Noam Chomsky: Language is the Basis of Reason and Creativity
00:00:00.000 | - So how deep do the roots of language go in our brain?
00:00:05.000 | Our mind, is it yet another feature like vision
00:00:09.560 | or is it something more fundamental
00:00:11.280 | from which everything else springs in the human mind?
00:00:14.280 | - Well, in a way it's like vision.
00:00:16.500 | There's something about our genetic endowment
00:00:21.340 | that determines that we have a mammalian
00:00:24.380 | rather than an insect visual system.
00:00:27.480 | And there's something in our genetic endowment
00:00:30.200 | that determines that we have a human language faculty.
00:00:34.220 | No other organism has anything remotely similar.
00:00:37.960 | So in that sense, it's internal.
00:00:41.040 | Now there is a long tradition, which I think is valid,
00:00:44.060 | going back centuries to the early scientific revolution,
00:00:48.280 | at least, that holds that language is the,
00:00:53.080 | sort of the core of human cognitive nature.
00:00:56.400 | It's the source, it's the mode for constructing thoughts
00:01:00.860 | and expressing them, that is what forms thought.
00:01:05.520 | And it's got fundamental creative capacities.
00:01:09.960 | It's free, independent, unbounded, and so on.
00:01:14.040 | And undoubtedly, I think the basis
00:01:17.600 | for our creative capacities
00:01:21.220 | and the other remarkable human capacities
00:01:26.580 | that lead to the unique achievements
00:01:30.260 | and not so great achievements of the species.
00:01:34.040 | - The capacity to think and reason,
00:01:36.340 | do you think that's deeply linked with language?
00:01:38.980 | Do you think the way we, the internal language system
00:01:42.620 | is essentially the mechanism
00:01:44.340 | by which we also reason internally?
00:01:46.900 | - It is undoubtedly the mechanism by which we reason.
00:01:49.700 | There may also be other,
00:01:52.100 | there are undoubtedly other faculties
00:01:54.540 | involved in reasoning.
00:01:56.620 | We have a kind of scientific faculty,
00:02:00.300 | nobody knows what it is,
00:02:01.620 | but whatever it is that enables us
00:02:03.700 | to pursue certain lines of endeavor and inquiry
00:02:08.220 | and to decide what makes sense and doesn't make sense
00:02:12.540 | and to achieve a certain degree
00:02:14.980 | of understanding of the world,
00:02:16.380 | that uses language but goes beyond it.
00:02:20.220 | Just as using our capacity for arithmetic
00:02:24.780 | is not the same as having the capacity.
00:02:27.580 | (air whooshing)
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