A sign of the future?
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Anemona Hartocollis, "Slashing Its Budget, West Virginia University Asks, What Is Essential?", NYT 8/18/2023:
The state’s flagship school will no longer teach world languages or creative writing — a sign, its president says, of the future at many public universities.
Christian Adams wants to be an immigration or labor lawyer, so he planned to major in Chinese studies at West Virginia University, with an emphasis on the Mandarin language.
But as his sophomore year begins, he has learned that, as part of a plan to close a $45 million budget deficit through faculty layoffs and academic program consolidation, the university has proposed eliminating its world languages department, gutting his major.
He will have to pivot to accounting, he says, and probably spend an extra year in college, taking out more student loans.
“A lot of students are really worried,” said Mr. Adams, 18. “Some are considering transferring. But a lot of students are stuck with the hand they’ve been given.”
Nick Anderson, "WVU’s plan to cut foreign languages, other programs draws disbelief", WaPo 8/18/2023:
West Virginia University, a crucial institution in one of the nation’s most impoverished states, is poised to jettison all of its faculty dedicated to teaching Spanish, French, Chinese and other foreign languages. Students interested in learning a new tongue would be pointed to instructional alternatives — such as, possibly, an online app.
The state’s largest public university also is moving toward elimination of a master’s degree program in creative writing and a doctoral program in mathematics, among other proposed cuts, in response to declining enrollment and what university officials call a “structural” budget deficit of $45 million. In all, 32 of the university’s 338 majors on its Morgantown campus would be discontinued and 7 percent of its faculty eliminated under a plan made public last week.
“We are going through an existential crisis in higher education,” E. Gordon Gee, WVU’s president since 2014, told The Washington Post in an interview Wednesday, “and we happen to be on the point of the spear.” Gee said cuts are essential to free up resources for programs in higher demand such as forensics, engineering and neuroscience. Amid declining public confidence in higher education, Gee said, universities must earn back trust. “The people of the state are telling us what they want,” he said. “And for once, we’re listening to them.”
Emma Pettit, "Scholars See Dangerous Precedent in West Virginia U.’s Plan to Cut Foreign Languages", Chronicle of Higher Education 8/18/2023:
That a flagship, land-grant, R1 university wants to eliminate its world-languages department — and potentially swap in-person instruction with an app — is shocking, and seemingly unprecedented, several faculty members told The Chronicle. Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, wrote to Gee that “no other state flagship university has forsaken language education for its students.”
Howie Berman, executive director of ACTFL, formerly the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, said he worries that other colleges, especially those facing financial problems, might follow West Virginia’s lead. Di Bartolomeo, too, said she’s afraid WVU “may be the canary in the coal mine.” Though she hopes the outpouring of support for the department will prompt university leaders to change their minds, she said, that’s “kind of like hoping that if everybody claps hard enough, Tinkerbell will come back to life.”
The Linguistic Society of America recently sent its members this open letter from Jonah Katz — there doesn't seem to be an online version, so the full text is below:
My name is Jonah Katz; I'm an associate professor of linguistics at West Virginia University. I work in a large department that includes all of the world languages and literatures at WVU in addition to its 'basic' and applied linguistics programs. On August 10, 2023, the WVU provost recommended dissolving our department and all of its academic programs and faculty lines, including the only Linguistics programs in the state of West Virginia (our MA and undergrad minor). All of the tenured and untenured faculty in the department are to be laid off, including the linguistics faculty. All of the foreign language and literature programs at the university are to be discontinued; the president of the university publicly stated that foreign-language classes will be replaced with online apps or remote classes at other universities. I'm asking linguists to help us publicize what's happened here and advocate on our behalf.
We are a very small program (4 faculty in basic linguistics and 4-5 more in applied linguistics/TESOL), but punch well above our weight in both research output and external grant funding. In fact, on the same day WVU wrote to tell us our department is cancelled and we are fired, they ran a front-page article on the university website celebrating the NSF grant that Sergio Robles-Puente and I recently received, and lauding our innovative research and intensive student mentoring. That grant will now need to be discontinued or moved to another institution. WVU linguists more generally have served thousands of students here over decades. They have helped document and preserve the unique linguistic heritage of the region, from ethnographic studies on Appalachian English in public-school classrooms to the only existing work documenting the Spanish spoken in West Virginia. They have helped train generations of public-school foreign-language and English teachers in a state facing a dire shortage of K-12 educators. And they have served as one of the few connections between West Virginia students and the larger world, from study-abroad programs to scientific training that has prepared students for graduate study at some of the most prestigious institutions in the United States and beyond.
