Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Languages, Not Only Language A consequence of Chomskys hypothesis of the universal grammar is that all human languages (or
at least their grammars) must be relatively similar, if they all sprung up from
the same universal grammar that is genetically transmitted from brain to brain.
There must exist a
relatively simple mechanism by which the brain
constructs a specific grammar (say, English) out of the universal
grammar. The US linguist Mark Bakertried to identify the
similarities among languages and what "parameters" determine whether
you speak, say, English or French. Imagine a car that you could personalize so
much that it could eventually look completely different from the car of your
neighbor, while still being manufactured at the same plant. The "personalization" would
consist in selecting "options" such as paint color, body shape,
number of doors, etc. At each step of
the assembly line, machines would obey one of the options and add a different
touch to your car. Something similar
occurs in the brain with language, according to Baker. Bakerimagines a "tree" (a
hierarchy) of such linguistic parameters. The parameters are arranged according
to their power to affect one another.
At each junction in the hierarchy, a parameter (or more) determines a
way to structure sentences. Below that junction, that parameter is fixed and
other parameters are taken into account.
Baker's hierarchy of linguistic parameters looks like the periodic table
of elements or Carl Linnaeus' classification of animals and plants, but it is different in that it
specifies how to "generate" such a classification. Alas, Bakerdoes not account for the evolution of languages. We do know that Italian evolved from Latin. Italian has wildly different grammatical rules from Latin. How did it happen that children born with a pre-wired brain and later brainwashed to acquire the parameters of the Latin language ended up changing those parameters? In fact, the one thing that seems to change a lot is the grammar itself. Words are relatively similar among languages of the same geographic area, but the grammar can be quite different (as any Italian who studied Latin in high school painfully remembers). Those changes occurred gradually over many generations. It is possible that all
languages descend from the same original language; and that children learn a language in the amount of time that it
takes to learn a language, not any faster. These may be clues to another scenario
for the origin of language. No question the brain is
born with a structure that facilitates survival on this planet. It is even too
easy to claim that so many skills must be "innate". We would not be alive if that were not the
case. However, claiming that our brains are "pre-wired" to discover
General Relativity would be an exaggeration.
It took Einsteinto discover General Relativity. Decades from now every human on
the planet will master General Relativity. That does not mean that General
Relativity was inevitable for all human brains. There may have been an Einstein of communicating, who invented
language. And we all might be simply
re-learning, generation after generation, that marvelous invention. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Language: Minds Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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