Time Links: 00:37 The importance of the cognitive revolution in the 50s/60s 09:53 The Chomsky-Piaget debate (constructivism vs. nativism) 12:53 Modularity of mind 20:29 About evolutionary psychology 27:13 The debate with Foucault (human nature, and epistemology) 35:43 The importance of creativity for humans
Excellent questions and style: simple, straightforward, slow. Asking Chomsky to comment on the impact of his legacy was the respectful approach to take and I'm sure Chomsky was grateful for the opportunity to do so. And his answers, so far, (I'm ten minutes in) are better than I had expected given his age. Like many, Chomsky introduced me to left wing radicalism during my high school years... and like some (too few), I eventually moved on to other thinkers and thoughts. Nevertheless, I'm grateful to Chomsky for provoking me into intellectual life at a young age. I may no longer agree with him about many things, but that I thought about those things at all is thanks, in large part, to him. A fitting video to release on a holiday; Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Chomsky!
(Importance of Cognitive Reovlition in studying human behavior?) - standard approach to study of human beings was behaviorism - inquiriy was limited to actual behavior, organization of behavior, description of behavior, eliciting control of behavior and so on. that's not how you study any organism if you want to understand it. What you want to do is try to understand what the internal mechanisms are that are causing the behavior. That was improper at the time. you had to keep to analysis of behavior. - cognitive revolution was trying to study the nature of cognitive processes that were being carried out internally. what we call mental processes, in the brain, that we try to discover and describe and see how they eventuate in behavior - this isn't new. there was a cognitive revolution in 17th century, begining of scientific revolution. among those topics were vision, language and others that became central in relived cognitive revolutiono of the 1950s - for vision in 16th century assumptions believe if you perceive a triangle the form passes thru space and implants intself in your mind. - galileo and other initiators of scientific revolution regarded that as mysticism and wanted to discover what actual mechanisms were. - descartes said the way you see a trianlge is tehe way a blind man with a stick would see it. touch various points on triangle(series of stimuli) and mind would create the image of a triangle because the mind works on principles like euclidia ngeometry. - that turned out to be raher accurate, not a stick but eye motions called saccadic eye motions, when you look at something you don't see it but what you see is a series of stimuli around and your mind constructs the image. - in case of language there were interesting developments . Galileo and contemporaries amazed and shocked at what they regarded as most remarkable phenomena. with a few dozen symbols we can construct an infinite number of thoughts, we can even convey those thoughts to others who have no access to the workings of our mind. - galileo thought that the alphabet was the most stupendous of human inventions. because it could carry out this miracle. of course because it was based on internal alphabet collection oof symbols - interesting investigations began on the nature of these processes. - this was all forgotten during the structuralist and behaviorist period. whole tradition was forgotten and revived in mid-1950s wihtout any awareness of history. - revived with new tools so the development of the theory of computation (great math achievement of 20th century, turing and gourddel) that made it clear how a finite object like the brain or laptop would have capacity to construct or generate an infinite amount of structured expressions, each of which can convey/constitute certain thought and can be externalized via sound or some other medium - that made it possible to begin to study traditional problems of language that had been left hanging because they didn't have these concepts to study them in a direct and serious way. to try to construct precise theories that would account for the knowledge that you and i have and largely share that makes it possible for us to communicate. - the same is true in the study of vision, new tech made it possible to discover what neurons are actually doing in. visual sectors of brain. they didn't do it with humans but it was considered ethical to do it to cats and monkeys by planting electrodes in the part of their brain that picks up visual symbols to discover exactly what their doing and some pretty remarkable discoveries were made. - in the case of language problem is a lot harder because systems are more complex and other reason is there is no comparative evidence since language is a unique human property. - no analog in other species so you cant study monkey or cats and other organisms to do experiments that wouldn't be permitted on humans so you have to user indirect means. nevertheless there are advances in tech that make it possible to learn what the brain is doing when you and I are communicating but most of the work is just intensive study of the wide variety of typologically varied languages to see if we can understand the mechanism that carry out this miraculous achievement that the so amazed galileo and others. - a lot has been learned. so for example go back to 1950s it was standardly assumed in the behaviorist tradition that languages could vary in almost arbitrary ways and that each language had the be studied on its own without preconceptions. -that's now known to be wrong. turns out as we proceed, languages that look very different on the surface seem to have pretty much the same internal structure with meeting the same principles in the way they compute thoughts and transmit them to the outside. a fair amount has been learned about these principles. - the cognitive revolution deals, in principle, with all cognitive capacities, but most far reaching results have been reached in language and vision and a few other areas. -
