Shadowing Practice: Noam Chomsky - Mysterianism, Language, and Human Understanding - Learn English Speaking with Video
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There is a concept called the new Mysterianism.
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It was coined by philosopher Owen Flanagan,
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who defined it as a postmodern position designed to drive a railroad spike through the heart of scientism by holding
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that consciousness may never be completely explained.
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And the term has been extended to broader questions about the scope and nature of explanations accessible to human intelligence.
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I'll use the term in the broader sense, which seems to be the more significant one.
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Actually, I'm cited as one of the culprits responsible for this strange postmodern heresy,
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which I happily accept, though I would prefer a different term for it, namely truism.
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That's what I thought 40 years ago in proposing a distinction between problems which fall within our cognitive capacities,
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maybe very hard, but in principle fall within them, and mysteries which do not fall within them at all.
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I was borrowing terms from Charles Sanders Peirce's account of what he called abduction,
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the concept in his words that the human mind is a biological system that provides the mind with certain admissible hypotheses,
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which are the foundations of human knowledge and of science.
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And then, as a matter of simple logic, these must exclude others that are inaccessible to us altogether,
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or perhaps too remote on some accessibility hierarchy to be accessible in fact,
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though they might be for a differently structured mind.
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Peirce's abduction is sometimes interpreted in the philosophical literature as inference to the best explanation,
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but that's not quite accurate.
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Crucially, Peirce insisted on what he called the limits of admissible hypotheses,
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which he took to be quite narrow for quite good reasons, to be a prerequisite for, in his words, imagining correct theories.
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Now Peirce was concerned with the growth of scientific knowledge, but the same logic holds for acquisition of common sense understanding.
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All of this does seem to me close to truism,
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if not necessarily for the reasons that have led many distinguished figures over the centuries to somewhat similar conclusions.
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The reason it's truism is that if we are biological organisms,
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not angels, then our cognitive faculties are similar to those that are called physical capacities,
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and they should be studied much as other systems of the body are.
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These truisms, and that's what they are, are commonly rejected in the study of mental faculties, the language in particular.
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That seems to me one instance of a curious tendency to treat mental aspects of the human organism differently from
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so -called physical aspects.
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It's a kind of methodological dualism, which is much more pernicious than Cartesian metaphysical dualism.
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The latter was a respectable scientific hypothesis,
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proven wrong, as respectable scientific hypotheses regularly are proven wrong
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when Newton demonstrated a few years later that one of the two substances that Descartes had postulated doesn't exist namely body
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Newton demonstrated that there are no machines
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that undermine what was called the mechanical philosophy mechanical science which was the foundations of early modern science from Galileo on.
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And by doing so, by eliminating the concept of body, physical, mechanical, and so on,
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Newton also eliminated the mind -body problem, at least in its Cartesian form.
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Mythological dualism, in contrast, has absolutely nothing to recommend it.
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And if that's true, I think it is, then And Mysterianism is indeed just a variety of truism, along with what's called internalism.
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This is contrary to views widely held, as philosophers among you will know.
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Well, as David Hume put the matter not long after,
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I'll quote him, we must keep to the Newtonian philosophy with a modest skepticism to a certain degree
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and with a fair confession of ignorance in subjects
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that exceed all human capacity and for Hume that includes virtually everything beyond appearances.
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We must, he said, refrain from disquisitions concerning their real nature and operations.
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It is the imagination, a kind of magical faculty in the soul,
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which is inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding.
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Can't possibly comprehend it.
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And it's that mystical system,
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magical system, that leads us to believe that we experience external continuing objects,
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so -called physical or so -called mind and self.
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Well, all of this is thoroughgoing Mysterianism.
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That would include the quandaries
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that were considered to be the hard problems in the early days of modern science
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and philosophy in the 17th and 18th century.
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The most troublesome of the hard problems in that era had to do with the nature of motion, of attraction and repulsion.
