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Author
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Topic: Natural Language Irreducibly Complex?
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Noel Rude
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Member # 516
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posted 30. May 2003 19:23
Moderator: “Would you be interested in starting a new thread on linguistics?”
Rather than carry the discussion of grammaticalization/reanalysis over to a new thread – would like to see the biologists react to the comparison at the old one – Redundancy and degeneracy: Evolution and design. Is it a good analogy for biological degeneracy? Or might we in ID have to say it is the same thing?
But here’s a subject that belongs on another thread: Is Natural Language – a linguist might say Universal Grammar – all or nothing? Could it be classed as irreducibly complex? The question is not so simple as it might seem. I’d like to suggest three lines of discussion – Innateness, Universals, and the relationship of Natural Language to other Information Systems.
Innateness
It would seem obvious that language is “innate” – we are biologically endowed to talk, dogs are not. We have color vision – dogs (or whatever) do not. Obviously “feet” are innate – we are genetically programmed for them – but what about Language?
Might Language, instead, supervene on more general cognitive capabilities? Is it simply a learned behavior, like bicycling or playing chess? Or is there a “language organ” (analogous to, e.g., feet)? The Chomskians argue for the latter, cognitive and functionalist linguists are generally not so enthusiastic.
Either way human beings are engaged in behavior vastly more complex than the purported slime from which they came. So what connection might this argument have to Darwinism and ID?
The question of “innateness” is directly related to the debate over Darwinian gradualism. The Chomskians argue for an all or nothing autonomous syntax – as it might be argued that bacteria either have a flagellum or they don’t. Though Chomsky may never have thought of it that way, what he has been saying, we could argue, is that we are innately endowed with an irreducibly complex language organ. It is for this reason that the gradualists (such as T. Givón) reject Chomsky’s autonomous syntax, whereas the Chomskians who do talk about evolution (such as Derrick Bickerton) favor the punctuated equilibrium of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould.
I don’t know all the reasons why the Chomskians have thought it important to argue for autonomy – one contrary note I’ve heard is that the Chomskians are still structuralists. True – they don’t like talking about meaning and function – these are not scientific concepts. That surely was the approach of the Bloomfieldian structuralists of mid 20th century America.
The functionalist counter analogically: We don’t have biological structures (e.g., feet) that are autonomous from function (e.g., walking). In biology the teleological connection is taken for granted – thus the Darwinist assumes a tight connection between innovation and selection every minute step of the way, ID sees actual design. But the Chomskians opt for an autonomous syntax – a syntax with no direct relationship to function. I say ID ought not base its argument on syntactic autonomy – even if otherwise agreeing – even if the Chomskians are more supportive of the program. This is because autonomy is rightly controversial.
Another area of dispute is animal language. Is there a discrete break between animal communication and human language? Once again I think you will find the Chomskians arguing for a discrete break – no animal even comes close to possession anything like human language. And again you will find the Darwinian gradualists arguing the opposite (e.g., T. Givón). The question is related to whether Human Language is irreducibly complex – either you have it (humans) or you don’t (animals).
Also related is the matter of child language acquisition – can it be said to recapitulate the evolution of language? Some hope so, others say no. Those with any expertise in this area are welcome to weigh in.
Universals
Then there is the matter universals (and of “primitive” languages – an obviously politically incorrect subject today, but one which is rearing its head in an unexpected way). However it is that individual languages might differ, it must be conceded that all peoples are completely capable – as children – of learning as their first language whatever language it is that they are exposed to.
It may be true that there are minimum requirements for grammatical complexity (as also upper limits) – languages evidently must be able to express aspect grammatically, but not necessarily tense (tense being inferable from context).
So what is it that all languages share? The mood in the linguistics of the 1060s was that they share very much. Today the mood seems to be swinging the other way – that all we share is our diversity. But whatever the mood – what can a legitimate scientific investigation tell us about universals?
If there is such a thing as language universals – whence come they? Biological innateness – a “language organ”? Do they arise from more general cognitive activity? From communicative exigencies? All of the above?
To the Chomskians universals are structural entities – things like “Move Alpha”, “C-Command”, etc. Any biological analogies here? How much can biologists get away with by talking only structural universals? Without mention of function?
