Syntax / Innateness

Click here and press the right key for the next slide.

(This may not work on mobile or ipad. You can try using chrome or firefox, but even that may fail. Sorry.)

also ...

Press the left key to go backwards (or swipe right)

Press n to toggle whether notes are shown (or add '?notes' to the url before the #)

Press m or double tap to slide thumbnails (menu)

Press ? at any time to show the keyboard shortcuts

Syntax / Innateness

[email protected]

‘I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one.’

core knowledge of syntax is innate?

What is syntax? To answer that question we need to think about syntatci capacities.

syntactic capacities

Human adults have extensive syntactic capacities, as illustrated by, for example, their abilities to detect grammatical and ungramatical sentences which they have never heard before, independently of their meanings. To adapt a famous example from Chomsky, ...

You demonstrate that you can track syntax when you ask questions. Example from (Saxton, 2017).

Note that syntax isn't plausibly just a list of which sentences are grammatical. Because people can make judgements about arbitrarily long, entirely novel sentences. Rather, the thing known must be something that enables people to make judgements about sentences. We might think of it roughly as a theory of syntax. It's like a theory in this sense: knowledge of it enables you to make judgements about the grammaticality of arbitrary sentences.

detecting sentences

The turnip of shapely knowing isn't yet buttressed by death.

core knowledge of syntax is innate?

Natural to think in terms of knowledge because it has to be systematic. But could it really be knowledge?

The second question is, Is it *knowledge* we have syntax or something else? There's something interesting. The knowledge can be revealed indirectly, by asking people about whether particular sentences are grammatical. But people can't say anything about how they know the sentence is grammatical. It's like perceiving the shape of something: there isn't much to say about how you know. So the theory of syntax isn't something we can discover by introspection: we have to *rediscover* it from scratch by investigating people's linguistic abilities.

[background] One question in the back of my mind is whether sceptics are right insofar as commonsense notions of knowledge lead to doubt.

[background ctd] A good source is https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0342.xml

[background ctd] This points out that Williams (1991) denies this view, whereas Stroud (1984) can be taken to support it (see especially pp. 81--2)

distinctive = has value distinct from true belief

KNOWLEDGE	yes	no
Is it a mental state?	Williamson (2000)	Hyman (1999)
Knowing entails believing?	Rose & Schaffer (2013)	Radford (1966)
Is it a form of belief?	Sosa (2007)	Williamson (2000)
Valuable for action?	Plato’s Meno	Kaplan (1985)
Is humanly attainable?	[others]	Unger (1975)
Depends on context?	Lewis (1996)	[lots]

No wonder these problems arise ...

Philosophical Folk Psychology

‘epistemic case intuitions are generated by [...] folk psychology’

Nagel (2012, p. 510)

Compare Nagel: ‘Unless there is a special reason to think that knowledge attributions work quite differently when we are reading philosophy papers - and I'll shortly survey some evidence against that sort of exceptionalism - we should expect to find that epistemic case intuitions are generated by the natural capacity responsible for our everyday attributions of states of knowledge, belief and desire. esire. This capacity has been given various labels, including 'folk psychology', 'mindreading', and 'theory of mind’’ (Nagel, 2012, p. 510).

Three Assumptions about Knowledge

- subjects can show some symptoms of knowledge without having knowledge

- knowledge is inferentially integrate with belief, intention and the rest

inferential integration

- knowledge can feature in practical reasoning

core knowledge of syntax is innate?

Natural to think in terms of knowledge because it has to be systematic. But could it really be knowledge?

You knew that the sentence was synactically correct (incorrect) after you considered it. But did you know that before? The acquisition of knowledge in this case seems to be like perception in this sense: you have no idea how it works, but it probably isn’t inference from things you know.

Am using `line-through` not to rule out the possibility that it is knowledge but only to highlight that we cannot assume that there is knowledge

We know that ‘implicit statistical learning is implicated’

(Kidd, 2012, p. 180).