The reason given for this egregious violation of ethical and professional norms is that the university faces a dire budget crisis, and the administration has no choice but to cut academic programs in order to close their structural budget deficit. But the administration's own financial data, gathered at great cost with external consultants and publicly posted here, clearly indicate that the department as a whole (p. 7) has generated operating profits of more than $800,000 in each of the last three years, even without counting our grant income, which is substantial (our NSF project is just one of several large external grants that faculty in our department have been awarded in the past several years). This is not a financial decision: it is an ideological one, as our president's public comments make clear.
The story of how the university got into such a catastrophic financial position to begin with is a long and complex one, and tangential to my message here. But for those interested, the exposé in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why is West Virginia U. Making Sweeping Cuts?” (unfortunately paywalled for many readers) and this anonymous report by WVU faculty demonstrate convincingly that skyrocketing administrative personnel costs and excessive debt associated with a failed growth strategy are two of the major drivers (declining enrollment, COVID, and inadequate state funding also played a role).
To be honest, I don't know if anything that we can do will help the situation. The leadership of the university has made up its mind, they have the backing of state politicians and the board they appointed to oversee the university, and they will not be swayed by appeals to reason or ideals. What they may respond to is public pressure, and to that end I am asking my colleagues to share what is happening here as widely as you can through all available media and professional networks. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we need a whole lot of disinfectant at my institution. You could also consider writing to the people who made these decisions and their enablers, and if you represent an organization like a department or institute, consider doing so publicly in an open letter. Let them know what you think of the decision to eliminate all foreign language, literature, and linguistics classes at a public land-grant state flagship, and to fire all faculty regardless of merit, longevity, or tenure. Let them know how this will affect the reputation of West Virginia University and the state that it represents. Let them know how it will affect young people's prospects and their choices in one of the poorest and least-educated states in the country, where huge numbers of our most talented and driven young people are already leaving to seek better educational and professional opportunities. Thank you for your time, and to my many wonderful colleagues who have reached out this week to ask how you can help. I am lucky beyond belief to work in such a supportive, principled, and collaborative field, and to have so many amazing mentors and colleagues. Linguists really are the best.
University leadership directly in charge of this process include President Gordon Gee and Provost Maryanne Reed. The WVU Board of Governors is a politically appointed body that is supposed to oversee the administration of the university and will eventually need to approve the provost's recommendations. They can be contacted via Special Assistant Valerie Lopez. Governor Jim Justice appointed most of the Board and has strongly supported Gee during his term. His office can be contacted using this form.
Sincerely yours,
Jonah Katz, Associate Professor of Linguistics
West Virginia University
Jenny Chu said,
August 19, 2023 @ 8:32 am
No university is immune to having its linguistics department eliminated. In 1993, when I was studying Linguistics at Harvard University as an undergrad, all of the members of the department suddenly received a notice that the department would be dissolved because linguistics was, after all, an "interdisciplinary" field.
Among other things, we, the undergrad linguistics concentrators, founded HRULS (Harvard/Radcliffe Undergraduate Linguistics Society) to protest the move – one faculty member commented, "It takes a bunch of Harvard linguistics students to come up with a student association that is unpronounceable in any modern language" – and wrote opinion pieces in the The Crimson.
The department's death rattles were silenced quickly enough for me to complete my degree, but I don't know what was actually going on behind the scenes; Michael S. Flier, a Slavic Languages guy who'd joined H/R the previous year from Berkeley, ended up as the new department chair.
Mark Liberman said,
August 19, 2023 @ 9:04 am
@Jenny Chu:
Similar proposed or implemented eliminations were widespread in that era. A key difference this time around is that the WVU program in question includes all foreign language teaching, all training of language teachers, and all foreign literature study.
David Marjanović said,
August 19, 2023 @ 9:19 am
Ah, political priorities.
Icelandic.
Welsh…
Taylor, Philip said,
August 19, 2023 @ 9:20 am
It is indeed very sad when a major university elects to close its teaching and research programmes in foreign languages, literature and linguistics, but if Professor Gee is not being disingenuous by saying "“The people of the state are telling us what they want, and for once, we’re listening to them.” then perhaps there are valid reasons for the decision which we should not ignore.
