods in Theoretical Linguistics in Structural Methods because that's everything there is. European Linguistics was about the same thing and again it has the same kind of framework of assumptions, it was deduced from this and it was believed that there can't be any real problem about language, there can't be any enigma because what you do is take data. and organizing them and unless you make a mistake or have the procedures wrong, it really can't be anything problematic, uh, it's, uh, there's a modern variant of this that, as I mentioned, overwhelmingly dominates the cognitive sciences.

I'll come back to that, since I say it is. a little strange for not only for exotic reasons but for the nature of what is obvious before our eyes, but there is nothing novel in that, that is how the sciences have developed, so, for example, for U, one of The great turning points in science were around the 17th century when scientists for the first time really allowed themselves to be puzzled about what seemed like very simple things, so that for thousands of years the greatest scientists had a simple answer to some fact. obvious. The obvious fact is that if I say I choose I take a cup of boiling water and put my hand on it.

If I remove my hand, the steam rises and if I release the cup, the cup falls. So why does the cup fall and the steam rise? There is an answer given by Aristotle. They are looking for their natural place and for thousands of years that was considered a satisfactory answer, modern science actually begins when Galileo and later others, they agreed, were able to convince themselves that there is something puzzling about why that happens and as soon as those questions arose. They started asking and investigating and it was quickly discovered that all of our intuitions about how these things work are simply false, intuition refers to drop rate and almost anything else simple, and it was at that point that it was discovered that what seemed obvious it wasn't actually understood at all it's at that point that modern science begins and that often hasn't happened yet in the human sciences things seem kind of obvious to us so we don't really question them, but if you can get stumped about them, you discover that we really don't understand anything.

Well, those are the two presuppositions I'm going to assume. It accepts both, that is, that the mind is modular like everything else in the biological world. in organisms and that language exists as a separate module uh this uh uh it really shouldn't be surprising that language and the human mind and intelligence must follow the biological norm, as I mentioned, language itself has very special properties. I'll mention a few of them and uh uh things that should have seemed puzzling are very puzzling and still are when you look closely and uh it's a very recent development if you look at the evolutionary record uh uh of course we don't have tape recordings. but there is a lot of archaeological evidence and the archaeological evidence for the existence of language implies that the existence of language is very modern, perhaps within 100,000 years or so and exclusive to humans, not found in the other branches of households, Neander THS, for example, who lived until perhaps 30,000 years ago, in fact we still have the underlying change, but it appears to be very specifically human, millions of years after this break with other organisms, there is now a huge literature, just in the last 20 years.

I am concerned about what is called language evolution, which in itself is a curious thing. The evolution of language is a very difficult topic to study. There is no direct evidence. There is no comparative evidence. No one knows where to look for neurological evidence. However, there are libraries full of books. about this, especially in the last 20 years, if you take much simpler topics, there is almost no literature on them, so let's say that the communication system of bees is quite complex, a few scattered articles, practically nothing about it, the reason is that it is understood to be too difficult. too difficult to study, I mean, the sciences can only study what is just at the limits of understanding, for bees, a study of the evolution of the systemof bee communication, which is quite complex, everyone knows the wag dance and that kind of thing.

It's much easier to study, I mean, there are about 500 species of bees, they have a lot of comparative evidence, they have different communication systems and some seem to have no communication system at all. They get along as well as each other, which raises some questions about what the function of those complicated systems is, but there is still plenty of comparative evidence that the brain is tiny, perhaps the size of a grass seed. neurons, tiny compared to the human brain, a very short gestation period, a couple of days, they can reproduce, etc., etc., you can do any experiment you want, if you want to take them apart, that's allowed, you don't need registration forms. consent or Ethical issues or something, so it's a perfect organism to study, and humans are impossible to study in all those dimensions and yet there is almost nothing about it because of the recognition among biologists, it's too difficult , on the other hand, the type of tcid.

The assumption that there really can't be much to language makes it a possible topic to study, if you don't know anything about language, and by the way, if you don't know, if you have rather fuzzy notions about evolution, there is a kind of a popular biology that is very widespread and that assumes that evolutionary change takes place in small steps and adds up and finally complex things happen, it was believed at one time not long ago, in fact, no one believes it anymore at this point, There is overwhelming evidence for what is called saltation, you know, sudden changes, and it is even understandable why this has been understood in the biological sciences since at least the 60s and 70s, when after the discovery of the regulatory mechanisms of the cells that govern the action of genes that govern the action of other genes, if you change the regulatory circuits a little bit, you get huge phenomenal differences, and now there are many examples of very small changes, genetic changes that lead to substantial differences in what is famous the organism.

