Yeah, Dan Everett managed a few good years of self-promotion via his Piraha/"I have disproved Chomsky" thing but it really hasn't amounted to much. IE, 14 years later, Everett's claims about the Piraha remain unproven and pretty much hinge on him being the primary translator of it. Notice that wikipedia descriptions of Piraha are essentially descriptions of what Everett says about it.
I saw him give a talk about Pirahã and recursion in 2007 or 2008, and his argument depended entirely on data that he collected and translated.
Pointing that out made him really defensive; understandable, perhaps, but recursion has been found in literally every other language in the world. You can't be that surprised when people have serious reservations an argument that hinges on the validity of a tiny data set from a language that only you understand.
I stopped paying attention after that, though. Maybe there's other people doing work on it now.
Yeah. Possibly a black swan knowledge (every swan is white until a black one is found much later) but can't be accepted as valid until someone else verified it.
Doesn't matter if some specific language lacks recursion. UG refers to a capacity of the human mind: if it happens to be the case that there is some language which does not feature recursion, that does not show that humans do not have that capacity. Just like how if there was a person somewhere who had grown up in isolation and never learned a language wouldn't show anything about UG.
"Chomsky has replied that he considers recursion to be an innate cognitive capacity that is available for use in language but that the capacity may or may not manifest itself in any one particular language"
which makes me wonder - do they show an innate understanding of the concepts when it is discussed with them.
The langauge could lack recursion but still be powerful enough to express what recursion is (just like English doesnt have pitch accent, but you can discuss pitch accent in Emglish).
Alternatively, someone who speaks Piraha natively could learn English and discuss about this concept in English.
Could he teach it to the children? If not it would start to seem like an argument that members of the tribe lacked mental faculties that the rest of humanity display (unless severely disabled) and for me would really call his claims into doubt without a lot of research from multiple sources.
I mean, this is the whole point of linguistic determinism, the concept under discussion here. These folks believe that our ability to think in recursive terms (as is necessary when dealing with numbers) is acquired through language.
I don't really believe it, and most linguists haven't since the early 20th century, but that's the claim he made.
A young missionary spends several decades living among and learning the language of a remote Amazon tribe.
He finds that his interest in languages and linguistics exceeds that of spreading Christianity and makes a career change.
Then, either
A) He realizes that he’s the only one who speaks this language and concocts a scheme to seek fame and fortune by falsely claiming it contradicts the leading theory of linguistics because no one can prove him wrong. Mwahaha!
Or
B) As he learns about linguistic theories, he realizes that the language he learned as a missionary contradicts the leading theory of linguistics. This is academically interesting, so he writes a paper and gives talks describing what he found.
While A is certainly possible, it seems B is more likely.
Is there a term for this sort of fallacious argument? It's based on "either this person is a liar or what they're saying must be true". The third, not mentioned possibility, is that a person can fool themselves.
And if you're talking the scientific investigation of complex phenomena like language, fooling one's self is common. Indeed, unless a researcher is using tremendous care, their chance of at least partly fooling themselves is very high.
Scientific processes and checks and balances exist because of this. That Everett essentially ignored these and primarily argued his case in the press leads me being very dubious of him. But this still doesn't he's a "liar", that he believes what he claims is plausible but doesn't change anything else.
It's like the "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" argument used by the likes of C.S. Lewis to argue that Jesus Christ is, in fact, the son of God or otherwise just terrible all-around.
I remember growing up as an Evangelical Christian, I felt this argument was pretty decent. But eventually I came to realize that the argument hinges on the assumption that you can't be both a 'lunatic' in one part of your life, and functional or even an admirable person in other parts of your life.
Which of course is a silly assumption. The world is filled with genius crackpots, do-gooders who sucked in other parts of life, or people who are highly successful in one area and utter failures in other areas.
Yes, that Lewis argument immediately came to mind.
It's notable also the way Lewis cites honest people attesting to miracles, with again the false dichotomy that either the miracles happened as they described or the people were liars, when we have already a multitude of examples of honest, intelligent people thinking they've seen something that they haven't.
It is known as a false dichotomy, and it is extremely common.
