030715
Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch in their Science review article (2002) indicate that “comparative studies of chimpanzees and human infants suggest that only the latter read intentionality into action, and thus extract unobserved rational intent. this goes along with my own conviction that internal models are significant in the phenomenon of human and self-awareness.
Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch argue that “the computational mechanism of recursion” is critical to language ability, “is recently involved and unique to our species.” I am well aware that many have died attempting to oppose Chomsky and his insistence that practical limitations have no place in the description of language capabilities. I am reminded of Dennett’s discussion of the question of whether zebra is a precise term, that is, whether there exists anything that can be correctly called a zebra. It seems fairly clear that Chomsky assumes that language exists in the abstract (much the way we naively assume that zebras exist in the abstract) and then proceeds to draw conclusions based on that assumption. The alternative is that language, like zebras, is in the mind of the beholder, but that when language is placed under the microscope it becomes fuzzy at the boundaries precisely because it is implemented in the human brain and not in a comprehensive design document.
Uncritical acceptance of the idea that our abstract understanding of the computational mechanism of recursion is anything other than a convenient crutch for understanding the way language is implemented in human beings is misguided. In this I vote with David Marr (1982) who believed that neither computational iteration nor computational recursion is implemented in the nervous system.
On the other hand, it is interesting that a facility which is at least a first approximation to the computational mechanism of recursion exists in human beings. Perhaps the value of the mechanism from an evolutionary standpoint is that it does make possible the extraction of intentionality from the observed behavior of others. I think I want to turn that around. It seems reasonable to believe that the ability to extract intentionality from observed behavior would confer an evolutionary advantage. In order to do that, it is necessary to have or create an internal model of the other in order to get access to the surmised state of the other.
Once such a model is available it can be used online to surmise intentionality and it can be used off line for introspection, that is, it can be used as a model of the self. Building from Grush’s idea that mental imagery is the result of running a model in off line mode, we may ask what kind of imagery would result from running a model of a human being off line. Does it create an image of a self?
Alternatively, since all of the other models proposed by Grush are in models of some aspect of the organism itself, it might be more reasonable to suppose that a model of the complete self could arise as a relatively simple generalization of the mechanism used in pre-existing models of aspects of the organism.
If one has a built-in model of one’s self in the same way one has a built-in model of the musculoskeletal system, then language learning may become less of a problem. Here’s how it would work. At birth, the built-in model is rudimentary and needs to be fine-tuned to bring it into closer correspondence with the system it models. An infant is only capable of modeling the behavior of another infant. Adults attempting to teach language skills to infants use their internal model to surmise what the infant is attending to and then name it for the child. To the extent that the adult has correctly modeled the infant and the infant has correctly modeled the adult (who has tried to make it easy to be modeled), the problem of establishing what it is that a word refers to becomes less problematical.