Taylor, Philip said,
August 19, 2023 @ 9:31 am
David — or even in English. Richard Adams used "hrududu" in Watership Down — "Come on, let’s get the others moving
before a man comes with a hrududu *", horribly mis-pronounced as /hruːduːduː/ in the film version of the book (it should obviously be pronounced as /hrʌdʌdʌ/ if one knows what the sound represents). And Czech: Hrdonov. Amongst, I suspect, quite a few others.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
August 19, 2023 @ 9:54 am
A sign of the future??
This has been decades in the making – starting in the late 60s – and the wrting has been on the wall ever since then (have no fear, in the 80sI thought Allan Bloom to be silly, and I've seen no reason to change my mind).
But I'm intrigued by @Jenny Chu's remark that linguistics is an "interdisciplinary" field and therefore of lesser merit. Is there any *academic* field that is not interdisciplinary?
Universities, after all, are not vocational training colleges, even though the trend (STEM, MBA) has been to push them in that direction – scholarship != apprenticeship, altough the latter is necessary at the early stages. The further we move away from the Humboldtian ideal (kindly familarize yourself with the writings of both brothers) the sillier we are going to get.
BTW, nothing against engineers, but you won't believe how many of them (having graduated with top grades) actually believe that dowsing works!
Final example: You could go to a "Bible School" and consider yourself an expert on scripture (you might even get your own TV show) – or you could study theology, which requires you to immerse yourself in Latin, Greek, (possibly) Hebrew, philosophy from (at the very least) Plato to Kant, philoiogy, history, anthropolgy, historical/political geography, architecture, plus art & and music history, plus a few millenia of poetry and mythology. (Being religious, BTW, is not a prerequisite, unless upon graduation you intend to join the Profession.)
PS are their any linguists to do not regularly check up on the JASA?
PPS Let's farm out any program whose name doesn't end in -ics or -ology (philosophy, chemistry and history excepted) as they are all training programs for trades. And kick out anything called * Studies – it's Sinology, not 'Chinese Studies',BTW. (There's a reason why Medicine and Law have always maintained their separate 'Schools'.)
Mark Liberman said,
August 19, 2023 @ 10:25 am
@Taylor, Philip: if Professor Gee is not being disingenuous by saying "“The people of the state are telling us what they want, and for once, we’re listening to them""…
I haven't found any evidence that there's been any formal attempt to figure out what the people of the state want or need. The main source of the WVU's problem, as detailed in this article, is 10-15 years of bad planning, in which Gee has played a central role. This includes wrong predictions about enrollment:
It also includes large investments in increasing the size of the campus and adding buildings (including an art museum), all with borrowed money:
Also the same sort of large increase in administrative positions seen in all U.S. Universities. And of course cuts in state budget support.
All that creates a situation in which expenses need to be reduced. But if we can believe Jonah Katz (and he brings the receipts – p. 7), the "World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics program" actually has been making a profit averaging $871,384 over the past three years — just considering tuition income relative to expenses, even without counting the indirect cost recovery for their grants. Since the students who stay will presumably continue to pay tuition, the effect will not be entirely PR. But still…
John Cowan said,
August 19, 2023 @ 11:23 am
David M. In Welsh the voiceless rhotic consonant is spelled rh, never hr, but Icelandic is a win, because the allowed coda consonant clusters in /-s/ are /fs/, /ns/, /ks/ (usually spelled x), /ðs/, /ŋs/, /ms/, /ls/, and /rs/ (the last loses /r/ in allegro speech). So it's /r̥ʏls/, or at least I think it is. Alas, there doesn't seem to be such a word — or at least not yet.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
August 19, 2023 @ 12:16 pm
So they took tuition fees as their basic income unit, applied an ambitious Bums-on-Seats multiplier, and followed Parkinson's law to the letter – hey, what possibly could go wrong?
Hint: Once you accept the very idea of tuition fees in the first place, you've lost the plot anyway. Why are certain countries so obsessed with them?
Rodger C said,
August 19, 2023 @ 12:55 pm
if Professor Gee is not being disingenuous by saying "“The people of the state are telling us what they want, and for once, we’re listening to them.”
As a West Virginian, I assure you he's being as disingenuous as one would expect from someone in his position. What kind of communication does he claim to have with "the people of the state"? A Ouija board? and who is this "we"?