A true dichotomy would be more along the lines of: he is right or he is wrong.
Of course all possibilities subdivide, if he is wrong he is knowingly wrong and a liar or he made mistakes and too grandiose claims. Even if he is right, he could be right for the wrong reasons: his conclusions could be unsupported by his premises & evidence but still correct.
Yeah, I hear ya... of course there are degrees of in-between. In the article and the comments here, however, the tone of the criticisms of this guy and his ideas (e.g. "managed a few good years of self-promotion") seem weirdly personal and harsh.
That may be my bias as a very casual reader who isn't particularly invested in linguistic theories. (I certainly like Chomsky's social/political criticisms.)
Yep, a somewhat related example is how statistical analysis of Mendel's seed data [1] revealed that some bias crept in because its too perfect. In Mendel's case he was right about the genetics of inheritance (and the bias likely unconscious), which goes to show even when we're dedicated to the truth our capacity for self-deception exists.
Irrespective of Pirahã, I still think Chomsky and anyone who agrees with him are wrong. Yes, he's come up with some useful abstractions and has identified, articulated and put into models ubiquitous features in human languages and cultures, but for him or anyone else to make universal claims... It seems arrogant and ridiculous to say the least.
I think you’re missing the context. Clearly we have evolutionary structures that provide a language affordance. We can see the manifestation of similar, less complex such structures in other vertebrate species.
Chomsky says there are universal, physiologically-based manifestations which are universal across humans. That is not really demonstrates but would not be surprising any more than the universality of the human visual system (as well as individual variation).
He claims to have identified some such universals, and that they are relatively high level. THAT is a bold claim, hard both to verify or falsify. But in principle not absurd.
I don’t believe it, but I no longer mock him with the phrase “grammar gland”. There is some insight there.
I buy it to an extent. But what gives me pause: When we compare the early stages of the visual system of animals we see striking similarities to neural networks we train on visual data. The detectors in the artificial neural network converge to detect the same kinds of features found in the biological network. In other words the structure that we find in the networks comes from the data.
We can also see this when brain areas are recruited for tasks they were not specifically designed for. For instance visual processing areas can be recruiited for other tasks in the blind.
So while there is specialisation in brain tissue, rather than there being circuits designed at a low level for certain cognitive tasks, it is more that the connectivity and kinds of neurons within an area are tuned to excel at a specific class of problems.
It is softer and more diffuse organ than a "grammar gland". Rather it is a kind of soil within the mind that permits the growth of certain kinds of cognitive structures. Rather than being computer like and existing prior to the input of data, it is merely a capability expressed by the tuning of an overall system.
Chomsky's universals in this view become rather less important. It is merely the statement that brain tissue is tuned in such a way that it encourages, among other things, certain specific kinds of linguistic structure.
It's similar to noticing that the human hand is good stirring soup and then describing it as a soup stirring organ. Yes the hand has properties that allow it to be easily used as a soup stirring organ, but those same properties make it useful for some other things as well.
> So while there is specialisation in brain tissue, rather than there being circuits designed at a low level for certain cognitive tasks, it is more that the connectivity and kinds of neurons within an area are tuned to excel at a specific class of problems.
Hasn't there been a lot of recent work showing similar circuits between songbirds and humans that seem to have independently evolved?
I thought the way Chomsky means it, "ubiquitous" and "universal" are the same thing. He isn't saying it's impossible for some aliens to develop a different sort of language. He's just claiming that all human languages share some properties, and those properties are genetically determined. It might be incorrect, but it doesn't seem arrogant and ridiculous. Plenty of human mental qualities are genetically determined across cultures, like reactions to a sweet taste or the sight of a snake-looking thing, so why not language?
I'm not the one making claims about universal laws governing human languages and cultures. Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary, in your face, irrefutable evidence. I'm simply saying that to me the whole notion of it seems intuitively nonsensical and the "evidence" provided appears to amount to not much more than armchair philosophizing. But I'm not a linguist ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (though I'm sure there are plenty of actual linguists who also disagree with Chomsky)
Yes, it's worse, you are making completely unsupported claims about universal laws governing human knowledge, you are claiming Chomsky is wrong because he's making universal statements which is itself an universal epistemological statement. Do some more armchair philosophizing, it will do you good.
