2012-07-22

Chomsky om människans natur


To me it's just like bee nature. Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature. We don't know very much about it except in a few domains. We know a lot about how the digestive system develops, that's part of human nature. We know some things about the visual system. With regard to cognitive systems, the systems are more complex and difficult to investigate, so less is known. But something is. Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.
In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable.
That's a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

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