(10:00 chomsky/piaget debate - piaget brought approach to children development regarding language and other aspects of cognition that was different than behaviorist but regarded interaction between agent and its environment. back then you defended a nativist approach to those problems. so could you tell us what were some of the biggest issues you debated?) - biggest issue is what you said. is development of language capacity and other cognitive capacities - a matter of following a fixed plan thats part of our genetic endowment - modified of course by the environment, so your genes dont determine whether you speak english or Spanish. but is there a fixed plan that directs the child reflexively, the child doesn't think about it, any more than you think about growing arms, but it sort of sketches out the basic plan of development with experience modifying it around the edges. - OR is there some process of maturation moving from stage to stage that doesn't involve any innate genetically determined components. - that was the core argument - but neither of us regarded it as a debate. - it was a discussion among many cognitive scientist. Chomsky's friend Foder participated. (13:00 wasn't the issue of modularity of mind brought to the table? you and Foder defended position that mind was composed of several different modules each of which had to deal with different cognitively distinct problems. would you say that those different modules were a result of natural selection and are mostly genetically determined or genetically based or not?) - first we have to distinguish genetically determined from a product of natural selection. - remember piaget was skeptical of natural selection. so much so that a number of the distinguished biologist were shocked by his dispositions, - Some of what he proposed then is not that exotic as it was at the time because of the discoveries in what has been called epigenetics. the way experience has some peripheral limited effects in complex ways in changing the genetic endowment. - His general anti-darwinian position is not suggestive - in chomsky, foder and Massimo Kately, foder and kattely wrote a book called "Why Darwin was wrong" in which they review many discoveries in recent years that have shown that many natural processes take place that are critical for evolution over and above natural selection. - they even raise questions about the nature of natural selection, but i think we can concede that that's a critical element of evolution and Darwin was largely right about that but there are many other ways in which the genome/"arrangement of genes" changes thru genetic drift transposition of genes from one place to another or one organism to another. lots of proceesses take place that yield the genetic endowment of the particular organism's genotype - so yes, chomsky's view is that their is a genetic endowment for language that humans have and other organisms dont have which is why we can't do the kind of comparative studies that you try with vision and other shared capacities. - no known explanation other than genetic endowment. - of course to find the basis in the genome for particular capacities is very diffficult even for simple traits like height, lets say, nobody doubts its genetically determined but to try to find the hundreds of genes involved in determininng height is what biologist sometimes call "fiendishly difficult" problem - its not going to be simple to find the genetic endowment for language, thats a huge probblem. - the fact that it's their i think is pretty well established, thats why a 2 year old infant has an amazing knowledge of language as you can discover by experimetn even though it's had very little experience. - if you look at the language development of infants it goes thru a very fixed program development. - a new born infant already has some information about the language of its mother. can identify the language of its mother distinct from another language both spoken by a woman they've never heard, a bilingual woman - by now lots is understood about that and theres 's a regular series of progression the infant goes thru of course is modified by experience but its similar to other genetic programs. - there have been efforts, extensive efforts, to try to elicit something like language behavior from other organisms, usually apes, but its been a failure because they dont ahve the coginitve capacities that allow them to use the data that an infant uses reflexiveily. - that also has to be the basis for the fact that languages generally seem to be cast to the same mold in some deep sense though on the surface they look very .. - this doctrine about the almost endless variation of languages was alsso held about organisms in the 1950s - the standard view among biologist was tht oganisms are so varied that you have to study each one on its own, but that's now known to be completely wring and discoveries show there are very few types of organism and they have deep properties they all share and its been suggested that there is a universal genome. - single fixed genome with slight modifications that give ytou different organism. - its a picture of somewhat like what seems to be discovered about language over the eyars. - a lot of this is contentious, dont want to suggest theres an overwhelming consensus about that but thats the way the evidnece looks to me increasingly. - dont really see any serious alternative to this view.
