Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Modifications of function are ubiquitous in natural selection (for example, primate hands, bear paws, and bat wings are adaptations that evolved by natural selection from the fins of fish), so the fact that a trait was initially shaped by selection for one function does not imply that it was not subsequently shaped by selection for another function.

Thus even if the larynx originally descended to exaggerate size, that says nothing about whether its current anatomical position was subsequently maintained, extended, or altered by selection pressures to enhance speech. The fact that Homo erectus had a spinal cord like that of other primates rules out an alternative hypothesis in which the change was an adaptation to bipedal locomotion.

This trait, as expected, is specifically found in males of reproductive age. Moreover, even with its descended larynx, the human supralaryngeal vocal tract is no longer than what would be expected for a primate of our size, because the human oral cavity has shortened in evolution owing to the fact that humans, unlike chimpanzees, lack snouts (Lieberman, 2003).

The experiment by Markson and Bloom cited by HCF showed that children display similar levels of recognition memory after a single exposure to either a new word or a new fact (e.g. “My uncle gave it to me”).

A demonstration that word learning and fact learning have this property in common does not prove they have all their properties in common.

In contrast, if one speaker mentions a fact about an object (e.g. “my sister gave it to me”) out of earshot of a second speaker, and the second speaker then asks about an object characterized by another fact (e.

Similarly, Gelman and Heyman (1999) showed that children assume that a person labeled with the word carrot-eater has a taste for carrots, whereas one described as eating carrots (a fact about the person) merely ate them at least once.

(which embrace all kinds of formal systems, including computer programming languages, mathematical notation, the set of all palindromes, and an in?nity of others), the fact that actual human languages are a minuscule and well-de?ned subset of recursive languages is unexplained.

In fact, most of the technical accomplishments of the preceding 25 years of research in the Chomskyan paradigm must be torn down, and proposals from long-abandoned “I have said nothing about other major components of the theory of word formation: compound forms, agglutinative structures, and much more” (Chomsky, 1995, p.

The only way to make sense of the fact that humans are equipped with a way to map between meaning and vocally produced sound is that it allows one person to get a meaning into a second person’s head by making a sound with his or her vocal tract.