Griceian Nature or Griceian Nurture?

Speranza

Some comments, below, on a book review from "World Wide Words" (©  Michael
Quinion http://www.worldwidewords.org).

Quinion writes:

"For the past half-century, the dominant view ... has been that human 
beings uniquely possess a hard-wired concept of language."

This of course was contested by Philosophers, notaby Davidson. In his "A 
nice derangement of epitaphs" (in a festschrift for Grice) he claims that 
'language' does not exist, never mind its concept.

"This implies that all languages are related at a deep level, because all 
of them are created on the same fundamental grammar template. It explains
how a  child is able to readily learn any language."

We can materialise this by thinking of little Grice. He was born in 
Harborne, an affluent district of 'Brum', and he naturally learned English easy 
enough. In Clifton, he later learned Greek and Latin, and I would add, "just
as  easy"?

Quinion:

"The idea, called Universal Grammar, was created by the  linguist Noam
Chomsky in the 1950s and has been enormously influential, not only  in
linguistics but also in fields such as psychology and philosophy."

Oddly, the index to Chomsky's "Aspects" misquotes Grice, as "Grice, A. P.".
It is from Grice that Chomsky (in 1966) drew (I guess someone gave him a 
transcript of one of Grice's Oxford lectures) the idea that

'and'

in sentences like

"The sun set and we had a party"

is truth-functionally equivalent to

"We had a party and the sun set"

(Or:

"He took the pill and died"

and

"He died and took a pill").

----

Quinion goes on:

"It’s still the standard view in most textbooks and has been popularised by
Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct and later books."

Which is not to surprise since Pinker and Chomsky shared a country (in the 
sense that Cambridge, Mass., is a 'country' -- or academic country as
Oxford  would be) and even an office! ("Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy").

Oddly, Grice popularised his ideas not far from Chomsky's country, but in 
the (some say) more prestigious campus, Harvard.

Quinion:

"However, the concept that language is an instinct, and a uniquely  human
one, has been challenged as a result of research in a number of fields in 
recent decades."

The opposition is: nature or nurture?

Quinion goes on:

"We now know much more about how children acquire  language, the diversity
of the world’s languages, the evolution of the human  species, the structure
and function of our brains, and the ways in which other  animals
communicate."

Indeed. Notably in the field of conversational implicature:

We know much more about how children tend to be literalist -- and won't 
accept an implicature. From a series Tv episode:

ADULT: Stop jumping on  the bed!
CHILD stops jumping -- for 3 secs, then resumes.
ADULT: I told you to stop jumping.
CHILD: You never said "forever".
ADULT: Okay: stop jumping forever.

------- Yes. Quaint. From a repeat of "The nephews" in "Little house in the
prairie", a repeat.

----

We know much more about the diversity of the world's languages: and how 
conversational implicature is a universal phenomenon, except, perhaps Elinor 
Ochs Keenan thought, in Malagasy.

"We know much more about the evolution of the human species" -- from 
non-human species.

"We know much more the ways in which other animals communicate".

It was thought that for them, "Try to make your contribution one that is 
true", was not a guideline, since it was held, by Lyons ("Linguistics") that 
animals cannot lie. Of course they can. In this way, the do follow 
'conversational maxims' which can be flouted, in e.g. irony, when one's  addressee
assumes that the animal is not making a genuine contribution ("What a 
rotten day", to implicate, "It's a beautiful day"), or when a plover screams to 
have his addressee think, falsely, that he is near the plover's nest. It's 
different with bees, apparently.

Quinion:

"A vigorous debate is raging. Vyvyan Evans ... has written The Language 
Myth to bring together the growing evidence against Universal Grammar."

Oddly, "Language Myth" was I think the title of a collection of essays ed. 
by Trudgill, or "Language Myths". The idea here, in Evans, is that language
IS a  myth, alla Davidson.

Quinion:

"For example, Chomsky’s view that this instinct for  language is unique to
humans and arrived suddenly as a mutation about 100,000  years ago cannot be
true. Our complicated vocal apparatus, with the  sophisticated brain
necessary to manipulate it to utter and remember speech,  couldn’t have been the
result of a single sudden change but must have evolved  stage by stage among
our hominin ancestors. Neanderthals had similar vocal  anatomy to ours and
so were very probably able to communicate through  speech."

I think Umberto Eco discusses this in "Open Work" (Opera aperta). He 
refers, more biblically, to Adam's language -- lingua adamica. Eco notes that 
the requirement is the ability to think BINARILY.

Quinion:

"One implication of Universal Grammar is that there must be some module or 
faculty in the brain, present at birth, dedicated to processing grammar.
Though  the brain does have sections devoted to specific functions, such as
Broca’s  area, responsible for the creation of speech, we know now that this
area does  other jobs as well and that the work of processing language takes
place quite  widely across various parts of the brain. A grammar module as
such doesn’t  exist."

Chomsky will have occasion to reconsult Grice in his John Locke lectures 
(which he gave before Grice gave his). He refers to Grice's behaviouristic 
approach in thinking of Aunt Matilda's resultant procedures and the readiness
to  respond in this or that a way. Chomsky is defending indeed the idea of
a module,  and a 'pragmatic' module he thinks dubious. On the other hand, to
quote from a  western, the Griceian does not seem to need 'no stinkin''
module?

Quinion goes on: "The truth, Professor Evans argues on the basis of current
research, is very different. Babies are not born with a set of internal
rules  but with a universal capacity to learn about themselves and the world
around  them."

This should sound Kantian and rationalist enough to please both Grice _AND 
POPPER_. (cfr. Piaget and his polemic with Chomsky).

Quinion goes on: "The brains of infants are plastic: experience and 
discovery moulds them and acquiring a language is one aspect of this. Professor 
Evans also partly rehabilitates a theory developed in the 1930s by Benjamin 
Whorf; a version that was developed after Whorf’s death is called the 
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after him and his mentor Edward Sapir. Whorf called it 
linguistic relativity, arguing that speakers of different languages 
conceptualize and experience the world differently."

The locus classicus is alas, not Latin (since 'locus classicus' is Latin) 
but Eskimo, and the zillions (more or less) ways to say 'snow is white' in 
Eskimo.

Quinion goes on:

"This has been denied by followers of Chomsky’s  work, since if true it
would refute the view that language is innate and  universal. Subtle
neurological experiments in the past couple of decades have  suggested that at an
unconscious level people can be influenced by the nature of  their language."

I think this was the challenge by Asian linguists, and for that matter 
Orwell (whose real name was Blair).

Quinion concludes:

"The Language Myth is a wide-ranging polemical  dismissal of the received
wisdom of many linguists. It’s worth reading also as a  classic case study of
an orthodoxy undergoing what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm  shift."

Misusing a term that for Plato triggered quite the opposite implicature, 
but still lovely!

(I'm not sure Popper bought Kuhn's idea of the paradigm shifts -- Grice 
possibly didn't. He shared the Philosophy Dept. with Feyerabend, who was much 
more of a radical anarchist in terms of scientific revolutions, and  stuff).