(20:45 since you agree that certain aspects of cogintion are gentically determined and also agree with modularity of mind position i've heard you criticizing the discipline of evolutionary psychology. since those are its 2 theoretical foundations, what do you think are its main flaws?) - i DON'T CRITICIZE THE DISCIPLINE. -My own work falls within it, but the practice of evo psychology that has to be viewed very carefully. A good deal of the practice makes enormous imaginative leaps on the basis of very scanty evidence. - jERRY Foder does believe in modularity of mind has written scathingly doubt the proactive of evo psych, there is work that is significant and serious (kin selection , evolution of altruism, Robert Grovers work) - but a good deal is pretty fanciful and constructing possible stories(with a lot of implications for human life) on basis of very thin and dubious evidence. so we have to be cautious. - in particular in this case we have to be cautious because of apparent implications for human life and human society, thats a serious matter. cant speculate wildly about that. (23:00 so your OPINION is that some conclusions of evo psych are not well supported by evidence?) - thats unfortunately true. Foder wrote about it. - Richard Luont and Stephen Gould (major biologist) have written critical assessments of it. Lewontin in particular has strongly argued we should be careful about "just so" stories. making up nice stories about animals and humans based on some metaphoric relationship to what might have happened without knowledge of how it happened. - evolution is a hard field you can't just wave your hand and say "this happened because of natural selection" that DOESN'T mean anything - to find the actual mechanism and processes that took place is no small problem. - kind of interesting to take a look at what is studied and what isn't studied. - take a look at honeybees, they have a very elaborate communicative system, the bees will fly away, wander, some hit a flower and take it directly back to hive in, this is called a bee-line because they go straight back to the hive. not a simple task. humans cant do it. - when they go back they wave wings and do dance and that informs other bees of height, quality and distance of flower. - pretty tricky communication system. - neurophysiology of it is not at all understood. - obviously genetically determined but nobody can find the genes. - What about evolution of this system? think about it. hundreds of species, some have dance and some don't, bees have a tiny brain sIze of grass seed, you can stick electrodes in with no ethical conditions and do any experiment you want. Almost no study of it, because its so hard. come to humans? INCOMPARABLY more difficult. - huge brain, can't do experiments, no comparative studies, yet huge literature on evolution of language. That already tells you that we're moving into an area of deep speculation. - it's not that you can't say anything of evolution of language, Chomsky wrote a book about it and there's a few things to say, btu it's an immensely difficult topic as compared with evolution of bee communication, which is understood by biologist to be a very hard problem. Try and google it on the internet and You'll find a few scattered studies but not many because it's hard. - That tells you something about the study of evolution.
(27:20 Debate with Foucault in 1971, mostly on first part on human nature from an epistemological perspective. Chomsky held very dissimilar views, Foucault focused on how social and culture environments we inhabit are responsible for constructing our cognition, but CHomsky brought an innatist perspective) - that's correct although there isn't an issue, humans are organisms and every organism has genetically deterined nature. - dogs have certain things they can and can't do just like humans, that's not because of their experience but because of the way that their designed and the way that Chomsky is designed. That's their nature. - there is a mystical belief that "yes we have a nature but its only responsible for our physical characteristics, but when we move to cultural, mental and cognitive charateristics it some how comes from somewhere else" -There's no basis in science, history, experience or anywhere that accounts for that view. - when you hear people say "humans have no nature only a history" that can't be correct' - if you didn't have a fundamental cognitive nature you couldn't understand anything. you would just be some hopeless ameoboid like creature wandering around aimlessly. - even to have experience requires a fundamental nature. when you look at the screen why do you see a person? why not just colors and shapes? and why does every younf infant see a person? that's because we have an internal nature that provides our experience. - when you see the moon rising, why do you see the moon rising? why not an array of colors and shapes that have no form? - even the simplest data and simplest part of experience is already constructed by the mind. that was understood in the 17th century. much more evidence for it today. - so at every aspect of our cognition and mental and social life must be based crucially on elements of our nature . - that DOESNT mean that experience doesn't have an effect, of course it has a huge effect. - so for example take an issue that's very much alive today. crucial question about the nation of our society. should people be slaves obeying the order of a master, is that