But does learning syntax also ever depend on innate capacties?

Consider an example of how poverty of stimulus arguments have been wielded in philosophy:

Poverty of Theory Argument

‘There would seem not to be enough ambient information available to account for the functional architecture that minds are found to have’

(Fodor, 1983, p. 35).

The argument works just as well this way around

Consider a phrase like 'the red ball'.

What is the syntactic structure of this noun phrase?

In principle there are two possibilities.

the red ball

Lidz et al (2003)

How can we decide between these?

Is the syntactic structure of ‘the red ball’ (a) flat or (b) hierachical?

\begin{center} from Lidz, Waxman, & Freedman, 2003 \end{center}

‘red ball’ is a constituent on (b) but not on (a)
anaphoric pronouns can only refer to constituents
In the sentence ‘I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one.’, the word ‘one’ is an anaphoric prononun that refers to ‘red ball’ (not just ball).(Lidz et al., 2003; Lidz & Waxman, 2004).

What I've just shown you is, in effect, how we can decide whihc way an adult human understands a phrase like 'the red ball'.

We can discover this by finding out how they understand a sentence like 'I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one.'.

But how could we do this with infants who are incapable of discussing sentences with us?

infants?

Here's how the experiment works (see Lidz et al., 2003) ...

The experiment starts with a background assumption:

‘The assumption in the preferential looking task is that infants prefer to look at an image that matches the linguistic stimulus, if one is available’ (Lidz et al., 2003).

Look, a yellow bottle!	control: What do you see now? test: Do you see another one?
[yellow bottle]	[yellow bottle]	[blue bottle]

So the key question was whether infants would look more at the yellow bottle (which is familiar) or the blue bottle (which is novel).

If they think 'one' refers to 'bottle', we'd expect them to look longer at the blue bottle;

and conversely if they think one refers to 'yellow bottle', then they're being asked whether they see another yellow bottle.

And, as always, we need a control condition to check that infants aren't looking in the ways predicted irrespective of the manipulation.

Lidz et al (2003)

And here's what they found ...

Lidz et al (2003, figure 1)

What can we conclude so far?

From 18 months of age or earlier, infants represent the syntax of noun phrases in much the way adults do.

But are these representations innate?

what exactly is innate?

‘Universal Grammar is [...] is the prespecification in the brain that permits the learning of language to take place. So the grammar-acquiring capacity is what Chomsky claims is innate’

(Jackendoff, 2003, p. 72).

It looks like this could hardly be wrong. But wait ..

‘Universal Grammar [...] must [...] prespecify the possibilities for derivational rules (if any) and for constraints in syntax, not to mention many important facets of phonological structure’

(Jackendoff, 2003, p. 78).

What can we conclude so far?

From 18 months of age or earlier, infants represent the syntax of noun phrases in much the way adults do.

But are these representations innate?

What do we mean by innate here?

The easy answer is: not learned.

But I think there's a more interesting way to approach understanding what 'innate' means.

Quite a few people pointed out that there isn't agreement on what innateness is.

But this is not very interesting by itself because there's disagreement about most things and potential causes of disagreement include ignorance and stupidity.

It's also important that the mere fact that a single term is used with multiple meanings isn't an objection to anyone.

As philosophers, some of you are tempted to catalogue different possible notions of innateness.

I encourage you to resist this temptation; if you want to collect something, pick something useful like banknotes.

There's a much better way to approach things.

Let's see what kind of findings are, or would be, taken to show that something is innate.

We can use these to constrain our thinking about innateness.

We will say: assuming that this is a valid argument that X is innate, what could innateness be?

### Poverty of stimulus arguments

The best argument for innateness is the poverty of stimulus argument.

We need to step back and understand how poverty of stimulus arguments work.

Here I'm following Pullum & Scholz (2002), but I'm simplifying their presentation.

How do poverty of stimulus arguments work? See Pullum & Scholz (2002).

