“[P]eople know how to talk in more or less the same way that spiders know how to spin webs.”
This claim epitomizes everything that was wrong with the first wave of evolutionary psychology. Spiders know how to spin webs because of an innate reflex. Language learning requires capacities for imitative learning, imagination, and inference that spiders are entirely incapable of. A spider knows how to spin webs even if it never encounters any other spiders, but humans can’t learn language in isolation. The first EPs often seemed to want to attribute all of human behavior to innate reflexes, and that constituted a profound misunderstanding of the way that the human mind works.
Yes, Pinker was very misguided by Chomsky. Language is a product of cultural evolution and its learned through imitation. Spiders don't have culture and they don't learn how to spin webs from other spiders. While the desire and ability to learn language are innate, knowing how to talk is not.
This made me look twice as well, and I wonder whether Pinker meant this in a more general way than it sounds. I think the consensus view is that we have a built-in genetic program to learn language quickly, in that several innate capacities and tendencies are primed and synched to enable us to do so — all due to historical evolutionary pressure.
I wonder if this is from his first book The Language Instinct. This book is from the 1990s and was written back when the Chomskyan view that there was a more or less identical, innate inner language structure in every human’s brain was predominant. I’m not a psychologist, linguist, or any kind of expert in the field, but I think that has been walked back a bit.
Yep, it's from The Language Instinct, and he did mean it in a more general way. His view is that we've evolved to acquire and use language, rather than that language is innate in a simple sense. The quote is taking some poetic license; it would be a mistake to read too much into the analogy.
My favorite writer of all time
“[P]eople know how to talk in more or less the same way that spiders know how to spin webs.”
This claim epitomizes everything that was wrong with the first wave of evolutionary psychology. Spiders know how to spin webs because of an innate reflex. Language learning requires capacities for imitative learning, imagination, and inference that spiders are entirely incapable of. A spider knows how to spin webs even if it never encounters any other spiders, but humans can’t learn language in isolation. The first EPs often seemed to want to attribute all of human behavior to innate reflexes, and that constituted a profound misunderstanding of the way that the human mind works.
I discuss Cecilia Heyes' critique of this mindset here: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/what-makes-humans-unique?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Yes, Pinker was very misguided by Chomsky. Language is a product of cultural evolution and its learned through imitation. Spiders don't have culture and they don't learn how to spin webs from other spiders. While the desire and ability to learn language are innate, knowing how to talk is not.
A biproduct of the panzootic deterioration of modern culture, most spiders currently learn to spin from TickTocks.
This made me look twice as well, and I wonder whether Pinker meant this in a more general way than it sounds. I think the consensus view is that we have a built-in genetic program to learn language quickly, in that several innate capacities and tendencies are primed and synched to enable us to do so — all due to historical evolutionary pressure.
I wonder if this is from his first book The Language Instinct. This book is from the 1990s and was written back when the Chomskyan view that there was a more or less identical, innate inner language structure in every human’s brain was predominant. I’m not a psychologist, linguist, or any kind of expert in the field, but I think that has been walked back a bit.
Yep, it's from The Language Instinct, and he did mean it in a more general way. His view is that we've evolved to acquire and use language, rather than that language is innate in a simple sense. The quote is taking some poetic license; it would be a mistake to read too much into the analogy.