In a discussion in the 1970s, Hob is one of the discoverers of these mechanisms. The Nobel Prize winner argued that if you could change its image, you could turn an elephant into a fly simply by changing the timing and organization of some regulatory circuits and that something cannot be proven yet, but similar smaller results have definitely been shown. , so the idea that everything has to happen in small steps is out the window. I could say that in the 1950s and 1960s also in biology it was generally assumed that organisms can vary arbitrarily, so the next organism you look at you have to approach it very differently from the others, without preconceived ideas, that's totally out of the window, so out of the window that at this point there are even proposals that are taken seriously. one from a molecular biologist at Boston University who says there may be a universal genome, meaning that all the complex metazoan organisms that come from the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago are fundamentally the same, they all have basically the same . genome with slight variations and that no longer seems exotic, it may not be true, maybe not, but it is not an exotic proposition given what is now known about the conservation of genes and genetic structures ranging from bacteria to humans and uh. uh Sim and deep homologies you know, very deep similarities in the way organisms come together uh I think the same goes for language, but it's much more controversial in this case, well, I'll give you some illustrations today.

I go back a couple of months. There was a review article in Science magazine, the flagship scientific weekly of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, written by a well-known neurocognitive neuroscientist at the MOX pla Institute in the Netherlands. He was reviewing several books on the evolution of language. in a sense he discarded most of them because they were contaminated by a false assumption, that is, the assumption that language is that language really exists, that is, that there are language-specific rule systems that determine the character of the systems. of sound, other externalization systems determine the structures and meanings of uh Expressions how they are interpreted and which cannot be uh violates the Dogma uh and indeed the uh To make the point, the editors added a photograph in the uh along with the article magazine that is a photograph of three babies, properly multiracial, it has to be politically correct, so, three babies that seem to be more or less paying attention to each other and the subtitle says, communication without synthesized text, without rules, so that shows that you can have communication without rules uh, you could have had a picture of three bacteria that would have made the same point clear, they also communicate without syntax uh, but behind this there is a fundamental dogma that is almost never questioned, although it is almost certainly false and that is, language is just a communication system, there are many reasons to believe that is not true, in fact, again, obvious reasons, if you just introspect, almost all of your language use , like 99% is internal, you can't go. for a minute without talking to yourself it takes a tremendous act of will to stop talking to yourself well that's obviously not communication that's thinking uh and that's almost all the use of language in fact it lasts all night unfortunate Ely but uh uh and even interaction like you know, interaction between people, parts of it are communication, but the larger parts are not, they just establish social relationships, whatever, yet this dogma is widely held and that leads to the assumption that you can understand something about language by looking at communication systems of other languages, that's what underlies all the work on language evolution.

If you take a look at this work, you will discover that it is not at all about the evolution of language, it is speculation, speculation, of course, about the evolution of communication to a quite different topic. not language uh and in fact language is used for communication but so is everything else that we do style of dress whatever and most of the language is not used language is only peripherally for communication but if you think about language as just being a communication system, so you can look at animal communication systems and you can see if you can draw some analogies or whatever, you can't really do much, but at least it's not ridiculous if you look at the properties of language, It's instantly ridiculous. even the ones that I just mentioned uh well the uh uh with respect to uh uh with respect to um statement there Al the title of the article by the way uh it's also revealing the title of the article has no social context question mark and what The point is to criticize the idea that you can study language without paying attention to the social context of its use.

In fact, if you're studying communication, that's true. It wouldn't make much sense to study communication without looking at the circumstances. of its use is close to topology, on the other hand, it is completely false from the study of mechanisms that enter into communication or that enter into other aspects of life and in other areas of cognitive sciences and biology that it is simply given for granted. For example, if you study the structure of the digestive system, you can do that, in fact, you do it without asking what happens when you have a Big Mac or something, in fact, you dismiss it, you try to abstract from it, uh, if you're studying. uh, in mental psychological systems there is very good work on, say, baby Elizabeth Spelly Renee's object recognition, but others, look, try to discover the mechanisms through experiments, uh, it's without social context, they're not interested , they do not look.

