Comments on: Slaughter Of The Innocents?

By: rickyjames

rickyjames — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 12:32:20 +0000

I can see I’ve got to check the comments on older stories more closely than I’ve been doing ;)

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 19:02:08 +0000

The Language Instinct is the only Pinker book I've read, so perhaps it's in one of the other ones. :-) And come to think of it he did go on for a while about evolution of the language part of the brain. Like how early humans found the especially articulate folks extra-sexy (which is why all us girls swoon over rickyjames! :->) My reading was certainly colored by what I had read just before that -- The Linguistics Wars which was a very entertaining look at what had been going on with Chomsky and the Cartesians vs. the empiricists (and a lot of other stuff). Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know!

By: apsmith

apsmith — Fri, 14 Mar 2003 14:08:59 +0000

and I’ve read some E.O. Wilson in the meantime – I’ll have to go back and check :-) As an “outsider” I seem to recall Pinker’s approach was very much based on evolutionary concepts; on the other hand, I think you’re right that he had little to say about animal capacities for language in general.

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 16:10:10 +0000

‘Cuz what I remember from reading The Language Instinct (it was a couple of years ago, I may be misremembering) is Pinker dismissing a theory that local conditions or physiology determine key aspects of language (a “Polynesian islanders have lots of vowels in their language because they live in lush, humid climates where the air is pleasant on their vocal cords, while Germanics have lots of gutteral consonants because when it’s freezing cold they want to keep their mouths clasped shut” sort of thing) on the basis of the negative results of a single study, which looked at a single region for a single short period. Pinker’s flat dismissal made me think that he didn’t hold much with evolution influencing language. My impression of him, from the book, was that he’s a true Cartesian in the tradition of Chomsky. He seemed to hold that “the language instinct” sprang into humans full blown at some point, without much in the way of evolutionary lead-in. (He flat-out ridiculed the idea that we’re learning anything about language from the great ape sign language experiments.) At least, that was the impression I took away from reading The Language Instinct.

By: apsmith

apsmith — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 11:14:20 +0000

Steven Pinker talks about the irrational antagonism there seems to be against evolutionary explanations of human behavior in some of his books (it may have been “The Language Instinct” that I remember this from). The Social Sciences have developed under the assumption for the most part that there is no need to think about “animals” – humans are unique and special. And of course we are in some ways; we have properties that are “emergent” and not really understandable by looking only our evolutionary heritage. But rejecting the evolutionary origin of our minds, culture, and habits is as unfruitful as a chemist rejecting the properties of atoms learned from physics, because physicists know nothing about chemical reactions.