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[A Poster He or I]

3uGH7D4MLj said,

...The European languages are mostly traced to India.

Please cite your source; this is not a valid statement according to my own training in linguistics. Most of the languages of Northern India and all the languages of Europe (with 3 exceptions) descend from the language spoken by invading tribes from the Asian steppes who overran Europe, then Northern India, in the 5th through 3rd millenia BC.

[Bohm2]

But maybe the biolinguists can eventually work out some historical way of demonstrating otherwise. In the meantime, I'm only asking that you look at arguments that disagree with your point of view, and reflect them. An awful lot of people here simply amass arguments in favour of some proposition. To me much of the point of philosophical debate is to come to terms with people who disagree with you, and who seem to make annoying sense

I have looked at some papers arguing against this view. There are a number of sites devoted to hi-liting these arguments like:

Could Chomsky be Wrong?
http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/ ... homsky.htm

I just didn't find the arguments very convincing. With respect to Witgenstein or Witgensteinians vs Chomsky, you might find this paper interesting, although it is tilted toward my position:

Wittgensteinians and Chomskyans: Mentalism in Linguistics
http://www.selectedworks.co.uk/wittgens ... kyans.html

[3uGH7D4MLj]

Please cite your source; this is not a valid statement according to my own training in linguistics. Most of the languages of Northern India and all the languages of Europe (with 3 exceptions) descend from the language spoken by invading tribes from the Asian steppes who overran Europe, then Northern India, in the 5th through 3rd millenia BC.

Do you have a good reference for me? You're right, my reading on this was very sketchy. Thanks for getting me to look further.

[Bohm2]

(Nested quote removed.)

Do you have a good reference for me? You're right, my reading on this was very sketchy. Thanks for getting me to look further.

Just to add some terminology here so there's no confusion about what nativists like Chomsky are saying, here's a relevant quote hi-liting the difference between E-language versus I-language (and why only the latter is a valid/scientific study of human language).

According to Chomsky, E-languages, due to their ephemeral nature, are not appropriate objects for scientific study in terms of their evolution, which is purely historical. In fact, Chomsky (2005) believes that we should not even use the term ‘evolution’ when we speak about cultural artefacts belonging to humans–more specifically, E-languages. Along similar lines, Mendíl-Giró (2006) is concerned with the notion of evolution of language as a social object. He questions the analogy of the evolution of language with Darwinian gradual change leading to improvement with the elimination of undesirable elements. This incongruent notion of languages (as E-languages) having evolved as adaptive systems for better communication, leads to untenable assumptions about linguistic change (Mendíl-Giró, 2006). Rather than focusing on historical changes in E-language and how they have evolved, he argues that we should concentrate on the evolution of I-language, which can be thought of as a linguistic species, with each member’s language organ, or phenotype, built by both the human genotype and developmental processes...Anderson and Lightfoot (2002) believe that arguments that follow the gradualist approach for the evolution of language, that is, from the simple to the complex, can be seen as left-overs from nineteenth century thinking, where languages were treated as external objects and evolved law-like, with directionality. The focus was then, as now, on the products of human behaviour, rather than the states and properties of the mind/brain that give rise to those products.

A Saltational Approach for the Evolution of Human Cognition and Language
http://www.lkse.net.au/PhDThesis.pdf

[Mcdoodle]

(Nested quote removed.)

I have looked at some papers arguing against this [minimalist biolinguistic] view. There are a number of sites devoted to hi-liting these arguments like:

Could Chomsky be Wrong?
http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/ ... homsky.htm

I just didn't find the arguments very convincing. With respect to Witgenstein or Witgensteinians vs Chomsky, you might find this paper interesting, although it is tilted toward my position:

Wittgensteinians and Chomskyans: Mentalism in Linguistics
http://www.selectedworks.co.uk/wittgens ... kyans.html