legitimate? should we accept a totalitarian state which controls and orders the actions and thinking of its citizens. we would all say no to that, while we all say no to it we accept it. That's what a business is. Take any business enterprise, a worker comes in the morning and until that worker leaves in the evening they're a slave. - They're controlled to a level you wouldn't imagine in a totalitarian state. - for example, Stalin didn't control when people were allowed to go to the bathroom for 5-15 mins. didn't control what they wore to the bathroom or if they talked to each other. All of this happens in every business, all the time. - Is a labor contract legitimate? go back in history you have different views on this, In early industrial revolution American workers were very militant and opposed to this, Their view was that if you work for a wage instead of under your own control you're just a slave. - Leading figures of the Enlightenment believed this. William Von Hombauldt was one of the leaders of the enlightenment, also a great linguist and humanist. founder of modern research university and founders of classical liberalism. - His view was that if an artisan creates a beautiful object on command, we will admire what he does but despise what he is. Namely an automaton controlled by someone else. That's not a free human being. - That was actually a slogan of the republican party in the mid-nineteenth century. Abraham Lincoln believed it. - It was a big struggle today if the elementary structure of our social organization have any legitimacy or whether they should be dismantled the way slavery was. - well ok, this a critical question and is often argued that it's part of our nature to "want to be subordinated to hierarchical structures that control us. that's the way our nature is we have to have this" - same arguments made about slavery, "blacks were just genetically(designed by their nature by God) to pick cottons on their backs. that's the way their happy and unfair to do anything else" - similar arguments are made about the basic structures of our economy. - so there are real issues, live issues, about what our nature is and what is the proper way for our nature and what kind of social organization is appropriate for our intrinsic nature to flourish, those are serious questions. - science doesn't tell us anything about it, nor does evo psych. experience tells us some things and history tells us some things. - but its a kind of truism that everything about us is some kind of combination of our intrinsic nature and the environment(social, personal and other aspects of the environment in which we develop and those parts are controllable, we can change them, - a person interested in constructing a better world, working for what's called "the common good" would be very concerned with these issues.
(36:10 let me ask you about another topic you debated with Foucault and that is creativity. Is that one of the things we have to keep in mind - to allow people to be creative when trying to devise a better system of social and political organization) - I think so, back to Von Hombauldt, he regarded the essence of human nature as being the desire to inquire and create. - You see it in young kids - they're very inquisitive. They want to understand everything, they want to make new things and so on. It's sort of beaten out of them by the educational system. - A proper education system should be nourishing it and allowing these qualities to flourish, thats what happens in a decent progressive education systems, but much of the system is devastating. - take the reigning system in the US, "Teach to test" you have to teach in 3rd grade what they can use to pass a test. - that's a way to ensure that people understand nothing and go no where. - we've all had the experience of taking a course in school which was taught very badly, had no interest. You worked hard enough to pass a test and 2 weeks later you forgot what the course was about. -You've also had, if you're lucky, the experience of being in an environment where your instinctive tendency to seek, to inquire and create is nurtured and opportunities are offered and encouraged. - we know the consequences are quite different - i think that holds for society in general. - it's one reason i think it's dramatically opposed to human nature to have social institutions in which people spend much of their waking lives basically as slaves.
Great interview. Just sad and disappointing that he had to say that work is a form of slavery. I used to work at a labor court and they probably believed the same.
Time Links:
00:37 The importance of the cognitive revolution in the 50s/60s
09:53 The Chomsky-Piaget debate (constructivism vs. nativism)
12:53 Modularity of mind
20:29 About evolutionary psychology
27:13 The debate with Foucault (human nature, and epistemology)
35:43 The importance of creativity for humans
Jesus. Noam Chomsky.
Hell yes! I Just started getting into Chomsky, what a timing.
Thank you for such an enlightening and inspirational interview.
You are doing good work. I can already see this channel exploding soon. Today you have about 3k subs. But you deserve 300k at least. All the best.
Excellent At 90 years old he is still sharing his brilliance with us. I love when he speaks about his history.
Vow, what a great interview, Ricardo. Considering the versatility of your interviews, I tend to admire your knowledge domain.
Incrível Ricardo!
Somos fãs do seu podcast!
O conteúdo é riquíssimo.
