this is the way to do it this is the way to do this is the way to do it as i was growing up there was this cliche that youth are the leaders of tomorrow we have refused gone are the days when people who engaged in community work mentorship and general capacity building were the older members of the community today we have kelvin opondo to just elaborate on that so kelvin yes tell us what you do i have a friend of mine who normally says we are community developers so our work is much involved with the community basically we work with the kids the youths and for now we are working with also the the youths and the children who are within the the demand home that is the juvenile building yes so let's talk about what you do let's talk about the mentorship okay how did you venture into it out of interest and desire and passion to work for youths of my age uh i was motivated by the fact that we face a lot of challenges as youths and just like you say it has always been on the focus that the elderly people understand the problem we go through we go through very well but i felt like some solutions to the problems we are facing as youths we have it on our own so out of seeing the challenges that we are facing in the society that motivated me to put myself into having solutions to be able to solve the matter that we are facing as youths in the society and that is why our focus much goes with how then are we able to improve the lives of the youths or the kids who are living within the community center and because of that we have ventured into different ways concerning also my training we have ventured into different ways on how to be able to solve these matters that our youths are currently facing for example we are just from covid of course we still have the effects of covid until now a number of youths who are locked in the house like we saw the restriction the government had put in place and unfortunately covid found me somewhere else i was in Zimbabwe and i was completely stuck i didn't know what to do until i found means and methods to come back home but as i met youths when i was here everyone was complaining they have nothing to do and so i also thought does it mean that we have nothing to do as youths and i think no it's a lot of things we can do but no one comes out to be able to share with us and talk to us and enlighten us that these are the parts that we as youths are able to take on our own so in the process of meeting youths here and there uh there was two years ago we we started a small program in our community and we thought of how can you bring these small boys and girls and work with them and focus on them and try to do things that are of greater benefit to themselves and to the satiate life so as we are walking into the villages and the community it was like we need to meet the girls and talk to the girls not to engage the boys but is it only about the girls no also the boys they should be responsible these are our young sisters in the community what is it that you can be able to do to make sure that such kind of things if they happen but the rate goes down so that is what motivated me and a number of youths that i brought in in in place that is i'm speaking about the recent past and we were able to start a number of projects in the community and until now i can say that they are doing sorry can you mention some of the projects uh we we we because uh we we had a program with the university students who were at home during that time and uh the question that i threw to them was we do not know exactly when this thing will come to an end what are you able to do so it's like everyone was at home even in the marketplace few people were coming in so we thought what if we gather a small amount of cash and we buy onions and we sell people in their home states and so the question was how do you get the money we don't have money which is very normal when you want to start a business everyone thinks of where do i get the money from as much as we don't have money but still there's some cash that passes across our hands that small bit of it can gather it up and make something great so yes with the with the students we gathered around 10 000 shillings and i made a move uh this is a number of people some of them are my classmates and i asked them for my support and they chipped in with another 10 000 shillings i moved to our area member of parliament gave him our proportion he also chipped in with some small cash and that is how we started and it was of great benefit and of course people are surprised how are these young boys doing this and is it sustainable yes we did it until time came up when they all went to their schools uh during that time as well we initiated another problem within the streets of kisumu we know we have a number of street points within the streets and of course them were also suffering and i don't know whether you've interacted with them but in normal location when you meet them they ask money from you there are any 10 shillings and 20 shillings and the kind of facial expression they give out is like they're really angry they really need something you really need to help them yeah so when we sat down and thought is this the best way to treat these young boys in the street because rarely you see the young guys i thought of it like they are not just street boys they are our young brothers and if we are stepping in we are stepping in to the point that we are their older brothers and we need to help them so the problem they have so we started a program within the streets of kisumu and we initiated an activity whereby we could meet in a certain place we engage in football we do other games and then we can take a meal together and they began to open up in the angle of opening up i realized that most of them earn much than i do it's only that they can't use it well no one teaches them exactly how to use what they earn so with one mind we thought of we're not going to give this boys money but you want the the older youths those who are above 18 we want to make them use the money that they are earning in the streets to make them have a better life an organization