I really struggled paying attention to what he was saying, until I set it to 1,5 times the speed. My mind finally managed fully to focus on Chomsky‘s lecture (I have adhd), and this was great! 😊❤️
i was just about to say this could be related to adhd since the same happens to me, glad you already know haha, glad you enjoyed the lecture, much love!
@@uydfi35 I was only diagnosed two months ago, so it’s amazing to not feel dumb or like the weird one out and realized my brain is just wired a little bit different. Thank you for replying ❤️
There is a Firefox add-on called Video Speed Controller, and a similar on chrome. After a while you get used to faster speeds, and even the 2x limit that youtube gives you isn't enough, and a video like this is pretty comfortable at 3-3.5x.
Can someone within the field point towards the best textbooks to get into the theories, where the field is and the immediate frontier technical tasks ahead for bio-linguistics? Thank you.
Thanks for the upload. Could anyone help with the exact references to new studies and new books mr. Chomsky mentions so I can finde them? Unfortunately I was not able to find them.
There is very little linguistics meat & potatoes on youtube as of late 2021. Hats off to Noam Chomsky, but you won't learn a whole lot from this lecture here.
Abralin is the closest for a semi-lay audience. For something more structured, there is Martin Hilpert's long-running series. There are also a myriad of professors who put great stuff up just as a kind of personal record and get next to no views (for obvious reasons); a random example is Nathan Hill (SOAS).
1:50 Galileo 2:08 How is it possible to express an inffinite number of ideas with a couple of dozens sounds, which in itself have nothing in common with the thoughts in our minds and allow us to understand what is not present in consicousness? That's indeed an interesting question. But, doesn't he goes too far with 3:06 "everything we can conceive and the most diverse movements of our soul" Some experiences are auditory and visual; consider colours, one can tell a blind man everything there is to know about colours and yet when he would miraculously starts seeing for the first time his experience will be expanded.
Wow, no one noticed that X-bar theory ruled out exocentric constructions! It was a central point of structuralism -- how could you have missed it, Noam?
That questioner is pretty confused by Noam’s use of the word neural nets but I think he doesn’t know the term refers to both biological and artificial systems. It’s just common to use it in an artificial context these days.
12:18 "Voluntary action is not a question which is currently fit for productive inquiry. " 👍 Brilliant response to the next time someone asks me why i broke something
Language is social and historic and evolves rapidly in a social context and changing world. It's for communication. I'm.not seeing any mystery. Would anyone like to explain?
the mistery has been repeatedly articulated by noam in numerous interviews and lectures including this one. namely, the spoken/written language seemingly operates as a linear representation of symbols. on the other hand, reading or listening to a speech, we effectively ignore the linear sequence of words and decode the message as a complex structure which is not explicitly given. that means, we posses implicit ability to process any message tho this ability is totally separated from conciousness and unreachable by introspection. human kids demonstrate an exclusive ability to acquire language instinctly, long before they obtain enough linguistic data to learn the sintactic rules by statistic generalization of experience. the language is used almost exclusively for generating thought. humans, just as other animals, didn’t need language to communicate. being unable to generate complex recursive sintactic structures, big apes have still a profound system of communication with which they can communicate efficiently and sufficiently. the organs of speech were there long before the emergence of language so as in animals. try to scientifically explain all this with trivial statements like ‘language is social and historic and evolves rapidly in a social context and changing world’.
Mental giant, moral fool. I can still see him singing with Hugo Chavez before the demise of Venezuela. After the demise was well underway, Noam tried to back pedal with the typical "nobody ever does socialism right" lame excuse. PS_ I adore the comments...I haven't seen this much fawning since Bambi was released by Walt Disney studious in 1942.
You know how democracy is not about inheritance. Basically just because one of the family members is a professor does not mean the other one has to be a professor as well? So in corrupt society where everyone is about connections mathematics does not work neither does economics.
Trying to square linguistic theory with some supposed "theory of evolution" is a wrong turn. Just stick to language as it actually is, focus entirely on that. And forget about how it supposedly came about. Self-evidently it did. Even if you could show the "evolution", it still explains nothing in terms of actual human language as it actually is. It is a typical way of going off into irrelevance, with overly puffed up "theories" re the origin of traits, etc., posing as, in this case, essentially, philosophical anthropology. But it can never be that. Chomsky here is not heeding his own advice to not be distracted by psychologically compelling but essentially irrelevant happenstance, circumstance, accidental things, etc.
There's a reason why M.I.T has a linguistics department. I'll let you try and figure out why M.I.T might be interested in the origins and evolution of language.
How can linguistic evolution irrelevant? It helps us understand language acquisition and the role of culture in its change. Remembers that language is not used in the vacuum. It needs space and time for it to function and develop..
"...it's fiendishly difficult to give an explanation for the evolution of almost any trait..." Could it be because the idea of "evolution" is, basically, rubbish?
If you read Stephen Jay Gould's "Structure of Evolutionary Theory" his magnum opus, essentially [over 1,000 pgs] it is clear that the theory has gone through so many changes that it is hard to get a clear fix on what exactly it is. It also seems to have many logical holes -- which have been pointed out by, for ex., Prof. David Berlinski, and others. And, as Rupert Sheldrake has emphasized, genes don't account for many aspects of an organism -- especially as regards its form, shape. I think the theory has become a kind of secular dogma, substituting for religion, and questioning it to any degree or in any way prompts an intense and irrational hostility -- consider the venomous response given to Jerry Fodor's work, for instance -- you can see it here on yt, some people in that audience seemed like they wanted to run him out of town. I think it has become a fixed, entrenched, at times irrational, dogmatic, mental structure in some intellectual circles.
Of course its gone through changes as it's an aspect of science, science doesn't stay static. The theories of evolution have changed over time with new research, new evidence and new discoveries. Would you expect anything else? Darwin didn't know anything about genes and the modern synthesis versions of evolutionary theory have had to incorporate evo-devo approaches. The fundamentals are pretty rock solid though. I absolutely agree that evolution and genetics do not account for everything in biology. Chomsky makes that point repeatedly in his writings and lectures around this subject, I've seen that he sceptical about the many 'just-so' stories, particularly in evolutionary psychology. There's an interesting YT video in which he talks some of these these things - "Chomsky on Evolution", Stony Brook Interview #3 with Richard Larson" I think from about 2003 or so.
