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Comment by gliese1337 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there are. Or at least, that we don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted just to that. The common counter to Chomsky's version of innate grammar is that language is the result of the interaction of a bunch of different cognitive modules which all evolved for different purposes, but which when combined happen to make language possible, and have since been under selection pressure to make language work better.

The article doesn't actually provide any support for the "innate" or "universal grammar" hypothesis as it is typically understood, though. This is really about whether the de-facto grammar that emerges from whatever the "language faculty" has a particular hierarchical and recursive structure. And yes, there are people who seriously argue against that, too. The most common alternative model that I have been exposed to is analogical template matching, which actually does a pretty good job at a lot of NLP tasks.

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Well, OK, I could understand a position saying "We don't have a special-purpose module of our brain devoted to grammar," which is (I think) a direct opposite of Chomsky's position. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't really know how much we're close to answering this.

However, that is very different from the quoted passage. It sounds like these "neuroscientists and psychologists" don't think our brain has any notion of "grammar" at all, and everything can be explained better with statistical relations. I find that very hard to accept, and I wonder if a more reasonable position (= there is no special part of brain reserved for learning grammar) was summarized poorly into a much stronger hypothesis.

Well, of course, if we reduce everything as much as we like, then we could say everything is about statistical relation of a gazillion variables (or quantum mechanics, if you go far enough). But that's not useful, isn't it? Even if we cannot pinpoint a neuron and say "This neuron will fire if it sees a past perfect!", if the brain as a whole acts like it has an underlying notion of grammar, then I think it's fair to say that it "knows" grammar.

And, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that my brain acts like it has some notion of English grammar. :P

Edit: Hmm, I think I caused confusion by using the word "innate". Apparently it can mean (1) existing from the time a person or animal is born, and (2) existing as part of the basic nature of something.

Chomsky proposes (1), and many disagrees. (I don't find Chomsky's arguments particularly convincing, either.) But the sentence I quoted (which didn't use the word "innate") sounds like it was against (2).

Let's say that you are very good at basketball, enough so that you can almost always make a shot from anywhere on the court. Your mind is computing, based off of visual feedback, how to fire your muscles in such a way so that the basketball makes a near-perfect parabola and makes it into the net.

Does your brain "know" the formulas that describe projectile motion? Is it running a physics model in your brain?

I think that's a very good analogy, and no, I wouldn't say my brain would "know" Newton's formulas. However, I will still say my brain "knows" grammar. The difference is complexity.

Even if you consider spins, throwing a ball is only about 9 degrees of freedom. It is too small to make good prediction on how the brain works, so Occam's razor dictates that it probably doesn't solve a differential equation. (Also I could try throwing a baseball, and I'll find that I have to re-learn everything, so it's reasonable to assume that my brain was "optimized" to just throw one particular kind of balls to a particular height.)

Human language is so mind-bogglingly complex that even if you just restrict yourself to a dozen words you can easily utter sentences that were never spoken in entire history of English. Yet my brain has no problem dealing with that.

Sure, we could say that it's all statistical relation, but those relations have to stack (almost) recursively and connect phrases that are a dozen words apart. At what point do we stop calling them a heap of relations and instead call it what it is, i.e., grammar?

Let's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and live-computing a kinematics physics model + wind simulation to simulate how you should be walking across that tightrope?

My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball doesn't mean you "know" Newton's formulas. Similarly, just because you know how to speak doesn't mean you "know" grammar.

The question to ask to help us answer this question would be: is grammar a simplified model of language?[1]

[1] This depends on whether you're a linguistic prescriptivist or descriptivist.

I don't think that question has that much to do with prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivists want to use the study of grammar to uphold certain linguistic norms; descriptivists find that language works fine without expert supervision; neither is a stance on the scientific origin of linguistic structure. You could be a prescriptivist and believe that grammar is a simplified model: you would just want that model to carry normative weight (e.g. for conservative reasons, or to promote standardized national language, or whatever reason).