First think of them in schematic terms ...

Poverty of stimulus argument

Human infants acquire X.
To acquire X by data-driven learning you'd need this Crucial Evidence.
But infants lack this Crucial Evidence for X.
So human infants do not acquire X by data-driven learning.
But all acquisition is either data-driven or innately-primed learning.
So human infants acquire X by innately-primed learning .

compare Pullum & Scholz 2002, p. 18

This is a good structure; you can use it in all sorts of cases, including the one about chicks' object permanence.

Now fill in the details ...

In our case, X is knowledge of the syntactic structure of noun phrases. (Caution: this is a simplification; seeLidz & Waxman (2004, p. ,\ 158)).)

This is what the Lidz et al experiment showed.

Note that no one takes this to be evidence for innateness by itself.

What is the crucial evidence infants would need to learn the syntactic structure of noun phrases?

This is actually really hard to determine, and an on-going source of debate I think.

But roughly speaking it's utterances where the structure matters for the meaning, utterances like 'You play with this red ball and I'll play with that one'.

Lidz et al. (2003) establish this by analysing a large corpus (collection) of conversation involving infants.

What can we infer about innateness from this argument?

First, think about what is innate. The fact that knowledge of X is acquired other than by data-driven learning doesn't mean that X is not innate; it just means that something which enables you to learn this is.

Second, think about the function assigned to innateness. That which is innate is supposed to stand in for having the crucial evidence.

This, I think, is the key to thinking about what we *ought* to mean by innateness.

So attributes like being genetically specified are extraneous---they may be typical features of innate things, but they aren't central to the notion.

By contrast, that what is innate is not learned must be constitutive (otherwise that which is innate couldn't stand in for having the crucial evidence)

Contrary to what many philosophers (including Stich and Fodor) will tell you ...

‘the APS [argument from the poverty of stimulus] still awaits even a single good supporting example’

Pullum & Scholz 2002, p. 47

(Pullum & Scholz, 2002, p. \ 47)

But they wrote this before Lidz et al. (2003) came out.

What is innate in humans?

I asked you this question, but what do I think?

I'd approach it by distinguishing two sub-questions (the second of which has two sub-sub-questions)

**todo: Stress other conceptions and arguments good; start with a project from Spelke & Lee (2012) or from Haun, Jordan, Vallortigara, & Clayton (2010) and you reach a different point!

What evidence is there?

What does the evidence show is innate?

Type: knowledge, core knowledge, modules, concepts, abilities, dispositions ...

Content: e.g. universal grammar?

Arguments from the poverty of stimulus are the best way to establish innateness.

The argument concerning syntax we've just been discussing is quite convincing, although if you follow up on the references given in the handout you'll see it's not decisive (as always).

For things other than knowlegde of syntax, the evidence concerning humans is far less clear.

There are, however, quite good cases in nonhuman animals, as many of you know.

So it's not unreasonable to conjecture that learning in the several domains where infants appear to know things early in their first year is innately-primed rather than entirely data-driven.

But, one or two cases aside, there's enough evidence to rule out the converse conjecture.

I don't think what is innate is knowledge, nor do I think it's concepts.

But I think there's a good chance that modules are innate (and therefore core knowledge if I'm right to suppose that 'core knowledge' is a term for the fundamental principles describing the operation of a module).

On content: I think quite a lot is known about the modules thanks to detailed tests that have little to do directly with controversy about inateness.

Follow the evidence!

Something syntax-ish is probably innate.

other domains could be similiar

- objects (Spelke’s Principles of Object Perception)

- minds (Carruthers on theory of mind)

- ethics (Mikhail’s language analogy)

Principles of Object Perception

(Spelke, 1990) (Carruthers, 2015) (Mikhail, 2007)

Keyboard Shortcuts?f

Syntax / Innateness

Syntax / Innateness

[email protected]

Keyboard Shortcuts`?f`