I strongly second the comment of the week! I really appreciated the bus ride post, particularly that naked, straightforward expression of pain and sorrow, and, yeah, despair.
It's something I feel like I am perpetually yearning to do as clearly and artfully as you did there, and -I while say in acknowledgement of your improvement since then- as you did even better (or better at something similar) in 'when you have come apart', which drew me in to reading your stuff seriously and regularly after being a casual fan for at a year or two.
& Fwiw it gives me a sort of comfort (or something like it) to see you just casually talking about being in a depressive funk... I've been in one for a couple weeks and have recently made similar apologies to people around me for 'reduced output'. Feels kinda lame to say but it helps to see someone else, someone I respect, dealing with something at least somewhat similar (and still putting out more good pieces a week than many writer do at their best...).
I love your book recommendations. One of the most satisfying areas of my life is my list of to-be-reads, which I pull out every time I feel myself getting sucked into Twitter and the internet. Being able to instantly reserve or buy these books keeps me going all year long, so thank you.
Dealing with depression is not easy (he said from experience, though with full knowledge that his mental health issues have been far less challenging than yours, due to his getting luckier in the biology birth lottery). I hope feisty commenters like me have not contributed to it (though would not be surprised to hear that we have ...)
When people write about awards I seldom see the Dublin Literary Award mentioned (It is a big $$ award--100,000--Maybe because its nomination process is so different (libraries nominate). The 2021 year's winner is Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.
The Lord Mayor of Dublin makes the announcement. The Lord Mayor is Hazel Chu.
The nominating library was Vila de Gràcia Library, Barcelona, Spain.
I'm a professor of communication sciences and disorders, and my area of expertise is the neurological organization of language from a Chomskyan perspective. Your post on the topic of Chomsky, Skinner, and poverty of the stimulus was well written, and I am simultaneously fascinated by these questions. There is actually ongoing research on the kind of Kaspar Hauser situations you described - the case of deaf late learners of sign language. The older children who entered schools in Nicaragua in fact failed to develop a full sign language - it was only the younger generation. This is the same with deaf adolescents and adults born to hearing parents in many countries who are only exposed to American Sign Language upon arrival in the U.S., past the critical period. These children are remarkably like Kaspar Hauser and the famous case of Genie - the hearing girl who was abused and deprived of language input until adolescence, and effectively unable to learn grammar (despite acquiring a large vocabulary). Unlike these isolated cases, the deaf subjects are a larger group and can be studied more systematically. I was involved in research projects with these subjects as a postdoc and I can tell you, there are striking effects here; they learn ASL vocabulary vociferously, but word and sentence structure seem essentially opaque (e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01690960500139363?casa_token=gUQaL0_lMIQAAAAA%3AnotZai96KSP8gzTrZg9DjAWc5sO9v9mb3JNknmerrQDaZOSv9UPm-EUlCsc0v1vw0CPntmzMTYWN).
You are also completely correct that many researchers in the cognitive sciences are essentially back at the Skinnerian position. Chomsky is very much out of vogue, and I would say that, on balance, most people in the field adhere to a more modern version of behaviorism that uses some different terminology but essentially amounts to the same claims: language acquisition is a learned behavior no different from other learned behaviors, and the shape of our knowledge of language reflects the shape of the language data we were exposed to. Unfortunately, this position is just as wrong now as it was in the 50s. The critical period data have not gone away, but they are often waved away. At any rate, for a long time I have feared the advent of a dark age of cognitive science, essentially forgetting all of the lessons of the cognitive revolution of the mid twentieth century, and stagnation in terms of our understanding of language and other faculties of mind.
However, lately I have been more optimistic. For one, there is still a strong minority of researchers who have not forgotten these lessons and are not caught up in the current zeitgeist. This includes some very prominent neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. Secondly, I feel that the new empiricist (~behaviorist) consensus, while perhaps reenergized with new methodological approaches, is starting to hit dead ends and that the flaws in this perspective will become more and more glaring. I think in about 20 years the Chomskyan position (at least in spirit, if not in detail) may very well become the dominant one again. Who knows, but I certainly hope so.
I strongly second the comment of the week! I really appreciated the bus ride post, particularly that naked, straightforward expression of pain and sorrow, and, yeah, despair.