in town came in and took us through some training with the street boys and actually the street youths and we designed a method on how they can be able to save uh i was also in that class and that class taught me much more even in saving skills and a number of them began to save like how much do you earn in a day 20 shillings 30 shillings 40 shillings 50 i'm doing write it down don't work on how much you say but just work on how much you earn so we bought them books and now they are putting it down every day i got this amount here i got this amount here and then we bought another book how they're using their money or i bought drugs with the money or i had food with the money so you are able to trace and put a track on how they get their money and how they use their money so from there we were able to balance out this is how much you can earn in a day this is how much you're spending what if you release your spending on this and this and this area and start saving and you picked on that and they began saving and now they have accounts and they are saving their money and some of them started businesses and they are doing so well so that is something that we are actually very proud of again we are working with a number of partners and we started another program at the remand home this is a place where by children who are below 18 years of course who are either in need of uh care and protection that is one or they have been into contact with the law they are placed there for a temporary period before their cases are finalized so we thought of what if again we visit them we organized for some festivals like we just cook and play football and talk to them and open up and they were enjoying the sessions then from then on as you thought of now why don't we engage them and talk to them because they are there one mind that has already been fixed in them is they are criminals some of them might some some of them might be taken as criminals you know when this mind runs into you you get affected even in your future so we also thought we don't deal with them like those who are in a remand home but they are our younger brothers and sisters again we handle and address them not that we are professionals but to get to the level of on their side we want to fill them with a reason with an idea of coming up to a solution the problems I have already faced so we have also been running the program at the remand home that is the kisumu remand home and we are so glad that our activities are gaining roots and they are really enjoying the program that we are doing with them I would love to understand more on how you approached a remand home to give such mentorship because I believe in my own opinion that uh there you've said about the stereotype of how they are criminals in a way they may be shy from meeting people like you how did you go about that we are youths we don't come as teachers we are youths and we easily connect and having been in the streets for two years working with the street boys uh and of course some of them are also caught and taken to the remand home before they either taken home but they're taken to prison or something of the sort so we already have better ways on how we can be able to interact and that's here with them you know once you're comfortable with me once you're able to obtain trust in me it is very easy to open up and talk yeah and the angle of talking we are able to come up with a solution probably understanding exactly what made you be here it's a long process we are living our world of course and defects of course we discuss effects so much but we forget about the course some of them have been undergoing through difficulties and burdens and situations for a long time it might be from the families it might be from school and no one gives that ear to listen of course when you're caught having committed a crime the focus on the crime that you committed not what led you to commit that crime but our focus is what led you there you are at this point you have you are at this situation what led you to that point because if you do not discuss the course of the problem we cannot come to a solution to the problem itself once in a while we are able to trace the families of these of these street kids and take them back home but our intention is not just dropping them home but we also want to listen from the parent side what is the challenge that this kid faces so much that makes him to leave home and go to the streets they are comfortable in the streets but this is not a good place why it is cold i mean your health is not guaranteed your safety is not guaranteed yeah your life is at stake anything can happen at any time and of course you've had so many cases happening in the streets a number of them have died as well in the streets uh recently we a boy was in my team i had a small circle of boys that i was mentoring in the streets it was a very good football player he was washing cars at the stage and he was saving money as well i really liked him i was passionate about him he was so close to me and just all of a sudden i just had it i yes and i was so disappointed because he was someone i really wanted to nurture and see him come out of the life that he was living he was staying in the street as much as he was earning money but we had moved to the level of finding my house we were not paying for the house but we trained him on how you can be able to pay for the house this is how we did it you earn your money you give it to us okay you take your lunch you take your breakfast of course some of them are using drugs and you can't stop them from using drugs immediately but we advise them not to use match so we try to bring in their money and you keep it for them so by that we were able to rent them houses buy them things in the house and this young man had his own house and he was staying in the house but i guess i don't exactly what happened the story was not so clear and we heard that he was he was beaten to death that was unfortunate it broke my heart because it was the team captain we we have a football team at the streets it was the football captain i was very much