When two kids are playing, maybe you can, but that's peripheral. You try to abstract from that and conduct experimental studies in a refined situation where there is no social context. That's the way you automatically study it, like anything else in Science. Take one. Of the main discoveries in the study of perception, one of the most interesting principles that was discovered was that of Shimon Alman, what is called the rigidity principle. It's quite a surprising fact, it turns out that if a person is presented with tcop images, you know. points on a screen a few points maybe three or four points on a screen and you have several presentations of it what you see what you perceive is a rigid object in motion that is the structure you impose on the sequence of a few points on a screen is the principle of rigidity, which is a quite remarkable discovery, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the social context, they are not even real objects, these are cystoscopic images like most of the study of vision, and in fact, in In all the biological sciences, as in chemistry or physics, all this is taken for granted, but in the study of language and higher human mental processes something is considered wrong, it simply cannot be approached in the way of the sciences, so take just take concrete examples of these things along the way, so I won't write on the board, but it's simple enough that you can keep it in mind, so take a real sentence, let's say in English, uh, take the sentence uh, they wonder, uh, if they wonder if the mechanics fix the cars well and suppose you want to ask a question about how many cars there were, you can say how many cars they wondered if the mechanics fixed let's suppose you want to ask the same question about the mechanics, then it comes out uh How many mechanics do you wonder if they fixed the cars right?

If there's clearly something wrong with it, you can't say it has a perfectly good meaning, that's fine, but you just can't express it in language and that generalizes widely, there are underlying principles that extend to all sorts of other constructions, but what? Did you have to study that in a social context or in a communication condition? Could it possibly be learned? I mean, did you have evidence that you're not allowed? say that or you can't say it, uh, of course not, I mean this is something like the principle of rigidity, it is a property of the system that, if you are willing to reach the stage of, for example, Galileo, if you want enter modernity. science, you should be puzzled, uh, and it's a typical example.

Countless examples of that type and any of them illustrates the fact that if you want to understand something about the properties of language, you will have to study it in the same way as Sciences. they are pursued even in cognitive science in other domains, but that is contrary to dogmas, well, what developed from this is, in modern cognitive science, a very strange concept of scientific research, not true, let's say , the study of VI. Vision like that of Aon Omen and others, uh, but it is true for uh comp, especially computational cognitive sciences, which have the merit that the proposals are clear enough that you can investigate them, they are not just hand gestures , you know, everything happens.

Like other primates, they actually have models that you can research, which is good and what you can show is that they fail 100% completely and it makes no difference because they succeed in terms of a new conception of science that dominates the computational cognitive. Science, the idea that science is a matter of developing models that more or less approximate the data, generally basic methods of statistical analysis and basic methods have the nice property that, whatever the data, you can find the basic analysis that fits them. you just have to fix the selection of the right backgrounds, etc., etc., they don't fit exactly, but you get close, uh, this is never done in the sciences, for example, if someone is studying, let's say communication B, you know, Let's say the movement dance of some. species of bees, they don't proceed by taking video tapes, massive video tapes of swarms of bees and then doing a statistical analysis of them, you know, basic analysis, from which you can get a pretty good prediction of what will happen next time There's absolutely no point in being scientists, and rightly so, if you apply for an NSF grant to study it, you'll be laughed at, on the other hand, if you apply for an NSF grant to do the same thing with the Corpus, a collection of spoken language that Understand it right away, that's considered very sophisticated or say physics, uh, if you try to study Physics, you don't take videotapes of what's going on outside the window, you know, the leaves are flowing, etc., and You analyze them and you know them quite well.

It's a huge collection, you get a pretty good prediction of what will happen tomorrow when you look out the window, a prediction that is much better than any physics can give you, in fact they can't give you any prediction and they don't give it to you. I care, but the sciences are just not done that way, the only things that are done that way are particular branches of computer science and other cognitive sciences that deal with the higher mental faculties, language in particular, and there is a criterion for success, hecriterion. The key to success is that you get a little bit better every time you have more data, you know more complicated basic analyses, more sophisticated methods, and you get a little bit closer to the data, as I say in any other domain, this would just be ridiculed, but it's the Criterion. of success in the novel approach of computational cognitive science, you can find it in all the major journals all the time, but only for language, not even for something as close to language as, say, a numerical calculation, so, for For example, let's say you want to study.