PS He's an administrator and shouldn't be addressed as "Professor."
PPS As a graduate of Marshall University, which WVU has always disdained as a poor relation, a small part of me that I'm not proud of is smiling grimly.
Taylor, Philip said,
August 19, 2023 @ 1:18 pm
Well, I erred on the side of caution, not really knowing what a President of an American university is (I assumed that the position was similar to (say) that of "vice-Chancellor", "Principal", "Warden", etc) but according to West Virginia University itself he is a professor of law and therefore entitled to be referred to as "Professor".
mg said,
August 19, 2023 @ 2:04 pm
Can a university keep its accreditation without having foreign languages?
Back in the 1990s I worked at Brown University. Gee was appointed president there and then was booted shortly thereafter. Sadly doesn't seem to have hurt his career.
Rodger C said,
August 19, 2023 @ 3:21 pm
@Taylor, Philip: Fair enough, though as an American I think I'd refer to him as either "President" or "Doctor."
What really annoys me about Gee's assertion is that it feeds into a stereotype of West Virginians: "Our younguns don't need to larn em no furrin stuff."
Sally Thomason said,
August 19, 2023 @ 3:58 pm
@Jenny Chu: That timing is interesting — that 1993 announcement of department closure was followed in 1994 by the convening of an external committee to identify terrific candidates for a senior faculty position in the department. I was a member of that committee, and we worked hard to do a good job for them, but the then-dean seemed rather clueless. When we warned him that one of our top candidates almost certainly wouldn't accept an offer unless her husband (also a terrific scholar) also got a good offer, they essentially told us that Harvard didn't do that sort of thing and we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about it. They didn't get her.
JC Krouse said,
August 19, 2023 @ 5:17 pm
It's my understanding these moves were initially discussed 15 years ago. If course Gee is being disingenuous. When hasn't he been? I've lived here 43 years, and we currently have the worst State government we've in my 43 years. This is not going to improve.
JC Krouse
Jerry Packard said,
August 19, 2023 @ 8:51 pm
Eliminating languages and linguistics at WVU is truly worrisome. US citizens are already considered woefully incompetent in foreign languages compared to the rest of the world. The arrogant assumption that foreign language illiteracy will do us no harm is, I feel, off the mark. Just because AI might make human translating easy or irrelevant doesn’t mean that not learning and using foreign languages is a good idea. Our diplomacy and business acumen will suffer if we get less fluent in foreign languages. P
Jenny Chu said,
August 19, 2023 @ 10:31 pm
@Olaf Zimmermann The "interdisciplinary" comment was exactly what we took greatest offence at, for precisely the reasons you mentioned. I recall that one of our talking points when we had our meeting with the Dean was "Math is interdisciplinary – why aren't you shutting down that department, too?"
@Mark Liberman Among the similar implemented actions was, I recall, the elimination of Yale's linguistics undergrad degree. That, to us, was definitely a reason we cited that Harvard should NOT any such thing. (Otherwise we might as well just give up and say, "Oh, yeah, Yale doesn't suck after all!", which would obviously get the Divinity School students after us for committing sacrilege and blasphemy of the worst kind.)
@David Marjanović I'm now guessing that the comment on the unpronounceability of HRULS was what we would recognize today as a clever piece of trolling / ragebait … and one of the grad students focusing on Icelandic had exactly the desired reaction upon hearing it.
@Sally Thomason The entire process – why the department was being dissolved, the appointment of faculty, why the decision was reversed, how the search process was being conducted – was totally non-transparent to us at the time. Very interesting to catch a glimpse, albeit somewhat unpleasant, of what was going on behind the scenes.
Terry Hunt said,
August 20, 2023 @ 12:10 pm
I am with mg (above) on this. It's a few decades since I was actively part of a university, and in a different country (Scotland) with doubtless different criteria , but I question whether an establishment that has no Departmental teaching of World Languages or Literature, as well as no Creative Writing or Linguistics, qualifies as a "university" at all.
I wonder if this is a deliberately egregious proposal designed to stimulate corrective measures (i.e. attract more external funds)?
Taylor, Philip said,
August 20, 2023 @ 12:51 pm
I can understand how one might expect a university curriculum to include world languages, world literature and linguistics, but is it really the place of a university to teach creative writing ?
Peter Grubtal said,
August 21, 2023 @ 3:09 am
Philip Taylor
I was wondering as well what else might have merited the chop instead of languages, but didn't wish to derail the thread with my speculations or preferences.
