Innate Endowment Research Articles

Rescuing Autonomy – Identity, Society and the Practices of Freedom

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault this article explores the ways in which the self has been limited by theories of social construction in philosophy and innateness in cognitive science and proposes an understanding of self-identity that places autonomy and freedom at the heart of ethical practice. I suggest that restrictions on the rational self place practices of freedom at the center of autonomous action. Improvisation is explored as a way of transcending the obstacles of innate endowment and social organization to create new meanings through communicative practice. Finally, the metaphors of construction inherent to the study of identity are questioned, and an open-ended language is proposed in their place. …the self is the new strategic possibility. Paul Veyne, 1997

Language: the perspective from organismal biology

The evolution of language and its mechanisms has been a topic of intense speculation and debate, particularly considering the question of innate endowment. Modern biological sciences - neurobiology and neuroethology - have made great strides in understanding proximate and ultimate causes of behavior. These insights are generally ignored in the debate regarding linguistic knowledge, especially in the realm of syntax where core theoretical constructs have been proposed unconstrained by evolutionary biology. The perspective of organismal biology offers an approach to the study of language that is sensitive to its evolutionary context, a growing trend in other domains of cognitive science. The emergence of a research program in the comparative biology of syntax is one concrete example of this trend.

Animist thinking in the elderly and in patients with Alzheimer's disease

Some patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) reveal low-level impairment in their concepts of living things (i.e., forgetting that zebras are striped). To test for more profound impairment, we investigated the concept alive—a “higher order” concept spanning every member of the domain. Many elderly controls were animists, attributing life to inanimates capable of self-generated activity (the sun, fire). Most AD patients were animists, with half even attributing life to inanimates whose activity is not self-generated (cars, lamps). Adult animists, like young children who have not yet acquired biological concepts, overattributed life to active inanimates. We believe this reflects an innate disposition to view active entities as agents, and that agency interferes with the biological concept alive. This interference, we suggest, reflects degradation of biological concepts in the face of spared perception of agents. It sheds light on the nature of fundamental questions concerning conceptual organization, innate endowment, and conceptual change.

Binding principles and ACD constructions in child grammars

. Antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) constructions have been the focus of much recent literature in linguistic theory. These constructions have been instrumental in arguments against dispensing with the operation of Quantifier Raising (QR) and a level of Logical Form (LF) (e.g., May 1985; Fiengo & May 1994; Fox 1999, 2000). In fact, it has been argued that in ACD constructions, the binding principles apply at LF (e.g., Fiengo & May 1994). The present paper assesses 4- and 5-year-old children's knowledge of ACD constructions in which principles B and C are relevant. The empirical findings show that children interpret these ACD structures like adults, suggesting that they invoke the binding principles at LF, and target vP, rather than IP as the landing site for QR, as claimed for adults by Fox (2000) and others. These central properties of ACD constructions in child grammars present a challenge to learning-based theories of language development, because the input to children cannot inform them how to interpret the ellipsis site of ACD structures or which binding principle is in effect. Nevertheless, preschool children are found to have adultlike interpretations of the structures investigated here. The data are taken to provide support for the view that binding principles are part of our innate human endowment for language.

Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (review)

Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution by Ray Jackendoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 477 pp. $40.00. ISBN 0-19-827012) MANY SCIENTISTS outside field of linguistics have been frustrated by lack of connection between theory and psycholinguistic models or investigations of brain bases of language. Jackendoff attempts to bridge this divide by laying out a model of language that clearly relates to models of language processing and that can guide investigations of neural systems underlying language. Given primary focus of book, Jackendoff could have stopped with main title, Foundations of Language, but subtitle, Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution, was needed to hook cognitive neuroscientists and psycholinguists. Attracting a broad readership is important because Jackendoff wants to convince cognitive neuroscientists and psycholinguists to give linguistics another chance and argues that his model provides an impetus for a new dialogue between linguistics and these related fields. To a large extent Jackendoff is successful-his proposals provide an accessible and useable foundation for cross-disciplinary research. In a similar vein he also urges linguists to adopt a more integrative approach to study of language and argues that Chomsky-driven syntactocentrism must be abandoned. Jackendoff reconfigures generative into a parallel architecture containing a set of components (e.g., phonological, semantic, syntactic) and interface modules that link structures within each component. The interfaces are not just between adjacent components (e.g., between syntax and semantics), but also between more distant ones, such as phonology and semantics. This latter interface accounts for certain intonational phenomena and lexical items such as ouch, which have a phonological and a semantic structure, but no syntax. In addition, architecture allows for a connection between semantics (conceptual structure) and articulatory and perceptual systems-an interface that Jackendoff hypothesizes arises during language evolution but still remains and accounts for phenomena such as onomatopoeia in spoken languages. For sign languages, this interface might be used to account for iconic mapping from articulators to conceptual structures that Taub (2001) proposes in her dualmapping analysis of ASL metaphor. Rathmann and Mathur (2002) also use this interface in their account of use of space in verb agreement and pronominal reference in signed languages. The parallel architecture JackcndofFproposes is extremely promising for studying properties of language that might be unique to signed languages. Foundations of Language is divided into three parts. The first part (Psychological and Uiological Foundations) lays out complexities of language that exist in even simplest sentence-a complexity that nonlinguists often fail to recognize. This section ends with an important discussion of theory of Universal Grammar (UG) that continues throughout book. In end, Jackendoff finds that the dominant view of Universal Grammar as a highly complex specification of all possible grammars-whether in terms of parameters or ranked constraints-is untenable (426). Feather, he argues that UG largely consists of architectural (i.e., what kinds of structures exist and how they interact) and some structural fragments (attractors) that have evolved over history of species and that bias a child's acquisition of generalizations. Such an approach is much more amenable to cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding our innate endowment (after all, only human primates talk). It is my belief^ however, that term Universal Grammar must be abandoned within such an approach because (a) it is too easily confused with linguistic universals (as Jackendoff notes), (b) it is already associated with grammar box approach, and (c) term currently engenders vehemently negative responses from many researchers outside field of linguistics (even those who would favor Jackendoff's approach). …

