SubscribeThe girl the dog the boy kicked bit cried.
Most language experts dismiss experiments like the ones with Panbanisha as exercises in wishful thinking. "In my mind this kind of research is more analogous to the bears in the Moscow circus who are trained to ride unicycles," said Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies language acquisition in children. "You can train animals to do all kinds of amazing things." He is not convinced that the chimps have learned anything more sophisticated than how to press the right buttons in order to get the hairless apes on the other side of the console to cough up M & M's, bananas and other tidbits of food.
Dr. Noam Chomsky, the M.I.T. linguist whose theory that language is innate and unique to people forms the infrastructure of the field, says that attempting to teach linguistic skills to animals is irrational -- like trying to teach people to flap their arms and fly.
"Humans can fly about 30 feet -- that's what they do in the Olympics," he said in an interview. "Is that flying? The question is totally meaningless. In fact the analogy to flying is misleading because when humans fly 30 feet, the organs they're using are kind of homologous to the ones that chickens and eagles use." Arms and wings, in other words, arise from the same branch of the evolutionary tree. "Whatever the chimps are doing is not even homologous as far as we know," he said. There is no evidence that the chimpanzee utterances emerge from anything like the "language organ" Dr. Chomsky believes resides only in human brains. This neural wiring is said to be the source of the universal grammar that unites all languages
Dr. Terrace says Kanzi, like the disappointing Nim Chimpsky, is simply "going through a bag of tricks in order to get things." He is not impressed by comparisons to human children. "If a child did exactly what the best chimpanzee did, the child would be thought of as disturbed," Dr. Terrace said.
Number of different words = finiteBut,
Number of total words = infinite
Ideas that can be expressed = infinite
(This is what I understand to be meant by "Language makes infinite use of finite means.")
Number of different words = finiteBased on my understanding, it is true that language "makes inifinite use of finite means," but it is not at all special, because a forest does the same thing. If I am misunderstanding the concept, I welcome further explanation from you, but be forewarned that merely repeating "Language makes infinite use of finite resources" will not further my understanding.
Number of total words = finite
Ideas that can be expressed = finite
(This is the practical reality, given the mortality of humans.)
Opponents of creationism are likely to reply that to accept intelligent design means to be very uncritical indeed. But that is to miss the point. 'Critical thinking skills' are part of the emptying-out of education that makes room for creationism. 'Critical thinking skills' are now an accepted part of the curriculum, yet in practice the term is used to dignify rather ordinary exercises. Critical thinking may be the outcome of a good education. But because critical thinking requires the thinker to be become independent, it is not something that can be taught as part of a curriculum. It certainly cannot be reduced to a 'skill'.This is the essence of the author's argument. Indeed, "critical thinking skills" are not to be taught in a scientific context. The only discipline I could imagine that would help students achieve "critical thinking skills" is philosophy, a discipline that some countries have incorporated into their highschool curriculum. In France, for example, every student that intends to finish high-school must pass a 4 hour long examination in philosophy for his/her baccalauréat.
In fact, critical thinking is rarely achieved. The popularity of the term shows a desire to flatter ourselves rather than an upsurge in independent thought. The actual content of the thinking then becomes pretty much irrelevant. Science or creationism, whatever. We still get to congratulate ourselves on our skills. It is this sort of emptying-out of the curriculum with its disregard for subject knowledge that can make space for creationism, and the creationists have clearly spotted the opportunity.
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posted by gurple at 10:35 AM on March 9, 2005