‘Honest Fakes’ and Language Origins
Knight, C. (2008d). Honest fakes and language origins. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(10-11): 236-48.
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1973 [1762], p. 195).
1. Digital Minds in an Analog World
Language has been described as a ‘mirror of mind’. Chomsky attributes this idea to ‘the first cognitive revolution’ inspired by Descartes amongothers in the seventeenth century. ‘The second cognitive revolution’ — triggered in large measure by Chomsky’s own work — is taken to have been a twentieth century rediscovery of these earlier insights into the nature of language and mind. In 1660, the renowned Port Royal grammarians (Arnauld and Lancelot, 1972 [1660], p. 27) celebrated
this marvelous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul.
For Descartes himself, however, this was no human invention: ‘the seat of the soul’ was the pineal gland (Descartes, 1991 [1640], p. 143). In Chomsky’s reformulation, the relevant organ becomes ‘that little part of the left hemisphere that is responsible for the very specific structures of human language’ (Chomsky in Piatelli-Palmarini, 1980, p. 182). As Pinker (1999, p. 287) puts it: ‘We have digital minds in an analog world. More accurately, a part of our minds is digital’.
But if ‘a part of the mind is digital’, how did it ever get to be that way? Under what Darwinian selection pressures and by what conceivable mechanisms might a digital computational module become installed in an otherwise analog primate brain? Can natural selection acting on an analog precursor transform it incrementally into a digital one? Is such an idea even logically coherent?
If these were easy questions, the origins of language — recently dubbed the ‘hardest problem in science’ (Christiansen and Kirby, 2003) —might long ago have been solved. Chomsky accepts Darwinism in principle, but doubts its direct relevance to this particular problem. In his view (Chomsky, 2005, p. 12), the ‘leap’ to language ‘was effectively instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring and coming to predominate….’ He considers the language faculty to be ‘surprisingly perfect’ — just as we might expect had it been designed by ‘a divine architect’ (Chomsky, 1996, p. 30). Of course, Chomsky is no creationist. But otherwise supportive Darwinians have criticized him for suggesting an apparent miracle — forgetting, perhaps, that Chomsky’s guiding principle is internal consistency, not conformity with the rest of science. ‘In fact’, writes Chomsky (2005, p. 12) in justifying his ‘Great Leap Forward’ narrative, ‘it is hard to see what account of human evolution would not assume at least this much, in one or another form’. Chomsky is informing us that language as he defines it cannot gradually have evolved.