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a kind which, as he points out, cross over the units of sequential computation, so they donât seem to follow directly. That ismore or less the story. And he raises and will suggest answers to the question of how these two things could interact. But then one may be third factor, like minimal search, and the other somehow specific to language? Now technically, if I have understood the abstract of his talk here correctly, one possible way of getting an indication (which does require work as his examples show) is that it all has to do with minimal search. Now that does require reanalysis of things like the Nominative Island Constraint and Superiority Conditions and so on, and I think there is some reason to believe that that is possible. But as you know, I am very skeptical about the Superiority Condition. I really donât think it exists; I think itâs been misinterpreted, along lines I discussed a bit in my book
The Minimalist Program
(1995). There is some work on things like the Negative Island Condition which suggest that it may have an explanation in other terms, like in Danny Foxâs recent papers. 27 It is possible, like some future goal, that it might all be reduced to minimal search. That is, minimal search
could
be â we have to prove this, you have got to show it â in principle it could be just a law of nature. It is just the best way of doing anything. And you
would
expect to find it in efficient patterns of foraging, all sorts of neural structures, and so on. If that can be worked out, then you would reduce it all to third-factor principles.
Of course you are exactly right. In the case of language, it is going to have very special properties, because language is apparently unique as a system of discrete infinity. So it is going to be totally different from foraging, letâs say, which is a continuous system, unlike language which is a discrete system. But it would be nice to try to show that the differences that occur in the case of language, in spite of the specific things you mentioned, are just due to the fact that it is uniquely a system of discrete infinity, which is then of course going to have different effects. Probably the nearest analogue with human language in the natural world, in the non-human world, is bee communication, which is a rich communicative system. In fact many kinds of different species use different forms of it. Oddly â somebody here who knows more about this can correct me, but as far as I understand the bee literature â there are about 500 species, and some of them use the waggle dance, others use sound, and they all seem to get along about as well, from the point of view of biological success, which does raise the question of what it is all for. If you can get by without the waggle dance, then why have it? But that is a typical problem in evolutionary theory. When people produce evolutionary speculations from adaptiveness, it just doesnât mean much. If you look at the encyclopedic reviews of the evolution of communication, what you actually find is people saying how beautifullysomething works in this ecological niche. Okay, maybe it does, but that leaves open the question â it doesnât say anything about evolution.
But whatever it is, bee communication is fundamentally continuous insofar as an organismâs behavior can be continuous (I mean, there are minimal perceptual effects), so they are just going to have different properties. Even with the same minimal search principle, it would show up very differently in a discrete system like language, and in a continuous system like, say, the bee dance. And maybe thatâs the answer. A shot in the dark, but I think it might be a direction to look.
P ARTICIPANT : Could I ask you to deal a little bit with Peirceâs theory of abduction, and the importance of an abductive instinct?
C HOMSKY : Peirce posed the problem of abduction in lectures which I think are from about a century ago,
The Minimalist Program
(1995). There is some work on things like the Negative Island Condition which suggest that it may have an explanation in other terms, like in Danny Foxâs recent papers. 27 It is possible, like some future goal, that it might all be reduced to minimal search. That is, minimal search
could
be â we have to prove this, you have got to show it â in principle it could be just a law of nature. It is just the best way of doing anything. And you
would
expect to find it in efficient patterns of foraging, all sorts of neural structures, and so on. If that can be worked out, then you would reduce it all to third-factor principles.
Of course you are exactly right. In the case of language, it is going to have very special properties, because language is apparently unique as a system of discrete infinity. So it is going to be totally different from foraging, letâs say, which is a continuous system, unlike language which is a discrete system. But it would be nice to try to show that the differences that occur in the case of language, in spite of the specific things you mentioned, are just due to the fact that it is uniquely a system of discrete infinity, which is then of course going to have different effects. Probably the nearest analogue with human language in the natural world, in the non-human world, is bee communication, which is a rich communicative system. In fact many kinds of different species use different forms of it. Oddly â somebody here who knows more about this can correct me, but as far as I understand the bee literature â there are about 500 species, and some of them use the waggle dance, others use sound, and they all seem to get along about as well, from the point of view of biological success, which does raise the question of what it is all for. If you can get by without the waggle dance, then why have it? But that is a typical problem in evolutionary theory. When people produce evolutionary speculations from adaptiveness, it just doesnât mean much. If you look at the encyclopedic reviews of the evolution of communication, what you actually find is people saying how beautifullysomething works in this ecological niche. Okay, maybe it does, but that leaves open the question â it doesnât say anything about evolution.
But whatever it is, bee communication is fundamentally continuous insofar as an organismâs behavior can be continuous (I mean, there are minimal perceptual effects), so they are just going to have different properties. Even with the same minimal search principle, it would show up very differently in a discrete system like language, and in a continuous system like, say, the bee dance. And maybe thatâs the answer. A shot in the dark, but I think it might be a direction to look.
P ARTICIPANT : Could I ask you to deal a little bit with Peirceâs theory of abduction, and the importance of an abductive instinct?
C HOMSKY : Peirce posed the problem of abduction in lectures which I think are from about a century ago,
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