Discussion Details
| Title: | Problems with Recent Proposals on Recursion & FLN |
| Submitter: | Daniel Everett |
| Description: | The recent article in Nature purporting to show that birds can recognize
recursive structures doesn't seem very convincing. On this I agree with Chomsky's recent esponse that the results are more likely related to short-term memory. On the other hand, I am not particularly impressed with Chomsky's own handling of the notion of recursion, nor of any of the things said about it in the different articles by Hauser, Fitch, and Chomsky. (There are some extremely useful articles showing how the reasoning about formal grammars used to interpret results of primate experiments cited in these HF&C papers is deeply flawed.) They say, for example, that recursion is perhaps the only thing in the FLN (Narrow Faculty of Language). And yet, when presented with the possibility that there are languages without recursion, they say (see their recent reply to Pinker and Jackendoff) that the only thing that really matters is whether people can learn recursion, so that if a particular language lacks it, this is not a problem. But think about this. If *a* language can lack recursion with no damage to the Hauser, Fitch, Chomsky idea of FLN, then *all* languages could lack recursion. That is, what they claim to be the single essential characteristic of human language could be lacking in all human languages. This claim is, well, contentless. But then what of the claim that that is OK to think of recursion as the only significant component of FLN, even in a world where all languages lack recursion, so long as people can learn recursion? I think that this also makes little sense. If people can learn recursion all that teaches us is that it is part of the brain. Anyone surprised? FLN proponents will then respond that this means that recursion is either part of FLN or part of FLB (Broad Language Faculty). We have already seen that it is rather silly to think in this case that recursion is part of FLN. But why would we even need to believe that the learnability of recursion is part of FLB rather than simply deriving from general properties of the brain, properties also responsible for music, for culture in general, for gourmet cooking, and the like? Another likely support for recursion as a general property of the brain, as opposed to something as arcane/specific as FLN/FLB, comes from the work of Herbert Simon. Simon has argued that thinking and handling of information by human cognitive-based systems requires recursion, i.e. that recursion in this sense comes 'for free' without any need to appeal to grammar-in-biology (other than human brains in general). A Nobel prize-winning economist, Simon makes this point about recursion in his 'Architecture of Complexity' article in 1962, a paper ignored by most linguists. It seems more likely that brains have recursion and this can, but need not, be reflected in human languages, given its usefulness (Simon 1962) in the processing of complex information. That is, the whole issue of recursion as part of some FLN (and, really, I think that FLN and FLB are unnecessary obfuscations in an already murky set of proposals) seems deeply misguided. I defy any reader of this list to cite a single crucial experiment in the history of psycholinguistics showing evidence for FLN/FLB or UG. |
| Date Posted: | 29-Apr-2006 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Philosophy of Language |
| LL Issue: | 17.1320 |
| Posted: | 29-Apr-2006 |