Moral Development and Moral Responsibility

At the end of Section of Freedom and Resentment,1 just after he has drawn our attention to the reactive attitudes, P. F. Strawson remarks, object of these commonplaces is to try to keep before our minds something it is easy to forget when we are engaged in philosophy, espe cially in our cool, contemporary style, viz., what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary inter-personal relationships, ranging from the most intimate to the most casual (50). It is striking, then, that the proponent of so thoroughly naturalistic an account of moral responsibility seems himself largely to ignore the fact that moral agents do not spring into existence ab initio. The adult moral agent, who is the central character of normative theory and of accounts of moral responsibility, was once child. Our juvenile selves get mention in Strawson's paper, but only as examples of creatures who are paradigmatically not responsible or who inhabit a borderline, penumbral area (61) with respect to responsibility.2 Thus it remains mystery, on Strawson's account, how we become the morally responsible creatures he takes us to be. It is constraint on any account of moral responsibility that it not attribute to adult moral agents capacities and abilities they could not (and thus do not) acquire in the usual course of human development. This com monplace, true of any interesting adult competence, from language to moral agency, cannot be gainsaid. However, the constraint might have more or less import. Given description of the relevant adult competence in question, the constraint demands an answer to the following question: how could children in the normal course of development come to acquire the capacities and abilities so described? The 'could' leaves it open to empirical inquiry to determine whether children learn all they need to know from the environment or whether such experience supplements some more or-less rich innate endowment. But whatever the respective contributions of nature and nurture turn out to be with respect to particular competen

The cultural evolution of communication in a population of neural networks

Human language is learned, symbolic and exhibits syntactic structure, a set of properties which make it unique among naturally-occurring communication systems. How did human language come to be as it is? Language is culturally transmitted and cultural processes may have played a role in shaping language. However, it has been suggested that the cultural transmission oflanguage is constrained by some language-specific innate endowment. The primary objective of the research outlined in this paper is to investigate how such an endowment would influence the acquisition of langage and the dynamics of the repeated cultural transmission of language. To this end, a new connectionist model of the cultural evolution of communication is presented. In this model an individual's innate endowment is considered to be a learning rule with an associated learning bias. The model allows manipulations to be made to this learning apparatus andthe impact of such manipulations on the processes of language acquisition and language evolution to be explored. These investigations reveal that an innate endowment consisting of an ability to read the communicative intentions of others and a bias towards acquiring one-to-one mappings between meanings and signals results in the emergence, through purely cultural processes, of optimal communication. It has previously been suggested that humans possess just such an innate endowment. Properties of human language may therefore best be explained in terms of cultural evolution on an innate substrate.

Relations between innate endowments, cognitive development, domain specificity, and a taxonomy-creator

Atran proposes that humans have a unique, innate, domain-specific tendency to create taxonomies of biological kinds. We show that: (1) in ontogenesis, children develop a notion Atran claims to be innate; (2) what Atran claims is unique to biological kinds may be found in artifact kinds; and (3) although Atran proposes a domain-specific mental construct for biological rank, it can be explained in domain- general terms.

Generative Research on Second Language Acquisition

A defining moment in the history of generative research on language acquisition was the advent of the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach (Chomsky 1981). Generative research on second-language (L2) acquisition was no different in this regard, but there was a distinct twist: The L2 research agenda has also often been informed by the possibility that the L2 learner may not have “access” to the innate linguistic endowment described by Chomsky and others (Bley-Vroman 1990, Clahsen and Muysken 1986). It was thus perhaps inevitable that one might find a volume like Point Counterpoint (Eubank 1991), in which researchers with generally opposing viewpoints addressed this possibility. However, while the issue will likely be examined again in future volumes, an appraisal of more recent L2 research suggests that the “access” question no longer dominates the L2 research agenda. Instead, more recent work suggests an agenda in which “access” to UG is presupposed. The purpose of this review is thus not only to review research on the L2 “access” thesis from the 1980s and 1990s, but, more importantly, to provide an overview of more recent L2 research that is not fundamentally constrained by this issue.

