Is Language the Result of a Dedicated Competitional Process?

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People like paul bloom and frank hile believe that infants are born with all sorts of concepts already baked into the brain, into the mind. Meanwhile, there's a whole different brand of cognitive science, say, so m i t was always like the chomsky and those guys were always asserted associated with nativeism. And over at use san diego, you had like this, the hot bed of a rebirth of empiricism. So is language the result of a dedicated competitional process? Sochomsky argued, of course.

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.