Whether or not that was his intention:
The behaviorist view was orthodoxy, until Chomsky exploded it. Writing as a graduate student in the mid-1950s, Chomsky observed that there are aspects of language acquisition that do not fit this paradigm. Language has semantics and syntax. While meanings of words (semantics) does seem to be acquired by a system of trial and reward, syntax (grammar and word order) does not arise this way.
Unlike the abundant evidence for trial and error acquisition of semantics in infancy (a baby in an English-speaking family learns to say “cat” when pointing at the house pet), there is not the slightest evidence for “trial and error” syntax acquisition in infancy. Very young children use correct grammar (syntax) from the very beginning of language development. This intrinsic knowledge of grammar happens for all languages, without exception. Babies are born knowing syntax and the syntax they know is common to all languages—what Chomsky called Universal Grammar. Chomsky pointed out that these structures cannot be learned by children by trial and error. Aside from the utter lack of evidence for a process of trial and error in studies of infant language, Chomsky observed that an infant could not really have the experience needed to explain syntax acquisition that way. Even young children inherently know and use grammar rules. They construct and understand sentences of such consistency, intricacy, and complexity that it is clear that they could not have acquired this knowledge merely through incidental daily experience with language.
Chomsky’s insight that language is an in-born “organ” unique to humans is of obvious relevance to our understanding of why humans are exceptional.
Michael Egnor, “Why linguist Noam Chomsky is a great scientist of our era” at Mind Matters News
Also by Michael Egnor on language:
The real reason why only human beings speak. Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly.
and
How is human language different from animal signals? What do we need from language that we cannot get from signals alone?
Of related note, besides humans having an in-built capacity for syntax, language itself, because of syntax, also shows no sign that it gradually evolved from some ‘proto-language’:
As Chomsky noted in 2019, “The human language faculty is a species-specific property, with no known group differences and little variation. There are no significant analogues or homologues to the human language faculty in other species.”
This same ‘irreducibly complex’ syntax that is found for human language and that refuses to be reduced to evolutionary explanations. is also found in the ‘grammar’ of the genetic code.
In fact, “The ‘grammar’ of the human genetic code is more complex than that of even the most intricately constructed spoken languages in the world.”
Such findings should give Darwinists nightmares.
Moreover, Dr. Chomsky is hardly alone. A who’s who list of leading experts in this area of language research joined Chomsky in 2014 and stated that they have “essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,,”
The late best selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by this honest confession from leading Darwinists that he wrote a book on the subject “The Kingdom of Speech”. Here is a general outline of his main argument in his book;
In other words, that humans should become ‘masters of the planet’ due to his unique ability to communicate information is completely contrary to the ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking that undergirds Darwinian thought.
Although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as lions, bears, sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and also to, specifically, infuse information into material substrates in order to create, i.e. intelligently design, objects that are extremely useful for our defense, basic survival in procuring food, furtherance of our knowledge, and also for our pleasure.
What is more interesting still about the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information, and have come to dominate the world through the ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, we now know that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are ‘made in the image of God’, than finding both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’, not by the red in tooth and claw ‘brute force’ of Darwinian evolution, but precisely because of our ability to infuse information into material substrates.
I guess a more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
And that happens to be precisely the proof claimed within Christianity.
Verses:
Do I even have to say it?
Couldn’t disagree more.
From Tom Wolfe “Kingdom of speech“
In May of 2014, Chomsky, Tattersall, Berwick the data cruncher, Marc Hauser of the 2002 Recursion Three, plus four other eminenti—making eight in all— published a historic ten-thousand-word revelation entitled “The Mystery of Language Evolution.” Historic it was, but not in any triumphant sense. In fact, there had never been a scholarly paper quite like it. Here you had a delegation of some of the biggest names in the study of language, above all, Chomsky, running up a white flag of abject defeat and surrender … after forty straight years of failure. “In the last 40 years,” this eight-man jeremiad began— as we first heard on the opening pages of this book—“there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.”
No explanation how it EVOLVED. That it evolved was stlll the assumption.