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  • Essay / You speak my language - 1530

    Language; we use it every day. Whether it's describing portraits to our family and friends, or announcing plays at a soccer game with our classmates, people use language in every moment. But how did this “language” evolve? Daniel Dor, an Israeli linguist, created a theory of language as a communication technology, which is "a new general framework for the description, analysis and explanation of language as a socially constructed communication technology, designed through cultural evolution to enable communication across experiential gaps between its users. Dor argues that language is related to its function of communicating with others rather than being and being an "organ", as Chomsky's argument shows. Dor's view also differs from the functionalist view, albeit slightly; functionalists argue that language developed due to morphological changes such as larger brain size. Dor argues that language developed through cultural evolution, being learned and improved with each generation. Using Dor's theory of language, Eva Jabonka and Marion J. Lamb argue that "language evolution [is] the result of continuous interactions between the cultural and genetic inheritance system, niche construction, and assimilation genetics being important. (p. 307) Although this argument is forcefully made by Jablonka and Lamb, its validity needs to be tested. This argument will only be valid “...if and only if it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. » The first premise is that a language evolves culturally from incoherent chatter to a sophisticated linguistic system. Jablonka and Lamb show this idea in the introduction to their thought experiment. In this experiment, there is a group of first...... middle of paper...... language that evolves, which makes the conclusion also true. Therefore, based on the definition of validity, this argument is valid. Even if the validity of the conclusion is proven inductively, this does not mean that it is valid. This idea of ​​genetic and cultural systems is still relatively new and requires more evidence to become a solid conclusion. In addition to the evidence, there are other ideas that still seem relevant to language development. The views of Chomsky and the functionalists are still debated, so this idea of ​​interaction is not solidified as the "culmination" of how language developed. As stated previously, the conclusion is valid, based on the inductive reasoning presented by the thought experiment. However, the validity of the conclusion cannot be proven due to the highly questionable ideas presented by the thought experiment..