"Universal laws about human language and culture are impossible"
Ah, but the above is a universal law, so it's self refuting!
Therefore, universal laws about human language are possible.
Checkmate, skeptics!
Anyone who actually thinks that is not just uncharitable, unproductively pedantic and arguing semantics, they're also wrong.
But OK, to satisfy them, we could say that, yes, universal laws about human language are indeed possible, and there is one such law. Let's label it "The Universal Law About Human Language".
It states
"The only universal law about human language is that there are no universal laws about human language (other than The Universal Law About Human Language)"
It even has recursion! (pun intended) So I guess us skeptics will also have to admit defeat that recursion is in fact universal...
You seem to think epistemology is trivial for some reason? Also why do you think universal laws about human language would be impossible, so far you haven't talked about why at all ...
I don't think it's trivial, I just think it's often applied in an unproductive and straight up incorrect way, devolving any discussion into uncharitable, pedantic, needless and pointless arguing about semantics.
I would happily grant there are more laws about human language. You could come up with all kinds of pointless truisms like "human languages facilitate communication" etc. No reasonable person would find much point in coming up with or debating "laws" like that. (but I'm sure there are plenty of "epistemologists" and "philosophers" who could debate them in minute detail until the end of time)
But Chomsky isn't claiming obvious truisms - he's claiming fairly detailed laws about universal grammar (and fairly detailed means through which they derive)
Critics point out such fairly strong claims need fairly strong, in your face evidence. The onus is on Chomsky to provide it. You don't get to turn around and shift the burden of proof on the critics and start arguing nonsense about how criticism of Chomsky's claims are "self refuting" or what have you.
Intuitively, at least to me, human languages and cultures don't lend themselves to universal laws. And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws. You could just say "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models" without claiming universality.
That is exactly the major insight from Chomsky - that it's wrong to think about language the way you are.
Language is a human capacity, so in fact there MUST be universal laws that govern it (to be more specific, this is true of human languages; aliens could have entirely different languages, but for any particular alien species, there will have to be some laws of the structure of that species' language).
How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense.
That is not to say that the laws that Chomsky has identified must be correct. He could even be wrong about searching for universal laws at the level of grammar. But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
I disagree. There's a strong desire from a western scientific mindset that everything be possible to reduce and turned into laws and models, but that doesn't mean everything works like that. It's putting the cart before the horse.
> How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense.
This is just armchair philosophizing, reminds me a lot of "praxeology". And even if it was true, which I don't believe at all, that doesn't mean that he or anyone else can successfully identify and articulate them.
> But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
I don't see that at all and while I happily admit I'm not a linguist I'm sure there are countless actual linguists who would agree Chomsky is a bit of an emperor with no clothes.
Not at all. I think Chomsky's claims and using armchair philosophizing to support them are fundamentally unscientific. You can't argue things into existence. It's empty rhetoric, not actual science.
> How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations?
Why should there be a predetermined law? I have never understood this argument and no, I don't "see that the alternative actually makes no sense". I would like to see some facts that support it, something its followers have failed to delivered for how many decades now?
To be clear, the alternative to having a pre-determined structure for language is that any sound or gesture you see/hear coming from ypur parents as a small child could potentially cary semantic meaning. Also, any characteristic of that spund or gesture (pitch, length, order, frequency, loudness, correlation with other events, time of day etc) could encode that meaning. Even once you somehow identify words as being the relevant part, you still have to identify how words relate to each other - the way order of wrods matters, the way order of sentences matters etc.
All of this ends up with a huge combinatory explosion of possible ways to assign meaning to language, requiring a huge amount of examples and counter examples to actually learn a human language. Just look at the training corpuses of something like GPT-X to see the amount of information that is required to learn elements of a human langauge if you start without any assumptions.
However, we know for a fact that human children get many orders of magnitude less examples of languahe use before learning a language - far too little to actually rule out all other possible structures if they had started with 0 assumptions.