Adoraríamos te entrevistar um dia.
Abraços.
Omg you got Chomsky on! Thanks
Wow, Chomsky in the flesh.
¡Genious!
Excellent questions and style: simple, straightforward, slow. Asking Chomsky to comment on the impact of his legacy was the respectful approach to take and I'm sure Chomsky was grateful for the opportunity to do so. And his answers, so far, (I'm ten minutes in) are better than I had expected given his age. Like many, Chomsky introduced me to left wing radicalism during my high school years... and like some (too few), I eventually moved on to other thinkers and thoughts. Nevertheless, I'm grateful to Chomsky for provoking me into intellectual life at a young age. I may no longer agree with him about many things, but that I thought about those things at all is thanks, in large part, to him. A fitting video to release on a holiday; Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Chomsky!
I LOVE YOU NOAM
Only way is up!
Wow talk about a big name.
wonderful
Does anyone know if you can watch the Chomsky and Piaget debate anywhere online?
I don't think so.
There are books out there about it, but I never saw any video recording.
He is remindes me of Havelock Ellis
I dont think Chomsky has read a lot about Evolutionary Psychology.
Chomsky understands French fairly well. You could've literally asked him all your questions in French and he would've responded in English
(Importance of Cognitive Reovlition in studying human behavior?)
- standard approach to study of human beings was behaviorism
- inquiriy was limited to actual behavior, organization of behavior, description of behavior, eliciting control of behavior and so on. that's not how you study any organism if you want to understand it. What you want to do is try to understand what the internal mechanisms are that are causing the behavior. That was improper at the time. you had to keep to analysis of behavior.
- cognitive revolution was trying to study the nature of cognitive processes that were being carried out internally. what we call mental processes, in the brain, that we try to discover and describe and see how they eventuate in behavior
- this isn't new. there was a cognitive revolution in 17th century, begining of scientific revolution. among those topics were vision, language and others that became central in relived cognitive revolutiono of the 1950s
- for vision in 16th century assumptions believe if you perceive a triangle the form passes thru space and implants intself in your mind.
- galileo and other initiators of scientific revolution regarded that as mysticism and wanted to discover what actual mechanisms were.
- descartes said the way you see a trianlge is tehe way a blind man with a stick would see it. touch various points on triangle(series of stimuli) and mind would create the image of a triangle because the mind works on principles like euclidia ngeometry.
- that turned out to be raher accurate, not a stick but eye motions called saccadic eye motions, when you look at something you don't see it but what you see is a series of stimuli around and your mind constructs the image.
- in case of language there were interesting developments . Galileo and contemporaries amazed and shocked at what they regarded as most remarkable phenomena. with a few dozen symbols we can construct an infinite number of thoughts, we can even convey those thoughts to others who have no access to the workings of our mind.
- galileo thought that the alphabet was the most stupendous of human inventions. because it could carry out this miracle. of course because it was based on internal alphabet collection oof symbols
- interesting investigations began on the nature of these processes.
- this was all forgotten during the structuralist and behaviorist period. whole tradition was forgotten and revived in mid-1950s wihtout any awareness of history.
- revived with new tools so the development of the theory of computation (great math achievement of 20th century, turing and gourddel) that made it clear how a finite object like the brain or laptop would have capacity to construct or generate an infinite amount of structured expressions, each of which can convey/constitute certain thought and can be externalized via sound or some other medium
- that made it possible to begin to study traditional problems of language that had been left hanging because they didn't have these concepts to study them in a direct and serious way. to try to construct precise theories that would account for the knowledge that you and i have and largely share that makes it possible for us to communicate.
- the same is true in the study of vision, new tech made it possible to discover what neurons are actually doing in. visual sectors of brain. they didn't do it with humans but it was considered ethical to do it to cats and monkeys by planting electrodes in the part of their brain that picks up visual symbols to discover exactly what their doing and some pretty remarkable discoveries were made.
- in the case of language problem is a lot harder because systems are more complex and other reason is there is no comparative evidence since language is a unique human property.
- no analog in other species so you cant study monkey or cats and other organisms to do experiments that wouldn't be permitted on humans so you have to user indirect means. nevertheless there are advances in tech that make it possible to learn what the brain is doing when you and I are communicating but most of the work is just intensive study of the wide variety of typologically varied languages to see if we can understand the mechanism that carry out this miraculous achievement that the so amazed galileo and others.