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Problems, incidentally, that were never solved, but were rather abandoned and so understood by the more perceptive observers,
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like John Locke and David Hume, recognized to be permanent mysteries, at least mysteries for humans,
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some other structured intelligence might see things differently
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that was incidentally well understood at the time forgotten now but well understood in those days
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so luck wrote that his words we remain in incurable ignorance of what we desire to know
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about matter and its effects and no science of bodies
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that provides true explanations is within our reach nevertheless he says
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he was convinced by the judicious Mr. Newton's incomparable book Principia
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that it's too bold a presumption to limit God's power in this point by my narrow conceptions
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so though gravitation of matter to matter is Locke wrote inconceivable to me as it was to Newton And nevertheless,
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as Newton demonstrated, we must recognize that it is within God's power to put into bodies powers
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and ways of operations above what can be derived from our idea of body
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or can be explained by what we can know of matter.
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and thanks to newton's work we know that he has done
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so given the mysterian truisms what is inconceivable to us is no criterion for what can exist
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and newton agreed in his constant search for some way to avoid what he called the absurd conclusion
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that objects interact at a distance
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He speculated that God, who is everywhere,
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might be the immaterial agent implementing gravitational interactions, but he could go no further,
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since in his famous phrase, he would not feign hypotheses beyond what could be experimentally established.
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So he left it as a mystery.
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And Newton agreed with his most eminent critic, Leibniz, that interaction without contact is inconceivable,
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although he did not agree that divine intervention, his only explanation, would leave such attraction as,
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in his words, an unaccountable and unreasonable occult property.
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It's referring back to debates about neo -scholasticism.
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Well, accordingly, the goals of scientific inquiry were implicitly restricted from the intelligibility of nature,
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which was, in fact, the criterion for true understanding in early modern science.
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Galilean science and its successors abandoned that and moved to something much narrower.
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intelligibility of theories about the world it's quite a different concept
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that seems to me a step of considerable significance in the history of human thought
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and inquiry much more so than is is generally recognized.
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It's been kind of assimilated into the.
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scientific common sense of the subsequent period without recognition of how
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much of early modern science was simply abandoned as beyond our capacities.
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This bears directly on the scope of Mysterianism in the broad sense.
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John Locke went on to conclude that just as God had added to matter such inconceivable properties as gravitational attraction,
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he might also have super -added to matter a capacity of thought.
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If we replace God by nature, that opens the way to inquiry,
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a path that was in fact pursued extensively in the years that followed, right through the 18th century,
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leading to the conclusion that thought is simply a property of certain forms of organized matter.
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Darwin restated the fairly common 18th century understanding by saying that there is no need to regard thought,
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a secretion of the brain, as more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter.
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inconceivable to us
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but that's a fact about our cognitive limitations not about the
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nature of the world some of the early modern understanding of these matters newton through darwin through darwin
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some of it has been rediscovered in very recent years sometimes with a sense of wonderment
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For example, Francis Crick formulated what he called his astonishing hypothesis
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that our mental
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and emotional states are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
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In the philosophical literature, this rediscovery has sometimes been described as a radical new idea in the study of mind.
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I'm quoting, as Paul Churchland puts it,
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quoting John Searle, the new idea is the bold assertion that mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused by the neurophysiological properties,
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activities of the brain.
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These proposals restate, in virtually the same words, the formulations of centuries ago,
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which have been forgotten, after the traditional mind -body problem became unformulable,
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with the disappearance of the only coherent notion of body, or physical, or material, and so on.
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For example, Joseph Priestley's conclusion into the 18th century that properties termed mental reduced to the organical structure of the brain,
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a concept stated in different words by Locke, Darwin, and many others,
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almost inescapable it would seem after the collapse of the mechanical philosophy which provided the foundations for early modern science.
