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The confirmation for the Chomsky-Kant connection comes from Chomsky's book Cartesian Linguistics.

Language as an organ, hence part of biology

I have just confirmed a sneaking suspicion that I've been developing in the last week: When Chomsky talks about language as an "organ", or when he talks about linguistics as a branch of "biology", he is making implicit reference to 18th century biology, reflected in Kant's view of biology and organisms. When Chomsky says that language is "generative", he means it in the same way that Kant means it when he says that organisms are self-generating. This puts things in a bit different perspective. What does Kant mean when he says organisms are "generative"? Among other things, he means that they construct themselves, in a way. The organism is built up from its parts, but the parts are goal-directed by the organism to build the organism. (See my last entry for a brief discussion of this with regard to a completely different topic.) In what way is language "generative", on Chomsky's view? Language constructs itself. Linguistic structures are built up of certain parts (say, X-bar structure, for those of you who know what that means), but they those parts are goal-directed by the larger linguistic structure to build the larger linguistic structure. Moreover, the parts (X-bar structure) are themselves (small) linguistic structures; this parallels Kant's claim that organisms build their own parts.

Now this raises a potentially very interesting cunundrum. Chomsky spends a lot of time saying that linguistic competence is innate. In order for it to be innate, it had to get there by means of evolution. But Chomsky and Fodor, among others, spend lots of time saying that language is not adaptive, and it can be called non-adaptive specifically because it is organic (in the sense above, namely, self-generating). So it had to be by means of a freak mutation or else as a freak side-effect of some other mutations that were adaptive. But insofar as the analogy between language and organisms is appropriate, the very possibility of the evolution of organisms from nothing becomes nill. You see, it's important that language is said to be innate and non-adaptive. These are things that make it possible for language to be organic - if language wasn't innate and non-adaptive, it wouldn't be organic. But if organisms are organic (a tautology), then they must share these properties of innateness and non-adaptivity. Or, to use more a more concise and understandable phraseology, organisms must be contingent. If Chomsky is right about language.

So, on the one hand, this leads Chomsky to a contradiction, whether he's right or wrong about language. On the other hand, if he's right about language, it raises some thorny issues for evolutionary theory.

...I think. I've made rather strong claims in this entry, stronger than I usually make when I see the possibilities for a lot of holes in my argument. I'll have to sit on these ideas for a while and see whether I can find such holes and then whether I can patch them up. In the meantime... It does make for some interesting thinking...

Two Kinds of Biology

I'm leading a discussion of a paper on Monday that I find rather difficult, so I'm going to write down some thoughts about it here. It's called "Organisms as natural purposes: the contemporary evolutionary perspective", by D. M. Walsh in the 37th volume of Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. This paper actually meshes well with some other reading I've been doing, including Dawkins' book (which I've already commented on a few times) and a book by Kirchner and Gerhardt called The Plausibility of Life. The argument goes like this: Kant described a paradox of sorts when he said that mechanical law is the only natural explanation; but organisms are natural purposes and thus inexplicable by mechanical law. I trust that the first half of the paradox is familiar territory. The second half takes a bit of explaining, and I find that I have trouble understanding it - perhaps because it is inherently more difficult to graph, or perhaps because it is largely ignored or even denied in modern science (that's not my claim, it's Walsh's, although I think I agree with him). Think of it like this: Mechanical laws are like lines of code in a computer program. Each line tells the computer to carry out a certain operation (say, add some number n + 1). By the time the program is done running, the output is the number 213. Now this computer is built in such a way that if a number other than 213 +/- 5 is ever output by any program, the program will crash, the computer will freeze, and you will never get the data off of its hard drive. If the number is 213 +/- 5, the computer will duplicate itself (never mind how). During duplication, the program may inadvertently get changed - say, one of its n + 1 lines gets deleted. If the program outputs a number more than 3 away from 213, the computer has a 95% chance of responding by adding or subtracting an n + 1 line, as appropriate, to bring the output closer to 213. Over time, the computer population will be very stable, because the computers are able to "fix" themselves, even though the program in each computer might be slightly different (one might output 213, another 212, another 214, etc.; one might reach 212 by adding 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + ..., whereas one might arrive at it by 1 + 1 + 1 + ... + 1 - 1 + 1, etc.). This variation can then be "naturally selected" if, say, computational efficiency is the desired trait; or if showy complexity is the desired trait. Sound like evolution? But there's a problem... The program not only is modified by the computer (by adding or subtracting n + 1 lines), but simply will not run without the computer! In order for the program to do anything - even for the program to exist - the computer must first be there to write and save and interpret and execute the program. This is what it means for a computer to be a natural purpose.