The quite interesting fact, in fact, it is a very surprising and puzzling fact that all humans have the ability to perform numerical calculations, they understand the number system, which, by the way, is a fact that baffled scientists who They created the modern theory of evolution, Darwin and Wallace, were kind of surprised by the fact that all humans who didn't experiment with this simply recognized that it was true that all humans have understood the number system, which is very surprising. from their point of view because it could not have been selected, it has barely been used in the entire history of humans, a small group of humans, mostly quite modern and still small, do you know that they made use of this system? but for most of human history, in fact, most humans in their time never used it at all.

They could handle small numbers, but so could apes and they could handle what is called numerosity, you know, knowing that 100 things is more than 80 things, but not the particular characteristics of the digital number system, you know the principles of multiplication or addition, etc. ., where does it come from? A big enigma for them if he wasn't selected, how is he there? In fact, Darwin and Wallace had a dispute over the co-founders of the theory of evolution. Wallace argued that there must be some principle in evolution other than natural selection to explain this mystery and Darwin disagreed with that, but he had no alternative suggestions. remains a mystery, has remained a mystery to the present, the likely answer that we can now begin to perceive is that if we look at the actual mechanisms of language, if there is ever a time, I can get to them or something about them, but if you understand it, if you look closely it turns out that if you radically simplify them, they actually produce the number system, so it's very likely that the number system just takes advantage of the language if you have a language, however, that evolved, uh you just get the number system as a gift by simplifying the language, actually reducing the Lexicon, the collection of words to one element, then basic computational principles give you a model of the number system which may very well be where it comes from.

Which, if true, would overcome the mystery. Well, um, let's get on with this. I will return to Enfield again, his useful collection of standard beliefs. He maintains that language does not exist because it is completely based on a constellation of cognitive abilities that each person has. taken separately it also has other functions, so it exists in the sense that, say, the current climate exists. I mean, yes, it exists, but it's not a subject of scientific study, it's just a constellation of other factors that operate independently and the argument is that that's true. There is not a particle of evidence for this in language, but it is held almost universally in the cognitive sciences, not entirely but very broadly, and in fact, as soon as you look at the simplest thing, you see that it cannot be true, for example, childhood acquisition. from the language uh or the only example I mentioned U how is that a constellation?

How can that? How can what you know about it derive from the interaction of other cognitive processes? And if so, how and if someone makes this proposal in Las Ciencias at least? They would be expected to give some evidence of this. Look at some simple cases, but not in cognitive science, just wave your hand. Name a well-known thesis in the study of language acquisition and one of the main figures. in the field is Michael Thomas C. Those of you in the field are familiar with this and your view is that language is just a structured inventory of linguistic constructs acquired by processes common to primates and others that are somewhat obscure, so there are interrogative constructions and passive constructions and you just acquire them, they could be any other way, you know, they're kind of accidental this way and there's nothing more to say about them.

He also notes that it would have to be finite, obviously it is not finite. Language is limitless, so how does it become? infinity well that's just more hand gestures uh uh getting back to Enfield talking about the evolution of the system, he says that there are well developed gradualist evolutionary arguments to support the conclusion that there is no such thing as language except as a complex of independent cognitive processes. the gradualist notion is a reflection of the mythology about evolution that still remains outside of biology, so I am in evolutionary biology, everyone knows that is false, but outside the field, even as close as that of neuroscience cognitive, it is still assumed that somehow everything has to be gradualist.

It's well known that that's not true, but it's something you learn in high school and people believe it. In Science he is also particularly bothered by what he calls the cist argument and it is cist that the transition from finite to infinite. was not gradualist, so natural language is clearly infinite, there is no limit to the number of expressions you can in principle produce and understand, just as there is no limit to the collection of triples of numbers XYZ, where Z is the product of X and Y. and in principle, if you had enough time and energy etc., you could calculate it well.

The language is the same. So how do you go from finite to infinite? The fact that that is saltation, not gradual, is as controversial as the fact that 2 + 2. equals 4 there is no logically possible alternative, it has to be exultation, but the fact that it is is incompatible with gradualist conceptions Now in a rational field when you have some conception and you have something that shows that it is logically impossible, you abandon the conception but in a field that is dominated by dogmas, many of them ancient dogmas, what is done is to deny the record of the facts even if they are just logical truths and that, unfortunately, is quite common.

