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Why Nurture Is Natural Too

Both within and outside generative linguistic circles, it is often claimed that at least two factors determine organismic development, hence determine language development in humans. First, an innate capacity, perhaps species-specific as well, that allows humans (but not e.g. cats) to acquire linguistic systems such as the one you are now using to transduce ‘retinal images’ to meanings. The second factor is, of course, the environmental input. Thus, we have the standard dichotomy ‘nature vs. nurture’. The influence of the environment is amply demonstrated, for example, through naturalistic experimentation indicating that a normal child raised in Japan acquires ‘Japanese’, but one raised in the Philippines develops ‘Tagalog’. Hence, the central role of the environment in language development. However, it is important to remember—as has been noted before, but perhaps it remains underappreciated—that it is precisely the organism’s biology (nature) that determines what experience, in any domain, can consist of (see Chomsky 2009 (originally 1966) for discussion (and resurrection) of the Rationalist roots of the idea, especially pages 103–105, concerning Cudworth and Humboldt; more recently, see e.g. Gould & Marler 1987, Jackendoff 1994, Lust 2006, Lewontin 2008, and Gallistel 2010). To clarify, a bee, for example, can perform its waggle dance for me a million times, but that ‘experience’, given my biological endowment, does not allow me to transduce the visual images of such waggling into a mental representation (knowledge) of the distance and direction to a food source. This is precisely what it does mean to a bee witnessing the exact same environmental event/waggle dance. Ultrasonic acoustic disturbances might be experience for my dog, but not for me. Thus, the ‘environment’ in this sense is not in fact the second factor, but rather, nurture is constituted of those aspects of the ill-defined ‘environment’ (which of course irrelevantly includes a K-mart store down the street from my house) that can in principle influence the developmental trajectory of one or more organs of a member of a particular species, given its innate endowment.