Lunis
Steven Pinker reflects on his admiration and disagreements with Noam Chomsky.
Full interview: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/160/
Source
Steven Pinker on Noam Chomsky's theory of Linguistics & Politics (Part 3/3)
Similar Posts
AITHOR: Revolutionizing Essay Writing with Artificial Intelligence
The Science of Warp Drives
Machine Learning Projects for Beginners (Datasets Included)
21 thoughts on “Steven Pinker on Noam Chomsky's theory of Linguistics & Politics (Part 3/3)”
Comments are closed.
Umm and I just explained how tho it might in some few cases have some sway but on the whole, people justify the actions they take regardless of laws. Seeing others being punished is only likely to have an effect on crimes you cannot justify (to yourself) committing. But you are unlikely to commit crimes you cannot justify to yourself already anyway. The punishment Idea of crime prevention harks back to behaviourism. Ideas have changed since then. Check out Cognitive dissonance.
Sorry, I am not interested in getting into a lengthy debate, if you are doubtful of the deterrent effect, look into how the Mafia control large groups of people through fear, with horrific acts of retribution These horrors stick in the mind, and stop most people transgressing in the future..
Hmmm your using a criminal organisation, people who professionally ignore laws, to justify the punishment strategy as a way of stopping people commit crimes. You just blew my mind man. I think you might want to rethink that argument.
Pinker obviously has no clue what anarchy is, nor what Rousseau wrote, nor what human nature is.
Equating socialism with "true democracy" is merely definitional wordplay. The decision underneath the semantics is simply whether the locus of political action ought to rest as much as possible with the individual, the state being a structure voluntarily participated in by individuals to help organize potentially competing individual interests, or whether it ought to rest primarily with the society or state, the individual being only a dependent part of the more important whole.
Polygamy? Come on now..:-)
even how you define what darwin said and mean is a discourse.
Why can't the bird sing because they love to sing, and occasionally call out a warning… because of an impulse to send a warning?
It doesn't have to be art and beauty OR utility and survival.
Bones are not mineral store OR support of organisms against gravity. They are both.
You are drawing an artificial distinction between legal and illegal organisations. The government decides what is legal and illegal. Methods for forcing people to behave in the way that you want are pretty universal.
The theory of evolution in no way states that genetic mutations will be advantageous. They can be detrimental, benign or beneficial. Beneficial mutations would be more likely to be passed on as that organism would be more likely to survive/reproduce. I think it's obvious that Pinker is brilliant and I would say that Chomsky is likely just as brilliant, I just think he is wrong in this case.
True democracy, a form of government, is not synonymous with socialism, an economic system. But you are right Steven Pinker is funny, which is why he is such a good communicator in addition to being a great scientist.
Given a choice between a philosophical argument on one side vs an empirical argument on the other I will side with empirical evidence.
And Pinker has neither.
Who's the interlocutor? Is that Sam Keyser?
'I'm not an anarchist, I do believe rule of democracy is a good thing''
Come on Pinker, get rid of those presuppositions, otherwise you wouldn't make such ridiculous statements. I hate to say it, but most scientists believe more of the propaganda an ideology then actually find out for themselves what lies beneath it. Pinker is no exception. Since they're discussing Chomsky, it seems proper to point out something he said regarding people who can't detect their indoctrination so they ''just don't even hear the argument''.
Not to degrade Pinker (or any other scientist) but there's a reason Chomsky never has discussions where he's meant to give his views on a specific contemporary.
Quite apart from sporting one of the worst hairdos I've ever seen, Steven Pinker is a charlatan. Here's why.
Notice he restricts his criticism of Chomsky's politics to a purely philosophical realm, talking about "human nature" and so on. He makes sure to throw in the condescending word "romantic" to discredit the vision of a fairer society, perhaps one where people like him don't get to fly all around bloviating. As we shall see, this is no accident; it's the only leg he has to stand on. The game would be over the minute he tried to meet Chomsky's political ideas concerning real world social structures, not philosophies floating somewhere up there in the nebulous world of ideas.