Well, what do we really know about the evolution of language? Not much in fact, but the little that is known is very suggestive. One thing we know, which is somewhat surprising if you are willing to be surprised by simple things, is that all humans have the same capacity for language, now all humans do. It hasn't been studied, but many language groups have been studied and there are no known group differences, there are individual differences but they are found in all groups, so for example if you take a baby from a tribe in, say, Papuan New Guinea, he hasn't had contact with other humans for, you know, tens of thousands of years, uh, and you bring him to Boston, his son is raised here, he'll be just like you, same language abilities, same cognitive abilities, will become a quantum physicist and vice versa, if we take a baby from here we put it in Pap Guinea, the same thing happens and, in fact, as far as is known, there are very marginal or no differences between human groups in cognitive abilities, just as than in linguistics. capabilities, they are so small that, if they exist, you can't find them with current methods, as marginal at best, well, humans, we all descend from a fairly small group that left Africa maybe 50,000 years ago, something like that and what that What it means is that for the last 50,000 years there has been zero Evolution, none, there has been change, but the change is not Evolution, you know, or the fact that we are different from hunter-gatherers in our cultures and size and everything else. , those are signs of change but not evolution, if there is evolution, they are very superficial things like, for example, skin color and hair length, things like that, but not in fundamental human capacities, so anyone can I mean, that's 50,000 years without any evolution, which is amazing, that means that whatever because the language, whatever evolved, was a little bit rigid, it never changed again, you know, of course, languages ​​differ, but that's not evolution, that's just something else, like the Norman conquest.

It changed English enormously, it made it somewhat like French, but that is not the evolution of languages. changing the way they say it because of the effect of teenage slang or something that has a very big effect on language change, it's not evolution, it's just changes that take place within a fixed system and the system seems to be quite rigid for 50 at least 50,000 years. If you go back about 50,000 years, you simply find no evidence that language existed. The evidence and paleoanthropologists commonly accept that at some point in that narrow window there was something that Jared Diamond sometimes called a Great Leap Forward, there is a short period in which there is a sudden explosion of complex artifacts complex social structures uh uh Symbolic behavior representational art Calculation of astronomical events such as the phases of the moon, etc. uh all of this happened at least in the archaeological record in a very short period, maybe about 75,000 years ago you can double the numbers if you want or triple them and nothing much changes it's because these numbers are so small that from an evolutionary point of view they don't matter and again, that's millions of years after the separation of another organ. other surviving organisms uh well, that seems pretty clear and is very suggestive about the nature of language uh a critical property of language crucial property uh in fact the central property of language is that every language consists at its root of some mechanism called a generative process, a mechanism that constructs an infinite range of structured expressions that have interpretations in two systems, two interfaces that are called the sensory motor system, you know, to make noises or signals or whatever, and thinking systems to plan the interpretation , etc. of these structured expressions has to be assigned to those two systems.

That and it's unlimited, like I said, and it's also digital, like numbers, like there's a five-word sentence, a six-word sentence, there's no five and a half word sentence and it goes on indefinitely as long as you have patience, time. and so on, and practically everything that is produced is really novel in your own experience, perhaps in the history of the language because the size of these sets is so astronomical that you keep producing new Well, things, that is the most basic property of the language, now they start around 1950 and generative processes like that were understood from a mathematical point of view, they really hadn't been in the past, but you know, algorithms, they're called or you know what type. of program that you can write for your laptop, let's say that these things began to be understood and understood quite well, so it was possible to ask what kind of generative process could have these properties, well, how could such a thing realize that it is So? became apparent given the limited evolutionary evidence, it must have happened quite suddenly, it's a very brief window, so presumably what happened it's hard to think of an alternative is that in some small group these are Hunter Collect societies, they remember like 100 people or something like that in some small group, wandering around Africa somewhere, some individual suffered a slight mutation that led to a small rewiring of the brain that provided a generative procedure.

Now mutations take place in individuals, not groups, so it would have been one person who was lucky enough or maybe. I was unlucky enough to suffer this mutation and that mutation provided a gender, a generative procedure, but remember it was a person, therefore there is no possibility of communication. If this generative procedure produced structures that were linked to pre-existing conceptual systems that that individual might think they could. plan, he could be interinterpreted, etc., that presumably produces some selection advantage. A mutation can be transferred to offspring, usually at least partially, and that means that over time there could have been enough people in this small group for someone to have.

