Is There a Difference Between Learning Language and Cognitive Learning?

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Chomsky believed that language wasn't it? I think he was. Budybodyansky, mot chomsky, ye. The fact that children can so much more easily learn language than adoubts like, which side does that favor? Or can both sides explain that equally well enough? Tat's a good question. Both sides can explain it in a different way. So that people who appeal to the general learning mechanisms, like statistical learning, would appeal to the plasticity of the brain,. Just being it's just more valuable early in life.

David and Tamler talk about the often rancorous debate among cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists over whether the mind is modular -- composed of discrete systems responsible for vision, reasoning, cheater detection, sexual jealousy, and so on. David and Tamler (mostly David) describe the history of the debate, then dive into a recent paper (Pietraszewski & Wertz, 2021) arguing that virtually all the disagreement is the product of a conceptual and methodological confusion â€“ that the two sides are operating with different levels of analysis and talking past each other as a result.

Plus, we REALLY tried not to talk about the University of Austin thing for the whole opening segment. We had another topic lined up and everything. It just didnâ€™t work out. Cicero would understand. Bari Weiss stans might wanna skip to the main segment.