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the last decade of the 20th century was designated as the decade of the brain
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there's a collection of essays reviewing the results published by the american academy of arts
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and sciences and it contains an introduction by a distinguished neuroscientist vernon mountcastle
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He formulates the guiding theme as, in his words, the thesis of the new biology, that things mental, indeed minds,
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are emergent properties of brains, though these emergences are produced by principles that we do not yet understand,
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once again reiterating 18th century observations in virtually the same words.
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The phrase we do not yet understand, however, should strike a note of caution.
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We might remember Bertrand Russell's observation in 1927,
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the year is important, that chemical laws cannot at present be reduced to physical laws.
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That was a fact, and it was a fact that led many eminent scientists,
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including Nobel laureates, to regard chemistry as not really a science but just a mode of computation that,
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for some reason, could predict experimental results, but not real science.
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Because it couldn't be reduced to physics.
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As soon was discovered, Russell's observation, though correct, was understated.
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Chemical laws were indeed not reducible to physical laws, as physics.. was then understood
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and remained irreducible and still are although after physics underwent radical changes with the quantum theoretic revolution
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which was just taking place at
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that time the new physics entirely different physics was unified with
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a virtually unchanged chemistry chemistry was never reduced to physics it was irreducible to physics physics changed
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and unified within unchanged chemistry
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and there may be lessons here I think there are for neuroscience
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and philosophy of mind
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so contemporary neuroscience is nowhere near as well established as physics
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was a century ago in fact what are there are what
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seemed to me quite cogent critiques of its foundational assumptions recently
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an important book by galliston king to find cognitive neuroscientists the common slogan
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that study of mind is neuroscience at an abstract level
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it might prove to be just as misleading as comparable statements about chemistry 90 years ago
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It doesn't sound too long ago to me.
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It was when I was a child that chemistry and physics were finally unified,
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with Linus Pauling's discovery of a quantum theoretic basis for the chemical bond.
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Well, returning to the impact of Newton's discoveries, his greatest achievement, David Hume wrote,
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was to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature,
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while also restoring nature's ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain.
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We may add, for humans at least, other forms of intelligence might view the world quite differently.
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All of this is a dedicated mysteriatism for very substantial reasons,
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including the leading figures of our intellectual, scientific, philosophical tradition.
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Well, as regards consciousness, it entered modern philosophy, philosophical discourse, at about the same time.
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There's a recent comprehensive scholarly study of this range of topics by Udo Thiel, a kind of gold standard in the field.
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he points out
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that the first English philosopher to make extensive use of the
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noun consciousness with a philosophical meaning was Ralph Cudworth in the 1670s,
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though it was not until 50 years later that consciousness became an object of inquiry in its own right.
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And subsequently, consciousness was identified with thought, as in fact it already had been by Descartes.
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And for some, like Wilhelm von Humboldt, a great linguist, thought was further identified with language,
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which provides the language of thought, modern phrase, but same idea,
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ideas that can be partially reconstructed in contemporary terms.
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Well, in the modern period, identification of thought with consciousness reappears in various ways.
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For example, in Quine's thesis that rule -following reduces either to fitting,
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as the planets fit Kepler's laws, or guiding by conscious thought.
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Only two kinds.
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John Searle's connection principle holds that operations of the mind must be somehow accessible to conscious experience,
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such an idea that's almost impossible to formulate coherently.
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But whether taken to be empirical claims or terminological stipulations,
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these doctrines rule out much of what has been discovered about rule following in language or perception,
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other domains of cognitive science.
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that includes the basic rules of language which do not have that property or what
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donald hoffman cognitive scientist his study of what he calls visual intelligence what he calls the rigidity rule
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that's the rule that image projections are interpreted as projections of rigid motions in three dimensions,
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even with highly impoverished stimuli, obviously by mechanisms that are totally inaccessible to consciousness.
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rule following beyond the most superficial level
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there is all of which is ruled out by contemporary philosophical doctrine which tells us something about the doctrine I think
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there's reason to believe that what reaches consciousness even potentially may well be just a scattered reflection of inaccessible mental processes
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which interact intimately with fragments that reach consciousness.
