trained to respond to its keeper’s commands.
What seems to distinguish homo sapiens is the ability to relate two different instances of MEANS (the C concept) in order to compose or to comprehend an ad hoc proposition. This poses a couple of questions.
The first is about the ability to relate: how are the R concepts acquired? The ones we’ve already seen in LanguidSlog are concepts like HAS PROPERTY and INSTANTIATED by; and AGENT, THEME and GOAL. Arguably these are innate. They certainly must have been in the minds of our pre-linguistic ancestors for language to have evolved to express them. But that doesn’t mean all R concepts must be innate. The example CONSIDERED NOT that was used above might not be universal and could be constructed just as well as LABRADOODLE can.
The second question is harder. The compositionality of language depends upon the generalisation of C concepts – not all into one but into manageable groups. For example, the infant learns POPPAEA / HASP / BEAUTIFUL and NERO / HASP / MAD, and knows that NERO / HASP / BEAUTIFUL may not be true but can be represented by a grammatical sentence. The infant also knows that MAD / HASP / NERO is nonsensical and would be ungrammatical in language. How is that done?
We might jump to the conclusion that Cs are acquired individually but are soon grouped. It’s conceivable that some groups are innate – old-fashioned ‘parts of speech’ perhaps. But there is a lot of evidence – synonymy, homonymy, idioms etc – that grouping is much more subtle than that. Surely it is learned rather than innate.
At this point we must be careful not to imply that, going from the particular to the more general, there’s a ghost in the machine making the necessary judgments. That would be very un-NG. So please tune in again next week.