Philosophy of linguistics as science

Naom Chomsky proposed that people have a template of "universal grammar" ingrained in a "special module" in their brain from birth. That is, people are born already KNOWING the complex rules of grammar in which one patterns words to make sentences, also known as syntax. How else would a child be able to quickly learn how to use the their LEARNED vocabulary in sentences? This is a claim of "cognitive science."

Karl Popper, a philosopher of science asserts that something must be falsifiable, or in other words, testable, in order to be distinguished as science from non-science.

Some linguistic theorists believe that Chomsky's hypothesis, the innate template for grammar, cannot be classified as a science because it is not testable. Is this theory testable? That is, is there a way to test if humans have this so-called template? If so, in what way?

Could we not test whether this template appears in different language speakers?

Could we not test whether this template appears in different language speakers?

Supposedly it does because all languages have the same concepts of grammar such as subjects, direct objects, etc. However, it is problematic because how could a child be born with the template to learn every language's grammars?

Why couldn't he? Every normal child is born with a capacity to learn to play chess, so far as is known.

I think this is an interesting subject...the impression I get is that people say Popper was a philosopher and not a scientist, and that science cares more about things supporting a theory than whether it can be disproven.

It wouldn't be a very good theory if it could be falsified automatically. But I think that a theory should be testable and make predictions. I don't think that there is a way to test this template. It reminds me a bit of philosophy of mind.

If this is the case, then I would expect all languages to exhibit similar syntactic structure. So, before looking for syntax modules in the brain, I would ask the linguists if all languages share the same syntactic structure, and if not, would it be possible to resolve all languages into a universal syntax in the first place. If not, then not. If so, then... I'm not quite sure how one would test that in a definitive way. My first thought was to use brain scanning devices, but I don't know how you'd be able to differentiate between syntax use and other linguistic terms in terms of brain-scan read outs.

I generally think of linguistics as more of an art and less of a science.

For these kind of things, don't they often say "if this theory is true, then this and this should also be true"? They make predictions and then research to see if the predictions are true. The periodic table predicted that there would be elements with certain features, and sure enough they later discovered them and they had those features. They do this a lot in astronomy I think.

I don't know why someone would say that astronomy isn't science.

Naom Chomsky proposed that people have a template of "universal grammar" ingrained in a "special module" in their brain from birth. That is, people are born already KNOWING the complex rules of grammar in which one patterns words to make sentences, also known as syntax. How else would a child be able to quickly learn how to use the their LEARNED vocabulary in sentences? This is a claim of "cognitive science."

Karl Popper, a philosopher of science asserts that something must be falsifiable, or in other words, testable, in order to be distinguished as science from non-science.

Some linguistic theorists believe that Chomsky's hypothesis, the innate template for grammar, cannot be classified as a science because it is not testable. Is this theory testable? That is, is there a way to test if humans have this so-called template? If so, in what way?

I've always wanted to know more about Chomsky's insights, but I haven't worked my way around to him yet. This notion intrigues me, and I may have to get to him more quickly.

How does he deal with the fact that there are so many grammatical differences between languages? English has six tenses, Russian has two, and classical Greek had seven. In English, word order is an important signifier of the role a word is playing in a sentence, but in Latin suffixes indicate the word's role and word order plays a much less significant part. In French articles denote gender, but articles in English are neuter. Ancient Greek writing did not leave spaces between separate words, but modern Spanish does.

Some of these grammatical peculiarities are insiginificant when one text is being translated from one language to another, some translations require a complete reworking of the text. Translation not only occassionally makes use of words with slightly different meanings, it also sometimes has to subsitute words with entirely different referents to communicate the concept at hand. Or here is another problem on another track entirely: If an American untrained in classical Greek were given a list of Greek vocabulary with English definitions, could they form a sentence with the words that an ancient Athenian could realistically have read? Or could they correctly translate a sentence from Plato into English with just this same vocabulary crib sheet? Could a modern Greek speaker without a background in classical Greek translate a sentence from the Dialogues? Could they write a grammatically correct classical Greek sentence? How successfully will I be able to diagram a sentence from Chaucer without a similar crib?

