in the southern part of India .
NC: Did your parents know Tamil?
JM: My father did; he learned it by squatting with kids on the floors of their schools .
NC: Did they speak Tamil at home?
JM: No, they didn't. But some of my friends spoke Tamil .
NC: So you picked up Tamil from your friends, from other kids. That's normal. No one knows why, but children almost always pick up the language of their peers. And they're not getting any feedback – certainly not teaching. The parents may be trying hard to teach you something, but all they do is teach you artificialities [irregularities]. So it looks like a tuning problem. It works in other things too. There are styles of walking. If you go to Finland –Carol and I noticed as soon as we were there – they just walk differently. These older women carrying shopping bags racing down the streets; we could barely keep up. It's just the way they walk. People just pick that up.
I remember once when Carol and I were walking down the streets in Wellfleet [Massachusetts] one summer and Howard Zinn was walking in front of us, and right next to him was his son, Jeff Zinn. And the two of them had exactly the same posture. Children just pick these things up. If people really studied things like styles of walking, I'm sure that they'd find something like dialect variation. Think about it: you can identify somebody who grew up in England just by mannerisms.
JM: Assume so, then what gets put into the lexicon in the way of phonological features?
NC: Well, as we both agree, a lot of what ends up in the lexicon comes from inside. Nobody's conscious of it, nor can be conscious of it. It's not in the dictionary . . .
JM: We hope it's accessible to some theory, surely .
NC: It has to be; there has to be some kind of theory about it, if you're going to understand it at all. As far as I know, we can't go much beyond the seventeenth century on this. It looks like they found a considerable amount of what we can be aware of. [But of course, that has nothing to do with what scientific theory can reveal.]
So it [that is, the question of what ends up in the lexicon] is a topic, but it's not going to be investigated until people understand that the externalist story [about language and its sounds and meanings] just doesn't get anywhere. Until people understand that it's a problem, it'll just not be investigated.[C]
Some of the stuff that is coming out in the literature is just mind-boggling. Do you look at Mind and Language ?
JM: Yes . . .
NC: The last issue has an article – I never thought that I would see this –you know this crazy theory of Michael Dummett's, that people don't know their own language, etc? This guy is defending it.
JM: Terje Lohndal [a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Maryland] – he and Hiroki Narita [a linguistics graduate student at Harvard] – wrote a response to it. I think it's good; I don't know if it will be published. I hope so. [See Lohndal & Hiroki 2009 .]
Is there anything you want to add about design?
NC: Well, the main thing is, we've got to find another term, because it's just too misleading. And it's true for biology altogether. In biology, people aren't usually misled by it, even though the connotations are there. Well, maybe some of them are misled. So if you read, for example,Marc Hauser's book on the evolution of communication – which is a very good book, and he's one of the most sophisticated people working in biology – well, if you read through the chapters, there's almost nothing about evolution there. The chapters are discussions of how perfectly adapted organisms are to their ecological niche. A bat can pick out a random mosquito far away and go right after it. And that shows that animals fit their ecological niche. The assumption [in the background] is, ofcourse, that that's because of natural selection; that they evolved [to fit their niche]. [But the book] doesn't say anything aboutevolution [– about how it took
NC: Did your parents know Tamil?
JM: My father did; he learned it by squatting with kids on the floors of their schools .
NC: Did they speak Tamil at home?
JM: No, they didn't. But some of my friends spoke Tamil .
NC: So you picked up Tamil from your friends, from other kids. That's normal. No one knows why, but children almost always pick up the language of their peers. And they're not getting any feedback – certainly not teaching. The parents may be trying hard to teach you something, but all they do is teach you artificialities [irregularities]. So it looks like a tuning problem. It works in other things too. There are styles of walking. If you go to Finland –Carol and I noticed as soon as we were there – they just walk differently. These older women carrying shopping bags racing down the streets; we could barely keep up. It's just the way they walk. People just pick that up.
I remember once when Carol and I were walking down the streets in Wellfleet [Massachusetts] one summer and Howard Zinn was walking in front of us, and right next to him was his son, Jeff Zinn. And the two of them had exactly the same posture. Children just pick these things up. If people really studied things like styles of walking, I'm sure that they'd find something like dialect variation. Think about it: you can identify somebody who grew up in England just by mannerisms.
JM: Assume so, then what gets put into the lexicon in the way of phonological features?
NC: Well, as we both agree, a lot of what ends up in the lexicon comes from inside. Nobody's conscious of it, nor can be conscious of it. It's not in the dictionary . . .
JM: We hope it's accessible to some theory, surely .
NC: It has to be; there has to be some kind of theory about it, if you're going to understand it at all. As far as I know, we can't go much beyond the seventeenth century on this. It looks like they found a considerable amount of what we can be aware of. [But of course, that has nothing to do with what scientific theory can reveal.]
So it [that is, the question of what ends up in the lexicon] is a topic, but it's not going to be investigated until people understand that the externalist story [about language and its sounds and meanings] just doesn't get anywhere. Until people understand that it's a problem, it'll just not be investigated.[C]
Some of the stuff that is coming out in the literature is just mind-boggling. Do you look at Mind and Language ?
JM: Yes . . .
NC: The last issue has an article – I never thought that I would see this –you know this crazy theory of Michael Dummett's, that people don't know their own language, etc? This guy is defending it.
JM: Terje Lohndal [a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Maryland] – he and Hiroki Narita [a linguistics graduate student at Harvard] – wrote a response to it. I think it's good; I don't know if it will be published. I hope so. [See Lohndal & Hiroki 2009 .]
Is there anything you want to add about design?
NC: Well, the main thing is, we've got to find another term, because it's just too misleading. And it's true for biology altogether. In biology, people aren't usually misled by it, even though the connotations are there. Well, maybe some of them are misled. So if you read, for example,Marc Hauser's book on the evolution of communication – which is a very good book, and he's one of the most sophisticated people working in biology – well, if you read through the chapters, there's almost nothing about evolution there. The chapters are discussions of how perfectly adapted organisms are to their ecological niche. A bat can pick out a random mosquito far away and go right after it. And that shows that animals fit their ecological niche. The assumption [in the background] is, ofcourse, that that's because of natural selection; that they evolved [to fit their niche]. [But the book] doesn't say anything aboutevolution [– about how it took
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