We joke about “physics envy” – but if mathematics is not biologically hardwired – but rather we are equipped to discover mathematics – as the mathematical Platonists would have it – then why can’t it be that we discover grammar? At least the most fundamental universal categories. This is a vast subject – much to say – anyone brave enough? Anyone thought about this?
Relationship to Other Information Systems
One can make the argument that Human Language sits at the top of the hierarchy of all known information systems – that it subsumes mathematics, computer language, chimp lingo, etc. When we devise formal systems – is this by putting limitations on natural language – or an inhancement? What about DNA – some argue that it is just like language – more limited, yes, but still a language. What can we say? When scientists outside linguistics talk about information, are they talking about something that could be informed by linguistics?
If, say, bee communication is quite limited in comparison to human language, in what ways might this be? Is bee communication irreducibly complex? Or only human language?
It may be that bee communication, DNA, Boolean algebra, “C” ... it may be that these are all in some way irreducibly complex but nevertheless finite systems. Early on Chomsky thought it important to show that the output of human language is unlimited. Somewhere, if I recall correctly, Bill Dembski has argued that the human mind is infinite (yes, of course, it’s limited by the finitude of brain and mortality) – and perhaps this infinity is best glimpsed through human language.
Perhaps what’s really significant is not biological innateness, enhanced neurological capacity, the communicative experience, etc. (there’s some of all of this), but that somewhere behind it all is human freedom – which Chomsky, for whatever his faults, alluded to long ago.
Is Language irreducibly complex?
Well, I don't really know what to say? You got any ideas?
[ 30. May 2003, 19:32: Message edited by: Noel Rude ]
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warren_bergerson
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posted 31. May 2003 08:17
Noel,
Your post cover a lot of territory so I am going to limit my comments to a single issue. Second, my comments are not based on a knowledge of linguistics. The issue I would like to address is the question of ‘sudden emergence’ as in the relatively sudden emergence of human language.
As is, I believe, obvious, there are any number of processes which can reconcile ‘sudden emergence’ with ‘gradual change’. If a complex process or mechanism is make up of many components, these components can develop gradually. The final product, however, can emerge suddenly when the final component comes into being. A simple example would be a ‘spaceship to the moon’. While the planning and design may take decades, the actual emergence of the trip to the moon is initiated by a single push of the button.
I believe that when we look at language, we find that many of the prerequisites clearly exist in species other than humans. To at least some extent, the sudden emergence of language is an example of the ‘final critical component’ phenomena.
Conventional scientific thinking seems to suggest that the problem with final component explanations is explaining how the bee and the ape knew they were designing the prerequisites for a human language system. The answer to this question, IMO, is the answer to the question of the sudden emergence of language.
Biological systems, I suggest, have the ability to evolve systems and processes which perform functions which promote, or appear to promote the likelihood of survival. More accurately, biological systems ‘appear’ to have this ability. The apparent ability to develop processes and systems to perform functions, is the result of a general ability to find adaptive solutions. What has developed or evolved in biological systems is a general capacity to solve problems and find adaptive solutions to problems. Over the last billion years biological systems have evolved very powerful problem solving mechanism. Mechanism which we would label intelligent.
This biological problem solving or intelligence is not something which works slowly over millions of years, but something that works rapidly to solve problems within the lifetimes of individual organisms. Now back to the problem of language. When did language develop/emerge/evolve. I would suggest that given the existence of a very powerful biological problem solving process, basic building blocks which developed over millions of years, a few relatively minor modifications in the human brain function, and information passed by non-genetic mechanisms, language develops or re-evolves in each human as a part of the developmental process. The ‘problem’ of creating language is solved from available components using the individuals biological intelligence.
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Samada
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posted 01. June 2003 19:19
"Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?"
- Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage, 1967)
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Demeter
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posted 02. June 2003 09:20
“I become aware of something in me that flashes upon my reason, I perceive of it that it is something but what it is I cannot see. It seems to me only, that, if I could conceive it, I would comprehend all truth” — Meister Eckhart
Hello:
The above quote says it all for me. It seems inner communication and our basic need to unite is always left out of the mix. I think of the great hermetic axiom, “As above so below.” Is that not the same as “As inside so outside?” The division within man is never even discussed and yet it is the entire reason FOR communication. There can be nothing greater than unity and connectiveness. Yet, we always seem to think in terms of OUTSIDE communication. I suggest to you that the need to communicate on the outside comes from the inner divisions. If you do not fix one, you cannot fix the other.
