The Science of Language Read Online Free PDF Page A

seventy thousand years ago. Everywhere where humans are, it's essentially the same. Now, maybe in Australia they don't havearithmetic; Warlpiri, for example, does not. But they have intricate kinship systems which, as Ken Hale pointed out, have a lot of the properties ofmathematical systems. Merge just seems to be in the mind, working on interesting formal problems: you don't have arithmetic, so you have complicated kinship systems.
    JM: That suggests that at least the possibility of constructingnatural sciences – that that came too with Merge .
    NC: It did, it starts right away. Right at this period you start finding it – and here we have fossil evidence and archaeological evidence of recording of natural events, such as the lunar cycles, and things like that. People begin to notice what is going on in the world and trying to interpret what is going on. And then it enters into ceremonies, and the like. It went on that way for a long time.
    What we callscience [that is, natural science with explicit, formal theories and the assumption that what they describe should be taken seriously, or thought of as ‘real’] is extremely recent, and very narrow.Galileo had a hell of a time trying to convince his funders – the aristocrats – that there was any point in studying something like a ball rolling down a frictionless inclined plane. “Who cares about that? There is all sorts of interesting stuff going on in the world. What do you have to say about flowers growing? That would be interesting; tell me about that.” Galileo the scientist had nothing to say about flowers growing. Instead, he had to try to convince his funders that there was some point in studying an experiment that he couldn't even carry out – half of the experiments that Galileo described were thought experiments, and he describes them as if he carried them out, but it was later shown that he couldn't . . .The idea of not looking at the world as too complicated, of trying to narrow it down to some artificial piece of the world that you could actually investigate in depth and maybe even learn some principles about it that would help you understand other things [what we might think of as pure science, science that aims at basic structures, without regard to applications] – that's a huge step in the sciences and, in fact, it was only very recently taken. Galileo convinced some people that there were these laws that you just had to memorize. But in his time they were still used as calculating devices; they provided ways of building things, and the like. It really wasn't until the twentieth century thattheoretical physics became recognized as a legitimate domain in itself. For example, Boltzmann tried all his life to convince people to take atoms and molecules seriously, not just think of them as calculating devices; and he didn't succeed. Even great scientists, such as, say,Poincaré – one of the twentieth century's greatest scientists – just laughed at it. [Those who laughed] were very much under Machian [Ernst Mach's] influence: if you can't see it, touch it . . . [you can't take it seriously]; so you just have a way of calculating. Boltzmann actually committed suicide – in part,apparently, because of his inability to get anyone to take him seriously. By a horrible irony, he did it in 1905, the year that Einstein's Brownian motion paper came out, and everyone began to take it seriously. And it goes on.
    I've beeninterested in the history of chemistry. Into the 1920s, when I was born – so it isn't that far back – leading scientists would have just ridiculed the idea of taking any of this seriously, including Nobel prizewinning chemists. They thought of [atoms and other such ‘devices’] as ways of calculating the results of experiments. Atoms can't be taken seriously, because they don't have a physical explanation, which they didn't. Well, it turned out that the physics of the time was seriously inadequate; you had to radically revise