For anyone remotely familiar with Chomsky's politics, the absolute cornerstone has nothing to do with philosophy. Square one is class struggle – as is true with all socialists – and the way rich and powerful institutions dominate and control the economic and political systems in their favor. Pinker's esteemed "liberal democracy," history tells us, is one of the many political organizations elites use to achieve these ends, enabled in part by a very complex and sophisticated system of propaganda and indoctrination. To its credit, liberal democracy brutalizes the population less then, say, fascism or feudalism, but it's easily controlled by rich, powerful interests, and therefore antithetical to democracy, if the word is supposed to have any meaning. Most of us here in the U.S. have been calling for a sensible health system in public polls for about 50 years. Still nothing. Take issue after issue and the picture's pretty uniformly like so across the board. This is not a democracy.
Now, Pinker's not a dumb guy. He knows all that. But he won't say it, because the same system has made him very rich and influential, and he lacks the conscience of a Chomsky (there are many others honest intellectuals out there, too), so he must rationalize, apologize, and lie to all you nice people. Typically, he overstates his contribution to Chomsky's ideas on language as well.
He really outdoes himself when he suggests that if a different, more fair, society were constructed, one in the control of the majority versus the minority of the rich and privileged, would lead to "violent chaos." I would encourage Pinker to page through a few history books and consider that the "violent chaos" contained within – from the Roman and British Empires to the World Wars to Vietnam, etc. – have all been a product of the sort of social, political, and economic structures he so enthusiastically endorses. Check yourself, fool.
Can anyone give good links for Steven Pinker on Michael Halliday? Having trouble finding them.
One thing I can't get is, why can't it be both? I mean creativity definitely has an evolutionary advantage. The making of a spear needed creative skills, skills which are at the very root of human intelligence. Our amazing ability of pattern recognition and ability to create made us superior. So if I understand it correctly then in order for us to make use of this hidden creative skill there should be a strong need to create (because making a spear wouldn't be any help at that instance till it actually did). So why can't this need for creativity inhabit in language as a product of an evolutionary advantage of (a subconscious need to create for its own sake) as an evolutionary advantage?
Does the original full video exist anywhere? The link in the description is dead.
Putting every spice in same dish makes it horrible.
Pinker is pretty sloppy or sneaky. This is the guy who said he was a Bakunin-ist until there was a police strike.
-not being capitalist does no mean not working for social or material reward, as seen by pre-capitalist cultures. Popularity, esteem, ego, membership in a group that protects you, and of course the actual material rewards of your labours, including pay all exist outside capitalism. Pinker himself is clearly smart, charming, and socially connected enough to be a rich entrepreneur rather than a middle class professor-but his motivations are curiosity, popularity, sociability, intellectual productivity. We know from studies that people lose motivation to work well when you start paying them over a Pinker type wage.
-he knows anarchy in the sense of "no government" is not what Chomsky or other left wing anarchists mean, and that they are the main strain of anarchists. So, here he switches to the right wing version, which he had just correctly said Chomsky isn't, in order to say it leads to chaos. Equivocation 101.
– we actually know that people are naturally cooperative and creative, humans are gregarious animals, are sexually active year round, with rape being mostly taboo. And we are problem solvers, unlike most animals we make art and tools, and like most animals we play. That doesn't mean that is all humans are. Again, all social systems are trying to encourage and maximize certain traits, the reason to do that is precisely because you believe the others do exist, how else would you be trying to avoid them? We would not try to explain terrible things like murder if we did not find them to be terrible, and they would not happen if they were not part of our nature.
-you don't need to have a romantic view of human nature, you just have to believe a decentralized structure can get you most of the good of a centralized structure (that good is order), without most of the bad (which is unfreedom). Why Mr Pinker, would centralized authority be undesirable to anarchists or marxists if they believed humans were naturally good? The king is human too, and so would be by his nature good, and ordering you to do good things that were good for you. So, you have to believe, like most people, in a dualistic human nature to be a left wing anarchist or marxist.
– Darwinian natural selection does not preclude any of the above. Group animals like humans, with poor physical strength, who's infants are defenseless, but have big brains, developed a huge amount of "goodness" as a side effect of natural selection. Remember that it is not the individual that natural selection is selecting for, but the genes, and your neighbor was likely to share yours when our nature was developing. Besides group selection may be a thing as well. Further, coming to language, Chomsky thinks he evolved as a thinking device mainly and communication is only secondary. There is nothing anti-evolutionary about this view. hat would explain why most of the words you use everyday are silent self dialogue in your head. Stupid animals can communicate, yet lack language. It makes sense to think that humans's ancestors could also communicate before language, then developed language as a brain-aid that boosted our survival, and its side effect was in turn to upgrade our communications.