disappointed and i felt like how will i be putting my life at stake working with the boys and this is what happens i mean all of a sudden you lose them that was one the other one became mad it was from Uganda it was in the streets of Kisumu also it was saving nicely it was listening carefully every time i could have a class with them and i could ask them the things we discussed two weeks ago or three weeks ago we still bring it out and it was so much in current these are boys who don't go to school but they are so bright they are able to speak of things that we discussed three or four weeks ago and that really motivated me and i saw future in them when i looked at them i saw future in them these boys can do better they only need someone who can understand them but these two broke my heart and i felt like i think i'm done with the street program because i have worked on it of course i'm not paid for doing that and i really loved them i really focused on them i i i a lot of people walked away from me because i was dealing with the street boys and now this is happening so such challenges really broke my heart as a person and i saw like my efforts were going to waste but those who are such of the few cases but again when we see a number of them also doing well in business you still get encouraged yeah having houses coming from the street and renting their own houses starting their own business you get encouraged and it's like as much as that has happened something good also is taking place so that motivates us and again i love to say that there are certain challenges you are meeting in the street that you are not able to solve it's beyond our capability of handling so we try to increase our networks with people in the society and hoping to work with different organizations in areas whereby we completely cannot solve the problem we also try to engage with people who at least can be able to offer some support and help us go through certain situations would you mention those certain challenges that you need extra help uh of course we need to work hand in hand with the police we know sometimes probably it's a notion that people will say that police are brutal but again they are there for the sake of us and there are areas where we cannot handle their families we cannot visit on our own we'll need their assistance to be able to take these kids back at home these kids get violent sometimes in the streets we cannot handle them well we're not trained for that we'll need people who are the ability for that and yes we work with the Red Cross there are things that the street boys might need that we are not able to offer to them they come in to support us or one area or another uh sometimes they need to take them home and the remand home has also been of greater help with the knowledge to be able to handle such kind of occasions and even to be able to trace the families of these kids and sometimes to facilitate the means to be able to move to these places and see how some of them can go back home safe yes there is this thing when I think and our communities I'm so to say this we have lost that touch it's like the responsibility of a child is entirely on the parents which is not the case when I was young when I was growing up when I made a mistake in the community before I was taken to my parents the person who found me making that mistake will deal with me right there but that doesn't happen these days I will blame the parents on one direction because if someone tends to get close to your child after he or she has done a mistake you will say that child is mine and now when the problem becomes bigger on the child side when you cannot handle on your own you want to blame people right so I will say this the children do not belong to the parents they belong to the community and it is the community responsibility to work on the kids in a general perspective yes so it is our responsibility when you see something wrong happening for example uh we walk around the streets no no no it is my responsibility to keep my city clean for example right I'd rather pick it because I believe we have dustbins all along you can pick it and dump it put it in a dustbin in a better place so same way I think when we see something wrong happen in our society we might say the police is doing nothing okay we can say our government is doing nothing but I want to say it is our responsibility and to work with those who have been assigned to do such kind of ones yes so uh mentorship requires a lot if I was someone who wants to to start mentoring what do I need to consider our greatest my great opinion will be do you have an interest and have you seen a challenge the community that you think you need to work on of course when you see that you always want to say I do not have the necessary resources the resources is you I am the resource I am the one who can make the change change begins with me yeah so when you want to become when you want to mentor people you have to think of it from yourself what is it the question I keep on asking myself is what is it that I can do that can change my community how am I able today how am I doing something that is making my community my society a better place yes that is how mentorship begins we need trainings yes but what if trainings are not there what motivates you what encourages you because when you speak about mentorship there are so many areas of mentorship right and in this case it's not more of knowledge based mentorship it is more of passion based mentorship I have something I am passionate about and the moment I start doing that I sincerely believe you'll always find people who be interested in what you're doing and they'll come in to support and assist you are there groups or people you've taken under your wing in terms of training for mentorship of course yes a number of people a number of youths not only in Kenya I with an interest of working with youths have traveled across eastern and southern Africa I really wanted to know is it that only Kenyan youths have problems so it made me move to Uganda it made me move to Rwanda to Burundi I made me move to Zambia to