The Innateness Debate & Language Acquisition

The Innateness Debate & Language Acquisition

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. It is a philosophical topic that has a long history and has seen a great deal of interest since the beginning of the 20th century in particular. One of the lasting questions within the philosophy of language is the question of language acquisition. Is it acquired through innate ideas or through experience? There have been many notable discussions and ideas related to this question. A look into this debate will shed some light on what the idea of innate knowledge is and whether or not it is intelligible to believe that humans possess innate knowledge and use it to acquire language.

Is it the case that the mind comes to the world equipped with certain items of knowledge? This question is given a look in Ian Hacking’s book Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? He mentions two important players in this ever important philosophical debate, John Locke and G.W. Leibniz.

Hacking mentions two examples that were used to illustrate the stances and points of both Locke and Leibniz. The first example employed by Locke is the �blank slate’ (or table of wax) example. This example is used by Locke as he compares how an infant new to the world and knowing nothing is impressed upon by the world and thus learns knowledge. This table of wax is then shaped into the knowledge that was impressed upon it by experience. The second example is the �block of marble’ example engaged by Leibniz. He describes that the child, like marble, is grained, so that only some shapes can be made from it by experience. The child is born with the form of possible concepts innate within it. These examples are the good illustrators of the debate at hand. This idea of innate knowledge is still of great importance as the foremost linguist, Noam Chomsky, revived it so as to use it to describe how language is acquired. It is thus significant to look more closely at the debate of innate ideas to see if the belief in them is justified.

The first argument one could employ to defend innate ideas is the Argument from Universal Consent. This argument is very simple as follows: There are certain propositions which everyone agrees are true. Hence these truths are innate.

As mentioned this argument is simple and thus it is quite a simple task for one to present objections to it. There are two objections I can think of. One obvious objection is that even if the first premise of the argument is true, that does not show that the truths are innate. One who would present this argument would just assume and jump to the conclusion. Another objection is that there are no truths upon which everyone agrees. There are a multitude of people (i.e. culture, age, gender, race, disabilities, etc.) in the world it would be impossible to find a truth upon which everyone concurs.

There are objections that could develop in response to the second objection that there are no truths that are universally agreed upon. The objection could be that the truths referenced in the first argument are recognized as soon as they are heard or, more importantly, understood. This means that the truths are somewhere in the back of the mind. They are known but a person must first be exposed to these truths in order to recognize them as being truths. Essentially, one would be proposing that there are truths of which we are not aware, but they are known.

It is tricky to proceed to attack the idea that there some kinds of subconscious truths that we are capable of assenting to but are simply not aware of. I think that it is unintelligible to say that something is innately known but one is not aware of it. This is unintelligible to me because how can something actually be known if one is not even aware of it being known. Additionally, my other objection to the claim at hand is that it cannot be said that an unconscious proposition is in the mind, for then we might as well say that all propositions are in the mind since the mind is capable of assenting to all of them. This is a valid objection because the claim at hand has to do with the idea of being capable of assenting. In other words why not consider all knowledge innate under the claim at hand. But certainly one would not agree with the fact that all knowledge we have is innate.

Perhaps the most powerful argument for innate ideas is referred to as the poverty of stimulus argument. There are a couple of different variations and derivations of this argument. First I will cover a more generic and older version of the poverty of stimulus argument and then I will cover a more recent and pressing version.

The basis of this argument is that there are necessary truths and contingent truths. Necessary truths are truths which could not possibly be false. An example is the truth that two plus two equals four. Contingent truths are truths which could possibly be false. Some contingent truths may appear to be necessary such as the truth that the sun rises every morning, we will focus more on this point later. The stance and trouble that necessary truths present for the �blank slate’ example is that individual instances from sense experience do not establish the necessity of these necessary truths. This is a problem for the �blank slate’ example because this is a classical empiricist example. When asked the question of how are these necessary truths in the understanding, one (or more specifically Leibniz in Hacking’s point of view) replies that they are in our minds as dispositions. This seems to prove the point because the difference between what knowledge one has in their disposition and what one has innately is ambiguous and could be considered the same.

Noam Chomsky used a variation of the poverty of stimulus argument. Though Chomsky used the argument in different manners and forms one common structure is as follows:

1) There are patterns in all natural languages cannot be used by children using positive evidence alone. Positive evidence is the set of grammatical sentences the language learner has access to, that is, by observing the speech of others. Negative evidence, on the other hand, is the evidence available to the language learner about what is not grammatical. For instance, when a parent corrects a child’s speech, the child acquires negative evidence.

2) Children are only ever presented with positive evidence for these particular patterns. For example, they only hear others speaking using sentences that are “right”, not those that are “wrong”.

3) Children do learn the correct grammar for their native languages.

Therefore,