Adding to this, there are certain elements of language structure that are not commonly thought about that happen to work identically in all natural languages that have been studied, sucha s the fact that order of words in a sentence matters, or the way certain words are omitted when constructing embedded sentences (e.g. 'can eagles that fly swim?' always having 'can' refer to 'swim', never 'fly').
It has been shown that the input that small children receive is much much larger than originally thought by the proponents of that theory. How parents stress certain words, how they make small pauses, how they look and point at things when talking, how they repeat a sentence correctly with emphasis when the child said it wrongly (Child: "apple green". Parent: "Oh, you want the GREEN APPLE? Here you are."). Wasn't there even a guy who said "How can children learn languages without pre-determined laws? Wouldn't that require being constantly corrected by their parents?". Well, see my example with the apple.
Anyway, this discussion is going nowhere. Notify me if there is other evidence apart from "I cannot imagine how the human brain can do that". As other people have written in a similar thread some months ago, this is pseudo-science.
I'd like to read more about that, could you give a source?
From my own readings, I thought that there is very good evidence adults don't bother to correct children in a lot of cases, and that children ignore the corrections completely anyway. They also don't seem to make the kinds of mistakes that you'd expect.
A great summary of some of some research I've been reading on this is the paper [1]. Also Steven Pinker's early work [2] is fascinating and easy reading.
I would love to bring myself up to date though, if these things have changed lately. Any help appreciated.
Couldn't agree more. It's barely even that, it's kind of just armchair philosophizing. (which is fun and often actually useful, but not sufficient to make claims about universal laws)
> Intuitively, at least to me, human languages and cultures don't lend themselves to universal laws.
I wouldn't think so either. That's what makes the claim, whether its right or wrong, interesting.
> And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws.
Well it sets a goal post and leads to further questions. Are there exceptions? Why are these features universal and not others? Why is any feature universal? If there are exceptions and they're rare what makes them different from the other cases? Etc.
> "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models"
If your model/abstraction doesn't differ from the ground truth as far as we know (or the proposer doesn't believe it does), what's the difference between that at claiming universality.
I'd claim that reality is just a model we don't yet know is wrong. For a long time we would say newtonian mechanics was universal. Now we say its a model that works at low velocity (relative to c). Was it wrong to claim universality back when we weren't aware of any counter examples?
I still think Chomsky and anyone who agrees with him are wrong.
Chomsky has been known to be wrong for decades. His real talent, if not genius, was pivoting away from linguistics while his reputation was still strong, and managing to preserve it despite his original claim to fame being thoroughly debunked.
This isn't true at all. Chomsky created a paradigm shift in linguistics. For that alone he deserves great credit. In fact, his review of BF Skinner's Verbal Behaviour [1] was enough to break new ground and help start the cognitive revolution.
You may or may not think Generative Grammar (or his more recent Minimalist program) is correct, but it's certainly not KNOWN to be wrong, and has yielded some insights. Has it changed over the years, of course, that's normal science. New data is found, new explanations are posited.
Further, Chomsky is still heavily and actively involved in linguistics. See his Feb 4th 2021 presentation [2] to eminent linguistics researchers in the field.
I'm not sure where this kind of comment comes from?
My problem with Chomsky's view of linguistics is that lacks falsifiability which makes it fundamentally unscientific. I'm not even sure what Chomky's theory is as it has become more and more vague over the decades as evidence has emerged which contradicts it.
In its original form, it was fairly specific and made quite strong claims. One claim, for example, was that we humans uniquely have a specialized language organ/section of brain that evolved at some point in time. No evidence has emerged to support this idea as it seems language skills are not concentrated in a single area of the brain (unlike vision for example). And it actually seems implausible that a genetic mutation would produce a language "organ" as it would confer no advantage to an individual in a society where your peers had no language skills.
And you'd imagine that a "fundamental theory" of language would have some practical application but Chomsky's theories don't seem to have any. For example, you'd imagine that it would provide the basis for the study of language acquisition. I remember a friend with a doctorate in clinical child linguistics laughing when I enquired about how their work in therapeutics for children struggling with language problems used Chomsky's theories. Apparently this "fundamental theory" of language has absolutely no application in this area and earlier attempts to apply it led absolutely nowhere. She says that clinicians ignore it - it has no relevance.