- a lot has been learned. so for example go back to 1950s it was standardly assumed in the behaviorist tradition that languages could vary in almost arbitrary ways and that each language had the be studied on its own without preconceptions.
-that's now known to be wrong. turns out as we proceed, languages that look very different on the surface seem to have pretty much the same internal structure with meeting the same principles in the way they compute thoughts and transmit them to the outside. a fair amount has been learned about these principles.
- the cognitive revolution deals, in principle, with all cognitive capacities, but most far reaching results have been reached in language and vision and a few other areas.
-
(10:00 chomsky/piaget debate - piaget brought approach to children development regarding language and other aspects of cognition that was different than behaviorist but regarded interaction between agent and its environment. back then you defended a nativist approach to those problems. so could you tell us what were some of the biggest issues you debated?)
- biggest issue is what you said. is development of language capacity and other cognitive capacities - a matter of following a fixed plan thats part of our genetic endowment - modified of course by the environment, so your genes dont determine whether you speak english or Spanish. but is there a fixed plan that directs the child reflexively, the child doesn't think about it, any more than you think about growing arms, but it sort of sketches out the basic plan of development with experience modifying it around the edges.
- OR is there some process of maturation moving from stage to stage that doesn't involve any innate genetically determined components.
- that was the core argument
- but neither of us regarded it as a debate.
- it was a discussion among many cognitive scientist. Chomsky's friend Foder participated.
(13:00 wasn't the issue of modularity of mind brought to the table? you and Foder defended position that mind was composed of several different modules each of which had to deal with different cognitively distinct problems. would you say that those different modules were a result of natural selection and are mostly genetically determined or genetically based or not?)
- first we have to distinguish genetically determined from a product of natural selection.
- remember piaget was skeptical of natural selection. so much so that a number of the distinguished biologist were shocked by his dispositions,
- Some of what he proposed then is not that exotic as it was at the time because of the discoveries in what has been called epigenetics. the way experience has some peripheral limited effects in complex ways in changing the genetic endowment.
- His general anti-darwinian position is not suggestive
- in chomsky, foder and Massimo Kately, foder and kattely wrote a book called "Why Darwin was wrong" in which they review many discoveries in recent years that have shown that many natural processes take place that are critical for evolution over and above natural selection.
- they even raise questions about the nature of natural selection, but i think we can concede that that's a critical element of evolution and Darwin was largely right about that but there are many other ways in which the genome/"arrangement of genes" changes thru genetic drift transposition of genes from one place to another or one organism to another. lots of proceesses take place that yield the genetic endowment of the particular organism's genotype
- so yes, chomsky's view is that their is a genetic endowment for language that humans have and other organisms dont have which is why we can't do the kind of comparative studies that you try with vision and other shared capacities.
- no known explanation other than genetic endowment.
- of course to find the basis in the genome for particular capacities is very diffficult even for simple traits like height, lets say, nobody doubts its genetically determined but to try to find the hundreds of genes involved in determininng height is what biologist sometimes call "fiendishly difficult" problem
- its not going to be simple to find the genetic endowment for language, thats a huge probblem.
- the fact that it's their i think is pretty well established, thats why a 2 year old infant has an amazing knowledge of language as you can discover by experimetn even though it's had very little experience.
- if you look at the language development of infants it goes thru a very fixed program development.
- a new born infant already has some information about the language of its mother. can identify the language of its mother distinct from another language both spoken by a woman they've never heard, a bilingual woman
- by now lots is understood about that and theres 's a regular series of progression the infant goes thru of course is modified by experience but its similar to other genetic programs.
- there have been efforts, extensive efforts, to try to elicit something like language behavior from other organisms, usually apes, but its been a failure because they dont ahve the coginitve capacities that allow them to use the data that an infant uses reflexiveily.
- that also has to be the basis for the fact that languages generally seem to be cast to the same mold in some deep sense though on the surface they look very ..
- this doctrine about the almost endless variation of languages was alsso held about organisms in the 1950s
- the standard view among biologist was tht oganisms are so varied that you have to study each one on its own, but that's now known to be completely wring and discoveries show there are very few types of organism and they have deep properties they all share and its been suggested that there is a universal genome.
