Customer Reviews

Language Instinct' Debate

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

There's nothing better than seeing an overconfident favourite getting a proper seeing to from an unfancied underdog.

All the same, when best-selling MIT and Harvard-credentialised psycho-linguist Steven Pinker's book "the Language Instinct" - a work feted far and wide and rarely challenged in polite circles - is subjected to critical treatment by an curmudgeonly British professor from an unfashionable second tier university in the home counties, it is a hopeful chap indeed who thinks an upset might be on the cards.

Pinker, after all, has the weight of Noam Chomsky (self styled most important intellect on the planet) behind him, and rates consistently favourable mentions from the literary review sections of important newspapers and that peculiar clique of populist science writers (Dan Dennett, Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins among others).

The best you could say for Sampson, on the other hand, is that he lacks profile: His tenure is at the University of Sussex - yes, there is one - and the profile he does have isn't the sort most people would want: as far back as 1977, Christopher Hitchens described him as "an academic nonentity who made various other incautious allegations [about Noam Chomsky's political views] and who later ... strolled into the propellers and was distributed into such fine particles that he has never been heard from again." Ouch.

That's all ancient history, though, and the pleasant surprise is that over the last thirty years the plucky little Britisher has made a full recovery from his encounter with the propellers and is in fine enough fettle to give said global linguistic superstar a good old-fashioned intellectual walloping. Even read alone, Pinker's book is built on a wobbly edifice, but with Sampson's expert guide, it looks positively idiotic. Sampson is systematic: he sets up each of Pinker's arguments (such as they are), represents them fairly (I read Pinker's original concurrently to check) and then, like a gentleman cricketer on the village green dispatches each of them deftly to the boundary through extra-cover.

I'm really not sure why Geoffrey Sampson's book hasn't received more attention: possibly the author's history (he seems to made a number of "incautious" political statements over his life and doesn't seem to be the recanting type), but also because it swims bravely against an intellectual tide: Sampson is - though I don't think he expressly says it - a relativist:

"What the language learner is trying to bring his tacit theory into correspondence with is not some single, consistent grammar inhering in a collective national psyche, the sort of mystic entity that a sociologist such as Emile Durkheim would call a "social fact". Rather, he is trying to reconstruct a system underlying the usage of various speakers to whom he is exposed, and these speakers will almost certainly be working at any given time with non-identical tacit theories of their own - so that there will not be any wholly coherent and irrefutable grammar available to be formulated"

Advocating relativism, as I think Sampson coherently and convincingly does, has the misfortune to be about as incautious as criticising Noam Chomsky these days, so perhaps Sampson's card is marked and that's that. All the same, the passage cited above is beautifully put, and by itself is more persuasive than Steven Pinker's whole book.

All the same, who's laughing now? Probably not G. Sampson esq., as he strolls from the wicket at stumps, having carried his bat valiantly, but not having managed to save the innings. But up on the grassy bank, this cricket connoisseur stand to applaud this stylish, defiant knock.

Well batted, sir.

Olly Buxton

This book certainly brought a different perspective to the empiricist/ nativist debate. It shed reasonable doubt upon the idea that we are born with innate semantic structure. Mr. Sampson does a good job of showing the empirical evidence does not always indicate the universals the nativists claim are substantial. After reading this book, I am certainly more confident in the creativity of human intelligence.

However, I have my qualms with Mr. Sampson. I am not a linguist, but most of the arguments were not out of my grasp. At times the author was repetitive, ambiguous and he often went on tangents, particularly in the last few chapters in which it seems he is struggling to respond to all of the critics of his first edition. Particularly I note how he struggled to convince the reader that Karl Popper would advocate his position. I am not very familiar with this philosopher, but Mr. Sampson is forced to combine quotes to manipulate his words. It seems that he just wants people to be on his side. All this, after he argued against the atrocities of hegemony! Aside from his prose, the biggest annoyance I had with this book was that he waits until the end to reveal his true stance. This is the spoiler: he believes that the mind is literally infinitely creative. This seems to contradict his statement earlier in the book that he believes Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate to be of great value despite the fact that this conclusion can only come from complete denial of everything this book stands for. Mr. Sampson calls upon the ghost in the machine, Descarte's dualism, as the source of human creativity. This view was not integrated into the book but simply pops out at the end, at least from my perspective. Regardless of whether it is true or not, as he admits, it is not a scientific argument.

It is a shame that Steven Pinker did not write this book, as it would have been more eloquent, and without the unnecessary supernatural conclusion. This book is at least a good start, hopefully someone will build off of it

Geoffrey Sampson's critical approach to Pinker's best-selling "The Language Instinct" makes some good points against the nativist position on language acquisition. Mostly, advocating for a return to empiricism, and using the science philosophy of K. Popper, Sampson tries to debunk the basic tenets of Chomsky's (and Pinker's) theory of language acquisition.