You ask if language is too complex to be irreducible. I ask, “Is man too arrogant to think properly?” Humans are not the only things on the planet that communicate. It seems everything does. We just do not deem it language because it seems we are arbiters of what is intelligent communication. We just glory in our own image, but when a cat shoves its empty food bowl into the middle of the room, this is language. This is real communication. Is it because they cannot hold a piece of chalk in their little paws and draw a representation of their action that it is not considered language? Again, the ape in us speaks, and in doing so we find that we require mimicry and redundancy of action as proof of thought.
Language in its present form is impossible to reduce since it is no longer based on universal shape forms. Some examples of these shape forms were found in Magdalenian cave sites (12,000-17,000 years before the present time). They include the runes, the cross, the swastika and many religious and magical sigils. Why the need for these symbols? They were based on the notion of entopic forms. Neurophysiology has clearly identified phosphenes, geometric shapes and images embedded in our subconscious. These are lodged within our visual cortex and neural system. When one’s consciousness has been altered, these forms are produced. They are universal in nature so it matters not from what country, educational background or supposed religious elitism one finds themselves believing in. These entopic forms used in meditation are for one thing only. They are the pathways that lead to trance. Thus the hidden use of ancient alphabets that used these shapes to generate their form. They were used to induce trance to help us find our way home. Take away entopic forms as being the progenitor of language and you have random patterns that are not reducible because they have no meaning for all parts of our brain. While the left brain can easily identify an artificial word and shape, try whispering that word to your subconscious. Its meaning is lost and so it needs to be converted into a symbol. The reverse is also true. For the subconscious to speak, it needs to give the conscious mind a set of symbols in which to ponder upon awakening. These dream symbols are language. The only language the other part of ourselves speaks. And yet no one seems to include this in the mix. Why? Why is there not a determined effort to give a voice and a language to that part of us that speaks to us eight hours a night? It was once so, so why is there no respect shown to it now? Is unity within the body unimportant? If we cannot communicate inside ourselves then how do we expect to speak with others? Perhaps it is as the original question implies, we are all just too darn smart. I am too smart for you to understand me and you are too smart for me to understand you. We are all too smart to understand one another and we leave it like that.
Returning to this point of translation and losing something in the translation, I offer this analogy. Suppose I go to a movie and it is about the richest man on earth. He gets up buys a dozen original paintings by Degas, some by Van Gogh, and one or two by Gaugin.
He then calls Harry Winston and buys a few Burmese rubies because he feels like it. Then one or two sports cars, etc., etc. Now this is all very nice for this gentlemen, but what has this to do with me? I would have to sit and translate the action and think, “Well, yes, the paintings he’s buying must be like when I am picking out $12 posters at the museum. And the rubies must be like when I go to Payless and pick out some shoes.” You can see that much has been lost in the translation. So, too, with this thing we call language.
The Egyptians had a one sight, one sound system. These pictographs were easily understood by all sides of ourselves, not just the one we deem important. I ask you, “Why do you worship the sun and not the moon?” This is the real question. Present day language demonstrates this point over and over again. If we wish unity within the body and mind, we need to go to another system of symbols and colors and sound to integrate that which has been divided. We could be doing this through language, but it seems we would rather worship the sun.
Sat Nam,
Demeter
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Rex Kerr
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posted 02. June 2003 15:09
I am reading the discussion with interest, but have little to add as it's outside my field of expertise.
However, I will mention that the complexity of phosphenes that have been demonstrated by neurophysiology (as opposed to, say, cognitive science) is minimal; certainly nothing worthy of the label "image". Furthermore, their role as part of pathways leading to trance is not something that has been studied scientifically, at least at the more mechanistic (neurophysiology) levels that I'm familiar with.
That doesn't make Demeter's description wrong, necessarily (although I am skeptical on some points); one just shouldn't take it as scientifically verified. I do think the level of analysis (of intrinsic cognitive tokens) is particularly appropriate to this problem, in large part for the reasons that Demeter mentioned or implied.
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Demeter
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posted 02. June 2003 20:09
Dear Rex:
May I address you by your first name? I apologize if this is too familiar.
Oh, well, so you want proof! My you are a hardliner. I think in asking for proof we run into even more problems. For is proof in the form of a name followed by the word, “Harvard?” It is hard to find a Yaqui Shaman with a degree from this place. Should their knowledge and revelations be summarily dismissed for want of a word? You see the proof for me is the five tattvas. These are symbols that have been used for centuries to induce trance.
