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    Natural selection might have built a specialized language... — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    Natural selection might have built a specialized language faculty containing inborn knowledge about language.

    Consciousness & MindPhilosophy of Language
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.A specialized language faculty with innate knowledge of Universal Grammar would help human children acquire linguistic competence.
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    • 2.Having linguistic competence enhanced our ancestors' fitness.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Natural selection acts on reproductive success, not linguistic competence per se, making the fitness link indirect and underdetermined.
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    • 2.Many adaptive outcomes (e.g., reading, mathematics) co-opt general cognitive machinery without requiring domain-specific innate content.
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    • 3.Tomasello's cultural learning hypothesis shows children acquire grammar through domain-general pattern recognition and shared intentionality, not UG.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.The 'poverty of the stimulus' argument presupposes a rich target grammar, but usage-based constructivist accounts deny children need innate rules to fill that gap.
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    • 2.Functionalist linguists like Croft and Bybee demonstrate cross-linguistic structural diversity is too vast to be explained by a single innate Universal Grammar.
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    • 3.If UG were a product of natural selection, we would expect clear homologs in closely related primates, yet no such faculty has been identified in chimpanzees.
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    Topics

    Philosophy of LanguageConsciousness & Mind

    Key Terms

    knowledge(Distinguished from mere true belief, which may be the product of indoctrination and need not exercise deliberative capacities.)
    Justified true belief — true belief that has been arrived at through the exercise of deliberative capacities, including comparison of and deliberation among alternatives.

    Related

    A specialized language faculty with innate knowledge of Universal Grammar would ...Functionalist linguists like Croft and Bybee demonstrate cross-linguistic struct...Having linguistic competence enhanced our ancestors' fitness.If UG were a product of natural selection, we would expect clear homologs in clo...
    +4 moreShow less
    Many adaptive outcomes (e.g., reading, mathematics) co-opt general cognitive mac...Natural selection acts on reproductive success, not linguistic competence per se...The 'poverty of the stimulus' argument presupposes a rich target grammar, but us...Tomasello's cultural learning hypothesis shows children acquire grammar through ...

    Similar

    A specialized language faculty with innate knowledge of Universal Gram...84%It is unclear how a language faculty containing innate representations...81%Whatever enables humans to learn and use language would have been subj...80%Tomasello's innate endowment for language learning is not language-spe...77%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: innateness-language
    View source passageHide passage
    Nativism is, of course, one possibility. Natural selection might have built a specialized language faculty, containing inborn knowledge about language (e.g., knowledge of UG), which subsequently was selected for because it helped human children to acquire linguistic competence, and having linguistic competence enhanced our ancestors' fitness. A problem with this hypothesis, however, is that it is unclear how a language faculty containing innate representations of UG might have arisen in th
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit