Extreme Nativism

[Lozzer]

I'm currently reading Stephen Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, but I'm having trouble discerning the premise of Fodor's 'Extreme Nativism'. As I understand it, it basically proposes that the meaning of words (and words themselves) are innate. Would that generally be correct? I'd like to expand further on my knowledge of it, but I'm still trying to tackle the book.

I've done a little research on Fodor, and he seems pretty popular among creationists. Would this have anything to do with his hypothesis being rather inline with the Babel myth? I'd love produce a presentation on it in my A2 for language.

[JOZeldenrust]

Nativism, in psycholinguistics at least, is the theory that language is innate in humans. Pretty much every psycholinguist agrees that lexical information (words or bound morphemes coupled to their meaning and grammatical properties) are not innate, and neither are the syntactical parts of grammar. This is clear from the fact that children raised in another language then the language of their biological parents learn the language of their environment as quickly as natives.

Fodor seems to believe that humans have thousands of innate concepts.

Nativism is opposed by an extreme empirical approach. It's just a part of the debate between empiricists and idealists/monists and dualists in philosophy of mind/metaphysics. As far as I am aware, there's still no empirical way of distinguish between the two competing theories.

ETA: for a good introduction into psycholinguistics, check out Trevor A. Harley, Talking the Talk, or wait until 2011, head over to the nearest university library, and have a look at this.

[Robert_S]

I've not come across this nonsense before, but I could see how it would be useful for getting people to believe in things like incantations and mysticism.

[JOZeldenrust]

Fodor isn't a fraud, and not everything he has to say is nonsense. His work on th modular structure of the neurological basis of language is very good. But psycholinguistics is very much a new science. Methodology is still being developed, and distinguishing between hypotheses that can be tested empirically and metaphysics is still very hard.

[Lozzer]

Fodor isn't a fraud, and not everything he has to say is nonsense. His work on th modular structure of the neurological basis of language is very good. But psycholinguistics is very much a new science. Methodology is still being developed, and distinguishing between hypotheses that can be tested empirically and metaphysics is still very hard.

What about his criticisms of evolution through natural selection?

[JOZeldenrust]

Fodor isn't a fraud, and not everything he has to say is nonsense. His work on th modular structure of the neurological basis of language is very good. But psycholinguistics is very much a new science. Methodology is still being developed, and distinguishing between hypotheses that can be tested empirically and metaphysics is still very hard.

What about his criticisms of evolution through natural selection?

Well, yeah. That part is bullshit.

[Lozzer]

Fodor isn't a fraud, and not everything he has to say is nonsense. His work on th modular structure of the neurological basis of language is very good. But psycholinguistics is very much a new science. Methodology is still being developed, and distinguishing between hypotheses that can be tested empirically and metaphysics is still very hard.

What about his criticisms of evolution through natural selection?

Well, yeah. That part is bullshit.

Bless him