Tanzania to Zimbabwe to South Africa and I realized that we are all facing the same problem I even thought of is it only in Africa I had a chance to go to South Korea I also realized it's youth problem is global we all have problems and and this is what encourages me much I only thought that our problems are our problem but it's not the case and I also believe that it is us as the youths the greatest potential we have is being a youth and just being a youth itself has its own solution to the problem that you're facing in the society because we are right there on the ground I know how you feel sometimes I feel like my parents cannot really know exactly how I feel but if I meet a fellow youth like me can know exactly how I feel and with the experience that we have and the challenges we've met I again assume that we have a better solution to help those who are younger than us to improve and make this sort of a better place and has it become a little bit better from where you started yes better tell us about it I I was in Burundi for a year as a volunteer in a youth program and of course the Burundi is different from Kenya we are a little bit developed not a little bit apart let me say much developed than Burundi and I thought of what am I able to do in Burundi as a person I'm not a teacher by profession but they were struggling to learn English so in the organization I was told why don't you go through these English books and teach English to these classes it was interesting but it was challenging very challenging and much more my class was based in university students and they were really eager to learn I took a class for one year and for that one year I thought of organizing an English pitch contest and luckily enough I was supported by the American Embassy around the English pitch contest I was so proud of it and number two we organized for leadership concerts with the youths and right now I have a friend of mine is working at the UN and he was my English student so I met him in Burundi and he asked me what is it that I can do and I told him for you to learn much more better please move to Kenya yeah I will connect to my organization move to Kenya and learn more and he came to Kenya he has been saying in Kenya and actually he's also giving back his teaching French in Kenya as much as he came to learn English and he's being so great and the activities that he has learned in Kenya is now working hand in hand with the UN habitat to run programs in Congo so for that that is one example that I'm sincerely proud of you have seen someone who I'm so much proud of and is doing great things in the society that is so that is so inspiring yes and so apart from mentorship what are the activities are you involved in I love farming yes I love farming and I'm really motivated into that of course I started a project it did not go so well but I'm still marching to it uh training the youths this is again everything that I do comes back into into mentorship I I love agriculture and I also thought and I was motivated by a young man in my society yes so he's a little bit younger than me and I decided to volunteer three months on his farm to learn from him what he's doing so I will go there early in the morning and by five so I was motivated yes so that got me encouraged so also youths can do farming at this great level so I was really challenged and that has really motivated me also to put myself into farming and in my small community in my home setup there are smaller kids who am I encouraged by buying for them chickens yeah and I tell them you want school fees but you can make your school fees on your own so even in that angle I also think it's still mentorship but again so the agricultural sector which has again been able to motivate me so much I I'm a sportsman I love jogging a lot yes it makes me I it brings me to thinking yeah and organizing my mind yes I love reading books a lot I read a lot actually wake up at four yes read until around six go for jogging and then I can get back to my normal duty because I believe in books you read the minds of people normally people say they have they have role models but I ask them how many books of the people you admire have written have you read and a number of people say they haven't even read a single book yes someone says like Obama is my Barack Obama the former US president is my role model how many books have you read Barack Obama then how would you how would you call him your role model and and you know nothing much about what you see on the TVs so that makes me to read books and by that I'm able to get closer to these people more than I can get to them in person so if I want because I'm more of I am a leader and I read a lot of leadership books because I believe that you as much as you go to class to learn that is not enough you need to do a number of things and that's what motivates me even to read more books so I love reading that's really really interesting yes saying that this is ventured mostly on individual decision uh how can this society support or what can the society do uh generally when you speak about support of course you normally speak about monetary in terms of resources funds money to me that is not it you see we have a number of youth groups which are so dominant because their intention was we start at YouTube then we get money from the government yeah so we can run our programs and again if you visit a number of youth groups again they'll say we are not in operations why we don't have funds so do we have to work because of money no we don't have to work because of money do you have the idea can you start the idea yes you can start the idea whether you have the funds or not or you don't have the funds I believe I am a strong believer every good course will always attract support there are people who will be watching whether you advertise yourself we don't advertise yourself people will be seeing what you're doing and they will always come to support you I harm a witness of that out of the thing that I'm doing all the connections of God are as a result of people seeing exactly what I'm doing and they get close and they