Now, let's turn to biological evolution. You have organisms which are like computers; you have genes which are like programs. All the other relations between computers and programs correspond to relations between organisms and genes. But the notion of a natural purpose is not much in vogue in the sciences. The general conviction is that nature is reductionistic, that the whole can be described in terms of the parts and that the parts are self-evident. This is Dawkins' view of evolution by natural selection. But there is apparently a rising tide of organisms-as-natural-purposes, coming from the developmental biology world. This is the position that Kirchner and Gerhardt take. Put in rather different terms, the generally accepted picture of evolution fits in the "mechanical laws" category; and the "natural purposes" category might be thought of as occupied by Intelligent Design. Hmmm... We come to this dichotomy again. Of course, I think that most people dealing with organisms as natural purposes are not thinking in terms of ID - rather, they are trying to put the natural purposiveness of organisms into a broader naturalistic picture. I'm not convinced that this is possible, but in the meantime there's some interesting stuff coming out of that group.

But what about Intelligent Design? In other entries I have come out rather negative toward ID. But I wonder... Would a modified form of ID be on stronger ground if it related itself directly to these kinds of issues?

Well, I'm not finished re-reading this paper, and my comments here take me about as far as I can go right now. I find it useful to write out my thoughts - it helps me to organize them in my own mind. And I think this entry is no exception to that rule. Phew! :-)

Dawkins on Morality

I've just finished reading the chapter in Dawkins' book that discusses where morality comes from, whether one needs to believe in God in order to be moral, and whether people who believe in God really are more moral than people who don't. It seems to me that he misses the point. I mean, sure, those are interesting questions to discuss, but the question lurking in the background which he does not address and which subsequently damages his argument is: what is morality, anyway? His claim is that morality is a by-product of evolution, for reasons that he spells out but I won't repeat here. He also claims that we evolved a sense of morality without the interference of God, whom he claims (probably) doesn't exist. Ok. In the same breath he attaches a huge amount of value to morality, to being good to others. That's fine, but this underscores the fact that he's not actually answering the question. If his story is right, then the reason he attaches value to morality must be because we evolved in such a way that we place value on morality. But if that's true, then where does God fit into the picture? He might say this is exactly his point. But I think that the Christian argument goes more like this. Suppose: I'm moral because I evolved that way; I would still be moral even without God; religious people might actually be less moral than atheists, because they are moral out of fear of retribution or hope of reward, whereas atheists are moral out of the goodness of their hearts. But this implies a value judgment that being moral is good; but where does that value judgment come from? From evolution. So if we had evolved to value rape, we would call Christians immoral if they didn't go around raping. But if morality is a by-product of evolution and we know that now, and we have the power to alter the course of our evolution, then if a group of people wanted to value rape, they could call it the next phase of their evolution. After all, more rapes would result in more pregnancies which would result in more replication of the rapists DNA, and DNA replication is the whole point of evolution (more or less Dawkins' own words). So what's wrong with it (if there isn't a God)? It is simply begging the question to respond that it's wrong because it's evil, or because moral philosophers have set down a principle that one should not hurt another human being. But this seems to be Dawkins' answer to the Christians who claim that without God there can be no morality. He's addressing a completely different question from what the Christians are asking, but doesn't realize it. (The question he's addressing is whether Christians are more moral than atheists.)