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There are now famous experiments, which some of you may know about, the Libet experiment on decision making.
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They provide some independent evidence about this matter,
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though what they show is that milliseconds before a conscious decision to do something,
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say pick this up, there's already activity in the relevant parts of the motor cortex.
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That's been interpreted as having some bearing on freedom of will, but I think that's just an error.
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It just says that whatever decisions and choices are made are beyond accessibility to consciousness.
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If this is correct, as it seems to be, then the recent focus on conscious awareness
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or accessibility to conscious may be an error
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it may in fact seriously impede the development of a science of mind
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now these are topics of considerable interest no time to pursue them here well instead of
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that let's return to mysterianism in the broad sense not restricted to consciousness taking
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it to be truism as i think it is well
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we can consider various kinds of mysteries as some of them are quite far -reaching such as those
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i mentioned probably permanent mysteries for humans return to these
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but before doing that it's worth considering mysteries of a kind
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that are narrower the cases that might fall within our cognitive capacities
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and where there might in principle be relevant in period empirical evidence though it's impossible for us to obtain
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it it's an interesting category of mysteries or even narrower cases where
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ethical considerations bar experiments that might answer questions that we can sensibly pose
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so for example a lot is known about the neurology of
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the human visual system thanks to invasive of experiments with cats
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and monkeys but we can't learn anything about language
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that way there is simply nothing homologous known in the animal world
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and relevant human experiments
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which you can think of are barred possibly some barriers might erode with new technology but that's
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so far just a hope well among these mysteries at least
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now maybe forever is the question of the origins of the atomic concepts for thought and language roughly words but not quite
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these are quite different in human thought
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and language from anything that's found in systems of animal communication
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there seems to be a total discontinuity the latter animal systems
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appear to be linked directly to entities in the extra mental
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world can be identified without any consideration of the symbolic system itself
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so let's take a vervet monkey has five signals five calls one of them is associated with fluttering of leaves
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we interpret that to mean
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a predator is coming i don't know what the monkeys do another might be associated with a detectable hormonal change
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which we interpret as meaning i'm hungry that appears to be quite general
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and across all known animal systems and totally different from human language
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Where even the simplest elements, simplest words, lack this property,
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contrary to a conventional referentialist doctrine,
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which holds that there is a direct relation between words and extramental entities that's illustrated in the titles of standard works,
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like Quine's Word and Object, or Roger Brown's Word and Things, and an extensive literature.
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Furthermore, the associations for animal symbol systems are of a kind quite different from anything in human language.
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One of the leading specialists on the topic, Laura Ann Petito, who directed the famous NIMH project,
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she writes that chimps, unlike humans,
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use labels in a way that seems to rely heavily on some global notion of association.
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So a chimp will use the same label, we take it to be apple, to refer to the action of eating apples,
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the location where apples are kept, events and locations of objects other than apples that happen to be stored with an apple,
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say the knife that was used to cut it, and so on and so forth all simultaneously
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and without apparent recognition of the relevant differences or the advantages of being able to distinguish among them.
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In contrast, even in the first words of a young human baby, she's intensively studied human babies,
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these are used in a concept -constrained way.
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But the usage of chimps, even after years of training and of communication with humans,
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never displays this sensitivity to differences among natural kinds.
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So surprisingly, she concludes, chimps do not really have names for things at all.
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They only have a hodgepodge of loose associations.
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Human language is radically different except in one respect.
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It also doesn't have names for things, though for different reasons.
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The atomic concepts of human language and thought, kind of word -like elements,
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do not pick out entities of the extra -mental world,
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entities that, say, a physicist could discover without investigating the human mind.
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So there apparently is no notion of reference or denotation for human language,
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Though, of course, there are actions of referring and denoting something quite different.
