Of Minds and Language by Pello Juan; Salaburu Massimo; Uriagereka Piattelli-Palmarini

from that to a science, then you’re going to ask what the guiding principles are that determine what happens – you’ve got to ask the Why questions: Why did it happen this way and not that way? And that is being done. That is evo-devo work, which is increasingly showing that the course of evolution to a large extent (not always) is more regulatory than structural. I mean, the structures stay and the regulatory mechanisms change, and then you get a lot of diversity. Now they don’t have a lot of experimental evidence for it, but that is a leading theme of modern evolutionary developmental biology, and plenty of biologists are staking on its potentially being true, whatever the evidence is.
    So I think that Turing is correct in saying that that is the way that biology ought to go as a science. True, you find all sorts of details when you look, but we know that that can’t be true generally. In this case, it is very much like the case of language, I think. It looked fifty years ago, and it still sort of looks, like every language is different from every other one and that is all you can say. You study the details. But it is conceptually obvious that that cannot be true, or no-one would ever acquire a language. And it is increasingly understood that it isn’t true, and that to some extent you can attribute it to natural law.
    About language evolving, yes of course language evolved. We are not angels. But evolution isn’t just selection. Now here is an extreme thesis: perhaps language evolved as a result of, say, the explosion of brain size, for whatever reasons that took place maybe 100,000 years ago. It could be. Striedter speculates that a consequence of that is that some neural changes took place. It is not understood well. Even the simplest computation of insects is not understood well. 36 But something is going on, and it could be that explosion of brain size led to some small rewiring which yields unbounded Merge, and everything else that it has come up with, and that yields the semantic interpretations. Then comes the problem of relating two independent systems, this one and the sensorimotor system, whatever it is, and you get complicated solutions to that problem which could be best-possible solutions – a research problem for the future. Well if that is true, then nothing in this particular domain involved selection. I don’t really expect that that is going to be true. That is just an extreme speculation. But if that is true, it evolved and nothing was selected. Beyond that, there will be what residue is left in UG after you have extracted all the third-factor principles. And I think the same question arises in the development of organisms. I mean an ant may be developing and you take a look at it and it looks hopelessly complex – this gene did this, and this kind of gene didsomething else, and so forth, but there has got to be some physical explanation for that. The problem is to discover it.
    P ARTICIPANT : I have a sort of exploratory question about the relationship of symbolic items that enter into Merge and content. One of our recent graduates wrote a dissertation on generics and he came to a conclusion where he basically just supposes a GEN operator and finds variables, and then that points him to a generalization. And while I’m sympathetic to that sort of approach, I’m not sure it is a strategy for studying mental content and its relationship to language in this way, because it sort of seems like, well, you try to work it out in a more conventional generative semantics way, but after a while you think, well, I can’t really get this to work out, so let’s just invent a new operator and say, hey, there’s this mystery box in the brain that takes care of it. So while I think it is great to come up with answers like that, I’m just wondering about the research value of this and how to make this a little more solid.
    C HOMSKY : Without going into