tend to support so of course it's challenging because you you may not know when this support will come in but we are not doing this for the sake of the support we are doing this for the sake of making our community in a better place that is our main interest whether it comes or it doesn't come our main focus is what is it that I'm doing today that will make my city a better place for the next generation yes that is that is really I'm actually at all like wow what what you're doing is so so inspiring so motivating to see that someone takes that initiative to change what is at his home place you know and you throw that umenda countries different countries to do the same thing and I would really love to appreciate you for sharing this story yeah so that is not just a story that is not just a narrative from Kevin it is a it is a message it is an imploring message to tell you to do something make a change if you feel you have the passion to make a change out there go ahead and do it do not focus on the funds the funds will come as he has said the funds will come this has been a very very impressive conversation and I would love such conversations to continue at your home place at your groups where you meet your friends go talk about how you can change the society this has been new thing action I am


Black to blonde. How many curly girls have tried this one only to come running back to the dark side with split ends and broken dreams? Well, me for starters. I recently went back to black then a month later this company called Bondx Romy and they are an anti-breakage system designed to be added to any chemical mixture to prevent damage before it can even begin. I decided to run a contest on my instead to find another curly girl with virgin hair and blonde ambition. Meet my winner Daphne Day and her bestie Erin. Okay, Erin, come. All right, this is Daphne and this is Erin. Hi. And they won my little contest. Yeah.  We're going blonde. Very nervous, but I'm so excited for this to happen. I don't do anything with my hair. So this is going to be like a huge change, like a huge, huge, huge change. I didn't let Daphne see her hair till the very end. So this was the last time she saw herself for hours. First up, the stylist mixed the color formula using the suggested mixing ratio of color to peroxide. Then he added step one of Bondx called the builder and followed the 10% rule. The mix was then applied to the whole head that Daphne sat under the dryer and now was time for phase two. After shampooing and towel drying her hair, the stylist applied step two of Bondx called the intensive fire and allowed it to penetrate for a minimum of five minutes to get the maximum benefits before rinsing. And that is basically a four hour salon appointment for you guys in a couple of minutes. Now the horror is officially did, but with color, it can look good the day of, but how does it hold up? So I decided to make all y'all wait a couple of weeks before we got the final reveal. Are you scared? No, it actually is really, really, really good. Okay. I'm still happy with the wait time now. I, okay. I can see it. You got it. Okay. All right. What made you bold enough to do it? Honestly, I've been wanting to dye my hair for a really long time. And then when you put it, you put it on Instagram, I was just like, oh, I should do it. But I was, I wasn't like, I didn't realize what I was signing up for. And then when he said I won, I was just like, I'm going blonde. And then like, I saw it went after they did my makeup and everything. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I'm blonde. And every time I look at the mirror, I'm just like, I'm blonde. And how is your hair in comparison to how you thought it would feel, you know, going completely bleach blonde versus how it actually feels? I thought it would definitely feel like crunchy and kind of dry. And my curls wouldn't really be like, vibrations and stuff like that. But honestly, I've been washing it like normal, with like a little purple shampoo and stuff. I've also been using the maintainer, which is like the third step. And you're supposed to use it like twice a week, they said. And it's really, really awesome because it helps your hair, like obviously maintain it and condition it. And it feels soft instead of like crunchy and dry and like dead. So it's like, what is it? Oh, it's a treatment. Yeah. Okay. It's really, really moisturizing for your hair, which is what I need. Can we show them? Yes, we can. I'm like, I'm nervous. Okay, I'm going to close my eyes. Okay. Okay. Feels great. And a very cool thing we got to do in addition to doing this process, was also take you to Smashbox to get a whole new makeup makeover. And that video, of course, will be posted shortly after this one. So you guys can stay tuned for that. And I also want you to keep us up to date with after one month after two months, like can you do that? Yeah, definitely. I just started a channel with my best friend and I'm going to do curly updates like once a month and just kind of keep everything, show you guys how I maintain my hair and maintain it and help it keep it healthy and everything like that. And it's called, No, It's Not A Weave. And we just started and I'm really excited. Our first video is going up very, very soon. Hi, I am Daphne Day and I am blonde and beautiful. She got her hair. She got her hair. Understand that they're going through that same complexion issue that you're going through. And maybe just, I guess, being the bigger person to just say like, you know what, I'm just going to let that ride.


This study found that Mauritians of different ethnicities had differing body mass index, BMI, levels and cardiovascular function. The results showed that Creole males and females had higher BMI's than other ethnicities, while Chinese males and females had higher systolic blood pressures than others. The researchers concluded that further studies should be conducted to determine the underlying causes of these differences in order to prevent future health problems. This article was authored by Jennifer L. Miles-Chan, Norge Nyonis, Shosei Jogana, and others.