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One can posit a circumstance -dependent relation of something like reference derived from acts of referring.
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So, for example, the name Jones refers to the person Jones,
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and the notion of person is far from an innocent notion
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that can do so insofar as we refer to him by using the name in some particular circumstances.
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But the act of referring is the only really functioning notion, contrary to widespread belief.
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this much incidentally was already clear to aristotle he concluded
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that quoting him we can define a house as stones bricks and timbers in terms of the material constitution
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but also as a receptacle to to shelter chattels
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and living beings in terms of function and design
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and Aristotle says we must combine both parts of the definition integrating matter
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and form since the essence of the house involves the purpose and end of the material
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Constitution hence a house is not a mind independent object and
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that becomes still clearer
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when we investigate the meaning of the word furthers no time to go into it
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but you find that very quickly and we discover
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that the concept house has much more complex properties universally across languages that's an observation
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that generalizes to every word you can think of inquiry reveals that even the simplest words
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have quite intricate meanings notice
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that aristotle was defining the entity house not the word house for him it's a matter of metaphysics
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and in fact i've been quoting from his metaphysics
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the entity is a combination of matter
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and form in the 17th century there was a kind of a cognitive revolution
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and this general point of view shifted towards seeking what were called innate cognoscative processes,
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it's a good word, that enter into our understanding of experience and that reshape experience to conform to our modes of cognition.
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Summarizing these many years of discussions of...
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such topics, quite rich discussion.
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And for his own independent reasons, Hume concluded that the identity that we ascribe to minds,
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vegetables, animal bodies, and other entities is only a fictitious one established by the
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imagination upon like objects and not a particular nature belonging to this form, something mind independent.
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Recent studies of acquisition have shown that even the most elementary words,
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meaning bearing elements, are acquired from very restricted evidence,
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and often very rapidly during the early years of life, even under severe sensory constraints.
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it's difficult to see how one can avoid the conclusion that these intricate structures
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depend on innate cognoscative powers of the kinds
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that were in fact explored in quite interesting ways during the first cognitive revolution of the 17th century
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and intricacies mount very rapidly when you go beyond the simplest
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elements like words reinforcing the conclusion
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that innate properties of the mind play a critical role in their acquisition
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and use of course well beyond accessibility to consciousness well if
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if these conclusions do indeed generalize this seems to be the case it would follow
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that natural language has no semantics in the technical sense a technical sense means relations between
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symbols
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and things outside the system reference denotation rather natural language has
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syntax some kind of symbol manipulation internal to the mind and pragmatics modes of use of language the field of formal semantics,
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which includes model theoretic semantics, falls under syntax in this categorization.
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It's a form of symbol manipulation.
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It's motivated by external world considerations,
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not just as phonology, the study of sound systems is motivated by external events,
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but it relates to the world only in quite complex ways
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in the context of theories of action well these conclusions pose
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very serious problems for any any potential theory of the origin of language as i mentioned
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it seems to be the case
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that animal communication systems are based on a one -to -one relation between mind brain processes
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and an aspect of the environment to which these processes adapt the animals behavior
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and quoting from a standard review if so then the gap between human language
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and animal communication is as dramatic in this domain as it is in every other domain the domain of language structure
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acquisition and use so there is a problem about a radical discontinuity between humans
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and anything in the animal world and no time to go into it here
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but that discontinuity appears to have emerged very recently
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and probably within the last hundred thousand years
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which is nothing in evolutionary time well let's turn briefly to the objects to which a speaker refers
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so we have to ask what qualifies actually quine was much concerned with this topic
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he observed
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that in some cases a noun phrase may not be i'm
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quoting a compelling candidate for a thinghood quoting daniel dennett discussing the issues recently then it observes paris
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and london plainly exist but do the miles that separate them also exist
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and quine's answer then it writes is
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that a noun phrase of this kind like miles is defective
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and its putative reference need not be taken seriously from an ontological point of view
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and there do seem to be distinctions among candidates for things would think
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but questions arise very quickly so it takes say the word thing
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That should be a compelling candidate for thinghood, you might imagine.
