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TheOtherDave comments on Academic Cliques - Less Wrong
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I am unclear on what observations I would differentially expect, here.
That is, if I observe that languages vary along dimension X, presumably a Chomskyan says "the universal grammar includes a parametrizable setting for X with the following range of allowed values" and an antiChomskyan simply says "languages can vary with respect to X with the following range of allowed values." The antiChomskyan wins on Occamian grounds (in this example at least) but is this really a hill worth dying on?
The question is whether the variety in human languages is constrained by our biology or by general structural issues which any intelligence which developed a communication system would come up against. This should have implications for cognitive science and maybe AI design.
Note that the anti-Chomskyans are not biology-denying blank-slaters. Geoffrey Sampson, who has written a good book about this, is a racist reactionary.
Ah! Yes, OK, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I studied linguistics as an undergrad in the 80s so am probably an unexamined Chomskyist by default. That said, I certainly agree that if such general structural constraints exist (which is certainly plausible) then we ought to identify and study them, not just assume them away.
Is there a language that doesn't have any kind of discrete words and concepts? 'cause I'm pretty sure there are possible intelligences that could construct a communication system that uses only approximate quantitative representations (configuration spaces or replaying full sensory) instead of symbols.
This is probably why, in my experience, innateness issues of any kind also don't play a role in the everyday practice of most linguists.
The people who study the issue of natural languages being somehow interestingly constrained by biology are, incidentally, not normal linguists, but they're mixture of computer scientists, mathematical linguists, and psychologists, who look at the formal properties of natural language grammars and their learnability properties. And if there are such constraints, there is of course the further question of whether we're dealing with something that is specific to language, or a general cognitive principle.
Being a much more ordinary linguist, I don't even know what the state of that field is. So basically, I don't really get what all the fuss is about.
A more significant divide in linguists seems to me to be between the people who do formally well-defined stuff and those who don't. Ironically, a lot of Chomskyans fall into the latter category.
Also, there's much more impressive developmental evidence for certain kinds of things being innate than language acquisition.