I came up with the idea that it might be useful to outsource it to map this internal system into something that can be perceived by others, maybe a sound, maybe a signal, you know, maybe tactile, whatever is fine, that process of externalization is very complicated. internal system that developed notice it would not have had selective pressures it could not have done it it is something that happened internally therefore it would have developed solely in terms of a natural law it would be something like a snowflake simply takes a perfect shape because there is no external pressures on it, so you would expect an internal system to develop that is like a snowflake, perfect in a sense and since theseThey are systems of computational systems, which would presumably mean is that it is computationally efficient and meets the perfect conditions. of computational complexity, well, enough is known about computational complexity to set fairly strict conditions on what it might be like, so what we would predict if we were investigating language is that there is an internal system, uh, perfect in a sense that is as computationally efficient as such a system can be uh, which connects the two interfaces, one of them, the interface, the mapping of thought systems again has no external forces acting on it, so it should be perfect too and also in variant. uh, it wouldn't change because there are no pressures, on the other hand, the mapping of the sensory motor system is quite complex.

The sensory motor system has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, pretty good evidence for that, and it had nothing to do with the internal system. system, so finding the connection between the internal system and the data produced by the sensorimotor system is a complex cognitive problem and can be expected to be solved in many different ways and indeed that is the task we face. For every baby, a baby gets some input from the sensory-motor system and has to figure out how to map it onto what might well be a virtually invariant and perhaps perfectly designed internal system of syntax and sematics and, as far as we know, one of obvious enough, You know overwhelmingly, yo, the facts about language are becoming better and better established as they go.

The research continues is that while externalizing systems vary enormously and are quite complex, the internal system, syntax and sematics seem almost invariant, which is to be expected because there is very little evidence for them, they look a lot like that example I found. You have almost no evidence for it, so they must follow rigid principles that exist because they are computationally efficient and may not have changed for say 75,000 years. You name it, they certainly haven't changed for 50,000 years. Well, when you study a language, what do you study, you study externalization, you learn the sounds, you learn the arbitrary meaning of words.

The association is not entirely arbitrary, but something like that, you learn irregular verbs, you learn word order, things like that, those are all parts of externalization. On the one hand, you do not learn the syntax and semantics sem, on the one hand no one can teach it to you because it is barely understood, on the other hand, you already know it, it is part of your nature and the same applies to the child acquiring a language that is more or less these are the The general facts that we observe fit this story quite well, this image and U seem to be the direction in which linguistic research should go and is internal to what is called the Generative Enterprise, but it's quite separate from the beliefs and doctrines in the cognitive sciences, especially the computational cognitive sciences, uh.

And I emphasize again that it's kind of a harsh judgment and I don't have time to talk about it, that there are literally no results in computational cognitive science with respect to language, it's a huge literature, but if you look closely, the only results are in terms of this novel concept of scientific research that I mentioned that has to do with comparing data that is not known in any other field, even in cognitive psychology, well, there is a lot to say about this, but it's getting late, so let me make one last point: any computational system, whatever it is, has to have some sort of computational atoms, you know, minimal elements that are operated by computational principles, let's say, any system that you program for your laptop, uh , any. computational procedure, so it has to be true for language, those are more or less a word-like first approximation, not really, so we can take words as a first approximation to be minimal atomic elements, well, where do they come from? ?

Here is something else that one should be puzzled about, how? They are words related to the external world, a word such as cow, person, table, river RI or any person you choose. There is a dogma about this, as with most things related to language. The dogma is what is called the referentialist dogma. A child learns the word cow because he sees a cow and someone says cow and an association is established between the cow and the word and that is the meaning of the word again the simplest investment research shows that this is totally false it is interesting it is quite true because it may be completely true for animal communication, every known animal communication system consists of atoms, a finite number of them, of course, which, for example, are linked to particular mind-independent events, events that a physical could describe, for example, a monkey, a vervent monkey. may have said five calls uh one of them is us, we call it a warning call is connected to the leaves moving on the trees verit see The leaves moving the trees emit this carbon and other verit flee uh or or it could be that I'm hungry You know, some hormonal change that is identifiable and, as far as is known, that's what animal communication systems are like, is completely false to human language, there are no mind-independent properties, properties that can be identified by a physicist and that They correlate with the words. and constitute their meanings, what they refer to, in fact, the meanings of words really just provide types of perspectives, cognitive perspectives that you can employ to discuss and refer to the world, there is no time to give examples, but it is literally true.