- single fixed genome with slight modifications that give ytou different organism.
- its a picture of somewhat like what seems to be discovered about language over the eyars.
- a lot of this is contentious, dont want to suggest theres an overwhelming consensus about that but thats the way the evidnece looks to me increasingly.
- dont really see any serious alternative to this view.
(20:45 since you agree that certain aspects of cogintion are gentically determined and also agree with modularity of mind position i've heard you criticizing the discipline of evolutionary psychology. since those are its 2 theoretical foundations, what do you think are its main flaws?)
- i DON'T CRITICIZE THE DISCIPLINE.
-My own work falls within it, but the practice of evo psychology that has to be viewed very carefully. A good deal of the practice makes enormous imaginative leaps on the basis of very scanty evidence.
- jERRY Foder does believe in modularity of mind has written scathingly doubt the proactive of evo psych, there is work that is significant and serious (kin selection , evolution of altruism, Robert Grovers work)
- but a good deal is pretty fanciful and constructing possible stories(with a lot of implications for human life) on basis of very thin and dubious evidence. so we have to be cautious.
- in particular in this case we have to be cautious because of apparent implications for human life and human society, thats a serious matter. cant speculate wildly about that.
(23:00 so your OPINION is that some conclusions of evo psych are not well supported by evidence?)
- thats unfortunately true. Foder wrote about it.
- Richard Luont and Stephen Gould (major biologist) have written critical assessments of it. Lewontin in particular has strongly argued we should be careful about "just so" stories. making up nice stories about animals and humans based on some metaphoric relationship to what might have happened without knowledge of how it happened.
- evolution is a hard field you can't just wave your hand and say "this happened because of natural selection" that DOESN'T mean anything
- to find the actual mechanism and processes that took place is no small problem.
- kind of interesting to take a look at what is studied and what isn't studied.
- take a look at honeybees, they have a very elaborate communicative system, the bees will fly away, wander, some hit a flower and take it directly back to hive in, this is called a bee-line because they go straight back to the hive. not a simple task. humans cant do it.
- when they go back they wave wings and do dance and that informs other bees of height, quality and distance of flower.
- pretty tricky communication system.
- neurophysiology of it is not at all understood.
- obviously genetically determined but nobody can find the genes.
- What about evolution of this system? think about it. hundreds of species, some have dance and some don't, bees have a tiny brain sIze of grass seed, you can stick electrodes in with no ethical conditions and do any experiment you want. Almost no study of it, because its so hard. come to humans? INCOMPARABLY more difficult.
- huge brain, can't do experiments, no comparative studies, yet huge literature on evolution of language. That already tells you that we're moving into an area of deep speculation.
- it's not that you can't say anything of evolution of language, Chomsky wrote a book about it and there's a few things to say, btu it's an immensely difficult topic as compared with evolution of bee communication, which is understood by biologist to be a very hard problem. Try and google it on the internet and You'll find a few scattered studies but not many because it's hard.
- That tells you something about the study of evolution.
(27:20 Debate with Foucault in 1971, mostly on first part on human nature from an epistemological perspective. Chomsky held very dissimilar views, Foucault focused on how social and culture environments we inhabit are responsible for constructing our cognition, but CHomsky brought an innatist perspective)
- that's correct although there isn't an issue, humans are organisms and every organism has genetically deterined nature.
- dogs have certain things they can and can't do just like humans, that's not because of their experience but because of the way that their designed and the way that Chomsky is designed. That's their nature.
- there is a mystical belief that "yes we have a nature but its only responsible for our physical characteristics, but when we move to cultural, mental and cognitive charateristics it some how comes from somewhere else"
-There's no basis in science, history, experience or anywhere that accounts for that view.
- when you hear people say "humans have no nature only a history" that can't be correct'
- if you didn't have a fundamental cognitive nature you couldn't understand anything. you would just be some hopeless ameoboid like creature wandering around aimlessly.
- even to have experience requires a fundamental nature. when you look at the screen why do you see a person? why not just colors and shapes? and why does every younf infant see a person? that's because we have an internal nature that provides our experience.
- when you see the moon rising, why do you see the moon rising? why not an array of colors and shapes that have no form?
