Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 11:08:28 -0600
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu>
Subject: Re: BHA: Epistemological relativism, human rights, culture


[Note: I wish people would post in plain text rather than html or mime
or whatever. The pretty colors are pretty but they make the post
difficult to handle, pose a virus threat, and take up more disk space.]


Marko writes:

<<<I would like to make a few points in conclusion. In this post
Marshall see's no problem in the claim that the language faculty is an
innate human endowment, "the cognitive revolution, if I understand it
correctly, is simply based on the notion that the capacity for language
is innate". Note that this directly contradicts the claim that was made
in his previous post "2. Many distinctly human characteristics,
including language, are geo-historical. They are not invariant human
characteristics".

       In this post however he accepts the claim that the language
faculty is innate that is it is a "invariant human characteristic". The
other claims I think are equally misguided. To say that the language
faculty is an innate human characterstic, and only a human
characterstic, is not to say that the language faculty is the only think
that is uniquely human.<<<

There is a good deal of controversy as to the evolution and nature of
language. Many argue that the _capacity_ (physiological and
neurological) for language existed for 10s of thousands of years before
language developed -- or, rather, was "invented." Biologically modern
humans probably go back 100,000 yers or so, while anthropologists and
evolutionary biologists debate whether language goes back around 40,000
or 70,000 years. One prominent biologist suggests it was probably
invented (a number of times) by childen in play, then adopted by adults.
He equates the appearance of language in what is now Europe with the
sudden disappearance of the Neandethals, after they and homo sapiens had
occupied the same area for many thousands of years.

I believe the hunt, connected with Chomsky's linguistics, for a
"universal grammar" hardwired into the brain has proved fruitless and is
being rejected by more and more linguists and anthropologists.

So language is (probably) very definitely _historical_, not "innate."

In a later post Marshall writes, "'Innate' does not mean independent of
geography or history. What's innate in one place and time may not be
identical with what's innate at another. "Innate" simply means that it's
biologically inherent rather than learned or totally due to external
factors." This is true, but still I think it useful to use "innate" in
the more restricted sense. Blinking if something comes toward your face
is a reflex, not learned, and it wouls seem useful to reserve "innate"
for such actions rather than for language and other learned activities.
That the capacity for language is innate seems a mere truism.

Language is also clearly _social_; one can hardly imagine a single
person speaking. (This is the great, unintended, comedy in Milton's
presenting newly created Adam as leaping to his feet and beginning to
speak and reason like an 18th c. philosophe.) The arguments for claiming
"innateness" for so many social features of humans seems to be (as Marx
seemed to have assumed in the "Theses on Feuerbach") emergent from the
radical individualism generated by capitalism -- that is, by the
reductive assumption that all human activity can be explained by
reference to the isolated individual.

Carrol


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