Transcript
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Introduces the evolutionary background of modern humans and argues that language likely emerged as the key development behind creative and cognitive capacities. It emphasizes that language appears to be a uniquely human system with no close animal equivalent.
to look into the question of language design it's useful to U think of how human beings evolved we don't know a great deal about it but we know some things so for example it's fairly clear from the archaeologicalrecord that modern humans modern Homo sapiens cognitively modern Homo sapiens developed quite recently in evolutionary time maybe within the last roughly 100,000 years which is a flick of an eye uh that's when you get the enormous uh increaseexplosion of uh indications of creative activity uh complex family structures symbolism and so on all of this develop roughly in that period and uh interestingly there has been no detectable evolution of these capacities in roughly the past 50,000years that's the period since our ancestors left Africa small number of them and pretty quickly spread over the world so all humans are pretty much identical with regard to cognitive capacity linguistic capacity and so on which means that
there's been essentially no Detective able Evolution so there's a small window there where something happened and it's generally assumed by paleoanthropologist people who study these topics that it must have been the emergence of language because it's hard toimagine any of these basically creative activities without language and uh that language does provide the mechanisms for them so it seems as though the core of human Sensibility and uh creative and cognitive capacity is the development of thiscompletely unique capacity there's nothing analogous to it anywhere in the Animal World um there are animal signaling systems but they're completely different in design and use and just about every Dimension so something strange happened roughly maybe 100,000 years
Explains that although languages sound very different on the surface, they may share a deep common design. The speaker describes core syntactic principles as part of human nature, with sound and sign serving as external forms.
ago not very long and language emerged in humans and the question then is well what kind of a system is it on the surface languages look very different from one another so if U somebody walks into the roomand starts speaking Swahili I'm not going to understand a word though I will recognize that it's a language I won't understand it but I know it's not noise you know as soon as you look more deeply you findthat these languages are basically molded to a pretty similar design maybe an identical design the large parts of the Lang what we hear is just the sounds but that's a very superficial part of language the core of languageis principles that determine uh actually an infinite array of possible Expressions structured Expressions which have definite meanings now all of that is well beyond what we can just observe by say looking at texts and when a child is
learning a language the child doesn't learn those things there's no evidence for them almost no evidence for them nobody can teach them we don't even know what they are these are just part of our nature the core principlesso-called syntactic principles that form expressions and that provide specific interpretations for them that's apparently just all part of our nature and then there are various ways of externalizing it in sound or in sign which is about the sameuh but it but that's a kind of a superficial manifestation of an internal uniformity and the really exciting and it almost has to be this way if you think about the way the system developed it apparently developed very
Argues that language may have emerged suddenly as a computational system shaped by natural laws rather than gradual training or experience. The section also notes the challenge of proving this and reducing language diversity to shared principles.
suddenly in an evolutionary terms which meant that there were very limited selectional pressures so it probably was designed as a a computational it's it is a computational system it's only explanation for this array of capacities computational systems havecertain optimal characteristics that some are more efficient than others and there's every reason to believe that this developed pretty suddenly as an optimal communication system essentially following laws of nature very much the way a snowflake assumes a verycomplex form not because of experience or training but uh just because that's the way the laws of physics work and there's every reason to believe that language is something like this now to try to show it is notrivial matter you have to try to show that The Superficial variety of languages actually reduces to principles of a common character which approach Notions of optimal design and there has been I think not notable progress in that uh
uh process is a long way to go to try to demonstrate it for uh but and of course then one wants to go beyond try maybe ultimately to discover the neural base for whatever this unique capacity is and
Discusses the difficulty of researching language in humans because invasive experiments are not possible, unlike in visual neuroscience. It concludes by pointing toward future convergence across acquisition, neural basis, and language design to understand human cognitive nature.
it that's a very hard problem to study for humans so we know a lot about the human visual system because of direct experimentation with u cats and monkeys we allow ourselves to do direct experimentation you know sticking electrodesinto the brain and so on controlled experiments but they we don't do it with humans uh and humans have about the same visual system is cats and monkeys so we know about the human visual system you can't dothat for language they're no analogous systems so you can't no no much use studying other animals uh we're unique in this respect and invasive experiments with human beings are of course barred so it's a very complex and intricatematter to try to find clever ways of getting around the barriers to learn something about these topics and some progress is being made I think we can look forward to a period when there will be convergence of various
modes of inquiry into design of language neural basis acquisition possible varieties of language and so on that's crucial task for the future which in fact U is directed to the core of human nature the core of COG nitivehuman nature the most intriguing question I think is uh the one that I basically just mentioned there's reason to believe that the core of human intellectual nature cognitive nature is a computational system which probably has something like theproperties of a snowflake it simply had to develop this way given biological and physical law and special circumstances and the most intriguing question is to try to see if that's true and if it is to show that it'strue