Steven Pinker: evaluation

Transcript context

…Moving chronologically through your career, let me ask you a big‑picture question about language. I come to linguistics very much as an outsider. Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar, which is somehow built into the structures of the human mind: in its early years there seemed to be a promise of some very definite accounting of what that structure would be. After a while it seemed to collapse into this very general idea of recursion, which to me as an economist seems almost tautological. If I came away from this debate and then I read people writing within popular science: “Today language is a number of different capacities brought together. They’re independent and just combined with our ability to divine meaning from others.” Could it be the case that Chomsky’s hypothesis was simply wrong? 2016, I know your books, but what’s your take on that today? It’s not easy to pin down what the hypothesis is, partly because Chomsky himself revises his theory every decade or so, on a principle of Mao’s Continuous Revolution. Just never let people settle into any kind of comfortable consensus. [laughter] It’s a moving target. Also, as you say, it was neither specified in a precise way nor field‑tested against a dataset of language variation, which I think is unfortunate in terms of ordinary scientific practice. Linguistics is an eccentric field in some ways partly because it was so polarized by a charismatic figure [Noam Chomsky] and his opponents that it didn’t proceed in the ordinary direction of making the theory more precise, more testable. With that caveat in mind, I think there is such a thing as, you can call it “universal grammar” in the following sense: that the child is biased to analyze the speech that he or she hears in particular ways. It does not simply record sentences verbatim. That’s the memory half of the language system, but the algorithmic or computational or rule‑governed half tries to pull out combinatorial rules from the speech stream. There are certain kinds of rules and elements that a child is keyed to look for. That set of abilities would be what I would call (if I used the term) universal grammar. There are commonalities across the world’s languages that come from the fact that language is created anew every generation by the minds of the children who construct it out of the data that they get from their parents and peers. Let’s turn from language to a closely related topic, theory of mind. Of course you’ve written a lot on this. We had Jon Haidt for one of these discussions, and he has this notion that in the mind there are these modules. They’re almost a bit independent. There’s an “empathy” module or a “being analytic” module. If I understand him correctly, in our political discourse different modules take over. It’s almost not integrated with the rest of your brain. What’s your take on how unified cognition is? To what extent, say, are political discourse ruled by independent modules, or is that not how you think about it?…

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