“Creation comes from the five tattvas and is dissolved into them. Greater than the five tattvas is that which is above them, without stain.” Jnanasankalini Tantra (27)
Can all the practitioners of meditation that have been using these symbols be wrong? The answer of course is, “yes.” For in logic we need to include all possibilities and this is a possibility. But in that logic we must reduce things to the simplest explanation as being the most probable. So is it still probable? Not when we include the other extraordinary manifestations of body and mind control that practitioners display. Then the answer changes. We must at least say, “maybe something is going on that does not go on in the laboratory.”
I don’t know why scientific theory must always “prove” something. Has anyone weighed “love?” If so how big is it and how much does it weigh? Tell me for I wish to know. I wish to have this proof for I’ve felt I’ve been in love, but need this proof. Can they do these sorts of things at Harvard? Princeton? Certainly not Yale! Perhaps they can at least disprove it for me.
So I find the experience of thousands of indigenous shamans and monks enough to believe in symbols as inducing trance. I cannot outrightly dismiss their empirical experience. But then that is me and you ask in so many words for studies. So we have Henreich Kluver who conducted studies of hallucinations at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. He came to discover a pattern for these perceptions he called, “form constants.” There were four types: (1) gratings and honeycombs, (2) cobwebs, (3) tunnels and cones, and (4) spirals. He postulated that these were the “elementary features that the nervous system was hardwired to perceive.” His conclusion?
“The analysis…has yielded a number of forms and form elements which must be considered typical for mescal visions. No matter how strong the inter- and intra-individual differences may be, the records are remarkable as to the appearance of the above described forms and configurations. We may call them form-constants, implying that a certain number of them appear in almost all mescal visions and that many “atypical” visions are upon close examination nothing but variations of those form-constants.”
Now before someone jumps out of their shorts and starts shouting, “But this is not proof of phosphenes, Kulver talks of form-constants!” - there is this:
However, Lewis-Williams and Dowson state that, at the present stage in their research, it is premature to distinguish between phosphenes and form constants. Thus, they have been grouped together and assigned the generic term of 'entoptic phenomena' or entoptics, by way of classifying these largely geometric visual percept. The term 'entoptic' comes from the Greek to mean 'within vision', and the term 'entoptic phenomena' means visual sensations whose characteristics derive from the structure of the visual system (Tyler 1978:1633). Lewis-Williams and Dowson use the term 'hallucinations' to describe more complex iconic visions (Siegal 1977:134; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978: 12-13). Tyler also makes the point that:
"the nature of entoptic phenomena makes it hard to design highly-controlled, stimulus-bound experiments to specify them. It is therefore appropriate to report them on an observational basis before more indirect outcomes are explored" (Tyler, 1978:1633).”
“An example of reduplication is illustrated by Reichel-Dolmatoff (1972:91-92) who noted that when Tukanoans were asked to draw their mental imagery, they tended "to fill the pieces of paper he gave them with rows of formalised and reduplicated geometric motifs comparable with their painting of the same motifs on the walls of their houses. The Tukano identified these reduplicated forms as images derived from what they themselves recognised as the first stage of their trance experiences; there can be little doubt of their entoptic origin" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978:12-13).
That point seems taken care of so I suppose as long as we are talking “proof” we need to have a direct linkage to these phosphenes and trance. Here is a paper written by Philip T. Nicholson. Unfortunately, I do not have his degree or alma mater so I apologize if he is from the School of Hard Knocks.
“ABSTRACT
The meanings of many metaphors used to describe luminous visions in the RigVeda (RV) remain elusive or ambiguous despite years of expert hermeneutical exegesis. In this series of papers, we classify the metaphors used to describe luminous visions into sets based on certain abstract characteristics (shapes, colors, movements, order of appearance), then show how these metaphor-sets can be matched with remarkable precision, image by image, to a sequence of internally-generated light sensations ('phosphenes') induced by meditation. These meditation-induced phosphenes can also evolve in longer and more elaborate sequences if the subjects practice meditation while in a sleep-deprived condition. A sleep deficit increases the risk of subclinical seizures emerging at sleep onset - and the paroxysmal activity generates further evolution of the phosphene imagery. In the first paper of this three-part series, we document the parallels between the meditation-induced phosphenes and two types of luminous visions described in the RV - the Asvins' radiant, three-wheeled chariot and the flame arrows of Agni.