Thanks Bohm. Maybe it's hard to shift one's own feeling about what's 'convincing' once it's somehow settled in. For instance I found the second paper you mention, which is by Pateman, unconvincing in its turn. People tend to set up strawmen to argue their case. For instance, that paper quotes, then tries to refute, the notion that 'Chomskyans treat something essentially social as if it were essentially individual'. The word 'essentially' is not in my sceptic's vocabulary To me non-machine language is communication or attempted communication between beings, so I struggle to understand the very concept of internal language or I-language. The supposed correlation between how children sometimes creolise language and the 'bio'-program is a very big inference from limited data: children learn from other children who learn from other children, I don't see how one can exclude cultural influences on the rules they formulate. The attempts by deaf children of the hearing to make signs according to what an observer sees as 'rules' supports neither case to me: there's no clear way of knowing that these 'rules' conform with some Chomskyan generative grammar.

For myself I like this quote by Jan Koster, who's sympathetic to the biolinguistic program: 'I think a fully naturalistic approach even to core grammar is untenable. I am a moderate Platonist and also committed to a version of the traditional view that language is in the first place a cultural phenomenon, crucially depending on a supra-individual, external record. I furthermore believe that the mind, unlike the brain, cannot be seen in isolation from the shared, external memory with which the brain lives in symbiosis (see Donald 1991). This external, cultural record determines how our biologically given resources are applied. ' [http://www.let.rug.nl/koster/papers/KOSTERsquib.pdf]

[Bohm2]

To me non-machine language is communication or attempted communication between beings, so I struggle to understand the very concept of internal language or I-language.

I will once again use a quote (as I'm lazy and I'm doing this from work and others say it so much better than I can):

Based on these common ideas on the biological foundations of language and thought, both Chomsky and Sebeok emerged from the dominant paradigms in linguistics in the middle of the 20th century to follow new theoretical paths in linguistics and semiotics...They both see human language foremost as a cognitive tool (because the species was capable of communication before it emerged). Agreement on this issue is far from trivial and its pronouncement bound to raise eyebrows among many linguists. Sebeok called language a secondary modeling system that allows the species to create models of reality in addition to the species-specific perceptual system, the primary modeling system. He believed that language served primarily “the cognitive function of modeling, and, as the philosopher Popper as well as the linguist Chomsky have likewise insisted […], not at all for the message swapping function of communication. The latter was routinely carried on by nonverbal means, as in all animals, and as it continues to be in the context of most human interactions today”.

What Connects Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics?
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/ ... ew/255/299

Another interesting paper just published today on the topic is the following:

The creative aspect of language use thus poses a problem for a science of language because human language, “being free from control by identifiable external stimuli or internal physiological states, can serve as a general instrument of thought and self-expression rather than merely as a communicative device of report, request, or command [as animal communication systems appear to be]” (Ibid., p. 57). In other words, the problem is how to account for the creative aspect of language use in a scientific context when it appears to be a form of free human action. I argue below that the solution to this problem involves accepting that the mechanisms underlying the creative aspect of language use can be a fruitful subject matter for a science of language, but that language use itself may not be. Though before doing so, I discuss in more detail the main issues that Descartes raised in regard to human language use. They are: (1) that it allows for an unbounded expression of thought and (2) it is independent from direct stimulus control yet at the same time (3) it is appropriate to new situations and coherent in new contexts.

The Creative Aspect of Language Use and the Implications for Linguistic Science
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9647/1/ ... cience.pdf

The supposed correlation between how children sometimes creolise language and the 'bio'-program is a very big inference from limited data: children learn from other children who learn from other children, I don't see how one can exclude cultural influences on the rules they formulate. The attempts by deaf children of the hearing to make signs according to what an observer sees as 'rules' supports neither case to me: there's no clear way of knowing that these 'rules' conform with some Chomskyan generative grammar.

