Greg Detre
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
introduced by Marc Hauser
Lecture series: Language and the Rest of the World:
The
Biolinguistic Turn
What Might the Language Faculty Be?
Intentionality and Beyond
A new science of the mind:
what is knowledge of domain X?
how is knowledge of domain X acquired?
how is knowledge of domain X used?
Chomsky focused on the first two
quoted from Chomsky, 1980 on Universal grammar
Texan rock band, �The Chomsky�
haven�t heeded Turing�s warning that to consider the question �can machines think?� is meaningless
that children have no problem with fairy tales involving princes � frogs � princes shows that they have no problems with the notion of psychic continuity
i-language � internal, intensional, individual
he�s dubious about framing the hard mind-body problem in terms of consciousness, and doesn�t like Nagel�s formulation � you can�t think of a wrong answer to �what is it like to be me?� � he�s dubious about the whole mind-body problem in general
Petty (Newton�s predecessor) considered elasticity to be the hard problem of science, and Boyle considered motion to be sufficiently mysterious to support the idea of a Creator
why am I so sure that the problem of consciousness is qualitatively harder than these???
Ken asked a question about computational theories of cognition
considers a program to be just a (completely formalised) theory written in a weird notation
but by formalising everything, it forces you to answer/formalise even that which can�t/shouldn�t be formalised
I don�t understand what can�t/shouldn�t be formalised�
he argues that much of the great mathematical progress wasn�t completely formalised
e.g. Euclid�s geometry wasn�t formalised till Hilbert
apparently, Berkeley pointed out a contradiction in Newton�s calculus proofs (defining 0 as nothing vs 0 as the smallest�), sending English maths into a tailspin(???)
there�s no need to make things more formal than you need, or can understand � programming a computer forces you to answer a bunch of questions that you just don�t understand
what do we know about genes for vocabulary acquisition?
there�s a gene foxP2 seems to have something to do with language development, but as far as he knows, there�s nothing genetic known about children�s phenomenal ability for vocabulary acquisition
what is reasonable to expect to learn soon about the �innate core� of language?
we just can�t predict that
�
wouldn�t be impossible to see insect navigation as some proto-prototype of language