A linguagem como instinto para Steven Pinker

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

The language became philosophy s main concern in the XX century, existing different types of approach such as, hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, structuralism among others. Another way to study it is by the relation with biological structures, and the researches in the fields of "mind theory": neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionist psychology. Among many others authors that work with this conception, one name is detached Steven Pinker. Among his many works, "The Blank Slate" (2004) and "How the Mind Works" (2004), detaches "The Language Instinct" (2002), where the author defends the theory in favor of the development of the language as a evolutional adaptation, exhibiting a profound link between that what is called mind and the brain. To Steven Pinker language is not a cultural artifact which we learn in the way that we learn to tell the hours or how the government works. On the contrary, it is clearly a tool of the biological structure of our brain. The language is a complex and specialized ability, that develops in a child without conscious effort or formal instruction, revealing itself without the knowledge of its internal logic, which is qualitatively the same in every individual. For this reasons, cognovits described language as a psychological tool, a mental organ, a neural system or a computer module. Pinker prefers to use the term "instinct". It gives the idea that people know more or less to speak in the same way that spiders know how to produce a web. The spiders know how to make produce a web not because a genius spider invented it or because they learned the process. They do because they have a spider brain, what drives and enable them to produce it. Think about language as an instinct changes the common sense, specially how it is seen in human and social sciences. To Pinker language isn t a cultural invention, as walking stand isn t. Pinker s work was profoundly influenced by Noam Chomsky, one of the first linguistics to reveal the complexity of the system and maybe the biggest responsible for the modern revolution in cognitive science and in language science. But Chomsky is a bit skeptic about the possibility that natural selection can explain the origins of the language organ that he proposes. Pinker affirms that if the human eye is a product of adaptation " which means, it is a functional tool, that developed by the means of natural selection -, so the human mind, in essence, also is. Pinker uses this "Darwinism" expanding Chomsky s theory in an adaptationist territory. It is clear in this work that the author defends the existence of a bound between that what is called "instincts" and "mind" once his book try to reflects about the way that the "mind" creates language. In this text we tried to reflect about the reality of the language structured in the notion of "instinct" as presented by Steven Pinker.

ASSUNTO(S)

cognitive psychology evolução humana neurociências human evolution philosophy neurosciences filosofia - dissertações psicologia cognitiva filosofia

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