Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Behavioural science has been much preoccupied with data and organisation of data, and it has even seen itself as a kind of technology of control of behaviour.

Human language is “Syntactic” in that an utterance is a performance with an internal organisation, with structure and coherence.

Hence, the issue is not one of “more” or “less,” but rather of an entirely different principle of organisation.

As far as we know, possession of human language is associated with a specific type of mental organisation, not simply a higher degree of intelligence.

This poses a problem for the biologist, since, if true, it is an example of true “emergence” – the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organisation.

A reasonable guess, then, is that if empirically adequate generative grammars can be constructed and the universal principles that govern their structure and organisation determined, then this will be an important contribution to human psychology, in ways to which I will turn directly, in detail.

In each such grammar there are particular, idiosyncratic elements, selection of which determines one specific human language; and there are general universal elements, conditions on the form and organisation of any human language, that form the subject matter for the study of “universal grammar.

In this case, the mental processes in question are those involved in the organisation of one specific domain of human knowledge, namely knowledge of language.

If, in some domain, the organisation of the behavioural repertoire is quite trivial and elementary, then there will be little harm in avoiding the intermediate stage of theory construction, in which we attempt to characterise accurately the competence that is acquired.

Nevertheless, I do not see what conclusions can be reached from a study of his materials beyond the fact that the savage mind attempts to impose some organisation on the physical world – that humans classify, if they perform any mental acts at all. Specifically, Lévi-Strauss’s well-known critique of totemism seems to reduce to little more than this conclusion.