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But what are the identity conditions for things?
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How many of them are there?
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How can we find out?
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Well, suppose, for example, that we see some branches strewn on the ground.
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If they fell from a tree after a storm, they're not a thing.
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But if they were placed there carefully by an artist as a work of conceptual art,
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maybe given a name then the construction is a thing might win an award an art exhibit
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and a little thought will show
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that complex factors enter into determining whether some part of the world constitutes a thing that includes human intention and design
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ristotelian form which are not properties that can be detected by study of the mind independent world.
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And if thing doesn't qualify for thinghood, what does?
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Answer, I suspect, nothing.
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What about Dennett's examples, Paris and London, which he says are prototypical examples of real things.
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Well, we can refer to them.
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So if I were to say I visited London the year before it was destroyed by a great fire
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and then rebuilt with entirely different materials and design 50 miles up the Thames
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and we're intend to revisit it next year London I'm referring to London
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but evidently the extra mental world doesn't doesn't contain an entity with properties like
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that an entity that a physicist could in principle discover.
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We can, however, refer to London,
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either by using the name London or by a pronoun linked to it or by some more complex phrase,
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maybe my favorite city or something else.
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What this means is that in my internal language, whatever stored up here.
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There is an internal entity, London, not necessarily matching yours exactly,
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constituted of elements that provide perspectives for referring to aspects of the world.
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Something that is familiar to phonologists, it's similar to the way that the features of the internal phonetic element, say, ta,
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provide means for me to pronounce and interpret certain events in the world
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but it doesn't pick out an entity in the world
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and these terms classical paradoxes become impossible to formulate
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that's from Plutarch's ship of Theseus to Saul Kripke's current puzzles all of
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which are stated in terms of referentialist assumptions and become unstatable if you reject those assumptions.
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With the rise of corpuscular theories in the 17th century,
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the focus of investigation into topics like these shifted from individuation,
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so what makes an individual distinct from others, to the prior question of identity,
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what makes an individual the same through time despite changes
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so for a corpuscularian like all the great scientists of the
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17th century an individual is just what it is quote robert boyle it's a distinct portion of matter
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which a number of corpuscles make up a study of identity through time,
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led pretty soon to a cognitive treatment of the issue, as Thiel puts it in his standard work,
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as substantial forms are denied and no principle of identity could be discovered in the things themselves,
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it is recognized that their identity must depend on what we regard as their essential constituents,
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that is, on our criteria for judging, on our concepts of things this subjectivist revolution as teal calls
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it was carried forward particularly by lock for whom existence is preserved under the same denomination
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that is in terms of our internal abstract ideas
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which we employ to think about the world david hume interprets
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our tendency to assign identity through time as a kind of a natural instinct
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which construct like an animal instinct which construct constructs experience to conform to the modes of cognition,
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Kantian terms, and in ways that sharply differ from anything in the animal world.
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And this instinct, Hume writes,
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is developed by the imagination which creates concepts that bind the succession of related objects together,
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leading us to imagine something unknown and mysterious connecting the parts.
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so ascription of identity is a construction of the imagination
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and the factors
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that enter into constructing these fictions become a topic of cognitive science although at this point hume would have demurred
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if the imagination is as he thought quoting him a kind of magical faculty
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which is inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding.
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These early modern forms of Mysterianism are fundamental.
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They lead to a fundamental kind of the sort that I mentioned briefly earlier.
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For Locke and for Hume,
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it follows simply from epistemological considerations that the limits of our understanding are extremely narrow, even in principle.
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However, Locke and Hume also took quite seriously the new science -based mysterianism that arose from Newton's demolition of the mechanical philosophy,
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which, as I said, had provided the very criterion of intelligibility for the scientific revolution of the 17th century.