It's true for almost everything, in fact this was understood quite well in the 17th and 18th centuries, there's been some interesting work on it, it's mostly been forgotten, well that poses a very serious problem, on the one hand, It's a problem of where these things come from, how they get in. it must be that they are internal all children know them you don't learn them you can't learn them very complex when you look at them they are invariant they are about whether they are different in various languages ​​very minor differences uh and how they evolved, that is a total mystery, in fact, a mystery so deep that it is quite possible that there will never be an idea of ​​it.

Well, let me stop there, we would like to thank Professor Chovsky very much for this opportunity to come speak for us tonight and we will open the floor for some questions, so if you would like to raise your hand, I can give you the microphone. If he has any questions, thank you teacher, my name is Frank. over here sorry right here how are you uh you talked about how you were critical of what you call gradualism in evolution you were critical of what you called gradualism in evolution and how people think it happened slowly over time and then you talked about how 50,000 years ago compared to now we have changed relatively little eh, I was just curious how that works, they seem like contradictory ideas to me.

I was just curious what you meant by that, why, why, why nothing changed in 50,000 years, well, you said We really haven't changed much, yeah, but then, uh, I feel like that's evidence of gradualism and I feel that you criticized gradualism against gradualism, it goes against gradualism, yes, yes, you know, there are just constant evolutionary changes, small changes. On the other hand, why should it have stopped somewhere before 50,000 years ago if what happened in human cognition is that some rigid system developed suddenly for reasons having to do with a natural law, a rewiring mutation of the computational complexity of the brain, etc., but then?

There is no reason to expect it to change, perhaps it will change one day with another mutation, but there is no reason to expect small changes, so this does not prove that the evolution of U is not gradual, it is simply consistent with the view that it is. is. We don't know anyway, any other questions, thank you professor for the generous talk from him, I just had a kind of reflection, so I was interested in a comment he made about the type of conscious and non-conscious. The processes and how the kind of functional aspect of the proposal is more or less non-conscious, whereas there is a kind of conscious component that is like our lived experience every day, that we are not going to be able to introspect. this functional system, so I was wondering, rather from a philosophical point of view, not how exactly we are supposed to think about phenomenal experience and the kind of conscious experience in terms of its relation to functional relations like you, specifically, your linguistic proposal, but also, um, others.

Domain specific proposals like uh perception um, there are those who don't believe that perception is, you know, module um modular or domain specific that is embedded or anything like that, so I'm wondering if you had any proposals um. Thoughts on this type of um. Investigate now and how this relates to our phenomenal lived experience. Well, let's take visual perception, which is relatively uncontroversial, and let's take the one example I gave, the rigidity principle. Okay, when you look at that sequence of tachistoscopic presentations, you perceive. a rigid object in moving MO, you can't help but perceive that that's what you perceive, period, what are actually the stimuli that actually reach your eyes, your retina are just a series of just three or four presentations in a Toyos reach, you know, a screen with lights, uh, uh, each of which has several points, well, you have no way of introspecting that your phenomenal experience is a rigid moving object, but the stimuli that hit the retina They are a very small number. from uh previous presentations of some points where you can't introspect that, in fact, that's why it's a discovery, you know, it's like the discovery of the chemical structure of coal, you know, carbon or something where you can't uh introspect So phenomenal descriptions you know are useful, but they're useful as data, they tell you very little about what's going on, so it's like everything else in the world where you have data but it doesn't tell you much. about what is happening, that requires, that is why you have to take courses in physics and chemistry, etc., you know, because the data is not transparent and it is difficult for people to deal with it, but the same goes for our conscious lives.

