WHAT THE AUGUST 30 POST SHOULD HAVE SAID!
In the August 30 post I attributed to Noam Chomsky views he disavowed in an e-mail to me (the text of the message is my September 9 post). What follows is
HOW THE AUGUST 30 POST SHOULD HAVE READ:
In my next post I will say how the mistake came about, and why some of Chomsky's formulations did strike me as suggesting that he believes the "language organ" that he posits has to contain representations of all learnable meanings (which is the feature of Fodor's original "mentalese" hypothesis that I find unsupportable).
In the August 30 post I attributed to Noam Chomsky views he disavowed in an e-mail to me (the text of the message is my September 9 post). What follows is
HOW THE AUGUST 30 POST SHOULD HAVE READ:
In my next post I will say how the mistake came about, and why some of Chomsky's formulations did strike me as suggesting that he believes the "language organ" that he posits has to contain representations of all learnable meanings (which is the feature of Fodor's original "mentalese" hypothesis that I find unsupportable).
Innate language?
I do not believe in “innate language”, (e.g., Fodor’s “mentalese”, which, when he wrote The Language of Thought, was supposed to have a built-in truth-conditional semantics, that is a semantics which fixes the meanings of all the sentences a human is capable is thinking (later Fodor moved to the position that “mentalese” has only a built-in syntax, and developed a causal theory of reference to account for content). Here are my reasons for this rejection.
I do not believe in “innate language”, (e.g., Fodor’s “mentalese”, which, when he wrote The Language of Thought, was supposed to have a built-in truth-conditional semantics, that is a semantics which fixes the meanings of all the sentences a human is capable is thinking (later Fodor moved to the position that “mentalese” has only a built-in syntax, and developed a causal theory of reference to account for content). Here are my reasons for this rejection.
The decisive objection, in my view, is that the
innate language that Fodor posited was supposed to be able to express all learnable meanings. If all possible meaningful terms were
definable from a number of basic terms that might have been selected for by
evolution (such as the logical positivists’ “observation terms”) , this would
be compatible with Darwinian evolution.. But Fodor rejects logical positivism,
and he suggested no alternative account of what the basic terms of “mentalese”
might be. Nor did The Language of Thought
tell us what mechanism could have
endowed the brains of primitive men and women with terms with such meanings as
“quantum potential” and “macroeconomic”,
or with terms by means of which they could be defined, if, indeed, there are
more elementary terms in which this could be done.
I am well aware that Fodor
rejects Darwinian evolution. (Since that theory is highly successful, and constitutes the beating heart of
population genetics, to mention just one part of biology, I would think that is
already reason to dismiss talk of innate language.) But if we are to suppose that“mentalese” appeared in
the brain serendipitously, that the makes the story even crazier. The story that the hundreds of thousands of terms in human
languages, and the millions of terms in possible
human languages, all correspond to terms in a master vocabulary of ‘Mentalese’
supplied to us by serendipity is
precisely analogous to supposing that monkeys
typed out Proust’s Remembrance of Things
Past. Of course, to reject that story is not to deny that some aspects of language might be innate;
that would not be incompatible with evolution.
