I really need help please( Below are the quotes from each question) 1. Review th
ID: 3458395 • Letter: I
Question
I really need help please( Below are the quotes from each question)
1. Review the quote from The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin and discuss how he viewed language as an instinct. Given what you know about Darwin and many oppositions he faced, how ground-breaking were his observations? Do you agree with Darwin? Why? If not, why not?
"The conception of language as a kind of instinct was first articulated in 1871 by Darwin himself. In The Descent of Man he had to contend with language because its confinement to humans seemed to present a challenge to his theory. As in all matters, his observations are uncannily modern:
As .. . one of the founders of the noble science of philology observes, language is an art, like brewing or baking; but writing would have been a better simile. It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learned. It differs, however, widely from all ordinary arts, for man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write. Moreover, no philologist now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented; it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps. Darwin concluded that language ability is "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art," a design that is not peculiar to humans but seen in other species such as song-learning birds."
2. What school of thought was dominant in social sciences when Noam Chomsky entered the intellectual scene in the 1950s? Briefly describe the school of thought. Then describe how Chomsky countered that view. What observations does Chomsky offer as evidence to support his view?
"In this century, the most famous argument that language is like an instinct comes from Noam Chomsky, the linguist who first unmasked the intricacy of the system and perhaps the person most responsible for the modern revolution in language and cognitive science. In the 1950s the social sciences were dominated by behaviorism, the school of thought popularized by John Watson and B. F. Skinner. Mental terms like "know" and "think" were branded as unscientific; "mind" and "innate" were dirty words. Behavior was explained by a few laws of stimulus response learning that could be studied with rats pressing bars and dogs salivating to tones. But Chomsky called attention to two fundamental facts about language. First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of
sentences out of a finite list of words. That program may be called a mental grammar (not to be confused with pedagogical or stylistic "grammars," which are just guides to the etiquette of written prose). The second fundamental fact is that children develop these complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence constructions that they have never before encountered. Therefore, he argued, children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a Universal Grammar, that tells them how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents. Chomsky put it as follows:
It is a curious fact about the intellectual history of the past few centuries that physical and mental development have been approached in quite different ways. No one would take seriously the proposal that the human organism learns through experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic structure of particular organs results from accidental experience. Rather, it is taken for granted that the physical structure of the organism is genetically determined, though of course variation along such dimensions as size, rate of development, and so forth will depend in part on external factors....
The development of personality, behavior patterns, and cognitive structures in higher organisms has often been approached in a very different way. It is generally assumed that in these domains, social environment is the dominant factor. The structures of mind that develop over time are taken to be arbitrary and accidental; there is no "human nature" apart from what develops as a specific historical product....
But human cognitive systems, when seriously investigated, prove to be no less marvelous and intricate than the physical structures that develop in the life of the organism. Why, then, should we not study the acquisition of a cognitive structure such as language more or less as we study some complex bodily organ?
At first glance, the proposal may seem absurd, if only because of the great variety of human languages. But a closer consideration dispels these doubts. Even knowing very little of substance about linguistic universals, we can be quite sure that the possible variety of language is sharply limited. . . . The language each person acquires is a rich and complex construction hopelessly underdetermined by the fragmentary evidence available [to the child]. Nevertheless individuals in a speech community have developed essentially the same language. This fact can be explained only on the assumption that these individuals employ highly restrictive principles that guide the construction of grammar. By performing painstaking technical analyses of the sentences ordinary people accept as part of their mother tongue, Chomsky and other linguists developed theories of the mental grammars underlying people's knowledge of particular languages and of the Universal Grammar underlying the particular grammars. Early on, Chomsky's work encouraged other scientists, among them Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle, and Alvin Liberman, to open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics. By now, the com-
munity of scientists studying the questions, he raised numbers in the thousands. Chomsky is currently among the ten most-cited writers in all of the humanities (beating out Hegel and Cicero and trailing only Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, the Bible, Aristotle, Plato, and Freud) and the only living member of the top ten. What those citations say is another matter. Chomsky gets people exercised. Reactions range from the awe-struck deference ordinarily
reserved for gurus of weird religious cults to the withering invective that academics have developed into a high art. In part this is because Chomsky attacks what is still one of the foundations of twentieth-century intellectual life—the "Standard Social Science Model," according to which the human psyche is molded by the surrounding culture. But it
is also because no thinker can afford to ignore him. As one of his severest critics, the philosopher Hilary Putnam, acknowledges, When one reads Chomsky, one is struck by a sense of great intellectual power; one knows one is encountering an extraordinary mind. And this is as much a matter of the spell of his powerful personality as it is of his obvious intellectual virtues: originality, scorn for the faddish and the superficial; willingness to revive (and the ability to revive) positions (such as the "doctrine of innate ideas") that had seemed passe; concern with topics, such as the structure of the human mind, that are of central and perennial importance. "
Explanation / Answer
1. Darwin’s arguments were based on his broad knowledge of anthropology, language use and acquisition in children, linguistic pathologies, and the behaviour of a wide range of animals, wild and domestic. Much of this information had been gathered through correspondence, as well as observations of his own children and pets. Darwin described how language might have evolved through natural and sexual selection. He compared birds learning to sing to infants babbling.Darwin addressed the natural theology of Max Müller and others by arguing that language use, while requiring a certain mental capacity, would also stimulate brain development, enabling long trains of thought and strengthening reasoning power. Vocalization in humans would be greatly enhanced by the development of other functions, especially the use of the hands. Finally, Darwin drew an extended analogy between the evolution of languages and species, noting in each domain the presence of rudiments, of crossing and blending, and of variation, and remarking on how each developed gradually through a process of struggle.
Darwin's observations were definitely ground breaking and I agree with with Darwin. Instincts dont include language. Language is a learnt process. However, sounds are not non-instinctive. Like when children take out sounds of babbling, it turns into a proper language through observation and immitation. Instincts as he says is an art. Its more like your gut telling you or provoking you to do something new that you might or moight not have done before. Hence yes I agree with him. After reading his books or theories on sociology, it had greatly influenced me. It also gave me another angle to look from. Hence my answer is according to that influence taht Darwins books had on me.
2.In the 1950s the social sciences were dominated by behaviorism, the school of thought popularized by John Watson and B. F. Skinner.
Behaviorism, also known as behavioral psychology, is a theory of learning based on the idea that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning. Conditioning occurs through interaction with the environment. Behaviorists believe that our responses to environmental stimuli shape our actions.According to this school of thought, behavior can be studied in a systematic and observable manner regardless of internal mental states.Only observable behavior or the overt behavior should be considered—cognitions, emotions, and moods are far too subjective.Strict behaviorists believed that any person can potentially be trained to perform any task, regardless of genetic background, personality traits, and internal thoughts. It only requires the right conditioning.
As quoted in the paragraph above:
First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words. That program may be called a mental grammar (not to be confused with pedagogical or stylistic "grammars," which are just guides to the etiquette of written prose). The second fundamental fact is that children develop these complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence constructions that they have never before encountered. Therefore, he argued, children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a Universal Grammar, that tells them how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents.
Chomsky gives a number of observable evidences. He speaks about the rate of development in children, the language development that happens with time and not only with the birth of the child. His evidences do not strongly oppose the behaviourist, but it definitely puts an impression and makes it thougth provoking for the others to question the theory of the 1950s.