We tend to take it for granted that you know it's normal that we can understand everything about ourselves, in fact we don't understand anything about ourselves, it's even harder than understanding how chemistry works because it's so much more. complex and that's the crucial step that the human sciences haven't really taken yet, for the most part, that was taken in the natural sciences around the 17th century. Just the willingness to be puzzled about things that seem obvious like what could be more. It's obvious that if I let go of a low cup instead of going up, well, you know, Galilea was willing to be mystified about that, that's why you take physics courses, uh, before that, everything had to tell you how things were going . its natural place and it is a great psychological step even when studying the external world, even greater when studying ourselves because there we feel that we know everything that is conscious must be what there is and in philosophy modern philosophy is kind In principle, It turned out that it was John Surl who I was quoting, but it is a widely accepted principle that nothing can be a mental process unless it is accessible to Consciousness, and as I mentioned, if you look through intellectual history, it is very difficult to find anyone who has gone From this point of view, okay, we'll take some time for one more question because it's getting late and someone here had raised their hand.

Yes, teacher. You mentioned the problems behind referential dogma. Would you say we are in a? If we reject that, are we in a situation where Quin may put us with forgiveness? Sorry, are we in a situation similar to Quin's translation indeterminacy? Would you say that's where we stay? Well, Quin accepted the Dogma, but that's it. It's not surprising because I do it today too, yes, his idea, his doctrine of indeterminacy was actually based on assuming this, so if you take his framework that there is nothing but association and conditioning, how do you know how to take his example? uh, when you hear a word, let's say rabbit, this is the case when a CH child hears the word rabbit, how does he know that the word refers to uh, that animal running, sorry and not to some part of the animal because if you see The animal that runs around its paw is also running, so how does the child know that it is not the paw and how does he not really know that the word does not refer to some disconnected object like the paw of this one and that of another? and so on, that is a standard problem of induction, it is Hume's problem of induction and, as Hume understood it, but his successors do not seem to understand, there is no way to solve that problem.

Hume himself, contrary to what you can learn in a philosophy course, was a rationalist, not an Empiricist, he took it for granted and I say that the only way to solve the problem of induction is through what he calls animal instinct, which means there must be some structureinternal in your mind that leads you to a particular answer because there is no way. get it by induction and I think that's right and I think the same thing could be true about the Gava guy of the coin, you know, rabbit, uh, the kid gets the right answer because he's designed to get the right answer and the right answer is It's not a uh, in the case of, say, a rabbit, you can easily show that what a child understands as a rabbit is not something physically identifiable, uh, like guessing your ages, but let's say my grandchildren were probably about your age. when they were kids.

U the story that they liked a little donkey named Sylvester and someone you know, the little donkey somehow turns into a rock and for the rest of the story he tries to convince his parents that it's not a rock, it's their little donkey and , like children's stories always end. Happily something happens and he ends up being a little donkey again and everyone is happy, but the interesting fact is that all the kids understand that that thing that has all the physical properties of Iraq is actually Sylvester and the reason is that this was in John Lock noted that people and indeed animals are individuated by properties like Psy's psychic continuity, okay, same thing if there is some psychic continuity, it doesn't matter how you change physically.

I mean, that's the standard fairy tale, you know, you know, the evil witch becomes. the handsome prince in a frog and he has all the properties of a frog until the beautiful princess comes and kisses the frog and he is a beautiful witch, the handsome prince again, well all the children know that he is always the prince because has ownership of Psy. Psychic continuity actually a lot of science fiction is based on this, but it's true even in children's stories. Well, that alone immediately tells you that, uh, uh, what? Individual objects are not a collection of physical properties, but a complex mental structure that we impose on them as psychic continuity and uh hum, I didn't think about that block , actually I did, but uh uh, I should say that humans recognized that it was true that we don't.

It does not identify words by physical properties, but they are found throughout the collection of words. You can't find such a simple word that doesn't have those properties. In reality, in Natural Sciences what you try to do is invent concepts that do have them. you have those properties so when you invent the concept U say U you know electron or something that you intend to be physically identifiable you don't want its meaning to change because of what's in your head you know that's the point so it's kind of a norm for the sciences, but it's not true for human language and that goes back to quin's example, the solution to his problem is essentially hum's hum's solution to the problem of induction, there is no solution except that you are made to choose things to structure them. the world in a certain way, so that's the way to do it right.

Thank you very much professor for giving us an insight into your area of ​​expertise. We would like to present you with a small token of our gratitude. We would love to have it. Come back anytime, so ladies and gentlemen, Professor Nom Chomsky, thank you very much, thank you, thank you.