Hey everybody, welcome back to Metric Orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a deck review. Hey, today we're going to look at the superior brand playing cards from Expert Playing Cards. Now, what's superior is it's their brand new line, so they've got a couple other lines. Expert does. This is a house line, so something that they're going to probably print multiple times. This is done on their new robusto classic stock, so they're arguing for a much thicker stock than normal. This deck's got tons of little built-in features and one of those cool things is that this tuck case was designed by Jackson Robinson of King's World Project. It's got embossing, it has multiple foil colors, it has spot UV, tons more. It does say Expert Playing Cards across the front. It says superior brand and fine quality playing cards. Down here at the bottom it says classic black. This side says Expert Playing Cards. This side says superior playing cards. The bottom, of course, has some ad copy. The back design is all foil. This is all like beautiful. You can see that embossing. It's all gold and black. It's really cool. Stands out very eye-catching. No tuck seal, which of course, you know, I like.  That is pretty much it for the tuck case. Let's take a look at these cards. This is a really thick card stock.  They're really thick. It is thick, strong, snappy. Yeah, let's just look at how thick these cards are with the caliper. The cards do have a waffle pattern embossed into them, so it does make them good for sliding and gliding. They don't clump up, but like I said, the stock is so, so thick. So it's gonna take you some time to break these in.  I do. But the thick stock is hard. Like just to spring them or shuffle them or interweave them. I can tell it's gonna take some breaking in. These cards have a lot of snap, a lot of durability to them. Of course, they glide nice. There's no clumping, but man, these things are like, they're like pieces of metal. They're just really robust, as their namesake implies. This back design has been used by expert playing cards before. This is a back design that they've used in the past, and so the thing that makes this deck different, that sets it apart, is the coloring. Of course, it's black and gold, and the fact that it's on this new robusto thick stock. Your ace of spades, it's going to be the Zen ace of spades that you've seen before from expert playing cards. The courts have a very old school, kind of more of a classic arco feel to them. I do like the chunkier pips in the corners, the bold colors. It really does feel like a vintage deck with this back design I'm married with these faces. Also with this deck, you're going to get two jokers. This is the repeated joker that you've seen before from expert playing cards. It's a jester standing. Both of them are identical, and he's holding a little fan spread of playing cards. The pips and indicy cards have a very thick, very pronounced look to them. The round edges are, I think, kind of fatter, and the sharp edges are kind of thinner, and so it kind of makes for extreme ends at the top and bottom. All right, so that is my review for the Superior brand playing cards from expert playing cards on their new robusto stock. As always, I recommend that you like this video, just so other people can find it faster. We also recommend that you subscribe to this channel just to stay up to date on all the Mason cards and card magic. If you want to follow me on social media, you can. I'm at facebook.com slash magicorthodoxy twitter.com slash magicorthodoxy instagram.com slash magic underscore orthodoxy, and you can always find more content at magicorthodoxy.com.


The other big story I think of the last week has been what's going on in Iran. I don't know if you've been following this, but again, horrible and inspiring at the same time. Last week, or maybe it's more than a week ago now, in Iran, these religious commandments, the religious laws, the women in public have to be covered. They have to cover their hair, they have to cover their face, but their hair has to be covered. I think the face can be revealed, so they don't have to literally wear her job, but their hair has to be covered completely. And it's against the law, and if the women don't cover their hair, they can get arrested. And this young woman, 22 years old, was a Kurdish woman, so from the northwest of Iran, the Kurdish section of Iran, was visiting Tehran and had her hair covering, but supposedly didn't cover enough of the hair according to the religious police in Tehran. She was arrested, and it turns out that she at the police station was beaten and ultimately beaten to death. The Iranians claim that she had some kind of heart attack. This was a healthy young woman, no reason for her to have a heart attack. Maybe she did die of a heart attack, but because she was beaten basically into death, into a body basically failing, or because she didn't cover a few strands of hair. The response started out in the Kurdish area of Iran. The Kurds, of course, are a minority within Iran. It's an oppressed minority pretty much everywhere in the Middle East. There's a massive Kurdish population in, you know, after World War I, when the France and the English divvied up the Middle East, the one ethnic group they didn't allocate a country to, the one big ethnic group, tens of millions of people, they didn't allocate a country to with the Kurds. And there was a very large population of Kurds in Iran, a very, very large population of Kurds in Turkey, and a very large population of Kurds in Syria and in Iraq. And in Iraq, they have some autonomy that they basically won through battle. But in Turkey, they've been trying to carve out their own states, and Turkey has