I’ve been short on time this week finishing some calculations and working on a paper, prior to receiving my second Covid jab. But the other afternoon I thoroughly enjoyed this article. It’s on the Galilean challenge and its reformulation, wherein discussion unfolds on why there is an emerging distinction between the internalised system of knowledge and the processes that access it.

As alluded a moment ago, a general theory of development has interested me for a long time. For my book published by Springer Nature, a lot of the study and references were originally motivated by this interest. When I last did an extensive read on the topic, there was a lot of progress in developmental models – biology, bio- and neuro-linguistics, child psychology, and so on. The summer when I was writing my book, I had already compiled all of my research and I was running short on time in terms of the writing process (I wrote the book in the span of two weeks). Around the time of my research, if I recall there was discussion in biolinguistics regarding the hypothesis of ‘[t]he fibre tract [as one reason] for the difference in language ability in adults compared to pre-linguistic infants’. I remember noting that interesting ideas were developing, and this is a nice article on that front. What is particularly fascinating, I would say, is how language design appears to maximise computation efficiency, but ‘disregards communicative efficiency‘ [italics mine].

This certainly runs directly counter to common belief, as mentioned in the article, namely the established view that communication is a basic function of language. For a long time, as I understand it, there was belief that there was an experiential component to early language formation; but what current research suggests is that, an experiential component is not fundamental at all. Of course an experiential component plays a role, in some capacity, when it comes to externalisation processes, such as in development of variances in regional accent here in England as an example. I mean, the subject is mediated (to whatever degree) by his/her sociohistorical-cultural circumstances, but, unless I am misunderstanding (I need to read through the research more deeply) language itself is not some purely social construct.

Regarding reference to the evolutionary record, I wonder how the developing view in the article relates to ongoing research concerning, for example, certain species of birds, their migratory paths, and the question of inherited or genetic knowledge. It’s an absolutely fascinating area of study, something I’ve been reading about with my interests in mathematical biology, and of course there is very apt analogy here also with broader developments in microbiology.

One last thing of note from reading the article, as I have written quite a bit about the enlightenment philosophes and the start of modern science, it is notable how they sought to ask the question of language. Descartes’ fundamental enquiry into language – the Cartesian question – remains interesting to this day, and I was delighted to see it referenced at the outset. I recommend reading Descartes’ meditations plus other contributions to the enlightenment philosophes – Kant, Spinoza, Hume, to name a few. There is so much here that remains relevant to our modern history and to the development of the contemporary social world. For a few years I’ve been writing a series of essays on Hegel’s science of logic and his epistemology, which is notably relevant today in my area of work in fundamental maths/physics.