In the second paper, we analyze metaphors used to describe the visions of Soma and Indra and show that there is a close match between these luminous visions and paroxysmal phosphenes. Based on the extensive parallels revealed by our comparison, we conclude that the metaphors for luminous visions in the RV were meant to refer to the same visual content as appears in the meditation-induced visions described by the author, and that, despite years of poetic embellishment, the eulogists' choice of metaphors suggests a much more empirically-oriented attempt to describe visionary experience than has hitherto been suspected. This hypothesis about the meaning of luminous visions in the RV has important implications for several issues debated by Vedic scholars, including: (1) the identity of the original soma plant; (2) the influence of shamanic practices in the creation of the Vedic myths, and (3) the extent of the continuities between the visionary experiences described in the RV and those described in the Upanishads and in the many yoga meditation texts in the Hindu, Tantric, and Tibetan-Buddhist traditions…”
“These new research findings about rapid shifts to paroxysmal activity upon activation of sleep rhythm oscillators can be used to explain why a meditator who is attempting to induce phosphene visions might experience the outbreak of a seizure and to explain how this outbreak of paroxysmal activity shapes the further evolution of the original, sleep-onset phosphene images [Nicholson, 1999; 2002a,b]. In this paper we reproduce a series of drawings from the sources just cited to illustrate the shapes, colors, movements, and ordinal progressions of the meditation induced, sleep-onset phosphenes and their further elaboration after the outbreak of paroxysmal brain waves.
- Philip T. Nicholson, ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF VEDIC STUDIES (EJVS), Vol. 8 (2002) issue 3 (March 27) (©) ISSN 1084-7561
So there we have a linkage to what I theorized. I am glad of that for it is quite easy for me to take a leap with no such proof. Not everyone is a cliff diver. Then we, of course, must tie it all back to language for that was what the discussion was about. So here further in the same article is this:
“Keith [1925] complains about the "chaos of the ideas [Ibid., p. 171]" and the "obscurity in detail [Ibid., p. 167];" MacDonell [1971] writes that the descriptions of Soma are "overlaid with the most varied and chaotic imagery and with mystical fantasies often incapable of certain interpretation [Ibid., p. 104]." In her introduction to a translation of selected hymns from the RV, O'Flaherty [1981] points out that problems of interpretation are complicated by language that is "intrinsically difficult (dense, complex, and esoteric even for the people of its own time), or difficult to people of another time (because of archaisms, hapax legomena, discontinued usages), or difficult because we have lost the thread of the underlying idiom [Ibid., p.14]." Even if experts agree on the literal meaning of the Sanskrit words, they still might not might be able to interpret what those words were intended to mean, not least because the RV "is written out of a mythology that we can only try to reconstruct from the Rig Vedic jumble of paradoxes heaped on paradoxes, tropes heaped on tropes [Ibid., p. 18]."
You see how McDonnell, O’Flaherty and Keith all complain about the same thing. The difficulty of translation of a language not like our own. While O’Flaherty complains that Sanskrit is “dense,” I suggest it is the one he was translating it into that lacked depth and richness. It backs up my original point that our present languages are not based on entopic forms and underlying patterns that have RELEVANCE. If something has relevance it has several meanings. Think of Gematria and the underlying themes implicit in finding hidden meanings in language. It would imply that hidden meanings are there, would it not? Do you find many people sitting around and giving a numerical value to English in order to discover the end time? Or the meaning of a Biblical revelation? If you do find such a cluster, please tell them for me they are wasting their time.
I must say I was surprised and delighted to find a response beneath my reply so quickly. It keeps me in the bubble of delusion that someone would care what I write. I am also most grateful that you gave me an opening to wheedle through. I don’t know what I would have done if you had said I was wrong. Perhaps I would have retreated into the emotional state called conscious thought. You know it just delights me to the nth degree to have conscious thought reduced to the concept of an emotion. It is justice for all those men that thought rational thought was exempt from such histrionics.
Sat Nam,
Demeter
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Justalayman
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posted 08. June 2003 14:06
Hi
I've been following the discussion of language and it complexity. It is complex. a therapist once told me 20% of language is verbal and the other 80 or 70 % is beyong awareness she wasn't talking about telepathy she was saying we communicate in way other than words that's where I think we get vibes or feeling about someone.
