Nullifying the Argument from Design

1
Nullifying the Argument from Design

• Wolfram Hinzen
• Universiteit van Amsterdam
• w.hinzen_at_uva.nl

2
The Argument from Design

• In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot
  against a stone and were asked how the stone came
  to be there, I might possibly answer that for
  anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there
  forever. But suppose I had found a watch upon the
  ground, and it should be inquired how the watch
  happened to be in that place, I should hardly
  think of the answer which I had before given,
  that for anything I knew the watch might have
  always been there.
• (Paley, Natural Theology, 1802)

3
Neo-Paleyanism

• Throw out God, but keep purpose.
• Look at structures in organisms as providing
  engineering solutions to given environmental
  problems
• The human mind has evolved because more complex
  cognitive faculties
• enhance the organisms chances of survival.

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Language as an adaptive solution

• FL is complex and specialized, serves the end of
  communication with admirable effectiveness, and
  has an ineliminable genetic component.
• Natural selection is the only known secular force
  to craft such functional complexes in a series of
  small mutations.

5
Circularity in the adaptationists suggestion

• The language faculty evolved in the human
  lineage for the communication of complex
  propositions (Pinker and Jackendoff, 2004)
• Unclear evidence for propositionality before
  sentences mere thought procedures?
• Conveying recipes, hunting techniques, gossip,
  or reciprocal promises require language.

Hey, Jim! Lion! You there, I here You master,
I slave.
6
Four perspectives on explanation in Tinbergens
scheme

• Mechanistic
• Ontogenetic
• Functional (Fitness)
• Evolutionary history

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Methodology of historical narrative

• In the absence of relevant paleontological and
  comparative data, one adaptationist hypothesis
  will simply replace the next
• where such claims are testable, it is w.r.t.
  fractions of language, not language as a whole
• Questions of adaptive function are independent of
  the question of mechanisms.
• An observation about what something is good for
  does not yet answer questions concerning how that
  beneficial effect is achieved.

8
Language

• An abstract core of computational mechanisms
  central to language and probably unique to
  humans.
• The communication system used by us.

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What is language for?

• Whats the sense of this question?
• language evolved and is clearly useful for
  communication
• answer unneeded for the detailed study of neural
  function and computation
• has certainly not led to a fruitful study of the
  latter
• Function of the whole system need not transfer to
  the functions and origins of the component parts.

10
Some functions

• Public
• thought and information sharing (and withholding)
• maintaining social relationships
• Private
• problem solving
• focussing attention
• reference
• meta-linguistic
• expressiveness
• memory aid
• enhancing social competence by rehearsing the
  thoughts of others
• shaping thought (Whorf)
• poetic function

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Communication

• if nobody spoke unless he had something to say,
  the human race would very soon lose the use of
  speech. (Somerset Maugham)
• communicative needs would not have provided any
  great selective pressure to produce a system
  such as language with its crucial relation to
  development of abstract and productive thinking
  (Luria 1974)

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Human and non-human communication

• Comprehensive study of comparative communication
  irrelevant to the formal study of language
  (Hauser 1997, 64).
• Link between both communication systems is the
  expression of emotional state.
• Why are there so many different languages?

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Some puzzling design features

• to a linguistic outsider such as a Martian, the
  sentence/NP distinction, far from fostering
  communicative efficiency, could well seem a
  point-less encumbrance and its universality among
  humans quite mystifying (Carstairs-McCarthy
  1999, 27).
• Impossible structures
• Who did he say how he loved?
• How did he say who he loved?
• Impossible words
• John shelved the books.
• John booked on the shelf.

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How usable is language?

• Partially!
• Massive ambiguity rules of language even create
  it.
• Endless confusions of interpretation
• near miss, which means nearly a hit, not nearly a
  miss
• I missed (not) seeing you last summer (I expected
  to see you but didnt)
• The rat the cat the baby stroked chased ate the
  cheese.
• The horse raced past the barn fell.

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Ancient and recent parts of language (after
Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch, Science 2002)
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Is FLB is an adaptation for communication?

• Mechanisms entering into FLB fundamentally shared
  with non-human animals, while serving no
  communicative functions there.
• No good case for selection for either speech
  perception or production in the human lineage
  (exception vocal imitation).
• Remarkable abilities to lock onto particular
  property (tool, colour, geometry, food, number,
  perhaps mind, self, etc.) in non-humans.

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Intentional/referential abilities

• Concepts ? reference.
• Signalling in rhesus monkeys (not in chimps) a
  dubious precursor to words.
• -no intentional reference/communicative intent.
• -most human words not associated to any specific
  function
• -no straightforward word-thing relation.

18
Is FLN perhaps an adaptation, then?

• Little evidence in non-human animals for a
  capacity to generate a unbounded range of
  discrete meaningful expressions.
• Its a good car, but they dont sell it.
• Its a good car, but they dont tell it.
• Cats that killed rats that ate the malt that lay
  in the house that ()
• 1,2,3,
• 0N, s(n)N for nN.

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Recursion in FLN

• We find communication systems
• discrete and finite (e.g., rhesus monkey call
  types)
• infinite but continuous (e.g., bee dance, bird
  calls)
• Recursion as such found in animal navigation,
  foraging.
• ((((the hole) in the tree) in the glade) by the
  stream)
• in the forest by the plain between the mountains
  in the north of the island
• --gtPossibility that FLN is empty The argument
  from design nullified

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Different types of unboundedness

• Rules operating locally
• (AB)n
• ABABAB
• John runs and runs and runs...
• Rules generating unbounded dependencies
• AnBn
• AAABBB
• Johns mothers sisters brothers letter.
• who did John say the man who told the barkeeper
  who loved the dog he killed adored?

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Do monkeys do it?

• Cottom-top tamarins spontaneously
• master finite-state grammars
• (FitchHauser 2004)
• Hierarchical organization in Cebus apella
• (McGonigle, Chalmers and Dickinson 2003)
• Still, Human may simply be different.

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A counterproposal for the study of the evolution
of language (Chomsky 1998, 2000, 2001 Hinzen
2005)

• Human language design characterized by three
  kinds of conditions
• unexplained conditions
• interface conditions conditions the language
  faculty has to satisfy to be usable at all
• general properties of organic systems (in this
  case, combinatorial and recursive ones)

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Designing a human the minimalist hypothesis

• FLN is what is structurally inevitable?
• LEX LEX
• D-structure
• S-structure
• PHON SEM PHON SEM

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Non-redundancy, locality, conservativity

• What do you give a gift to Mary?
• John seems that it was told t that Mary left.
• John was seen t
• Which book
• do you say
• that he thinks
• that he has read t?

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A vision for the evolution of human nature

• The less structure there is to FLN, the less we
  have to explain by external constraints.
• All the facts of language appear to refute
  Minimalism. (Chomsky 2000)
• But facts are (just) that facts!

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Message

• Innate traits (parts of human nature) do not per
  se force an adaptationist explanation.
• As of now, adaptationist hypotheses on what
  language is for have predicted virtually none
  of the empirical properties of language.
• Moreover, the question what something is for
  does not actually need to have an answer at all.
• There is an absolute need in language evolution
  for the comparative method.

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The human as document
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The human as artifact
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The human as crystal