Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

In fact, this step is a presupposition of efficient communication; as long as I must recover meanings effortfully, I am not able to communicate in a way that would be considered normal.

We can generalize this point as follows: Any intentional state determines its conditions of satisfaction, and a normal animal that has intentional states must be able to recognize when the conditions of satisfaction are in fact satisfied.

A normal child acquires this knowledge on relatively slight exposure and without specific training.

Moreover, neonates? sensitivity to speech appears to depend on the parts of the brain that subserve language in adults: a recent study using optical tomography showed that left-hemisphere temporal regions of the brains of newborns responded more ? to normal speech than to spectrally similar reversed speech (Penaet al., 2003). 208 S.

The gene has been sequenced and subjected to comparative analyses, which show that the normal version of the gene is universal in the human population, that it diverged from the primate homologue subsequent to the evolutionary split between humans and chimpanzees, and that it was a target of natural selection rather than a product of genetic drift or other stochastic evolutionary processes (Enard et al.

It is designed for elegance, not for use, though with features that enable to it to be used sufficiently for the purposes of normal life.

Anyone concerned with the study of human nature and human capacities must somehow come to grips with the fact that all normal humans acquire language, whereas acquisition of even its barest rudiments is quite beyond the capacities of an otherwise intelligent ape – a fact that was emphasised, quite correctly, in Cartesian philosophy.

He then goes on to argue that “acquisition of an initial language is acquisition of a secondary symbolic system” and is quite on a par with normal second-language acquisition.

However, as I mentioned earlier, the empirical problem that we face today is that no one has been able to devise an initial hypothesis rich enough to account for the acquisition by the child of the grammar that we are, apparently, led to attribute to him when we try to account for his ability to use the language in the normal way. The assumption of common origin contributes nothing to explaining how this achievement is possible.

As I have now emphasised several times, there seems to be little useful analogy between the theory of grammar that a person has internalised and that provides the basis for his normal, creative use of language, and any other cognitive system that has so far been isolated and described; similarly, there is little useful analogy between the schema of universal grammar that we must, I believe, assign to the mind as an innate character, and any other known system of mental organisation.