Just our spoken language is highly complex and when you add non verbal communication it makes it more complex.
the arguemnt was made here that animals have their own language and that we are arrogant for thinking our language ability is the only ability that is worth talking about. Animals do have language but if their language were on par with ours they would be using the internet or something like it. And too do they have the ability to adapt their languages so that words constantly take on new meanings?
Our better brains make it possible to have our language and excell beyong other animals how could this remarkable capacity have evolved I am asking seriously here If it did evolve what would be the mechanism of it evolution? What would make it move from a less complex to a more sophisticated one ?
And for that matter what would make anything move from less complex to more complex? It's specious thinking I think to believe this happened without some design behind it.
If mutations were the mechanism of evolution
and most mutations are deleterious how could they make something as sophisticated as our brains or a cell or an amino acid?
I'm just a layman but I still have common sense is my common sense invalid because I'm not as educated as others?
Thanks guys just blowing off steam but I really want someone to answer these questions
justalayman
[ 08. June 2003, 14:11: Message edited by: Justalayman ]
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Rex Kerr
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posted 09. June 2003 02:48
First, anyone who wishes to is welcome to call me Rex. I'm pretty informal most of the time.
I found Demeter's post quite interesting as psychology (maybe even psychophysics), and will read in more detail later. Unfortunately, I probably still won't be qualified to comment, as the literature on phosphenes is larger than I'd anticipated. As near as I can tell from glancing quickly, there appear to be studies done showing that, for example, migrane headaches decrease stimulation thresholds for phosphene induction--which would lead me to hypothesize that the causal link would be from trance to phosphenes, not vice versa. I'm not aware of any good links to language yet.
On a meta-level, since people have asked, no, I do not want proof. I want evidence. As an experimental scientist myself, I've become acutely aware of how often our initial guesses are inaccurate, incomplete, or just plain wrong. I care about details and mechanisms, because this is what gives us the power to intelligently impact events. Also, unfortunately, many people who are not experimental scientists never come to realize just how important evidence is, or just how extensive the evidence needs to be; this is why studies from Harvard and Yale are worth paying a little more attention to than an average exposition off the internet.
As a corollary (taking us even farther off topic), when Justalayman asks, "is my common sense invalid because I'm not as educated as others?", I'd say: in this case, it probably is.
Common sense works well in common situations. Walking through doors, not putting your pot-holder on a stove burner that's on, pointing the shower head away from an open shower door before turning it on--these kinds of things. Common sense is exceedingly useful in life. However, it's much less reliable when you apply it to uncommon situations--especially to scales and processes that are unlike ones we encounter on a daily basis. Atomic scale phenomena (quantum mechanics) and interstellar scale phenomena (relativity) are good examples where you need a lot of study to have any "sense" about behavior on that scale. I'd suggest that the properties of evolution are in a similar category. That doesn't mean that there necessarily wasn't design--it just means that common sense can't be trusted. That's why we try to make predictions and check them against observations.
(I am not going to reply here to the various reasonable common-sense questions, since it would take way too much space and time to give useful answers. Luckily, many of these issues are addressed in other places, such as the talk.origins FAQ.)
Now, to get back on topic, I would say that language is irreducibly complex, but that you can find a steady decline all the way from the richness variety of syntax, meaning, nuance, and so forth possible in, say, English down to the most basic logical language. Of course, how basic this was would depend on the definition of language, but in analogy to the simplest universal Turing machines found by Wolfram (in A New Kind of Science), I'd bet that the language had only a handful of very simple components and rules. (In fact, if a UTM counts as a language, I think it requires only something like 5 rules.) This means that some ultra-simple form of language, though irreducibly complex, isn't complex enough to be improbable to generate with an appropriate chance process.
However, that doesn't mean that the human capability for language is generated by chance. It does indicate, though, that we will not get our answer simply by looking at language itself. Rather, we have to do the difficult and tedious work of figuring out mechanisms for language use in humans, and then decide whether that is IC, and if so, whether it was unevolvable.
