5. Conclusion Language Origin
Conclusion regarding Chomsky’s arguments for Universal Grammar
If Universal Grammar exists, as Chomsky claims, as yet there is no cred- ible evidence that supports it. All of Chomsky’s arguments for Universal Grammar have been shown to be inadequate.
It is time for Emergentism to re-emerge?
An Empiricism which was popular in the early part of the twentieth cen- tury and has returned in a reformulated version is one called Emergentism (Sperry, 1969; Beckermann et al., 1992; McLaughlin, 1992). It is a form of the Mind–Body Interactionism view that was discussed earlier in this chapter. Essentially, Emergentism is based on the view that certain higher-level pro- perties, in particular consciousness and intentionality, are emergent in the sense that although they appear only when certain physical conditions occur, such properties are neither explainable nor predictable in terms of their underlying physical properties. The properties of mind are genuinely novel and bring into the world their own causal powers. Thus, mind may have some control over behaviour, which is in accord with the most common- place of human observations.
It is thus highly likely that we are born with a brain that has inherent in it physical properties that allow for the development of intellectual processing powers. Such powers would be able to process environmental input from the physical world and yield all manner of intellectual objects including language and mathematics. This commonsense kind of philosophy/ psychology is one that we favour and would like to see more fully developed along more contemporary lines in the coming years.