Abstract
This article examines some recent work by Berwick and Chomsky as presented in their book Why Only Us? Language and Evolution (2015). As I understand them, Berwick and Chomsky’s overarching purpose is to explain how human language could have arisen in so short an evolutionary period. After articulating their strategy, I argue that they fall far short of reaching this goal. A co-evolutionary scenario linking the mechanisms that realize the language system, both with one other and with cognitive mechanisms capable of exploiting linguistic expressions, is surely unavoidable. And yet this is precisely what Berwick and Chomsky in effect rule out.
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Notes
All page references for B&C will refer to this book unless otherwise noted.
Here the idea would be that Instinctively modifies Swim in each of the corresponding hierarchical mental expressions because it is closer to Swim in terms of structural distance than it is to any other constituent it might modify. (Here and below I follow the convention of using small caps to name concepts.)
I will use square brackets to illustrate hierarchical structure; “[X [Y Z]]” represents an expression in which X is superordinate to Y and Z.
To see how this goes, consider the linguistic expression [X [X [X Y]]]. This structure would be built as follows: first X and Y would be Merged, yielding G = [X Y]; then X and G would be Merged, yielding H = [X G] = [X [X Y]]; finally, X and H would be Merged, yielding I = [X H] = [X [X [X Y]]].
I thank Richard Moore for drawing this work to my attention.
See Gerhart and Kirschner (2007) for an excellent discussion.
For a discussion of the effect of music on the production of neurotransmitters, hormones, and other biomolecular messengers, see Gangrade (2012).
One might think that this work is done by the semantic “features” posited by the Minimalist program. Put simply, features are like “tags” that attach to lexical items and determine what those expressions (and the complex expressions they make up) can and cannot combine with. If one wishes to appeal to features in this context, then a story must be told about how they came to exist prior to Merge. (This will be more or less difficult depending on what one wishes to say about the forms of mental representation that existed prior to Merge.) But even granting that such a story can be told, it will not obviate the need for a mechanism in the above sense; this is because features merely constrain rather than determine what is combined with what.
To be sure, there are a few ways we might conceive of the MCU and its relation to Merge, but the details do not really matter here.
I am here assuming the existence of complex expressions prior to Merge. More on this assumption below.
The most seminal article in this area is perhaps Ned Blocks’ “Conceptual role semantics” (1998).
An expression can be complex—can have parts—without having linear syntax, but not vice versa. (See Gallistel and King 2011, Ch. 5, for a nice overview.) .
Importantly, this is not to assume the prior existence of an independent language of thought that was as expressively rich as language in B&C’s sense. (For one thing, we are here assuming that the expressions which existed prior to Merge had linear syntax only. This antecedent representational system might have been limited in all sorts of other ways too.).
One might be thinking at this point, “Regardless of what B&C say, couldn’t one hold that Merge was selected for due to its facilitating communication?” It is far from clear how this might go, given B&C’s picture of the language system and its relation to the rest of the mind. It would be too large a digression to delve into this issue here, however. Suffice it to say that any new communicative sophistication on the part of some Merge-possessing sender would appear to be lost on a receiver unless that receiver (1) also possessed Merge, and (2) possessed cognitive mechanisms capable of exploiting the Merged expressions which the sender’s communicative behavior cause him (i.e., the receiver) to construct. But to assume (2) just is to assume cognitive machinery that would have upgraded cognition independently of communication. (Note also that (1) is not a trivial assumption: it presupposes that Merge appeared simultaneously in two or more habitually interacting individuals (e.g., a pair of siblings).)
To be clear, this act of relating would run from Merge (or better: the workspace) to the conceptual system via the interface with the latter.
I use an “_” here to mean that the conjoined words represent a single, unstructured concept.
If the point is still not clear, perhaps the following analogy will help: Imagine a standard addition chip which has been designed to operate on expressions that encode numbers using the binary encoding system. Now imagine feeding this chip a new set of expressions which, while still encoding numbers, encode them using some other encoding scheme. The chip will produce nonsense.
See Carruthers (2006) for a discussion.
I say “the vicinity of Merge” because one might think that these systems deliver outputs to a mechanism controlling the operation of Merge—our MCU from above—rather than Merge itself. (Here I am assuming that the MCU and Merge would themselves be in the same vicinity, as is surely plausible given the brain’s tendency to “save wire” [Striedter 2005].) This would be compatible with Merge having been directly connected to one or more of these modules when Merge first appeared.
Because of the expression’s novel format, another possibility is that it might simply fail to cue the module into action at all; it might prove epiphenomenal. Alternatively, it might cause the module to operate but to produce some non-adaptive output.
And an ironic place for B&C to wind up, it’s worth noting, given their apparent sympathy for a massive modularity picture of the mind.
I thank Kim Sterelny for bringing this point to my attention.
Indeed, on B&C’s view, even anatomically modern humans would have lacked language for over 200,000 years. But such humans—as the nomenclature is meant to indicate—were physically just like us, brain size included.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Matt Spike and Kim Sterelny for conversation regarding this article and to Bruno Ippedico for comments on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank Richard Moore and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for their helpful feedback.
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Planer, R.J. How language couldn’t have evolved: a critical examination of Berwick and Chomsky’s theory of language evolution. Biol Philos 32, 779–796 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9606-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9606-y