Even in AI natural language processing it led nowhere when it was the foundation of AI research in this area from the 60s to the 80s. All breakthroughs in this area use statistical approaches.
I find linguistics fascinating particularly historical linguistics and I used to be quite surprised at how authors in the area seemed to tip-toe around Chomsky's theories - reading between the lines in Guy Deutscher popular book on the evolution of language, for example, he espouses a theory which seems fundamentally at odds with that of Chomsky's (and also seems far more plausible to me than the idea that language ability just sprang into existance through a random genetic mutation) but he seems to go out his way to credit Chomsky's brilliance.
Having observed the villification of Everett - far beyond what I think would have been reasonable - I now understand why linguists genererally either ignore Chomsky's theory or pay some sort of lip-service to give it credit rather than attack it outright. Doing the latter is academic suicide it seems.
As an amatuer in the area, it looks to me like the Emporer has no clothes. It's a theory which is defended vigourously but has no appparent application and is not truly falsifiable. Even when contradictory evidence emerges, the theory is "refined" not into something more useful - the way most scientific theories evolve - but into something vaguer and even less useful.
it actually seems implausible that a genetic mutation would produce a language "organ" as it would confer no advantage to an individual in a society where your peers had no language skills.
This is a non-sequitur because you're implying that such a mutation would be binary: either a creature has it and can communicate with creatures that have the same, or it hasn't and communication is impossible. That's not how evolution works, specialization of organs can happen over thousands of generations. If a specific mutation is beneficial, it spreads through the population over time, and additional mutations in that area can further develop the organ.
Second, our speech apparatus isn't one "organ" in the narrow sense: our lungs/vocal chords/tongue/lips/cheeks/jaw all contribute to the richness of our speech. The breadth of our speaking ability is a specialization of fine muscle control in all those areas, coupled with a finely-tuned hearing apparatus to analyze and understand those sounds.
It doesn't seem like an extraordinary claim to me that our evolutionary path has enhanced our communication ability far beyond our peer species -- because it's clear to see how a rich vocubulary can aid a species' survival over time. I have no knowledge of Chomsky's specific claims, but I don't think you are representing his theory accurately.
Everything you say is reasonable and I can agree with all of it except the claim that I’m misrepresenting Chomsky - in it’s original form it specifically defined a “language acquisition device” - a part of the brain which evolved specifically and exclusively for language. The only basis for the claim, given the lack of physiological evidence at the time (subsequently evidence emerged against it) was that children were not subjected to enough samples/examples which would explain how they learn language.
Where does Chomsky claim this? As far as I know, he has never claimed any particular part of the brain is responsible for language.
The claim of Chomsky's UG is that there is a genetic component to the language faculty of humans. That's pretty much a truism given that we can speak and our closest biological relatives can't. Presumably this cashes out somewhere in our brain.
There's evidence that certain regions of the brain are involved in Language (Broca & Wernicke's areas) given evidence from brain injuries and their effect on language.
He does posit an LAD (language acquisition device) but this is a logical/theoretical construct, to aid in theory building. It seems very likely that we have this given the universality of language in our species and our ability to learn the language of our own culture. The LAD though has not been claimed to be physically located somewhere in our brains by Chomsky (again afaik). Though presumably if we have it, it is fairly likely to be somewhere within our skulls.
I don't know much about linguistics, so most of your post I can't really evaluate, but responding to the falsifiability of Chomsky's theories: I got the impression that Chomsky makes (among other claims) a pretty specific claim about human language, which is that recursion is a universal feature of human language. That seems falsifiable to me, and an important topic of the article is the academic discussion on whether Everett's findings constitute disproof of Chomsky's theory.
Even the recursion claim is now quite vague - according to Chomsky, while revision is a fundamental feature, not all languages exhibit recursion.
I also realize that I don’t even know what it means for a human language to be recursive. I get sub-clauses but I don’t see their existence as evidence of recursion being a fundamental feature of human language. In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses. The concepts are certainly independent with computer languages - originally Algol had procedures (analogous to sub-clauses) without supporting recursion.