Hopefully those spared were all disciplines with serious academic content.
Even linguistics, since ChatGPT et al. have blown Chomsky and his theories out of the water, the curriculum could be concentrated now on matters of real substance.
Andreas Johansson said,
August 21, 2023 @ 4:18 am
Isn't the traditional requirement that a university teaches law, medicine, theology, and philosophy?
James Wimberley said,
August 21, 2023 @ 6:31 am
I idly looked up how much WVU spends on its sports teams. This source gives total athletics current spending in 2022 as \$97m, including $19.9m for paying coaches: https://knightnewhousedata.org/fbs/big-12/west-virginia-university#!quicktabs-tab-where_the_money-0 A tiny fraction, not broken out, is for participation sport by ordinary students, the great bulk must be for the essentially professional teams and their ticketed contests. This large operation is claimed to be self-financing, with athletics revenues of \$105m, of which only \$5.5m is "government/institutional support". The comparison looks massaged, as the spending pie excludes service on the debt contracted for stadia and other expensive facilities, as well as the burden of time and attention on university leadership. Linguistics isn't just competing with business studies but with football.
Mark Liberman said,
August 21, 2023 @ 6:35 am
@Andreas Johansson: Isn't the traditional requirement that a university teaches law, medicine, theology, and philosophy?
I don't think so — the "seven liberal arts" traditionally consist of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Though there are other lists, like this one, which gives grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, theology. Law and medicine? Not so much.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
August 21, 2023 @ 9:26 pm
@MYL: I am sure that @Andreas Johansson, factually mistraken as he is, meant to say "Isn't the traditional requirement that a university {\em teach} law, medicine, theology, and philosophy?"
(Be that as it may, the subjunctive is here to stay!)
J.W. Brewer said,
August 22, 2023 @ 8:13 am
WVU already fails to offer instruction in either Latin or Ancient Greek, thus grossly deviating from the basic model of a (Western) university that had crystallized by the early 16th century. To complain that a university that has abandoned the learned languages is now no longer teaching Spanish or Mandarin or what have you does not move me. Googling suggests that Latin, at least, was taught at WVU within my own lifetime, e.g. by the Transylvanian-American scholar Laszlo A Borsay (1915-1993). Presumably it was eliminated with some blah blah blah about lack of practical utility, and what goes around comes around.
Note FWIW that "poor relation" (per Rodger C) Marshall claims to be the only institution in the state that currently offers a Latin major (and a Greek minor): https://www.marshall.edu/humanities/classics/
J.W. Brewer said,
August 22, 2023 @ 8:32 am
BTW, from the wiki article on _quadrivium_ (describing a status quo that started to change in Italian universities as early as the 14th century): "Altogether the Seven Liberal Arts belonged to the so-called 'lower faculty' (of Arts), whereas Medicine, Jurisprudence (Law), and Theology were established in the three so-called 'higher' faculties." A pre-university "prep school" might teach all seven arts or might just do the "trivium," but one would have expected a full-service university to also have the "higher faculties."
Jerry Packard said,
August 22, 2023 @ 12:00 pm
@Peter Grubtal: “Even linguistics, since ChatGPT et al. have blown Chomsky and his theories out of the water, the curriculum could be concentrated now on matters of real substance.”
While not an acolyte who swallows Chomsky’s work hook, line and sinker, I don’t see why things like ChatGPT would have any relevance at all to Chomskian theory, to say nothing of ‘blowing it out of the water.’ And I completely disagree with the statement that Chomsky’s work lacks real substance. While the details might be mightily criticized, Chomsky’s work was the basis for the revolution in linguistics and cognitive science that occurred at the end of the last century. And I say this respectfully as a former student of Charles Hockett.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
August 23, 2023 @ 9:48 am
On behalf of the Paris of Appalæchia, I hereby invite everybody in Morgantown to come on up and enroll at Duquesne, Pitt, CMU, RMU, PPU — all of which have administrators who value learning over whatever other stupid metrics they use that I’m not allowed to reveal because my wife works in academe.
Peter Grubtal said,
August 23, 2023 @ 11:34 am
Jerry Packard re Chomsky etc
Whatever the shortcomings of the LLM's in matters of substantive content and accuracy, a lot of people are astounded that its messages are delivered in nigh-on perfect English. And all that without apparently being aware of a single rule of grammar. It "learns" language purely from associations and context. This is how, some linguists have always argued, humans acquire language, and not by some alleged innate universal grammar a la Chomsky.