A very important difference: someone who is good at throwing a basketball (or any sport, really) will "switch off" their brain while doing so. There's various words for this, e.g. "being in the zone". Ask the person to think about something while throwing, and they'll likely miss. It takes years of training to teach the brain to do the correct motions while " switched off".

Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think.

Actually if you look at research done on freestyle rappers, you'll find similar mechanisms as those found in great basketball players. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroa...

Being in a flow state seems very similar to being in the zone.

And then consider that freestyle rapping is a formally demanding way of speaking, and that speaking is something people do all the time without much mental effort. Impressive rappers can produce rhyming and alliterating verses in "flow" but a normal dinner conversation is in flow by default (depending on how neurotic your dinner guests are).

Do the more neurotic dinner guests rhyme a lot?

Language doesn't seem to require conscious thought either. Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein talked about that a lot. The postulating of an internal thought process "behind" everything is basically what Heidegger spent his life refuting, from what I've read of Dreyfus's book... And Wittgenstein explains language as a tool that people use to get things done, more or less. You can talk without "really thinking", people do it all the time. Grammar is natural in that sense. Pinker's "The Language Instinct" mentions studies that show higher educated people in some situations tend to make more grammatical blunders and to be slightly less "fluent," maybe because of second guessing their language instincts.

(Any errors in this comment due to the fact that I wrote it without thinking.)

I must admit I was thinking more about the mental process of constructing the content of e.g. an argument than of the process of putting the content into grammatically correct sentences. I completely agree you can talk, and even be gramatically correct, without really thinking.

> Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think.

I'm not sure I agree, not entirely at least. "Thinking while speaking" is something I associate to speaking a second language that you don't really master. Then you really think in one language, think about the translation, and speak. If I speak in my native language or in English, I don't think about the words I'm saying or about how I'm using the language, there's a much bigger component of instinct and thoughts can be much more impulsive.

> Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think.

Not consciously, no. I mean, do you really think about what you say when you speak in your native language, or do you just say it? It's actually a milestone in learning a foreign language - switching from thinking in native and translating into foreign to just thinking in foreign. If you find yourself running your internal monologue in a foreign language then you know your brain groks it.

And generally, mastering a task means switching it to unconscious mode. A good driver doesn't consciously think about turning the steering wheels or pressing pedals; they think about car (or rather, car+themselves system) moving faster or slower, going here or there. A soldier is trained until most of his tasks are muscle memory. A programmer doing what they really knows how to do will find themselves in the state of flow, etc. Mastery of a task is mentally abstracting it into just another basic capacity, just like breathing or moving your hands.

It doesn't "know the formulas". However, it has accumulated a life time worth of statistics, which it uses to predict what's about to happen, all the time. So I can be immediately surprised when something unexpected happens. In that sense, there's a running physics simulator.

As for throwing the basketball, most people know (#) what the arc should be, and can immediately after the throw tell if a throw will hit or miss with reasonable accuracy, assuming a viewpoint that allows them to extract the movement accurately. The difficulty there is learning to execute that throw.

(#) edit, know as in "have learned", not as an innate ability.

I am not aware of Chomsky ever making the argument that language has a specific physical location with the brain, or that it is the achievement of a single organ which evolved for exactly this purpose. You may be confusing Chomsky with Jerry Fodor, whose "Modularity of Mind" was inspired by Chomsky's ideas (which it helped popularize).

Thanks for the second point. It's frustrated when they write titles like that for the public.

I always think that "human is born with some miracle thing" is quite suspicious. How can orderliness be born out of no where (no work spent, no energy consumed)? The probability of orderliness to be spontaneously assembled itself must be infinitesimally small.

Grammar might evolve along the way (due to statistical learning) but it seems too good to be true if it's born out of no where.

Giving birth to a human child is not trivial. Lots of assembly required. DNA is pretty complex, and the process of motherhood is not just waiting for nine months and delivering a miracle.

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