How did Adam and Eve learn to speak?

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Hi @dga471,

I believe you misunderstand me. I was not implying that God was being deceptive by encoding structures in Adam’s and Eve’s brains. That was not the point of my argument. Rather, my point was that meaning without a causal history fails to specify the structures to be encoded, at the molecular level. It’s too vague and high-level. More detail is needed.

Both you and I agree on the meaning of the word “three”, even though we may have learned it in different circumstances. With more complex words such as “melodious” or there could be cultural and personal nuances that make our understandings slightly different, but there is also a large amount of agreement such that you and I both understand each other when we use that word.

With Adam, God has to create neurological structures that make him understand the word “melodious”, and God must choose what personal and cultural nuances attach to that word, to avoid the problem of under-determination as you mentioned.

Although we learned the meanings of “three” and “melodious” under different circumstances, there’s enough overlap between the different ways we learned them for us to be able to agree on the meanings of these words, in everyday life.

You suggest that “God must choose what personal and cultural nuances attach to that word [‘melodious’], to avoid the problem of under-determination as you mentioned.” But the problem is that you can’t neurologically code a culture out of nothing. Remember, Adam had no culture: he wasn’t born into a human community. The only satisfactory resolution to the problem posed in this post is to suppose that Adam and Eve were literally brought up by God, over a period of about 20 years or so, during which God introduced them to various concepts (and presumably, let them develop their own, once they had reached a certain stage). The other solution (favored by secular evolutionists) is that there was no first human being, and that language evolved gradually. That would create fatal problems for traditional Christianity, however: you can’t have half a rational soul, for instance.

@vjtorley, do you think Jesus turning water into wine suffers from the problem of underdetermination?

If all Jesus said was, “Let there be wine,” then my answer is “yes.” If he came up with a non-arbitrary specification of which wine he wanted (e.g. “Let the water turn into wine with precisely the same atomic composition as what is commonly considered to be the best wine in Judea”), then the answer is “no.” Cheers.

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Good point, @swamidass . Maybe that explains how Homo sapiens could have sprung up all across Africa between 330,000 and 300,000 years ago.

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That would probably depend on which two people, and how closely they relate with one another. Identical twins seem to invent language extensions. I don’t know if there is anything comparable for fraternal twins.

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Feral children are not a good example for this.

I disagree with the usual interpretation of experience with feral children. I see the main problem as most likely due to a failure acquire important concepts at an early enough age.

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There is wide disagreement as to what we mean by “language”, particularly as possibly applied to non-humans.

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I recall that Jared Diamond makes a similar argument in one of his books, maybe the Third Chimpanzee. I think he says that he believes the ability for spoken language is what set homo sapiens apart and led to our expansion.

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Language extensions != entire new language, and the twins in question are already familiar with at least one actual language. I don’t see the relevance. We’re talking about one couple inventing a complete language from scratch with no model to work from. That isn’t credible.

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This too is a problem, because of course the age in question is with reference to brain development, and A&E would presumably have arrived with adult brains to go with their adult bodies.

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But what about the expansion of H. erectus and various other Homo species?

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I’d have to dig out the book and look at exactly what he said. He made an argument as to why he thought the spoken language ability is what set sapiens apart.

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Is the Genesis story clear about that?

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So, imagine that A&E were created as embryos or infants and bought up by God in such a manner as you described. Fast forward 20 years. They have now acquired language capabilities and a host of cultural nuances from their interactions with God, nature, and each other. Their neurological structures have developed based on their experiences or causal history, as you said. For example, Eve’s neurological structure now has a configuration S_E = \{x_1 y_1,x_1 y_2,...,x_2 y_1, x_2 y_2, ...\} where x_i y_j denotes a connection between two specific neurons.

My question is: why can’t God simply have created Eve instantaneously, 20 years beforehand, with neurological structure S_E? Why did he have to use natural processes to make Eve have neurological configuration S_E?

(By the way, I’m not entirely opposed to the scenario that God created Adam and Eve in a state where they are mentally like children, and they needed some tutoring by God to fully develop into adult human beings. In fact, this could be a strength of the model - God could have wanted Adam and Eve to have a special upbringing, personally taught by him instead of other hominids. The problem is just that the Genesis text seems to talk about a man and woman, not children. That seems to imply some level of development at the moment of creation.)

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About what, exactly? It doesn’t say specifically that Adam was created as an adult or that he had an adult brain. But it doesn’t say a lot of things. It seems to me that if he had been created as a baby, the story would have mentioned that. It’s an important detail. The story reads as if it’s not skipping over huge amounts of time, and there’s no reason to allow an interpreter to suppose literally anything that’s not explictly contradicted.

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All this discussion about how GAE learned how to speak misses the key character in the Genesis story - the talking snake. Within the GAE framework, when and how did the snake learn to speak? Apparently Eve was able to carry on meaningful conversations with this special specimen of the Squamata Serpentes suborder of reptiles.

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Yes, that is where we often end up in our exchanges on various topics. So time to call it a day. A la prochaine.

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There are lots of important details that are missing. That’s part of why it looks more like an allegory than like history.

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How do you know what’s missing?

A more important reason is that what’s there is just bizarre if taken literally.

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Because meaning is not something that resides in the head, not even for molecular twins raised in normal language communities, as Putnam claims to show in his Twin Earth thought experiments.
The issue is not underdetermination, as you show. The issue is that meaning is external. That is, meaning involves external relations to the world, as mediated by one’s language community and the norms enforced by that community. Or so some philosophers claim.

Suppose they are right. Now suppose as you did that Adam and Eve were created in the body state of mature language users with language dispositions appropriate to their environment. At their moment of creation, one could argue they lack the causal history to make their language-like behaviours meaningful. But they would form a community of language users and after sufficient time for them to communicate and live in their environment, their utterances would be meaningful.

I don’t know how they would decide who was right if they fought about the meaning of a word, but in the event they had bigger problems than that.

OTOH, I am not sure what to make of God teaching an immature Adam alone and communicating solely with him. Would that be an language community?

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You can see that there is missing detail, but you don’t know what to fill in. But that’s great for an allegory – you get to fill it in however you want.

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Important detail? Nobody tells us what Adam had for dinner on Tuesday (presumably not apples) but that’s not important. What of importance was clearly left out?