I'm surprised you're not aware of the debate: I think languagelog restricts the number of links per post so here's just a selection :
https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/04/26/chatgpt-raises-questions-about-how-humans-acquire-language
https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007180
“Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language”.
https://slator.com/how-large-language-models-prove-chomsky-wrong-with-steven-piantadosi/
Rodger C said,
August 23, 2023 @ 11:41 am
J.W. Brewer, I'm very glad to know that Marshall still has its classics department, complete with a major and a minor. It was there that I first learned Greek.
Peter Grubtal said,
August 23, 2023 @ 3:00 pm
Jerry Packard
Whatever the shortcomings of the LLM's in matters of substantive content and accuracy, a lot of people are astounded that its messages are delivered in nigh-on perfect English. And all that without apparently being aware of a single rule of grammar. It "learns" language purely from associations and context. This is how, some linguists have always argued, humans acquire language, and not by some alleged innate universal grammar a la Chomsky.
I'm surprised you haven't been aware of the debate: I think languagelog restricts the number of links per post so here's just a selection :
https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/04/26/chatgpt-raises-questions-about-how-humans-acquire-language
“Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language”.
https://slator.com/how-large-language-models-prove-chomsky-wrong-with-steven-piantadosi/
Peter Grubtal said,
August 24, 2023 @ 6:28 am
Sorry about the double posting. The first one didn't appear for ages, so I trimmed a link and tried again, then much later both appear.
Jerry Packard said,
August 24, 2023 @ 4:48 pm
@Peter Grubtal
I am of course aware of the debate about language being acquired via associations and context versus by an innate universal grammar. And I for one am also astounded that LLMs are able to produce such remarkably good English.
But the fact that LLMs produce good English without being aware of grammar rules does not entail that there is no innate language learning mechanism. Call that mechanism or propensity ‘universal grammar’ or whatever you like, but the fact that all humans learn human natural language, and learn it as a virtually automatic reflex, while, e.g., chimps, ducks, ants and computers do not, is the most simple and straightforward evidence that such an innate ability exists, whether it is Chomsky’s characterization or not.
The fact that the child knows which utterances are acceptable and which are not constitutes the child’s knowledge of the rules of grammar, whether the child is aware of that knowledge or not.
Peter Grubtal said,
August 25, 2023 @ 3:15 am
@Jerry Packard
That there is an "innate language learning mechanism" , the physical and mental capacity and innate motivation to acquire language which is unique to humans is self-evident, but to conflate that with an innate grammar is a non-sequitur.
The point is that the child learns which utterances are acceptable and which not, and doesn't know them ab-initio.
Taylor, Philip said,
August 25, 2023 @ 3:33 am
"the fact that all humans learn human natural language, and learn it as a virtually automatic reflex, while, e.g., chimps, ducks, ants and computers do not, is the most simple and straightforward evidence that such an innate ability exists, whether it is Chomsky’s characterization or not" — I really wish that I could decide whether or not I agree with this statement. While I can see that "the fact that all humans learn human natural language, and learn it as a virtually automatic reflex is […] evidence that such an innate ability exists", why is the fact that chimp[anzee]s, ducks, ants and computers do not learn human natural language in any way relevant to the debate ?
Jerry Packard said,
August 25, 2023 @ 5:04 pm
It is relevant because it shows that we are the only ones pre-programmed to learn it.
Jerry Packard said,
August 25, 2023 @ 5:11 pm
Peter,
‘the child learns which utterances are acceptable and which not, and doesn't know them ab-initio.’
That ability, and not the utterances, is what exists ab-initio.
Taylor, Philip said,
August 27, 2023 @ 2:00 am
Jerry — "it shows that we are the only ones pre-programmed to learn it" [where "it" = "human natural language"]. Well, I think that I would express the idea as having the innate ability to learn […] rather than being "pre-programmed", but then one would not expect chimpanzees, ducks, etc., to have the innate ability to learn human natural language, whereas I (at least) would expect chimpanzees to have the innate ability to learn chimpanzee natural language, ducks to have the innate ability to learn duck natural language, and so on. Computers, of course, have no innate abilities at all, other than the ability to do exactly what they are subsequently programmed to do.