place in these specific cases]. [So far as the discussion of the book is concerned,] a creationist could accept it: God designed bats to be able to catch mosquitoes. But that move is very fast. To try to demonstrate anything about evolution is extremely hard. Richard Lewontin has a paper coming out on this, about how difficult – just on the basis of population genetics – about what it would take for natural selection actually to have worked. The way it looks, it seems to be a really remote possibility.
JM: Jerry Fodor is against selection too . . .
NC: But he's against it for other reasons concerned with intentionality, and that kind of stuff about what something is for. His instincts are right, but I think that's the wrong line to take. You don't ask whether a polar bear is white for surviving or for mating, or something like that. It just is, and because it fits the environment, it survives. That's why people like Philip Kitcher and others go after him.
Do you think that there's anything else to say about design?
JM: No, although I'm sure that discussion of the topic will not endthere .
9 Universal Grammar and simplicity
JM: OK, now I'd like to get clear about the current status of Universal Grammar (UG). When you begin to focus in the account of acquisition on thenotion of biological development, it seems to throw into the study of language a lot more – or at least different – issues than had been anticipated before. There are not only the questions of the structure of the particular faculty that we happen to have, and whatever kinds of states it can assume, but also the study of how that particular faculty developed . . .
NC: How it evolved? Or how it develops in the individual? Genetically, or developmentally?
JM: Well, certainly genetically in the sense of how it came about biologically, but also the notion ofdevelopment in a particular individual, where you have to take into account – as you make very clear in your recent work – the contributions of this third factor that you have been emphasizing. I wonder if that doesn't bring intoquestion the nature of modularity [of language] – it's an issue that used to be discussed with a set of assumptions that amounted to thinking that one could look at a particular part of the brain and ignore the rest of it .
NC: I never believed that. Way back about fifty years ago, when we were starting to talk about it, I don't think anyone assumed that that had to betrue. Eric Lenneberg was interested in – we were all interested in – whatever is known about localization, which does tell us something about what the faculty is. But if it was distributed all over the brain, so be it . . .
JM: It's not so much the matter of localization that is of interest to me, but rather the matter of what you have to take into account in producing an account of development. And that seems to have grown in recent years .
NC: Well,the third factor was always in the background. It's just that it was out of reach. And the reason it was out of reach, as I tried to explain in the LSA paper (2005a), was that as long as the concept of Universal Grammar, or linguistic theory, is understood as a format and an evaluation procedure, thenyou're almost compelled to assume it is highly language-specific and very highly articulated and restricted, or else you can't deal with the acquisition problem.That makes it almost impossible to understand how it could follow any general principles. It's not like a logical contradiction, but the two efforts are tending in opposite directions. If you're trying to get Universal Grammar to be articulated and restricted enough so that an evaluation procedure will only have to look at a few examples, given data, because that's all that's permitted, then it's going to be very specific to language, and there aren't going to be general principles at work. It really wasn't until theprinciples and parameters conception came along that you could really
JM: Jerry Fodor is against selection too . . .
NC: But he's against it for other reasons concerned with intentionality, and that kind of stuff about what something is for. His instincts are right, but I think that's the wrong line to take. You don't ask whether a polar bear is white for surviving or for mating, or something like that. It just is, and because it fits the environment, it survives. That's why people like Philip Kitcher and others go after him.
Do you think that there's anything else to say about design?
JM: No, although I'm sure that discussion of the topic will not endthere .
9 Universal Grammar and simplicity
JM: OK, now I'd like to get clear about the current status of Universal Grammar (UG). When you begin to focus in the account of acquisition on thenotion of biological development, it seems to throw into the study of language a lot more – or at least different – issues than had been anticipated before. There are not only the questions of the structure of the particular faculty that we happen to have, and whatever kinds of states it can assume, but also the study of how that particular faculty developed . . .
NC: How it evolved? Or how it develops in the individual? Genetically, or developmentally?
JM: Well, certainly genetically in the sense of how it came about biologically, but also the notion ofdevelopment in a particular individual, where you have to take into account – as you make very clear in your recent work – the contributions of this third factor that you have been emphasizing. I wonder if that doesn't bring intoquestion the nature of modularity [of language] – it's an issue that used to be discussed with a set of assumptions that amounted to thinking that one could look at a particular part of the brain and ignore the rest of it .
NC: I never believed that. Way back about fifty years ago, when we were starting to talk about it, I don't think anyone assumed that that had to betrue. Eric Lenneberg was interested in – we were all interested in – whatever is known about localization, which does tell us something about what the faculty is. But if it was distributed all over the brain, so be it . . .
JM: It's not so much the matter of localization that is of interest to me, but rather the matter of what you have to take into account in producing an account of development. And that seems to have grown in recent years .
NC: Well,the third factor was always in the background. It's just that it was out of reach. And the reason it was out of reach, as I tried to explain in the LSA paper (2005a), was that as long as the concept of Universal Grammar, or linguistic theory, is understood as a format and an evaluation procedure, thenyou're almost compelled to assume it is highly language-specific and very highly articulated and restricted, or else you can't deal with the acquisition problem.That makes it almost impossible to understand how it could follow any general principles. It's not like a logical contradiction, but the two efforts are tending in opposite directions. If you're trying to get Universal Grammar to be articulated and restricted enough so that an evaluation procedure will only have to look at a few examples, given data, because that's all that's permitted, then it's going to be very specific to language, and there aren't going to be general principles at work. It really wasn't until theprinciples and parameters conception came along that you could really
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