The model they argue for doesn't exclude cultural influences but this isn't important for the genetic language part. Consider this:

According to Chomsky (2005: 6), three factors have to be explored when one aims at an explanation of language design:

(i) The genetic endowment (= UG-Universal Grammar)

(ii) Linguistic experience

(iii) Principles not specific to the language faculty

According to this distinction, factor (i) contains the components of the faculty of language that are both language- and species-specific; thereby it roughly corresponds to what Hauser et al. (2002) call the ‘faculty of language — narrow sense’ (FLN). Factor (ii) refers to the linguistic input, which is the source of variation within this parcellation of language design. Factor (iii) contains principles of biological and computational systems not specific to the faculty of language. According to Chomsky, these are “(a) principles of data analysis that might be used in language acquisition and other domains; (b) principles of structuraln architecture and developmental constraints […] including principles of efficient omputation,” and, as Chomsky adds, “properties of the human brain that determine what cognitive systems can exist.” Given this factor distinction, Berwick & Weinberg’s claim that UG includes the locality constraint is unwanted. Within the biolinguistic perspective on language design, a third-factor explanation offers a benchmark for what counts as a genuine explanation and thereby corresponds to Fodor’s “full-blooded Type 3 explanation.” In other words, as pointed out also by Richards, biolinguistics is characterized by a trend away from factor (i), that is, UG must be small and simple, on evolutionary grounds. The faculty of language, according to Chomsky, arose too recently for there to have been enough time (in evolutionary terms) for the development of a rich UG containing several language-specific principles, constraints, etc. Accordingly, as Chomsky argues, the more we can ascribe to third factors and the less to UG, the more tractable the issue of language evolution becomes. Given this shift in perspective, it is reasonable to assume that UG only contains properties such as recursive Merge, binary branching structure, and the valuedunvalued feature distinction. All other universal properties might follow from the interaction between UG and principles of extralinguistic components that belong to factor (iii). These principles, by definition, do not depend on UG and are independently motivated.

Third Factors and the Performance Interface in Language Design
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/ ... ew/273/298

[A Poster He or I]

For anyone else here who questions Chomsky's views, I recommend Lakoff & Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh for many reasons but most saliently to this thread for their criticism of Chomsky's ideas on Universal Grammar, and tranformational grammar. Lakoff is a pioneer (along with several other renown linguists) of Cognitive Linguistics which has developed since the 1970s, relying strictly on empirical testing to model language. It has reached many conclusions that directly challenge Chomsky's ideas.

[Rombomb]

For anyone else here who questions Chomsky's views, I recommend Lakoff & Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh for many reasons but most saliently to this thread for their criticism of Chomsky's ideas on Universal Grammar, and tranformational grammar. Lakoff is a pioneer (along with several other renown linguists) of Cognitive Linguistics which has developed since the 1970s, relying strictly on empirical testing to model language. It has reached many conclusions that directly challenge Chomsky's ideas.

So explain them (or just one), and argue the conclusion.

[A Poster He or I]

I'm afraid that would take a thesis, not a post in this forum. But as a tidbit, consider the following 2 English sentences:

"If I were you, I would hate me."
"If I were you, I would hate myself."

Chomskyan transformational rules have no way to explain the difference in meaning between these sentences. In contrast, Cognitive Linguistic models derive the correct meaning easily.

[Mcdoodle]

Another interesting paper just published today on the topic is the following:

(a partial quote from a thesis by a man called Soulin) '...the problem is how to account for the creative aspect of language use in a scientific context when it appears to be a form of free human action. I argue below that the solution to this problem involves accepting that the mechanisms underlying the creative aspect of language use can be a fruitful subject matter for a science of language, but that language use itself may not be. ..'

The Creative Aspect of Language Use and the Implications for Linguistic Science
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9647/1

I have patiently read this, Bohm, but I think it's a truly terrible paper. It refers to no empirical studies of language use, or any accounts of supposed internal thoughts - indeed, I don't know that there are substantial accounts of this supposed I-language. How can we scientifically assess a supposed primary form of 'language' of which we lack data?

Asoulin's is a philosophy of despair, that 'language use itself may not be...' a fruitful subject matter for a science of language. This is based on old-fashioned assumptions (indeed he quotes Fodor from 1963) about how there would be so much data to understand, to analyse the simplest of actual contexts in which language is used, that the study would be impossible.