> In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses.
I think the interesting thing about recursion in language is precisely that we rarely see deeply nested examples yet we don't seem to have issues parsing deeply nested examples when they do occur (if they're not specifically constructed to be hard to parse). The fact that we probably didn't learn this by example might be an indication that our brains are somehow hardwired to look for regularity in grammar, including recursion.
The place to look for more than two levels of subclause is Henry James.
Procedures without recursion was a FORTRAN innovation. Recursion started in Algol. It would not be surprising if the first Algol effort lacked it.
What Chomsky did not understand, and still might not, is that his grammatical structures are fundamental to computation, and necessarily arise anywhere that symbolic processes of any complexity occur. So, their rise is not a product of culture, or of unique human biology, or of nerve biology, but of the architecture of the universe all operate in.
Chomsky's grammatical analysis was anticipated, in fully elaborated detail, in Sanskrit, millennia ago. The structures' importance in fundamentals of computation was understood (by a few -- Schonfinkel, Curry, Church) almost a century ago.[0]
It would not be at all surprising to find the principles to be important to DNA manipulation—particularly as part of immune response, and convergent in multiple independently-developed lineages.
> And it actually seems implausible that a genetic mutation would produce a language "organ" as it would confer no advantage to an individual in a society where your peers had no language skills.
It could evolve primarily for internal thought first, or have some other benefit for enhancing existing systems of vocalized mimicry (for hunting, and maybe other uses).
>The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited.[150] As such he argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences.[151] In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behavior (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments.
that reminds a similar theory that stone axe making is a result of genetic transfer (like 'bird song') and not social transfer
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/ . Curiously if one replaces "axe" with "language" in the article it would look a lot similar as how one would go proving Chomsky linguistic theory.
I just use HN Search along with client-side software to make it easier to build these lists. I described this at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158300 but have since written more code. It's still kind of a primitive process but much faster than before.
> The endgame is probably not to fully automate these lists but to have software generate a starter version and then give the community ways to edit it.
I agree. There has been a lot of recurring-interesting topics discussed on HN but there's no one place to tag them all. Relying on you/someone else to pop up and give the curated links is currently the only way for others to know what have been discussed before.
There's this one sentence in the article, that – I think – may give a hint on the difficulties explaining linguigenesis if constrained in the way portrayed by the article:
> The authors compared animal and human communication, eliminating the aspects of vocalization that are shared by both, and concluded that one operation alone distinguished human speech: recursion. In the course of working on the article, Fitch grew sympathetic to Chomsky’s ideas and became an articulate defender of the theory of universal grammar.
"(…) distinguished human speech(…)", if you think about it, that's a weird assertion/assumption to make. The idea, that there's a clear line between human and non-human communication, as if this was something binary.
We humans have this weird concept, that there's "something", that makes us fundamentally different from the rest of the animal life on this planet. Yes, we've got the largest impact on the biosphere, we can reason about it. But if you were to track back on the coginitive abilities of our evolutionary ancestors, I'd say it would be very difficult to put a hard threshold in the phylogenetic tree, where suddenly a whole subset of means of communication discretly vanishes.
> Currently, sure. Across all time, I'd go with blue-green algae.
I knew that someone were to point this out. Yes, of course across geological timeframes at the moment we're playing second fiddle at best. But over the course of, let's say, that past 10 million years or so, I'd say, we're a firm contender for first place.
> We humans have this weird concept, that there's "something", that makes us fundamentally different from the rest of the animal life on this planet. Yes, we've got the largest impact on the biosphere, we can reason about it. But if you were to track back on the coginitive abilities of our evolutionary ancestors, I'd say it would be very difficult to put a hard threshold in the phylogenetic tree, where suddenly a whole subset of means of communication discretly vanishes.
Agreed, there is no hard threshold (biology seems to avoid those anyways) but subjectively there is some sum of fuzzy attributes in humans which allows for us to achieve the highest complexity of lifestyle(?) of all lifeforms on the planet.
