Yesterday, I blogged about how some of the latest findings in language usage are dialing back past claims about the degree of the brain's modularity.
More on that today; it appears that language usage by the brain is more of a kluge, or "workaround," than has previously been understood.
It probably undercuts, again, claims to human "rationality," too. I'm thinking more and more the old Enlightenment duality between "rational" and "irrational" needs evaluation and modification.
In 2016, Michael Tomasello put the final stake in Chomsky's ideas. (The Chomsky fanbois still don't accept this.) Tomasello does note that Chomsky, by the late 1980s, recognized that his single "universal grammar" was as dead as a doorknob. Instead, he tried to shift to, basically, classes of universal grammars. This still failed.
And, Tomasello adds that many of Chomsky's ideas were unfalsifiable.
1 comment:
one good thing I like about chomsky is that he says if we believe now what we believed 20 years ago in linguistics, the field would be dead...
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