Finally, I might quibble with the exact numbers on Justalayman's therapist's splitting of verbal and non-verbal components of language, given that one can say many more different words with different meanings than one can give gestures, body postures, voice modulations, and so on. However, it's a good reminder that nonlinguistic communication is very important to our lives (and to the lives of other animals). I seem to recall that people are better at telling when someone is lying when they can't hear what the liar is saying. If we include this as language--and depending upon the commonalities between nonverbal communication and language we may wish to do so--then I think it's even less sensible to say that language/communication is IC. So again, to answer evolutionary questions, I think we're forced back to look at the mechanisms of communication.
I imagine that issues like the above were precisely why Behe focused his attention on biochemical complexes. A biochemical complex has a well-defined target of study and clear cases where many components are required to maintain function (you often can't find a complete gradation all the way down--though this could say as much about our ability to predict protein function as anything else).
[ 09. June 2003, 02:51: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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Noel Rude
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posted 11. June 2003 15:55
Well … must be no horde of linguists out there … which is to be expected because there are very few linguists (compared to biologists, etc.) and the few that there are generally eschew any association with ID. James Barr, I recall, comments (Fundamentalism, 1981) on the fact that, although religious fundamentalists (those who think God revealed himself to Israel as recorded in the Book) are rare in academia, there are more of them in the hard sciences than in biology and more in biology than in the humanities. We can argue that linguistics is rather rigorous as a science, but its culture is probably more in line with that in the humanities.
Would that more bright young Turks became linguists and took up the cause of ID! A cross disciplinary major might be recommended – linguistics and mathematics, linguistics and AI, linguistics and physics, neurolinguistics, etc. There is nothing more ubiquitous than language, nothing more central to being human, nothing more essential to scientific inquiry – and yet countless youth graduate from our institutions of higher learning scarcely knowing there is such a discipline, let alone what linguists do.
But … to get this thread going … my brainstorm was not that Language is irreducibly complex – I would not have advanced this as a thread – but rather that the syntax promulgated by Noam Chomsky is clearly an example of IC.
I’m a product of the functionalist school which, for the most part, rejects the Chomskian notion of an innate syntax. Also I’m a mathematical Platonist for whom the question, “Is natural language irreducibly complex?” is rather like, “Is mathematics irreducibly complex?” But here I’m probably unique among linguists.
Like Chomsky, the founders of our functionalist school all assumed a Universal Grammar, but unlike Chomsky the motivation for this UG was in communicative function – which suggests a broad spectrum of neurological, social and real world factors. It is quite obvious that humans are born to speak. Functionalists say this need not be due to a unique “language organ”. What is clear is that we are gifted with enhanced development of already existing organs (larynx, tongue, Brocca’s area …). And thus we functionalists, unlike Chomsky, are as adept as anyone in telling Darwinian “just so” stories.
Chomsky says that the investigation of language allows us to postulate a universal syntax that is “autonomous” of meaning and communicative function. This syntax consists of a set of rules, analogous, say, to the rules of a game like chess. But these rules reside in some cerebral module which we have learned to put to use. A biological organ such as the hand is not a proper analogy, because no one argues that the hand developed first and then found its function. A better analogy would be some unfashioned stone which we are able to put to use.
Because Chomsky’s syntax is both innate and autonomous, it could not have been selected via any Darwinian gradualism.
Why this autonomy? I have heard various arguments. Perhaps the best is Saussure’s “arbitrariness of the sign” – the observation that there is no necessary connection between sound and meaning. So if there is no necessary connection between the form of a word and its meaning, then why does this not also hold for grammar? Language, you see, is not just words, it is also a system – there is grammar. And if there is such a thing as Universal Grammar, then might there be some necessary fit between it and communicative function? The Chomskians say no, the functionalists say yes.
Chomsky, as I emphasized in the post above, probably would not describe his syntactic module as an example of irreducible complexity. Yet according to my Darwinist friends (those who are linguists), Chomsky resists any gradualist explanation for its evolution. Thus this brainstorm: If Chomsky’s theory is upheld, it is indeed an example of Behe’s IC.
One wishes to hear argument for and against the Chomskian theory, but it seems that although everyone has heard of Chomsky, hardly anyone outside linguistics is aware that his theory has been seriously challenged. Also one suspects that most nonlinguists – philosophers included – do not really understand what Chomsky has been saying.
Maybe no linguists or neuroscientists are lurking out there … maybe this thread is destined to die with this very whimper … but then brainstorms are rather unpredictable.
[ 11. June 2003, 15:56: Message edited by: Noel Rude ]
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