I don't accept this as a basis for anything. He's saying we must make a science of certain artificial uses of language which he calls 'the creative aspect of language use' because we can't know enough about actual language use. That seems to me plain silly as a philosophical or scientific proposition. (He also makes odd assumptions about language-in-use being 'stimulus-free' but I can't go into that now).

Life and science have moved on. Computational linguistics can now survey the vast corpus of the world wide web, or sub-segments of it. Conversational analysts have developed a format for analysing language-in-use and suggested some parameters for how dialogue works. The Chomskyans have long ago had their revolutionary day. You might be interested in this piece by Norvig, Director of research at Google, in which he criticises Chomsky's critique of computational linguistics : http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

[Bohm2]

You might be interested in this piece by Norvig, Director of research at Google, in which he criticises Chomsky's critique of computational linguistics : http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

I have read the Norvig piece and a discussion of that article on the the Language Log over a year ago:

Straw men and Bee Science
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3180

You might find some of the 51 comments at the end of the piece interesting. Again I'm not a linguist. My interest in this stuff is indirectly due to my interest in other related areas, but In general I'm symathetic to Chomsky. I'll give you an analogy from physics why a statistical model alone seems "physically unsatisfying". Consider gravity:

For example, to simply specify correctly the motion of a body with a certain mass and distance from the sun in terms of elliptical space-time orbit is not to explain the earth's revolving around the sun but rather to redescribe that state of affairs in a mathematically precise way. What remains to be explained is how it is that the earth revolves around the sun in that way, and within classical mechanics, Newton's law of universal gravitation and second law provide that explanation.

Formalism, Ontology and Methodology in Bohmian Mechanics
https://springerlink3.metapress.com/con ... erlink.com

[Mcdoodle]

I have read the Norvig piece and a discussion of that article on the the Language Log over a year ago:

Straw men and Bee Science
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3180

You might find some of the 51 comments at the end of the piece interesting. Again I'm not a linguist. My interest in this stuff is indirectly due to my interest in other related areas, but In general I'm symathetic to Chomsky. I'll give you an analogy from physics why a statistical model alone seems "physically unsatisfying". Consider gravity...

Thanks Bohm. I can't access the Springer piece, it needs a subscription but I understand the point you're making I think. And I too feel a great sympathy for Chomsky even though I feel in this are he's up a gum tree.

In a sense this is a very old debate. I remember in reading about the history of science, something of the respective attitudes of Descartes and Boyle. While Descartes was revolutionary in his day, he preferred to argue from first principles, and saw experiment as a way of confirming what rational thought had already structured. 'Apodictic'. He thought Boyle was a bit barmy for operating his bloomin' air-pump over and over again and getting the same or similar results: why would anyone want to go on and on experimenting, especially if they still didn't understand the principles underlying the results they were getting? But then indeed Hooke and Boyle and their sceptical experimental friends were succeeded in turn by another know-it-all, some alchemist named Newton who had a theory for everything

It does feel to me that the Google-generation of corpus-analyzers (they do do analysis based on functions and parameters, pace Chomsky) might well be succeeded by a later generation of theoreticians who can make better sense of all this. Hope I live to see it!

Here's Steven Pinker on this issue, from ejournal.narotama.ac.id/files/NATURAL%2 ... ATURAL.pdf

