“It was Pavlov who showed that language was a consequence of the human cerebral complexity and that it objectified the superiority and specificity of the human brain with respect to animal brains. He perceived language as a special type of conditioned reflexes, a second system of signalization, the first one being that of gnosis and praxis of direct thinking by images. To each image will be substituted through education its verbal denomination. Since they name everything, instead of associating images, human beings can directly associate the corresponding names, a system more efficient in maximizing the abstraction capabilities of the human brain” [Chauchard 1960, p. 122, from Michaud 2019].
In short, Pavlov believed that the process of thinking is possessed by all animals (which runs contrary to the views of Chomsky 1965, 2012), and what happened to humans (between 2 and 0.5 mya, Everett 2016; Kimura 1993) is that they invented language (as they invented writing, the steam engine, and AI) by using the ‘thinking’ process of the neocortex to make associations between sounds and objects in the real world (a little like what Chat-GPT does today, but more efficiently and at an accelerated rate during development). The universal grammar proposed by Chomsky (1965) is merely an acknowledgement that all Homo sapiens are of the same species and therefore have a common capacity to acquire language, which today includes reading and writing both of which have become global requirements for citizenship by way of state-sponsored education from K to 12. Indeed, Pavlov’s view (unlike Chomsky’s) fits better with our understanding of evolution and human inventiveness (Michaud 2019), two notions ignored by Chomsky.
On the one hand, humans and some animals have syntax, on the other hand, I can not imagine "time" as an object of the real world.
It really depends on how one defines invention as it relates to cultural transmission within species. I suspect that if there were a massive nuclear war/climate-collapse, whereby most records of human ingenuity were destroyed, humans would be forced to re-invent the wheel before returning to Chat-gtp status. Let's hope our kids don't get to experience this.
Furthermore, regarding a previous comment defending Noam Chomsky, the commentator needs to read more Noam Chomsky to understand that Chomsky is a philosopher and not a biologist. In all my years at MIT, he never attended not even one neuroscience seminar and I very much doubt that he attended seminars on genetics and evolutionary biology.
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