declared them terrorists, the Kurdish independence movement. And of course, you know about the Kurds in Syria because because Trump betrayed them, they were the ones who helped the Americans defeat ISIS. And then Trump basically said to Erdogan, the authoritarian in Turkey, yeah, you can come into Syria and take the Kurds and kill the Kurds. But anyway, the Kurds have a real presence in Iran. And I did a whole show on how he betrayed them, so you can go back and find the show on just horrible. I mean, or you could read what's his name, his advisors, national security advisors, account of how he betrayed the Kurds in his book. I forget the name now again of Bolton, John Bolton, who I saw in Korea. John Bolton has a great account of how Trump on a phone call randomly, in spite of Bolton arguing against it. Trump just stabbed the Kurds in the back. But again, I'm putting that aside. I did a whole show on it when it happened. And anyway, the Kurds in northwest Iran, there were massive demonstrations about this woman who had been killed and had family in that area. And they were obviously super upset and incensed about the fact that she had been murdered. Well, those demonstrations of now, those demonstrations now spread initially to Tehran and now to a lot of the other major cities in Iran and beyond. So they've spread beyond the major cities to smaller cities. These are some of the largest demonstrations, probably larger than the ones in 2019, and maybe even as large or larger than the ones in 2009. In 2019, the demonstrations were primarily economic about economic hardships that were placed on Iran because of the sanctions. Nothing came of that. The 2009 demonstrations were massive. That was around a stolen election that people thought felt that this election was stolen, that a moderate should have won instead of Amin Ajad, who was a much more consistent, religious, hard right, religious. And in 2009, there was a real, I think, opportunity to have overthrown the regime and really to make a dent in the regime's power. And the Obama administration just was pathetic. It could have supported it, could have supported both with Mao. Courage, it could have smuggled weapons and it could have done a lot of things, but they did very little, if anything. They were too busy negotiating a nuclear deal with the Iranians and they didn't pay attention to this. We are pro, at least to some extent, pro-freedom, at least to some extent, freedom in Iran, an anti-the clerical regime. Anyway, that opportunity was lost, maybe lost forever, but there might be an opportunity right now. I mean, the demonstrations right now are unique. They're about freedom. They're about the treatment of women. You're seeing things that you've never seen before in Iran. You're seeing, A, you're seeing people fighting back against the police. You're seeing them beating up the police. You're seeing women burning their hijabs. You're seeing them taking out and putting them in the street and burning them and being cheered on by men for doing that. So these are not the same conservative men of the past. This is a different generation. This is the generation from the last 20 years who've grown up under this theocratic regime, don't believe in this theocracy, and are finally fighting back. You're seeing women. There was a video of a woman in the middle of these demonstrations cutting her hair, which is short, which is against illegal and without hair covering in public and that being cheered on by men. You're seeing the demonstrations spread. You're seeing it being led by women. You know, in 2019, they're estimating that the regime killed 1500 people in order to quell the demonstrations. So far, the regime has not been as violent. So only by official measures, maybe 30, 40, 50 people have been killed. We'll see if this spreads and becomes worse. But you know, we will see this is worth watching. The president of Iran, who is a real conservative, real, real theocratic conservative Iranian Mullah, has come out and said, we're going to crush this so you can expect an escalation of violence in Iran. We'll see whether the demonstrators keep fighting back. We'll see whether this gets outside of the control of the local police. We'll see if they have to bring in the military and troops and the National Guard. This could get ugly and horrific. The good one of the one of the more positive things that have happened is that Iran shut down the internet. So they've blocked all the internet access in Iran. So what happened was the Biden administration, this is to their credit, the Biden administration said, okay, we know we have sanctions against Iran, but anybody who wants to sell equipment into Iran for them to get internet access. So any connection with Iranians for the purpose of giving them access to the internet is we're releasing that from sanctions. So we're eliminating sanctions immediately. And I think this was coordinated with Elon Musk. Immediately, Elon Musk said that he is activating Starlink over Iran. And they're going to try to smuggle in and they're going to try to sell into Iran the dishes, right? Starlink dishes. So they're going to try to get internet access to the Iranians. And again, this was facilitated by the Biden administration releasing because Musk couldn't have done it without the Biden administration saying, we won't prosecute Musk for providing services in Iran because of the sanctions. So let's hope we can get a bunch of satellite equipment into the Iranians, into the demonstrators, let them get dishes. One of the things that's happening is the Iranians now have learned from the Arab Spring, from other demonstrations around the world, they've learned how to use social media, they've learned how to use their