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which was based on the conception of the world as an elaborate machine it's commonly believed
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that newton presented a conception of the world as a machine that's exactly the opposite
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newton showed that nothing is a machine and whatever the world is it's not a machine
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galileo had insisted that theories are intelligible only under a very restrictive
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As he put it, if we can duplicate their posits by means of appropriate artificial devices.
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That was a concept that was maintained by Descartes,
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Leibniz, Huygens, Newton, all the great figures of the scientific revolution.
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accordingly newton's discoveries left the world unintelligible when his theological
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assumptions are dismissed and the solution
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that was kind of tacitly reached as i mentioned earlier was
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simply to lower the goals of science abandoning the search for
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intelligibility of the world in favor of something much weaker the search for theories
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that are intelligible to us whether or not what they posit is intelligible
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so it was quite natural for Bertrand Russell a century ago
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to dismiss the very idea of an intelligible world as absurd
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there is we'll never get an understanding of the world that's no longer a reasonable goal for scientific inquiry well
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while the list of Mysterians as long and distinguished as these examples illustrate,
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their stance seems to contrast with the exuberant contemporary thesis
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that the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment provided humans with limitless explanatory power as illustrated by the rapid development of modern science.
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This was recently articulated by physicist David Deutsch who wrote that the great achievements of the Enlightenment and modern science,
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early modern science, was to direct inquiry to the quest of good explanations so that potential progress is unbounded.
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Philosopher of Physics David Albert expounds his thesis with the introduction of
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that particular habit of concocting and evaluating new hypotheses there's a sense
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that we can do anything the capacities of a community
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that has mastered this method to survive and to learn
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and to remake the world according to its inclinations are in the long run literally boundless
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I can't discern any argument here that addresses the range of the mysterious concerns and conclusions of the
403
classical literature which i think are quite sound however the basic there are basic assumptions here
404
that trace back to purse again he purse did offer an argument
405
it's related to albert's observation about mastering the method to survive a person was writing right after darwin proposed
406
that the what he called the abductive instinct
407
that allows us to choose among a limited range of admissible hypotheses he argues
408
that developed through natural selection variants
409
that yielded truths about the world yielded a selectional advantage
410
and were retained through darwinian descent with modifications with others
411
while others fell away that belief however is totally unsustainable there's nothing in natural selection
412
that equipped humans to develop quantum theory or anything else for
413
that matter on the contrary the theory of evolution leads to the opposite conclusion.
414
It places humans firmly within the natural world, takes them to be biological organisms,
415
which, like others, necessarily have scope and limits, including the cognitive domain.
416
So those who accept modern biology should be thoroughgoing mysterians.
417
Well, dropping the untenable recourse to natural selection, we're left with a serious
418
and challenging scientific inquiry to determine try to determine the innate
419
components of our cognitive nature in language perception concept formation theory construction artistic creation
420
or other domains of life and a further task is to try to determine the scope
421
and limits of human understanding while recognizing
422
that some differently structured intelligence might regard human mysteries as simple problems and wonder
423
that we cannot find the answers just as we observe the inability of rats to run prime number mazes simply
424
because they lack the concept by the very nature of their cognitive capacities
425
and far from bewailing the existence of mysteries for humans we should be extremely grateful for it
426
if there are no limits to abduction then our cognitive capacities would also have no scope just as
427
if the genetic endowment imposed no constraints on growth and development in
428
that case an organism can only become some shapeless amoeboid creature reflecting accidents of an unanalyzed environment.
429
The conditions that prevent a human embryo from becoming an insect also play the decisive role in determining
430
that it can become a human and the same holds in the cognitive domain.
431
It's a simple logical point.
432
Incidentally, classical aesthetic theory recognized the same relation between scope and limits,
433
recognized that without rules, there can be no creative activity, even when the creative activity challenges,
434
tries to revise prevailing rules.