It's something I feel like I am perpetually yearning to do as clearly and artfully as you did there, and -I while say in acknowledgement of your improvement since then- as you did even better (or better at something similar) in 'when you have come apart', which drew me in to reading your stuff seriously and regularly after being a casual fan for at a year or two.
& Fwiw it gives me a sort of comfort (or something like it) to see you just casually talking about being in a depressive funk... I've been in one for a couple weeks and have recently made similar apologies to people around me for 'reduced output'. Feels kinda lame to say but it helps to see someone else, someone I respect, dealing with something at least somewhat similar (and still putting out more good pieces a week than many writer do at their best...).
I love your book recommendations. One of the most satisfying areas of my life is my list of to-be-reads, which I pull out every time I feel myself getting sucked into Twitter and the internet. Being able to instantly reserve or buy these books keeps me going all year long, so thank you.
Dealing with depression is not easy (he said from experience, though with full knowledge that his mental health issues have been far less challenging than yours, due to his getting luckier in the biology birth lottery). I hope feisty commenters like me have not contributed to it (though would not be surprised to hear that we have ...)
Meanwhile, looking forward to chapter 3 ...
I loved the fiction you published. I’m really looking forward to the rest, and I hope it being out there gets it some attention.
When people write about awards I seldom see the Dublin Literary Award mentioned (It is a big $$ award--100,000--Maybe because its nomination process is so different (libraries nominate). The 2021 year's winner is Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.
The Lord Mayor of Dublin makes the announcement. The Lord Mayor is Hazel Chu.
The nominating library was Vila de Gràcia Library, Barcelona, Spain.
https://dublinliteraryaward.ie/books/lost-children-archive/
I'm a professor of communication sciences and disorders, and my area of expertise is the neurological organization of language from a Chomskyan perspective. Your post on the topic of Chomsky, Skinner, and poverty of the stimulus was well written, and I am simultaneously fascinated by these questions. There is actually ongoing research on the kind of Kaspar Hauser situations you described - the case of deaf late learners of sign language. The older children who entered schools in Nicaragua in fact failed to develop a full sign language - it was only the younger generation. This is the same with deaf adolescents and adults born to hearing parents in many countries who are only exposed to American Sign Language upon arrival in the U.S., past the critical period. These children are remarkably like Kaspar Hauser and the famous case of Genie - the hearing girl who was abused and deprived of language input until adolescence, and effectively unable to learn grammar (despite acquiring a large vocabulary). Unlike these isolated cases, the deaf subjects are a larger group and can be studied more systematically. I was involved in research projects with these subjects as a postdoc and I can tell you, there are striking effects here; they learn ASL vocabulary vociferously, but word and sentence structure seem essentially opaque (e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01690960500139363?casa_token=gUQaL0_lMIQAAAAA%3AnotZai96KSP8gzTrZg9DjAWc5sO9v9mb3JNknmerrQDaZOSv9UPm-EUlCsc0v1vw0CPntmzMTYWN).
You are also completely correct that many researchers in the cognitive sciences are essentially back at the Skinnerian position. Chomsky is very much out of vogue, and I would say that, on balance, most people in the field adhere to a more modern version of behaviorism that uses some different terminology but essentially amounts to the same claims: language acquisition is a learned behavior no different from other learned behaviors, and the shape of our knowledge of language reflects the shape of the language data we were exposed to. Unfortunately, this position is just as wrong now as it was in the 50s. The critical period data have not gone away, but they are often waved away. At any rate, for a long time I have feared the advent of a dark age of cognitive science, essentially forgetting all of the lessons of the cognitive revolution of the mid twentieth century, and stagnation in terms of our understanding of language and other faculties of mind.
However, lately I have been more optimistic. For one, there is still a strong minority of researchers who have not forgotten these lessons and are not caught up in the current zeitgeist. This includes some very prominent neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. Secondly, I feel that the new empiricist (~behaviorist) consensus, while perhaps reenergized with new methodological approaches, is starting to hit dead ends and that the flaws in this perspective will become more and more glaring. I think in about 20 years the Chomskyan position (at least in spirit, if not in detail) may very well become the dominant one again. Who knows, but I certainly hope so.