Sorry but, no it isn’t. I think you should look up logical positivism, it has nothing to do with what you are discussing.
Clearly there are different categories, and yes there has to be a boundary between them. However, there is no reason why this boundary must be a single point or a sharp line. It can also be a boundary zone of some finite duration, or some other relevant measure, such as in colours a range of frequencies. In many cases that is as precise as you can get. Live with it!
If you want to improve on that you would need ultra detailed, exhaustive definitions of what constitutes a member of group under consideration. In the case of French you would need a very long list of all the words that are French, and all the words that are not French; you must include and exclude all possible grammatical rules; and so on - and once you have al that you could (in theory!) check for every single person if they are French speakers or not, by those criteria.clearly a monumental and probably impossible undertaking, and actually a totally pointless one.
None of this really adds anything to our knowledge or understanding, in my view. All it is, is us humans struggling with the way we iare wired to categorise stuff in the world. In the meantime, the stuff itself couldn’t care less about our self-imposed conundrums and it just goes about its merry ways.
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Actually, @PdotdQ just explained why there can be in fact a sharp line with a clear definition.
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No, I don’t think so. The problem is that a very simple criterion is necessary if you want to create a sharp dividing line, and any such simple criterion would necessarily be arbitrary. We could define the first speaker as the first person to say “kay” instead of “kweh” for que. That would be a fairly sharp line. But what have we accomplished then?
You must mean something different than I do by “appropriate”. One can always create an arbitrary sharp line at some point in a continuum. One could create any number of such lines at any number of places. So?
Exactly. He’s asserting that there must be a single “human allele” whose presence makes one human and whose absence makes one not. Or would it be necessary to be homozygous? In that case the person with the mutation would not be human, only half-human, and one would have to wait for a homozygote before the first human arrived. And of course we would have to have humans mating with non-humans for quite some time until humanness became fixed. There’s no biological sense to it at all.
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Neither language nor humanity is anything like a continuous function.
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For the purposes of this discussion, they’re close enough if the intervals between states are very small, which they are. No single change separates French from Latin or humans from non-humans.
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Let’s all grant that the genetic changes were very small. How do you know there was not a large gap, at some point, in the evolution of the human mind’s function? Given that we do not have, for example, intermediate states between animal and human language, how do you know that there was not a sharp transition as some linguists have theorized?
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I think he means “precise and (in principle) objective, even if not presently observable in the limited evidence we currently have.”
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Can you think of anything analogous that we do know about? That just doesn’t seem to be how evolution works. Saltationism expires from lack of evidence. Of course the absence of intermediate states is a gap created by extinction.
That meaning doesn’t work for any of the cases we’ve discussed so far. I particularly object to the weasel phrases “presently observable” and “limited evidence”.
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There are often functions that are either there or not. Some theologians are defining human by the potential for particular mental functions. It is entirely plausible to affirm that genetic changes were gradual but that function (because it is by definition binary) was not there at one time and then appears in a first exemplar.
Note that 1) defining human the presence of (rather, the potential for) particular mental functions has a long theological tradition that preexists evolution; 2) determining when this potential arises in the archeological record is an open question, and likely will remain so until we invent a time machine.
I do not know of any linguists who propose a sharp transition in a single generation. Have I overlooked something?
Grace and peace,
Chris
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I don’t think it’s at all plausible. Do you have any real examples of such a thing? It may be plausible to theologians, but is it plausible to biologists? You are bending over backwards here, and I applaud your flexibility but not your judgment.
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Yes, you overlooked Chomsky.
We are discussing different categories here. I’m not saying something about biology. I’m granting entirely the biological view you are arguing for. I’m saying there is another legitimate way that could also describe that reality.
Here is another way, some people say that the image of God is defined by our relationship to God, much like a marriage defines a husband and wife. At what time does that version of the Image of God arise? How could we possibly know? Yet, either humans were in a covenantal relationship or not. It is a binary state, and (just like marriage) it can be meaningful, and it is not detectable in biology.
This is not to say that “anything goes,” but a key confusion here is that biologists are talking about different things than the theologians. That is just a brute fact. Biologists, for this reason, cannot really make pronouncements on theological categories without doing a great deal of work to ensure that the translation is correct.
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Apparenty, but you’re the only one discussing theology. Everybody else here, Craig included, was talking about biology. And so were you until just recently. Perhaps you should stop trying to change the subject and go with biology like everyone else.
That’s the crux of the issue here. WLC is not talking about a biological category. So I’m not changing the topic. We are not talking about a category that will appear in biology. We are talking about something else.
In that case he’s a very bad writer. And here I thought that genes and alleles and species were biology.
No it is just a communication gap. He is not linking “human” with a taxonomic category like “species.”
Yes he is; “Heidelberg Man”, in fact. And he’s postulating a single mutation that results in reproductive isolation. That’s speciation by saltation.
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I think maybe I didn’t make my question clear enough, so I’ll add some context.
Some linguists have proposed a gradual evolution of complex language capabilities over millions of years. Others like Chomsky have proposed an accelerated evolution of human language. Chomsky locates this within the past 100k years, asserting that recursion is the key way to distinguish between human language and the utterances of other creatures.
But no one, not even Chomsky, has proposed that a fully developed Broca’s area miraculously appeared in a human brain for the first time at a specific point in history, such that prior to that point there was zero human language and after that point there was a fully developed universal grammar.
At least that’s my reading of the linguistics literature. If you have a reference to a model that proposes a point-in-time, instant appearance of fully developed human language in a single generation, I’d love to read it.
Thanks, Joshua.
Grace and peace,
Chris
P.S./EDIT: I agree with you, Joshua, that a theologically significant, point-in-time change occurred when God established His first covenant with man. What I disagree with is the idea that a simultaneous point-in-time change happened with regard to linguistic ability.
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That is correct. No one has proposed, this not even me in this scenario. That is not what we are discussing.
He proposed it was in a single generation, a single individual, because he saw recursion in language as an all-or-none and defining property of human language. That is not “accelerated” evolution, but a clear definition.