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Universal grammar and the Baldwin effect: a hypothesis and some philosophical consequences

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Abstract

Grammar is now widely regarded as a substantially biological phenomenon, yet the problem of language evolution remains a matter of controversy among Linguists, Cognitive Scientists, and Evolutionary Theorists alike. In this paper, I present a new theoretical argument for one particular hypothesis—that a “Language Acquisition Device” of the sort first posited by Noam Chomsky might have evolved via the so-called “Baldwin Effect”. Close attention to the workings of that mechanism, I argue, helps to explain a previously mysterious feature of the Language Acquisition Device—the sheer variety of languages it allows the child to learn—thereby revealing a far stronger case than adherents of the hypothesis have previously supposed. A further unheralded consequence of the hypothesis is a conceptual shift in the Chomskyan understanding of language, wherein the essentially public nature of language is freshly emphasised. This has the effect of bringing the Chomskyan view into closer accord with Saussurean accounts of language, as well as with recent trends in evolutionary theory.

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Notes

  1. For examples of such work, see e.g. Lieberman (1984) on the physical costs of the larynx and Lieberman (1989, p. 396) which describes as “impossible to even survey” the copious literature regarding “genetically transmitted neural devices that facilitate the perception of… human speech.”.

  2. Pinker (1995, p. 174) discusses the evidence that there may be “default” settings to these parameters.

  3. c.f. Pinker (1995, p. 146) on the prerequisites for learning dictated by learnability theory.

  4. Similar effects were hypothesised almost simultaneously by Henry F. Osborn (1896) and Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1896).

  5. Depew (2003) provides a useful overview of the principal varieties of such theories. The version I outline here owes most to the account given by Daniel Dennett (1993, 1996, 2003), although little of my argument hangs on the differences between the various strains.

  6. On the distinction between “plasticity” and “elasticity” in learning, see Tobin (1999, p. 7). The distinction is based upon materials science, where plastic materials subjected to a force deform permanently, while elastic materials return to their original form once the force is removed.

  7. Hinton and Nowlan (1987) was the first such study. Briscoe (2003, pp. 307–314) summarises the numerous subsequent studies, and their varying emphases and distinctions, including a variety specifically concerning language and grammar. Downes (2003) summarises the case “that there are not sufficient grounds to add the Baldwin effect to our evolutionary explanatory repertoire” (p. 33).

  8. c.f Chomsky’s discussion (1980, p. 8ff) of what Husserl termed the “Galilean style” of theory formation. How realistic the idealisation is may be open to question, but it greatly assists us in gaining conceptual clarity about the evolution of language.

  9. A very similar idealisation regarding a “homogeneous speech community” is at the root of Chomsky’s theorising—see ibid. p. 25.

  10. As the Minimalist Program seeks to reduce the number of grammatical principles to one, I have pluralised the statement in line with the older Principles and Parameters model; the original reads “… a finitely specified generative procedure (function) that enumerates an infinite set…”. This has been done with a view to aiding understanding of our model and the relation in which it stands to the language. Apart from suspending judgement on Minimalism, little violence is done to Chomsky’s views by the change; a very similar, though less concise, account is given in Chomsky (1980, p. 220).

  11. Kneale and Kneale (1984, p. 364) trace this insight to the seventeenth-century “Port Royal Logic” of Arnauld and Nicole which, via Descartes, strongly influenced Chomsky.

  12. Though I have treated the E-language/I-language and performance/competence distinctions as more or less coextensive for the purposes of this paper, they are distinct concepts. In Rules and Representations (1980, p. 59) Chomsky expresses misgivings about the term “competence”, which “avoids entanglement with the slew of problems relating to ‘knowledge’, but… is misleading in that it suggests ‘ability’, an association that I would like to sever.” Due to such considerations, Chomsky later rephrased the distinction as one between “I-language” and “E-language”. I have generally found it less ambiguous to use the older vocabulary, and will continue to do so here.

  13. For a detailed discussion of this idea with specific reference to Baldwin effects, niche construction, and language acquisition, see Depew (2003), Downes (2003), Deacon (2003) Godfrey-Smith (2003) and Dennett (2003).

  14. For a contemporary example of the speed at which this can take place, and the high degree of grammatical creativity it may involve, see Adams (2003).

  15. It is, needless to say, unlikely that public language remained perfectly static for the duration of the LAD’s evolution. Nevertheless, I am relying here, following Chomsky (1980, p. 8ff), on a “Galilean” idealisation of the subject. For more sophisticated accounts of the interaction of culture and evolutions—albeit accounts too complex for the purposes of the present idealisation—see in particular Sterelny (2004, 2006) and Wimsatt and Griesemer (2007), as well as the literature on “niche construction” discussed in “Competence and performance” below, where the interactive nature of the LAD/environment relation is emphasised.

  16. Pinker and Bloom (1990, p. 723) noted this effect, and foresaw that it may be connected to the multiplicity of human languages, though they continue to discuss the question in terms of generalized learning mechanisms. Pinker (1994, chap. 8), though dealing with language diversity, does not follow up the Baldwin effect possibility.

  17. Though the possible evolutionary origins of competence have more recently been discussed by him in conjunction with his colleagues Tecumseh Fitch and Marc Hauser, where a distinction is made between the evolvable faculty of language in its “broad” (FLB) and uniquely human “narrow” (FLN) senses. See in particular section 1.3 of Fitch et al. (2005), as well as Hauser et al. (2002).

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Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to James Levine, Brian Garvey, Greg Radick, Jon Hodge and Morten Christiansen, among others, as well as to the editor and anonymous reviewers, for extremely helpful comments and advice at various stages.

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    Shane Nicholas Glackin

  2. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

    Shane Nicholas Glackin

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Glackin, S.N. Universal grammar and the Baldwin effect: a hypothesis and some philosophical consequences. Biol Philos 26, 201–222 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9225-3

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