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...