'Third, arguments that language is designed for communication of propositional structures are far from logical truths. It is easy to formulate, and reject, specific alternatives. For example, occasionally it is suggested that language evolved as a medium of internal knowledge representation for use in the computations underlying reasoning. But while there may be a language-like representational medium -- "the language of thought," or "mentalese" (Fodor, 1975) -- it clearly cannot be English, Japanese, and so on. Natural languages are hopeless for this function: they are needlessly serial, rife with ambiguity (usually harmless in conversational contexts, but unsuited for long term knowledge representation), complicated by alternations that are relevant only to discourse (e.g., topicalization), and cluttered with devices (such as phonology and much of morphology) that make no contribution to reasoning. Similarly, the facts of grammar make it difficult to argue that language shows design for "the expression of thought" in any sense that is substantially distinct from "communication." If "expression" refers to the mere externalization of thoughts, in some kind of monologue or soliloquy, it is an unexplained fact that language contains mechanisms that presuppose the existence of a listener, such as rules of phonology and phonetics (which map sentences onto sound patterns, enhance confusable phonetic distinctions, disambiguate phrase structure with intonation, and so on.) and pragmatic devices that encode conversational topic, illocutionary force, discourse antecedents, and so on. Furthermore people do not express their thoughts in an arbitrary private language (which would be sufficient for pure "expression"), but have complex learning mechanisms that acquire a language highly similar in almost every detail to those of other speakers in the community. '

[Bohm2]

Here's Steven Pinker on this issue, from ejournal.narotama.ac.id/files/NATURAL%2 ... ATURAL.pdf'

I like reading Pinker's stuff because he writes very clearly. The major back and forth debate between Pinker's group and Chomsky's group can be found in these 4 papers:

Chomsky’s group:

The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20021122.pdf

The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.f ... ky2005.pdf

Pinker’s group:

The faculty of language: what’s special about it?
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/ ... endoff.pdf

The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky)
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/ ... Pinker.pdf

I understand that Chomsky is in the minority position in this view when he argues that this uniquely human part of our language faculty (FLN-see links for details) having the properties of recursion (also found in our mathematical abilities) emerged in human brains for “physical” reasons yet to be fully comprehended; so unlike most innatists/ nativists (e.g. Pinker/Jackendoff) the reasons suggested are not due to “natural selection” but instead are guided by principles of elegance and compactness (not “tinkering” in Pinker’s sense, I guess). So to give one example, “why did Helium evolve after Hydrogen in the evolution our universe”, etc. It wasn’t for reasons of “natural selection” in any sense of the term. There were physical laws dictating it that it occur. Same with this uniquely human abstract abilities in language and mathematics (or so, it is argued by this position). Here’s an interesting quote from Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini:

Early linguistic investigations led to an elegant and compact formulation of the problem of what may be seen as ‘natural knowledge’. Many so-called mental modules thus described already resist any simple-minded emergence in classical adaptationist terms. But the challenge became all the more extreme with the advent of the Minimalist Program, with its suggestion that linguistic structuring obeys some kind of optimum (at any rate, an optimal compromise) at the interface between the interpretation and the externalization of language. Interestingly, optima turn out to be quite important when considering growth patterns in general. We find it natural to conceive that program in terms of broadly construed physics, a dimension that is alien to standard accounts in terms of natural selection. The present paper argues for this approach, illustrating it with the presence of Fibonacci growth patterns in language, which we take to be a signal case. (Space limitations prevent us from going into several other optimal solutions in this realm.) What could it mean to ground such properties on a human brain? We wager that they are the result of the brain’s very physical conditions, in some sense to be fully investigated and understood. Structural properties of linguistic behaviors should then, more generally, follow as a deductive consequence of quite abstract and all-important brain micro-properties.

So just as the justified contextual optimality of a given structure may argue for its adaptive value, to the extent that we find structures that can be characterized as optimal irrespective of any functional correlate, the opposite conclusion should be driven: their optimality must obey a different cause, not bio-genetic interactions winnowed by natural selection. In our view, the more that optimality in any biological network can be separated from its putative function, the more we should suspect that the process behind the abstract form follow from physicochemical invariants....The patterns we are after present a characteristic optimality to them, which might suggest that it is, after all, a result of natural selection. However, the sort of optimality that natural selection could yield is tied-up to contextual specifications of a functional sort. A structure, in these terms, is optimal for a function, and therefore it wins the evolutionary race simply because alternative structures are less fit for that function in its context. This is quite different, in principle, from the optimality we seek to understand.