Initial knowledge: six suggestions

Although debates continue, studies of cognition in infancy suggest that knowledge begins to emerge early in life and constitutes part of humans' innate endowment. Early-developing knowledge appears to be both domain-specific and task-specific, it appears to capture fundamental constraints on ecologically important classes of entities in the child's environment, and it appears to remain central to the commonsense knowledge systems of adults.

Dummett on Meaning and Classical Logic

IRecent criticisms of Michael Dummett's views on meaning tend to focus on the fundamental presuppositions that lie behind his views on language understanding. Theories ofunderstanding, the a-rgument goes, are epistemological theories, theories concerning a special type of knowledge, namely knowledge of sentence meaning. Dummett claims that philosophy of language has replaced epistemology as the foundation of philosophy. But, in reality, Dummett has merely pressed forward the claims of a particular type of epistemological problem to be of especial importance, bringing uncritically to the solution of this problem assumptions from the supposedly superseded discipline of epistemology that self-confessed epistemologists have long rejected as inadequate. Thus Dummett's three-pronged attack against what he terms realism in the theory of meaning based on the manifestation, acquisition, and communication arguments1 is held to represent nothing more than the crudest empiricism in epistemology. Dummett claims that no teacher could manifest and communicate to a pupil, about to acquire a language, grasp of sentences which are determinately true or false though we may be incapable of determining which. But the argument seems to hinge on the empiricist dogma that what is learned cannot radically transcend the experiential or stimulatory inputs to learning. This dogma, taken literally, is clearly false. The same sequence of stimulation can lead to very different cognitive states in organisms with different initial psychologies, including different innate endowments. An anti-empiricist in epistemology will claim that it is an empirical matter how much the innate component contributes; after the fashion of Chomsky, he can say that learning and communication situations simply act as catalysts for the transmission of beliefs whose content greatly transcends what is given in experiential input. The anti-realist cannot legislate a priori that beliefs with recognition-transcendent truth conditions cannot be transmitted via public signals which would, in other organisms, be used to transmit beliefs with much more empirically accessible contents.2 These criticisms of Dummett's arguments for his position seem to me to be just. But though his arguments are bad, the position he argues for may none the less be correct. I have argued elsewhere3 that the molecular view of

Rules and representations

AbstractThe book from which these sections are excerpted (N. Chomsky,Rules and Representations, Columbia University Press, 1980) is concerned with the prospects for assimilating the study of human intelligence and its products to the natural sciences through the investigation of cognitive structures, understood as systems of rules and representations that can be regarded as “mental organs.” These mental structui′es serve as the vehicles for the exercise of various capacities. They develop in the mind on the basis of an innate endowment that permits the growth of rich and highly articulated structures along an intrinsically determined course under the triggering and partially shaping effect of experience, which fixes parameters in an intricate system of predetermined form. It is argued that the mind is modular in character, with a diversity of cognitive structures, each with its specific properties arid principles. Knowledge of language, of the behavior of objects, and much else crucially involves these mental structures, and is thus not characterizable in terms of capacities, dispositions, or practical abilities, nor is it necessarily grounded in experience in the standard sense of this term.Various types of knowledge and modes of knowledge acquisition are discussed in these terms. Some of the properties of the language faculty are investigated. The basic cognitive relation is “knowing a grammar”; knowledge of language is derivative and, correspondingly, raises further problems. Language as commonly understood is not a unitary phenomenon but involves a number of interacting systems: the “computational” system of grammar, which provides the representations of sound and meaning that permit a rich range of expressive potential, is distinct from a conceptual system with its own properties; knowledge of language must be distinguished from knowledge of how to use a language; and the various systems that enter into the knowledge and use of language must be further analyzed into their specific subcomponents.

Early stimulation and maternal care as related to infant capabilities and individual differences†

Recent research on the capabilities of newborns and their individual differences is reviewed. Experimental results suggest that the newborn is a great deal. more capable of organized responses than has been assumed and that he is most responsive to stimulus configurations which are inherent in the mother and her care. In the earliest weeks of life, the mother is thus a sufficient source of both affective and cognitive stimulation for the “average expectable” infant. In cases of unavoidable or avoidable deficit in maternal care, compensatory stimulation may be beneficial. The stimulation requirements differ in kind with the premature, the institutional infant, the ghetto child, and the neglected child. For optimal development and to counteract special vulnerabilities, differences in the infants’ innate endowment also differentially affect stimulation requirements. Illustrations are given. For the studies of individual differences to be most useful, they should not only pinpoint special vulnerabilities, but...