[R]ecursion could occur because human beings are just smarter than species without it. In fact, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Herbert Simon, who taught psychology for many years at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote an important article in 1962 called The Architecture of Complexity, and in effect, although he doesnt use this word, he argued that recursive structures are fundamental to information processing. He argued that these are just part of the human brain, and we use them not just in language, but in economy, and discussion of problem-solving, and the stories that we tell. If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. Thats not part of the grammar per se, thats part of the way that they tell their stories. So my idea is that recursion is absolutely essential to the human brain, and its a part of the fact that humans have larger brains than other species. In fact, one of the papers at the recursion conference was on recursion in other species, and it talked about how when deer look for food in the forest, they often use recursive strategies to map their way across the forest and back, and take little side paths that can be analyzed as recursive paths. So its not clear, first of all that recursion is unique to humans, and its certainly not clear that recursion is part of language as opposed to part of the brains general processing. tinyurl/kngkbxa
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 09:25:49 +0000
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