Reception
Pinker's assumptions about the innateness of language have been challenged; opponents claim that "either the logic is fallacious, or the factual data are incorrect (or, sometimes, both)".
The statement that deaf babies "spontaneously invent sign languages with complex grammar" is actually only true in groups of deaf children (deaf communities) while a lone deaf child in a village where everyone else can hear never invents more than simple gestures. This actually supports a view of language as a social adaptation evolutionary kludge.
Richard Webster writes that The Language Instinct argues cogently that the human capacity for language is part of the genetic endowment associated with the evolution through natural selection of specialised neural networks within the brain, and that its attack on the 'Standard Social Science Model' of human nature is effective. Webster accepts Pinker's argument that, twentieth-century social scientists have, for ideological motives, minimized the extent to which human nature is influenced by genetics. However, Webster finds Pinker's speculation about other specialized neural networks that may have evolved within the human brain, such as "intuitive mechanics" and "intuitive biology", to be questionable, and believes that there is a danger that they will be treated by others as science. Webster believes that such speculations strengthen supporters of extreme genetic determinism.
Read more about this topic: The Language Instinct
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)