- even the simplest data and simplest part of experience is already constructed by the mind. that was understood in the 17th century. much more evidence for it today.
- so at every aspect of our cognition and mental and social life must be based crucially on elements of our nature .
- that DOESNT mean that experience doesn't have an effect, of course it has a huge effect.
- so for example take an issue that's very much alive today. crucial question about the nation of our society. should people be slaves obeying the order of a master, is that legitimate? should we accept a totalitarian state which controls and orders the actions and thinking of its citizens. we would all say no to that, while we all say no to it we accept it. That's what a business is. Take any business enterprise, a worker comes in the morning and until that worker leaves in the evening they're a slave.
- They're controlled to a level you wouldn't imagine in a totalitarian state.
- for example, Stalin didn't control when people were allowed to go to the bathroom for 5-15 mins. didn't control what they wore to the bathroom or if they talked to each other. All of this happens in every business, all the time.
- Is a labor contract legitimate? go back in history you have different views on this, In early industrial revolution American workers were very militant and opposed to this, Their view was that if you work for a wage instead of under your own control you're just a slave.
- Leading figures of the Enlightenment believed this. William Von Hombauldt was one of the leaders of the enlightenment, also a great linguist and humanist. founder of modern research university and founders of classical liberalism.
- His view was that if an artisan creates a beautiful object on command, we will admire what he does but despise what he is. Namely an automaton controlled by someone else. That's not a free human being.
- That was actually a slogan of the republican party in the mid-nineteenth century. Abraham Lincoln believed it.
- It was a big struggle today if the elementary structure of our social organization have any legitimacy or whether they should be dismantled the way slavery was.
- well ok, this a critical question and is often argued that it's part of our nature to "want to be subordinated to hierarchical structures that control us. that's the way our nature is we have to have this"
- same arguments made about slavery, "blacks were just genetically(designed by their nature by God) to pick cottons on their backs. that's the way their happy and unfair to do anything else"
- similar arguments are made about the basic structures of our economy.
- so there are real issues, live issues, about what our nature is and what is the proper way for our nature and what kind of social organization is appropriate for our intrinsic nature to flourish, those are serious questions.
- science doesn't tell us anything about it, nor does evo psych. experience tells us some things and history tells us some things.
- but its a kind of truism that everything about us is some kind of combination of our intrinsic nature and the environment(social, personal and other aspects of the environment in which we develop and those parts are controllable, we can change them,
- a person interested in constructing a better world, working for what's called "the common good" would be very concerned with these issues.
(36:10 let me ask you about another topic you debated with Foucault and that is creativity. Is that one of the things we have to keep in mind - to allow people to be creative when trying to devise a better system of social and political organization)
- I think so, back to Von Hombauldt, he regarded the essence of human nature as being the desire to inquire and create.
- You see it in young kids - they're very inquisitive. They want to understand everything, they want to make new things and so on. It's sort of beaten out of them by the educational system.
- A proper education system should be nourishing it and allowing these qualities to flourish, thats what happens in a decent progressive education systems, but much of the system is devastating.
- take the reigning system in the US, "Teach to test" you have to teach in 3rd grade what they can use to pass a test.
- that's a way to ensure that people understand nothing and go no where.
- we've all had the experience of taking a course in school which was taught very badly, had no interest. You worked hard enough to pass a test and 2 weeks later you forgot what the course was about.
-You've also had, if you're lucky, the experience of being in an environment where your instinctive tendency to seek, to inquire and create is nurtured and opportunities are offered and encouraged.
- we know the consequences are quite different
- i think that holds for society in general.
- it's one reason i think it's dramatically opposed to human nature to have social institutions in which people spend much of their waking lives basically as slaves.
Great interview. Just sad and disappointing that he had to say that work is a form of slavery. I used to work at a labor court and they probably believed the same.
Disappointed? Wtf do you think work is? Freedom?
Work in a capitalistic country is slavery.
Megan Parks no it isn’t. You are not your boss’ property. People get a wage, and there are lawful limits on what workers do
Megan Parks if you want to see horrible disrespect to worker’s rights, go to places like North Korea, China and Cuba
@@BUSeixas11 Try America,europe,India,South East Asia etc etc