Still a bridge too far? Biolinguistic questions for grounding language on brains
http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~massimo/p ... arPUBL.pdf

I'm not sure if this makes sense but, I've always thought to myself let's assume that the Chomsky position is true; that is, that this uniquely human part of our language faculty emerged in human brains for “physical” reasons (e.g. principles of elegance and compactness-not “tinkering” in Pinker’s sense):

1. Does this make it any easier to understand why our ability to do higher mathematics is so useful in studying physical phenomena even though it did not evolve for reasons of “natural selection” (or so, they argue); that is, does evolution of abstract mental structures (from more primitive language and mathematical cognitive structures) that is guided by physical law versus natural selection ("tinkering") make it more plausible why language and mathematics is so useful for doing science/physics, etc?

2. If accurate would this strengthen, weaken or have no effect on Peirce's notion that "nature fecundates the mind of man with ideas which when those ideas grow up, will resemble their father, Nature"?

[Mcdoodle]

I like reading Pinker's stuff because he writes very clearly. ....

I'm not sure if this makes sense but, I've always thought to myself let's assume that the Chomsky position is true; that is, that this uniquely human part of our language faculty emerged in human brains for “physical” reasons (e.g. principles of elegance and compactness-not “tinkering” in Pinker’s sense):

1. Does this make it any easier to understand why our ability to do higher mathematics is so useful in studying physical phenomena even though it did not evolve for reasons of “natural selection” (or so, they argue); that is, does evolution of abstract mental structures (from more primitive language and mathematical cognitive structures) that is guided by physical law versus natural selection ("tinkering") make it more plausible why language and mathematics is so useful for doing science/physics, etc?

2. If accurate would this strengthen, weaken or have no effect on Peirce's notion that "nature fecundates the mind of man with ideas which when those ideas grow up, will resemble their father, Nature"?

I like clear writing too. The area I'm focussed on, at the moment, is actually none of this, but the role of metaphor and metonymy. Over there Lakoff writes so crisply he can seem seductively right, when so much writing in this field seems wilfully obscure.

As to your numbers:

1. My own feeling is that higher mathematics is so clearly, in historical terms, a recent development that it's even harder to place on the evolution/development/tinkering scale than other aspects of the language faculty. I've also been reading the basics of the cognitive neuroscience of music, I suspect there are some clues there - the music-making faculty and the language-making faculty might have common roots - music distinguishes us from our evolutionary cousins even more obviously than language does - it makes surprising connections between mathematics, higher abstraction, emotion and art that we normally rule out of 'intellectual' study. But perhaps that's by the by

2. Your Pierce quote places his notion of inter-explanatory ideas rather closer to Continental than to analytic traditions. What is that we 'discover' when we believe our knowledge advances? Nature, including 'nature', is saturated with human thought and the categories we apply. That to me returns us to a related subject you've mentioned elsewhere, that we are conscious beings aware of our consciousness. Do we structure our beliefs about the world we're in the way we do, just because of the way our brains are structured? Hm.

[Bohm2]

My own feeling is that higher mathematics is so clearly, in historical terms, a recent development that it's even harder to place on the evolution/development/tinkering scale than other aspects of the language faculty.

Chomsky has suggested that it is possible that mathematics may be an offshoot or as an "abstraction of linguistics operations":

Nonetheless, it is interesting to ask whether this operation is language-specific. We know that it is not. The classic illustration is the system of natural numbers. That brings up a problem posed by Alfred Russell Wallace 125 years ago: in his words, the “gigantic development of the mathematical capacity is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause,” if only because it remained unused. One possibility is that it is derivative from language. It is not hard to show that if the lexicon is reduced to a single element, then unbounded Merge will yield arithmetic. Speculations about the origin of the mathematical capacity as an abstraction from linguistic operations are familiar, as are criticisms, including apparent dissociation with lesions and diversity of localization. The significance of such phenomena, however, is far from clear; they relate to use of the capacity, not its possession. For similar reasons, dissociations do not show that the capacity to read is not parasitic on the language faculty.

