This is a crucial point. Establishment of a covenant has nothing to do with biology or genetics or new species. There’s no way even in principle for science to address that issue. But WLC is arguing for some unspecified genetic changes that establish a new species with a bottleneck of two people. Joshua is conflating these two entirely separate scenarios. I don’t think anyone else here is, and WLC doesn’t do it in the document posted here.
That is not true. I’m sorry. You’ve misread him. He has not argued this, and I would know.
This is the probem with dismembering threads. Context disappears. You may recall that I registered a number of objections to the original document from WLC, accompanied by the quotes of parts I objected to. All that was about biology. While the biology was in service to theology, it was still biology. Perhaps you would like to go back there and explain what I’m misreading, and why.
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Of course it is true that some individual at some specific point in time was the first to use recursion in grammar. Someone had to be the first to say a sentence like, “John said that Mary said that the sky is blue,” just like someone had to be the first to wear polka-dot socks. That does not by a long shot mean that recursive grammar was suddenly a la mode in every human society the moment that first usage was uttered, just like polka dot socks did not suddenly became the rage.
Chomsky’s aversion to statistical studies did not help him regarding this question. Other linguists have investigated recursion and found that it almost never happens in oral communications in some European societies, and that it never ever happens in the Piraha language.
Chomsky’s response to such studies is that the Piraha could use recursion if they wanted to. To me, that relegates recursion to the same status as polka dot socks. You can wear them if you want to, or not, as you prefer, just like you can use recursive grammar if you want to, or not.
I would very much caution against adopting Chomsky’s identification of recursive grammar with human thought. Consider the repercussions when we examine the case of Genie. If ability to use recursive grammar is the sine qua non of humanity, Genie is not human.
Grace and peace,
Chris
That is @PdotdQ, @dga471, Chomsky, and my point.
Well, if we define “human” that way, there is just one “human” society, so by definition it is in every human society at the time. By definition.
This is just illustrative. No one is saying that recursive grammar is the sine qua non, without contextual boundaries.
Genie was a child that was raised by abusive parents and, and did not acquire normal language. This not an issue for structuralists, such as Catholics, because it is clearly the case that she had the capacity for language, but due to environmental factors that capacity was damaged. Therefore she is human.
The slightly more difficult case is a person who has genetically disabled so as to lose capacity for language, so they never had the capacity to learn. The structuralist would say that God’s intention was for her to have this capacity, but that disease intervened to prevent it. Therefore she is human.
The same sort of reasoning, by the way, applies to babies, even though they do not have the capacity for recursive thought or language yet. It is about intended potential, not actual ability.
Christ, I can barely even read that forking story. And somehow God resisted intervening.
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The oddest part about it is what seems to be the author’s total lack of outrage…
Following this logic: If I were to contend that the defining characteristic of humanity is lactase persistence, then I could claim that humanity suddenly and completely came into existence on a global basis approximately 30kya.
This approach to defining boundaries does not strike me as productive. I think it much better to accept that grammatical constructs and biological markers have come into being gradually and continue to change, just like the French language. We should demarcate humanity’s calling and existence as God’s image by the covenants God has established.
What contextual boundaries would you add? Chomsky, to my knowledge, never added them.
Grace and peace,
Chris
No one does that, as it isn’t salient to humanness. A human mind, however, is.
Except that may not in fact be true of certain traits. So we shouldn’t blindly accept this point.
Of course I think is a very reasonable alternative strategy.
He certainly had an implied context. If AI ever has fully recursive grammar (if it doesn’t already), he would not have called it a human. That was outside his scope. Rather he is talk about the origins of language in biological humans, which presumed all sorts of contextual boundaries.
I’m not really very invested in a position here, but I am challenged in envisioning a first individual with the ability to engage in an essentially social activity as speech. What is the point of fluency in proto-stoneage if no one around you, except maybe the kids, understands a word of what you are saying? Does speech which consists of no grammar and a few nouns or imperative verbs constitute a language?
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My $.02: I strongly contend that it is true with respect to both capacity for and actual usage of recursive grammar. It is well-nigh folly to say that either the capacity for recursive grammar or its actual usage is a binary trait that came into being on some specific day, unless we define the boundary so narrowly as to be almost devoid of significance. Humanity was born on January 27, 101243 BCE when some Neanderthal said, “Bleggor says that Gorgham says…”? Nay, say I, nay! 
Defining human thought by a particular form of grammar, and defining the inception of humanity as the first day that the particular grammatical construction was used, seems as fragile to me as defining French speaking as the first day “je ne sais quoi” was uttered. Sure, there was a first day for the utterance of “je ne sais quoi.” But defining the French language that way seems arbitrary if not capricious because French has a certain, I dunno, je ne sais quoi.
Again I ask, what would those contextual boundaries be?
Grace and peace,
Chris
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Chomsky’s accelerated evolution of language was falsified by Daniel Everett in “How Language Began” which shows the evidence of Homo Erectus having language as far back as 1.5 million years ago. Regarding the Broca’s area, it is not a language center as language is now regarded as a whole brain activity.
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So there are 3 types of grammar in Chomsky’s framework. Perhaps H Erectus used a language with a non-recursive grammar, but the advent of languages with recursive grammar did not occur until 100kya. Since Chomsky says the marker of human thought is recursive grammar, a Chomsky follower could acknowledge Erectus language but nevertheless assert that human thought began only 100kya.
Not that I’m buying this at the moment. I’m just saying the evidence of Erectus language doesn’t really collapse the support for Chomsky’s hypothesis.
Grace and peace,
Chris
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I doubt that Chomsky was precisely correct. However his hypothesis illustrates that it isn’t merely theological considerations that bring people to this question. If we have a sharp definition of human, even if it isn’t resolvable by archeology, we justifiably can expect a discrete beginning, even if we don’t know precisely when from the evidence.
In the case if the definition of “French speaker,” the definition was somewhat arbitrary. However in discussing certain thresholds of mental capacity it may not be so arbitrary.
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He is discussing human origins in an evolutionary context, but not 1) the humanness of mentally disabled people today, 2) the humanness of artificial intelligence, 3) the origin of intelligent aliens, etc etc etc.
Transposing his ideas into these other domains requires careful translation, with attention to background assumption. For example, say we write a piece of software that can parse recursive grammar, Chomsky would not say (none of us would) that this software is essentially human. At least we would not say the software was human based on this fact alone. We also want to see attributes that are taken for granted in Human origins (eg embodied, reproducing, etc.), but are unstated in discourse on human origins because all animals share these traits.
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Is that sharp definition of human any less arbitrary than a sharp definition of French? And is the single-allele origin of recursion at all credible?
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Depending on one’s philosophy of the mind (which is underdetermined by the evidence) there can in fact be expected a non-arbitrary definition.
I do not think the single allele origin has been demonstrated with evidence, but the point I am making here is independent of this detail. We can imagine several different ways genetics interacts with Chomsky’s ideas.
I can’t. Perhaps you would reveal one of your ways.
And when we pose that question in view of God’s judgment, it is certainly GOD who decides who qualifies as human and who (or what) does not!