A lot of things a human can do can be found in other species, but I think the ability to read and write arbitrarily complex ideas really does set us apart, and caused a phase transition. It allows us to transmit ideas across time and space that would otherwise be lost. It allows the accumulation of knowledge that no brain is large enough to hold. Outsourcing our memories to persistent storage. Someone can write down an idea, it can be forgotten for hundreds of years, and then rediscovered and applied. It can allow one person to design something, and communicate that design to thousands of other people. Take that away, and local achievements in knowledge remain local until they are forgotten because other knowledge has takes precedent.
A beaver might instinctively know how to build a dam because it's built into its DNA, but a human can read the writings of past dam builders, learn the abstract theory of dam building, come up with their own improvements, debate those changes with other people interested in dam building, communicate their design to dam builders, and publish their work to become a permanent part of dam building literature. For a beaver to change how it builds dams, it would require a change in their DNA to pass on to future generations.
> but I think the ability to read and write arbitrarily complex ideas really does set us apart,
I'm not denying that humans, in their current form, as a species are set apart from the rest of life on this planet.
Rather what I'm trying to get at is, that if you'd backtrace the evolution of humans, at no particular point in time you could make a clear desitinction of "this generation of pre homo sapiens species fundamentally differs in their linguistic capabilities from the next evolutionary step".
The linguistic capabilities of hominids and humans more likely than not developed gradually, just like every other feature that makes a distinct species. Eventually you'll be able to clearly tell them apart. But when applying a "derivative" operator on it, you'll find that evolutionary development is smooth and continuous.
And I think that also applies to linguistic capabilities. The proposition I'm making is, that the linguogenesis of homo sapiens can not be explained within the boundaries of that species. Rather I'd say that the roots of our language can be traced back far further than you'd presume by presence of certain vocal anatomical features alone.
> I'd say it would be very difficult to put a hard threshold in the phylogenetic tree, where suddenly a whole subset of means of communication discretly vanishes.
Unless the hard threshold was created by an external force, such as humans killing off or interbreeding with every other ape species capable of high level language.
That's a philosophical question. In the end, we don't know what came first: the word (sound), or the abstract mental image. It's quite possible that our analytic ability (the ability to perform abstract thought) evolved after the first communicative speech, simply because there is no need to form coherent abstract "ideas" if your interaction with the world consists solely of concrete objects.
If "idea" is the wrong word for the "quantum of human thought", what would be?
I'd preemptively say "word" is a poor candidate as it is in reference to oral language. If there's a distinction for a "thought word", then that would seem appropriate, just as in computer architecture "word" is distinct. Anecdotally, I usually don't think in English words, but in my own "ideas". Related ideas carry meaning and compose thoughts. Those thoughts I then translate into oral sentences via words. Words are the quantum of speech, ideas are the quantum of thought.
Speaking technically about the production of human speech, the quantum would be the phoneme, the linguistic definition for a unit of sound. Words, after all, are composite objects and should therefore not be considered quantum: in written language, they are composed of letters, and in spoken language, they are composed of phonemes.
But that wasn't what the OP was asking, or at least not how I interpreted the question. The question was whether thought should be considered the mechanism/substrate underpinning human language. My comment was about the relationship between thought and language, about which of those shapes the other, and to what extent they should be considered independent or universal.
Yes, when we (adults) reflect on how we talk, we tend to form opinions and meanings in our head before we produce sentences. So that might lead us to conclude that thought informs language, and not the other way around. Yet children learn to speak before they learn to think, at least that's the prevailing theory in child development studies. So then "the idea" cannot be the quantum of language because it is only true for adults who have already learnt both.
Then we also have evidence from cultures like the one in the article, which shows that when a language is missing certain concepts (numbers in this case), the adults who grew up in that language also lack the abstract mental capacity associated with it (counting in this case). The blanket statement "the idea is the quantum of language" implies that ideas are universal concepts, yet the evidence we have shows that ideas are shaped by one's childhood language.
So, to reiterate my point: language and thought are most likely two interdependent processes, each of which shapes the other. The more interesting question is whether we should really consider them as separate processes, or whether "thought" is just a manifestation of an internal dialog with ourselves, in which "ideas" are the langauge.