435
Honesty should lead us to concede i think
436
that we understand little more about creativity than the spanish physician philosopher juan harte did in the 16th century
437
when he distinguished the kind of intelligence
438
humans share with animals from the higher grade that humans alone possess
439
and is illustrated in the normal creative use of language
440
and proceeding beyond that from the still higher grade illustrated in true artistic
441
and scientific creativity nor do we know whether these are questions
442
that fall within the scope of human understanding
443
or whether they are among what Hume took to be nature's ultimate secrets consigned to
444
that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Noam Chomsky - Mysterianism, Language, and Human Understanding”. This video has 444 sentences and 5732 words to shadow. The speech runs for 49:38. The speaker talks at a steady 115 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 77% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| cognitive adjective | /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ | Relating to the part of mental functions that deals with logic, as opposed to affective which deals with emotions. |
| refer verb | /ɹɪˈfɜː/ | To direct the attention of (someone toward something). |
| consciousness noun | /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/ | The state of being conscious or aware; awareness. |
| mystery noun | /ˈmɪs.t(ə.)ɹi/ | Something secret or unexplainable; an unknown. |
| physics noun | /ˈfɪz.ɪks/ | The branch of science concerned with the study of the properties and interactions of space, time, matter and energy. |
| entity noun | /ˈɛn.tə.ti/ [-tʰi] | That which has a distinct existence as an individual unit, often used for organizations which have no physical form. |
| newton noun | /ˈn(j)uːtən/ | In the International System of Units, the derived unit of force; the force required to accelerate a mass of one kilogram by one metre per second per second. |
| conclusion noun | /kənˈkluːʒən/ | The end, finish, close or last part of something. |
| inquiry noun | /ɪnˈkwaɪ(ə)ɹi/ | The act of inquiring; a seeking of information by asking questions; interrogation; a question or questioning. |
| hypothesis noun | /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/ | A tentative conjecture explaining an observation, phenomenon or scientific problem and that can be tested by further observation, investigation, or… |
| topic noun | /ˈtɑpɪk/ | A subject; a theme; a category or general area of interest. |
| domain noun | /ˌdəʊˈmeɪ̯n/ | A geographic area owned or controlled by a single person or organization. |
| scope noun | /skəʊp/ | The breadth, depth or reach of a subject; the extent of applicability or relevance; a domain, purview or remit. |
| narrow adjective | /ˈnæɹəʊ/ | Having a small width; not wide; having opposite edges or sides that are close, especially by comparison to length or depth. |
| chemistry noun | /ˈkɛm.ɪ.stɹi/ | The branch of natural science that deals with the composition and constitution of substances and the changes that they undergo as a consequence of alterations… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| pick out verb | To remove by picking. | |
| rule out verb | To cross an item out by drawing a straight line through it, as with a ruler. | |
| carry forward verb | To transfer to a new page, column, ledger, or similar entity. | |
| fall away verb | To cease to support a person or cause. | |
| fall under verb | To belong to for purposes of categorization. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
| point out verb | To identify among a group of similar subjects, or in a scene where the subject might not be readily seen or noticed, with a gesture of the body. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been extended · have led · has done |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was coined · has been extended · is sometimes interpreted |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | dualism, which is · science which was · form which are |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 24 contractions and reduced forms, such as doesn't, I'm, can't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, thesis /ˈθisɪs/, nevertheless /ˌnɛvɚðəˈlɛs/, theoretic /ˌθiːəˈɹɛtɪk/, thoroughgoing /ˈθʌɹəˌɡoʊɪŋ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, notion /ˈnoʊʃən/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, imagination /ɪˌmæd͡ʒəˈneɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: entity /ˈɛn.tə.ti/ [-tʰi], inquiry /ɪnˈkwaɪ(ə)ɹi/, hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, philosophical /ˌfɪl.əˈsɑ.fɪ.kl̩/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like cognitive, refer, consciousness.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.