Could I determine which word was the noun in a simple sentence, and which word was the verb, without knowing the language in which they spoken or written. To what degree does meaning impact grammar (and vice versa,) and to what degree is meaning tied to a specific cultural context?

Also, I question the degree to which infants, children and adults do speak in sentences, much less in grammatical sentences. Many of the means by which we demarcate and organize sentences in writing do not exist in speech. My main example is obviously punctuation. While we might teach children that a period separates two distinct sentences in language's written form, and that it also might indicate a hypothetical pause in speech, this "pause" is imaginary. We often speak in run-on sentences without distorting our meaning. Likewise we often speak in incomplete sentences, and rely on context and gesture to complete our thought. Our interlocutors often understand us anyway. And in fact, when we first "teach babies to speak" we use single words and gestures almost exclusively.

While an infant slowly fills out her vocabulary, to what degree is she absorbing the words' grammatical use, and to what degree is she learning how to use words through practice without reference to any rule other than efficacy?

I am not attacking any particular viewpoint, but the above are questions that came to mind while I was reading this. I'm assuming that these are not unique or unexpected questions. What were Chomsky's response to them (in brief, of course?):Cara_2:

There is a similarity between all languages and this includes the "universal grammar" of DNA ingrained into every individual human.

The similarities are:

#1 All languages are tools used to codify information.

#2 All languages fulfill Purlwitz, Burks and Watermans definition of code in that they satisfy either probability space A, probability space B, or both.

#3 All language tools that codify information must be capable of satisfying Claude Shannon's communication protocols adhering to set principles of syntax, semantics, error correction, noise reduction, redundancy, sender, receiver, and alphabet.

I'd go beyond calling these similarities. They are requirements.

But that's the point of my reply. I'm offering you a predictable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable, HOW.

If he believes the Human brain comes into existence with a preset knowledge of grammatical rules, then it is worth consideration to acknowledge that the Human brain is the very product of grammatical rules. Those rules apply to DNA just as much as any other language, so he/we must include that proto-language in the discussion.

St. Louis researcher Wes Warren from Washington University's Genome Sequencing Center was interviewed about his latest findings on the Zebra Finch appearing in this Months Journal Nature.


Warren has demonstrated a different mechanism than mere "interactions of neurons within the brain". He seems to have discovered what causes those interactions to occur.


"We show that song behaviour engages gene regulatory networks in the zebra finch brain, altering the expression of long non-coding RNAs, microRNAs, transcription factors and their targets. We also show evidence for rapid molecular evolution in the songbird lineage of genes that are regulated during song experience. These results indicate an active involvement of the genome in neural processes underlying vocal communication and identify potential genetic substrates for the evolution and regulation of this behavior."

The implications of this are staggering, as
We once again find another use for the so called Junk DNA. It seems that when the Zebra Finch expresses a DESIRE to sing, that desire causes a change in sequence of the "long non-coding RNAs, microRNAs, transcription factors and their targets." And thereby, a change in that sequence, is the very mechanism which causes the "interactions of neurons within the brain".


"Two of the cDNA clones that measured the most robust increases27 align to an unusually long (3 kilobases (kb)) 3′ untranslated region (UTR) in the human gene that encodes the NR4A3 transcription factor protein (Fig. 4a). The entire UTR is similar in humans and zebra finches, with several long segments of >80% identity"
"These findings indicate that this NR4A3 transcript element may function in both humans and songbirds to integrate many conserved microRNA regulatory pathways."

"It has been proposed that ncRNAs have a contributing role in enabling or driving the evolution of greater complexity in humans and other complex eukaryotes32. Seeing that learned vocal communication itself is a phenomenon that has emerged only in some of the most complex organisms, perhaps ncRNAs are a nexus of this phenomenon."

DNA itself may in fact be controlling the language centers in the brain.

However, I don't see grammatical rules in Animal communication.

If we could take a look at the gene that both animals and humans would be predicted to have, and know for a fact that one was just turned on for grammatical rules and the other off, I would be convinced.