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    Whatever enables humans to learn and use language would h... — Carmelics
    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    Whatever enables humans to learn and use language would have been subjected to strong positive selection pressure once it began to emerge in the human species.

    Consciousness & MindPhilosophy of Language
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The ability to speak and understand a language provided and continues to provide humans with many benefits.
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    • 2.The costs of the ability to speak and understand language were not too great.
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    • 3.Traits that provide significant benefits at low cost are subjected to strong positive selection pressure.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Language capacity may have emerged as a spandrel—a byproduct of selection for other traits like general cognition or social complexity, not language itself.
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    • 2.Gould and Lewontin's spandrel argument establishes that not every complex trait requires direct positive selection; indirect co-option is evolutionarily well-documented.
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    • 3.If language is a spandrel, the claim that 'whatever enables language learning' faced strong positive selection is unwarranted, since the selected trait was something else.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Strong positive selection pressure requires reproductive fitness advantages to accrue to individual variation in the trait, but early language may have had negligible individual-level fitness variance.
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    • 2.Sober and Wilson's work on multilevel selection suggests group-level benefits do not straightforwardly translate into individual selection pressure of the kind the claim assumes.
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    • 3.A trait conferring diffuse group benefits without fine-grained individual heritable variation may not face 'strong positive selection' in the technically precise population-genetic sense.
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    Philosophy of LanguageConsciousness & Mind

    Related

    A trait conferring diffuse group benefits without fine-grained individual herita...Gould and Lewontin's spandrel argument establishes that not every complex trait ...If language is a spandrel, the claim that 'whatever enables language learning' f...Language capacity may have emerged as a spandrel—a byproduct of selection for ot...
    +5 moreShow less
    Sober and Wilson's work on multilevel selection suggests group-level benefits do...Strong positive selection pressure requires reproductive fitness advantages to a...The ability to speak and understand a language provided and continues to provide...The costs of the ability to speak and understand language were not too great.Traits that provide significant benefits at low cost are subjected to strong pos...

    Similar

    Natural selection might have built a specialized language faculty cont...80%The ability to speak and understand a language provided and continues ...80%Only humans have language.79%Only humans possess linguistic competence79%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: innateness-language
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    The ability to speak and understand a language no doubt provided and continues to provide us with many of these benefits. Consequently (and assuming that the costs were not too great — as patently they weren't), one can be sure that whatever it is about human beings that enables them to learn and use language would have been subjected to strong positive selection pressure once it began to emerge in our species.
    Extraction notes

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

    Details

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