Another difference bites the dust
People have been trying to prove for a long time that humans are fundamentally different from animals instead of simply being higher on a continuum. First it was tool use, then self-awareness, culture, and language, but animals have been shown to have all the same faculties, albeit less developed of course. Each time those claiming a divide are
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That doesn't "blow his theory out of the water" anymore than the hypothetical existence of modern-day dinosaurs would blow evolution out of the water. That proves that, if his big theory (the language organ exists) is correct, his smaller theory (birds don't have one) is incorrect.
It could also mean that humans have a language organ, but birds are capable of learning basic syntax without such a thing, because we're different species.
That doesn't mean I have an opinion on the theory in question.
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you appeal to my regular_ego are you familiar with experimental wRIGHTing!
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Thanks for the correction, Connie. You're right. I've been looking at it from the wrong angle -- it's not Chomsky's theory of a "language organ" in and of itself that has always irritated me, but the implication that humans are more special than animals, rather than simply more advanced. A language organ may or may not exist, but if it does I don't believe it's a uniquely human attribute except possibly in its degree of development. I believe that Homo sapiens is nothing more than a more advanced life-form than the others on this planet, not a fundamentally different creature.
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"What difference does it make to you if humans are fundamentally different rather than simply greater by degree?"
The controversy loses its bite if we don't care one way or the other. If it's simply a matter of how many brain cells there are in a bird-brain, we can just count them. But if it MEANS something about your inherent worth as a creature, then it's really a big deal.
God loves everybody, even the sparrows and the lilies of the field. But I'm His favorite.
Or, maybe not. And then what? Can I live with myself knowing I'm not the final crowning jewel of evolution?
Or is even that not enough? Do I have to be beyond evolution, a special creation without peer?
I hope some day people learn to relax and get along with the rest of the planet, as well as each other.
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No, that icon is perfectly put!
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Someone actually wrote a Chomskybot. It's a script that spews out Chomsky-like spew. Chris showed it to me and asked what it was. I read it and said, "Just looks like Chomsky's latest crap". Little did I know it was machine-generated. :) And it does an amazing job of being precisely as incomprehensible as he is.
Did I mention that my thesis was Chomskyan? :)
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I love the Chomskybot ... I just wasted ten minutes reloading it, reading the info about it, and then playing with it some more!
I've never even attempted to read Chomsky's writings -- one glance has always been enough to make me run screaming from the room. Even his political views are impossibly convoluted. He generally comes across as a leftist, but Wikipedia says that he "identifies with the labor-oriented anarcho-syndicalist current of anarchism ... has also stated that he considers himself to be a conservative of the Classical liberal variety [and] has further defined himself as a Zionist; although, he notes that his definition of Zionism is considered by most to be anti-Zionism these days...." And that's from just the introduction to a very long article ( ... )
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I didn't post a story. Too painful to think about still. Soon, I expect.
He seems invested in proving that humans are special, that we have an innate ability that no animal does
Yup, that. And much much more. It's his syntax that I was studying.
I agree with you re animals and humans differing in development. I've always thought that. And I think that the sign language studies with primates go a long way to show that.
I thought your thesis was about recording a dying Native American language. In what way was it Chomskyan (and why)?!No, my thesis was about the nature of subjects and objects of Nakota sentences. It was a very theoretical thesis. I went about showing that the prefixes on the verbs that denote the subject and the object are agreement morphemes, not the actual subjects and objects of the verb, even though they are often the only marker of the subject or object. I'll gladly give you a copy if you're interested, but I gotta admit, it's a difficult (and boring!) read ( ... )
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