Chomsky Research Homework

H/W Investigate Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the possibility of innate grammar 

(sometimes referred to as 'universal grammar). 

• Summarise his argument
• Give two or three reasons / arguments that support Chomsky
• Give two or three reasons / arguments against  his claims
• What do you think?

This it is exactly the kind of thing you ought to be doing if you want to get really good.

Try these places for starters: 

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/475609-grammar-comes-from-a-biologically-innate-dedicated-faculty

Excellent!

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-language/

Very comprehensive, but perhaps a little daunting. I haven't read al of it yet, but I will before I see you again so that you can't expose my ignorance!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Debates

Very useful

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar

There are lots of others  - be independent!

Some string, the self, Independent objects and difficulties for empiricists

We spent some time trying to get our heads around the slightly tricky notion that we cannot get the concept of independently existing physical objects through experience. When we experience something the experience happens in our heads and is not, therefore, 'independent' of us. So, something existing independently of our experience is by definition beyond our experience and therefore unknown to us. 

So, if you get all your ideas through experience, then how do you get the idea of an independently existing physical object? This kind of thing is obviously a problem for  Empiricists and there are marks:) for remembering it. 

Other problematic concepts include: causality and the self. 

Now, the concept of the 'self' seems like the most obvious thing that could possibly occur to a human bean (sic), but nothing's obvious anymore - not in the crazy old world of philosophy (ha, ha, ha!! they laughed ironically!) According to Hume, and he's got good point,  'Just as there is no mind independent of perception, there is no self independent of perceptions'. We tend to think of the self as 'having' or at least 'containing' our experiences, but if you think about it this is actually  rather stupid, after all how could you have a self if you hadn't ever experienced anything - no thoughts no nothing. No self. Even if something did 'have' or 'contain' the experiences and thoughts, that something wouldn't be part of the self. Imagine a bucket of water: the water equals perceptions / thoughts etc and the bucket equals the thing that contains the thoughts; it is clear that the bucket is not part of the water and in the same way the thing that contained the perceptions wouldn't be a perception/experience/thought and therefore wouldn't be part of the self!!


Is this making sense to anybody except me??


And of course we can think of the the various perceptions / experiences / thoughts as being like the strands in a ball of string: none of them run the whole length of the string none of them constitute a 'self' existing as one thing, one identity through time. I need to stop my brain becoming numb. :)

Locke, Caruthers Babies & Birdsong

Last week we covered a lot of ground in 3 lessons. We read some John Locke; Bk 1, Ch 2. ‘No innate Principles in the Mind’ and saw his three arguments against innate ideas they went something like this:

 1. The argument from universal consent (or assent): If any idea were innate in all human minds then surely certain ideas would be universally accepted and agreed on. But they're not.

 2. Children and Idiots: It makes no sense to speak of an idea being in our minds without us being aware of it. How can we have 'understandings' that we don't understand. Surely the whole point of an idea is that it is 'had'. (As in, "I've just had an idea!" said Clive.) So, according to Locke, if ideas were innate then children and idiots would have ideas in their minds that they didn't know they had and couldn't understand anyway!!

3 The circular argument: The argument that we only come to knowledge of these 'innate' ideas when we develop our 'reason', is again non-sensical and seems circular' according to Locke. (And Sam.) Because in order to know innate ideas we have to have reason, but the evidence that we have 'reason' is our knowledge of innate ideas.

What is an idea? 

You also spent some time working out what an idea actually is - in philosophy one should always try to define one's terms:) 

We/you decided there were two kinds of ideas: propositions e.g. the sun will rise tomorrow, and concepts e.g. 'yellow' or 'ugly' or 'friend'. 

Experience as a Trigger: We read about Peter Carruthers' theory that suggests ideas can develop in a similar way to physical capacities like sight or speech. And we drew some marvelous diagrams!! Here are Tansy and Abby's 

And then we began to tackle the first really tricky bit of philosophical thinking and writing in order to answer the question: 

How do Peter Carruthers’ Ideas about pre-linguistic thought help refute Locke’s arguments against the possibility of innate ideas.  

Roughly speaking the answer to this is going to suggest that for Caruthers the imagery used in mental rehearsals of action (something that babies can possibly do without language) is a kind of pre-linguistic thought. When we acquire language this triggers the our full understanding of the 'innate idea'. 


TheIf we push this a little further and point out that  the concept of 'self' , which is bound up with the concept of identity, is difficult to account for empirically (we don't seem to experience the idea of self) and that David Hume (the most important early empiricist) accepted  that the concept of self could not be gained from experience, then we begin to construct a rather clever way of suggesting the possibility of an innate idea of the self!! (get it?) :) 

The Homework was to

read the next bit of Locke's Bk 2 Ch 1-7 up to, but not including, Chapter iii Ideas of one sense