Everett: Language is not Innate!

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Veritas Aequitas
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Everett: Language is not Innate!

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Daniel Everett is an American linguistic anthropologist and author best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett

Everett focused on the theories of Noam Chomsky.
Everett eventually concluded that Chomsky's ideas about universal grammar, and the universality of recursion in particular (at least understood in terms of self-embedded structures), are falsified by Pirahã.

Everett wrote the following books:

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
In November 2008, Everett's book on the culture and language of the Pirahã people, and what it was like to live among them, was published in the United Kingdom by Profile Books and in the United States by Pantheon Books. Blackwell's booksellers in the UK selected this as one of the best books of 2009 in the UK. National Public Radio selected it as one of the best books of 2009 in the US. Translations have appeared in German, French, and Korean, and others are due to appear in 2010 in Thai, and Mandarin. Although the book has been discussed widely on the internet[according to whom?] for the chapter that discusses his abandonment of religious faith,[citation needed] it is mainly about doing scientific field research and the discoveries that this has led to about the grammar and culture of the Pirahã people.[citation needed] Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes was runner-up for the 2008 award for adult non-fiction from the Society of Midland Authors.[8]

Language: The Cultural Tool
This book develops an alternative to the view that language is innate.
It argues that language is, like the bow and arrow, a tool to solve a common human problem, the need to communicate efficiently and effectively.[9][10]

Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious
In this book, published by the University of Chicago Press, Everett reviews a great deal of philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science to argue that humans are molded by culture and that the idea of human nature is not a very good fit with the facts. He reiterates and supports Aristotle's claim that the mind is a blank slate and makes the case that the notion of the human self most compatible with the facts is the Buddhist concept of anātman.

How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
In this work, Everett makes the case that Homo erectus invented language nearly two million years ago and that the subsequent species Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were born into a linguistic world.

Religious beliefs
Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, Everett's belief in Christianity slowly diminished and he became an atheist.
He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982 and had abandoned all faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late 1990s;[11] when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact. However, by 2008 full contact and relations have been restored with his children, who now seem to accept his viewpoint on theism.[12]


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Anyone has any serious counter to Daniel Everett thesis that Language is not Innate?
Age
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Re: Everett: Language is not Innate!

Post by Age »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Mon Dec 27, 2021 7:10 am Daniel Everett is an American linguistic anthropologist and author best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett

Everett focused on the theories of Noam Chomsky.
Everett eventually concluded that Chomsky's ideas about universal grammar, and the universality of recursion in particular (at least understood in terms of self-embedded structures), are falsified by Pirahã.

Everett wrote the following books:

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
In November 2008, Everett's book on the culture and language of the Pirahã people, and what it was like to live among them, was published in the United Kingdom by Profile Books and in the United States by Pantheon Books. Blackwell's booksellers in the UK selected this as one of the best books of 2009 in the UK. National Public Radio selected it as one of the best books of 2009 in the US. Translations have appeared in German, French, and Korean, and others are due to appear in 2010 in Thai, and Mandarin. Although the book has been discussed widely on the internet[according to whom?] for the chapter that discusses his abandonment of religious faith,[citation needed] it is mainly about doing scientific field research and the discoveries that this has led to about the grammar and culture of the Pirahã people.[citation needed] Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes was runner-up for the 2008 award for adult non-fiction from the Society of Midland Authors.[8]

Language: The Cultural Tool
This book develops an alternative to the view that language is innate.
It argues that language is, like the bow and arrow, a tool to solve a common human problem, the need to communicate efficiently and effectively.[9][10]

Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious
In this book, published by the University of Chicago Press, Everett reviews a great deal of philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science to argue that humans are molded by culture and that the idea of human nature is not a very good fit with the facts. He reiterates and supports Aristotle's claim that the mind is a blank slate and makes the case that the notion of the human self most compatible with the facts is the Buddhist concept of anātman.

How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
In this work, Everett makes the case that Homo erectus invented language nearly two million years ago and that the subsequent species Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were born into a linguistic world.

Religious beliefs
Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, Everett's belief in Christianity slowly diminished and he became an atheist.
He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982 and had abandoned all faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late 1990s;[11] when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact. However, by 2008 full contact and relations have been restored with his children, who now seem to accept his viewpoint on theism.[12]


........................
Anyone has any serious counter to Daniel Everett thesis that Language is not Innate?
This would depend on what 'you', "veritas aequitas", or "daniel everett", actually mean and refer to when you both use the word 'innate'.

See, NO one is born with let us say for example the 'korean language', OBVIOUSLY.
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