Some simple evo-devo theses: how true might they be for language?
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~fs39 ... vodevo.pdf

I thought this was an interesting debate by pro-minimalist/optimalist paper (Hiroki Narita & Koji Fujita) arguing that physical law versus natural selection played a more important role in the evolution of language. Anna R. Kinsella, Gary F. Marcus (K & M) are critical of this view. I'm not sure why but I just have this hunch that this minimalism/optimality of a mental organ (in language and math) may be one reason why Peirce may have been right but perhaps for the wrong reasons? Read both papers to compare the arguments. Some interesting quotes:

We also agree with K&M (and with every evolutionary biologist) that gradual adaptation by natural selection is a major element of biological evolution and that for familiar reasons it often yields only sub-optimal solutions, absolute optimality or perfection being rare cases...Building on Pinker & Jackendoff’s (2005: 27) remark that “nothing is ‘perfect’ or ‘optimal’ across the board but only with respect to some desideratum”, K&M go on to examine various possible criteria of optimality, including ease of production, ease of comprehension, ease of acquisition, efficient brain storage, efficient communication, efficient information encoding, and minimization of energetic costs...

To begin with, as K&M themselves admit, “evolution sometimes achieves perfection or near-optimality” (p. 188). So it is rather self-contradictory that they reject from the start the possibility that language is one instance of such perfection. In fact, many instances of biological design can be shown to obey some optimization principles. A classic case is bone structure, which achieves maximal strength with minimal material (Roux’s maximum-minimum law; see Gierse 1976). Likewise, blood vessels are known to have an architecture that ensures efficient blood flow with minimum energy consumption. Also, Christopher Cherniak’s work on brain wiring minimization, often cited in Chomsky’s recent writings (Chomsky 2005 et seq.), points to the fascinating conclusion that neural optimization is a ubiquitous biological property derived “for free, directly from physics” (Cherniak 2005, 2009, Cherniak et al. 2004)...

The theory of ‘symmorphosis’, for example, claims that a biological structure is economically designed, to an extent that is just sufficient to satisfy its functional need (Weibel 1998, Weibel et al. 1991). Given this state of affairs, we need to realize that at least conceptually, the evolvability condition on language does not preclude the possibility that (part of) the human language faculty also instantiates such optimal design found elsewhere in the biological world. K&M observe, ostensibly correctly, that perfection and optimality do not very often result from adaptation by natural selection, but then they hastily conclude, incorrectly, that evolvability considerations do not tolerate the optimality of language design that minimalism is searching for. While surely adaptation by natural selection is one major aspect of evolution, it must also be admitted that natural selection does not work in a vacuum, and a full understanding of biological evolution requires taking into account many factors other than natural selection, including random genetic drift, genetic assimilation, exaptation, self-organization, canalization, etc., all of which are presumably governed by the physical laws of nature. In other words, a theory of natural selection needs to be supplemented by those mechanisms if it is to explain anything about evolution...

As we saw in the previous section, minimalism is essentially a research program that seeks to identify the (optimizing) effect of physical laws of nature in the domain of human language. K&M’s rejection of the minimalist endeavor, then, essentially amounts to making a very unrealistic claim that we had better disregard the relevance of all such effects (viz. the third factor) from biolinguistic theorizing, prioritizing the notion of gradual adaptation. It can be pointed out that the above-mentioned unrealistic view can be seen as a particular instantiation of what Godfrey-Smith (2001) calls ‘empirical adaptationism’, a very strong empirical hypothesis which holds that it is possible to predict and explain the outcome of evolutionary processes by attending only to the role played by natural selection (p. 336). According to this view, no other evolutionary factor has the degree of causal importance that natural selection assumes, so that we can safely ignore all other non-selective factors, if any, and focus on adaptation by natural selection for the purpose of understanding evolution.

A Naturalist Reconstruction of Minimalist and Evolutionary Biolinguistics
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/ ... 17/showToc

Evolution, perfection, and theories of language
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/marcusArt ... 202009.pdf