Some arguments are clearly backed by evidence. For instance, the idea that "language mutants" with an specific genetic disorder that affects the use of suffixes has been not well research by Pinker, since further evidence shows that the gene involved in the problem is NOT only relevant for linguistic forms, but to more general learning processes.

However, the philosophical and logical arguments against Chomsky's classic proofs such as "poverty of stimulus" and the like are not as clear. Maybe Sampson keeps his arguments at a logical level (which makes it harder to fallow the argumentation, very dense at moments), instead on relying on more empirical evidence.

In sum, it is an interesting book, but the style and the dense argumentation (as well as some subtle clear dislike for Chomsky and his role in the world of ideas) doesn't make it a candidate to be THE definite critical voice in the linguistic innateness debate.

I enjoy looking at both side of an argument; as an introductory linguistics course I am taking has highlighted this book as a good way of looking at the other side of the Chomskyan claims I swiftly ordered my copy, fully expecting several evenings of intellectual challenge and brain stretching. The book has thoroughly disappointed me. It is a pamphlet rather than a scientific work.

I'll propose that the first paragraph of the book is an acid test for the potential reader. It reads as follows: "the English language, and other languages, are institutions like country dancing or the game of cricket: cultural creations that individuals may learn during their lifetimes, if they happen to be born into the appropriate cultures, but to which no one is innately predisposed".
If you're struck by the fact you hardly know anybody who doesn't speak a language (I know nobody having chosen to not learn one during her lifetime), but probably know several people who don't play cricket you'll be hard pressed to find a satisfying explanation.
If on the other hand, you find this claim fairly self obvious (maybe you don't know anybody who doesn't play cricket for instance) and are in fact scandalized anybody could think otherwise, you'll probably enjoy the book.

I'm torn between a three and a four on this one. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the issue of whether or not language is instinctual. Sampson scores some hits against those believing that language is inborn. I admit that I'm a pushover for discrediting Noam Chomsky. I consider him to be a philosopher, rather than a scientist, since he doesn't empirically test his ideas. Logic is a valuable tool, but ideas that originally seemed logical litter the path of science when they don't stand up to testing.

Sampson is particularly strong when he catches his opponents making assumptions rather than basing their arguments on actual data. He searches databases like the British National Corpus, that includes samples of everyday speech, to show that many forms of speech aren't as rare as was supposed, and it is therefore more likely that a child could learn them by observation. He also catches them in overgeneralizations about things that are frequently, but not always true. These are the strongest parts of the book.

Still, in the end I am not convinced that he is right. He argues that the idea that language is entirely learned, like games or dances, is the "commonsense" position. I don't know about that: I have read that in the Middle Ages, efforts were made to isolate infants from adult speech in the belief that they would then speak the original language. And I am unaware of any culture that does not have a language. Even deaf infants babble.

I also think that Sampson overstates the "instinct" position, to set up a straw man. He says: "All of us, surely, would rather be what most of us have supposed we are: creatures capable of coming to terms with whatever life throws at us because of our ability to create novel ideas [...] Who would not prefer this picture to that which portrays biology as allotting to the human mind a range of available settings, like a fully featured washing machine [...] The former concept of Man is far nobler. The evidence suggests that it is far more accurate." I don't think that most people are arguing that either all behavior is instinctive or it is all learned. The "instinct" proposal still leaves room for the great variety that we find in languages, and it doesn't necessarily mean that any other behavior is instinctive. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what we would like to believe, but what is true.

So I think that Sampson does the noble work of pointing out weaknesses in the instinct language, and good scientists will thank him, even if it is through gritted teeth, for helping them perfect their data collection. On the other hand, he has chiefly presented arguments against his opponents, not for his own position.

Even if I do not agree with the idea that there is no innateness that we are born with, but the strong argument against Noam Chomsky is very helpful to have better understanding of child language acquisition. If you do not overcome Chomsky's theory, then you better try this book.

Chomsky and his followers tried very hard to persuade us that we were born with certain language abilities programmed into our DNA. Others believe that our ability to learn, and even to create, languages is a function of our overall ability to learn things at very high levels.
If you want to believe that human beings are run by their DNA, the way birds and fishes are, then Chomsky is for you. But if you believe that human intelligence is an "open" system that allows complete flexibility in navigating the unpredictabilities of the world, then you might want to make use of the valuable information in this book.

I approached this book with some enthusiasm as it had promised to disprove nativist theories. However, from the first page it was obvious that the author is quite uninformed and had not delved deep enough into the nativist literature to postulate a reasonable argument. (Come'on, do you actually think you can write off the CPH in 3 pages...?) The tone of the entire book is extremely sophomoric reflecting an emotionally driven stance and lack of theoretical foundation. It is no wonder Chomsky and Pinker have written this author off as a buffoon. The poor scholarship in this book is not deserving of their attention.

If nativism is to be disproved one must go about such an enterprise with some guile and intelligence. This book was written too disingenuously to be of any merit or threat to the theory. If you are a linguist you will find this book quite comical, but it's not worth the money to actually buy it. My suggestion is to check it out from the local library if your curiosity gets the best of you.