Around p. 71, Pinker illustrates what he means by "good reductionism" by applying Chomsky's division of the analysis of mind into five mutually irreducible levels(: "good reductionism")to language. The first four levels treat language as an "intervnal, individual entity." The fifth, however, is "external language," i.e., language as it exists in a culture.
Such a treatment of language has its problems. For language is never simply internal. Nor is culture simply external. Pinker would perhaps agree and add that it involves an interaction of the two and that culture studies one side of that interaction, the other four disciplines study the other side. But my point is that language can never be grasped as an interaction of inner and outer events. It consists of individuals sharing something in common: the sharing is personal, that which is shared is common. But the sharing is not an internal event observed in the same manner that the activity of a non-living thing is observed. Nor is the shared and external event, etc. Nor do we relate the sharing and shared by studying the correlation of two physical events, one neural and the other not.
Pinker's taxonomy is dualistic in the sense that it takes two aspects of a whole and treats them as two pieces. This internal/external dualism may not be Cartesian, for Pinker is a materialist. So instead of accusing him of positing an immaterial ghost, we should perhaps say that he posits a gnome in the machine).
On the other hand, his treatment of the external/internal language is a bit of an embarrassment to my thesis that Pinker is, ontologically speaking, a greedy reductionist. The external as described by Pinker is definitely not reducible to the internal. Either I misunderstood what he said earlier and Pinker's "good reductionism" DOES involve an ontological heirarchy or I understood him correctly and his treatment of culture is inconsistent with what he says elsewhere about "good" reductionism.
Such a treatment of language has its problems. For language is never simply internal. Nor is culture simply external. Pinker would perhaps agree and add that it involves an interaction of the two and that culture studies one side of that interaction, the other four disciplines study the other side. But my point is that language can never be grasped as an interaction of inner and outer events. It consists of individuals sharing something in common: the sharing is personal, that which is shared is common. But the sharing is not an internal event observed in the same manner that the activity of a non-living thing is observed. Nor is the shared and external event, etc. Nor do we relate the sharing and shared by studying the correlation of two physical events, one neural and the other not.
Pinker's taxonomy is dualistic in the sense that it takes two aspects of a whole and treats them as two pieces. This internal/external dualism may not be Cartesian, for Pinker is a materialist. So instead of accusing him of positing an immaterial ghost, we should perhaps say that he posits a gnome in the machine).
On the other hand, his treatment of the external/internal language is a bit of an embarrassment to my thesis that Pinker is, ontologically speaking, a greedy reductionist. The external as described by Pinker is definitely not reducible to the internal. Either I misunderstood what he said earlier and Pinker's "good reductionism" DOES involve an ontological heirarchy or I understood him correctly and his treatment of culture is inconsistent with what he says elsewhere about "good" reductionism.
Comments