The mind problem

The study of language became a science when its ideas started to be submitted to experimental tests, and one of the first achievements of the new science has been described with great clarity by Massimo Piattelli- Palmarini  

Clearly the children deduced that blinket meant a particular shape and not a material substance, while dax referred to a material substance and not to a shape. These are abstract hypotheses, and children must have inborn mental rules in order to perform such complex operations. 

Without a theory of the mind it is impossible to explain how a language is learned, and we must conclude that a child has an inborn mind, a set of mental rules and mental objects which allow him to interact with the external world. It is known, furthermore, that a child can learn any language whatsoever, and this means that the inborn mind must contain a set of rules which apply to all languages, a set that Noam Chomsky (1965, 1972) has called universal grammar. 

Against the theory of inborn ideas there has been proposed, for centuries, the opposite view that the mind of a newborn child is a tabula rasa where only experience, like a writing hand, can begin to leave marks, and the whole debate about human nature has traditionally been centred on the opposition between hereditary characters and environmental factors. 

In reality, such a solution is not at all satisfactory, either from a philosophical or from a biological point of view. What does one actually mean with the statement that genes control the rules of the universal grammar but not those of the individual one Perhaps that genes contain all the instructions that make up the universal grammar That the environment does actually deliver all the instructions which shape the individual grammar  

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