phones. That's part of the reason why the regime has shut down the internet. But you don't need the internet. There are a lot of apps now that don't need the internet in order to communicate between apps. I forget how it works, but it's phone to phone to phone to phone. So they create networks of the phones without having to connect to a server to the internet itself. So they're using those technologies to coordinate the demonstrations. If they get Starlink, they can elevate that even better. Anyway, to be watched, let's see if the Biden administration rises to the challenge. Let's see if the West supports them. Again, the Biden administration is in this position where they're negotiating a nuclear treaty with Iran. Maybe they don't want to upset the Mullahs too much. Maybe that's the silent about it. I guess it's a mesh network, Enric, yes. So let's see what happens. But my hope is that somebody will stand up and call this and actually embolden the Iranians, not just to demonstrate in the street, but to overthrow the regime. Iran is an amazing country. The Iranian people are amazing people. They've always been the intellectuals of the Middle East. When the Arabs first conquered the entire Middle East after Muhammad and spread Islam everywhere, well, the people who ran the Caliphates, the people who ran the Arab empire were the Persians. The Caliph, the top guy might have been an Arab because he had to be because he had to be a descendant of Muhammad. But the people who actually ran things were the Persians. Of course, being intellectual also makes you open to bad ideas. So they also take their religion more seriously than others do. But there's also a strong secular movement within Iran. There's a strong secular forces within Iran. They were established by the Shah, and there's a lot of Iranians which has been exposed to the West. And you could see that in the demonstrators and these women that have had enough of it. If they could overthrow this regime, I mean Iran, A, you'd immediately have a dramatic decrease in the price of oil, gas prices would tumble. Iran has vast reserves of oil they can't get to because they don't have Western technology to go and actually drill for it. Iran becoming a more westernized country would change the Middle East in such a dramatic fashion. It would change the global situation. It would have global strategic implications that are massive and all positive. So for all kinds of reasons, for the sake of the people in Iran, and for all of our sake, we should do whatever we can to promote liberty and freedom in Iran.  So to help the demonstrators, we should support the demonstrators explicitly. That won't happen. But given that won't happen, maybe we can support them in covert ways, or maybe we support them in morally. I think this is the one regime where the United States is justified in and indeed should be actively, militarily, covertly, whatever way is most efficient, active in undermining the regime and destroying it, whether it's assassinating the Supreme Leader, whether it's bombing the Homs, which is the center of learning. But yes, we should be actively helping the Iranian people bring about regime change in Iran. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com.  Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.


Noam Chomsky is absolutely a towering intellectual figure in our era and in any era. He's had enormous impact on the fields of linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and by extension, psychology. And also, he's had great prominence as a political commentator and activist. He's published, I think, over 100 books and countless articles. Noam began studying linguistics in the 1940s. He was a student at Penn, University of Pennsylvania, where he ended up studying with Zellig Harris, one of the most prominent figures in American structuralism. From 1951 to 55, he spent some time at Harvard at the Society of Fellows, where he worked on what ultimately became major unpublished book for many years, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. It used to circulate in mimeographed form and eventually was published, I think, in 1975. After his time at the Society of Fellows, he moved along Massachusetts Avenue to MIT, where he taught for most of his career. In terms of landmark publications, aside from the logical structure of linguistic theory that I just mentioned, maybe some of the touchstones within linguistics have been the publication of syntactic structures in 1957, which was, for many people, their first introduction to generative transformational grammar. His 1965 book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, fused his theory of generative grammar with a new approach to linguistics in general that proposed to integrate linguistics into the cognitive sciences more generally. I realize I should have also mentioned, in this context, his 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior, which had enormous influence, not only among linguists, but also among psychologists who were interested in the representation of knowledge of language in the mind. And by many people considered one of the landmark events in the decline of behaviorist psychology as opposed to more cognitive psychology that we see today. Beyond that, his 1981 book, Lectures on Government and Blinding, reinvented the field. That came along at the time when I and many of my contemporaries were at MIT. But one of the amazing things about Noam is that he's always reinvented the field again and again. This happened again in the 1990s with the development of the minimalist program. And the minimalist approach to linguistic theory has undergone repeated revisions, many of them quite fundamental as Noam's ideas have developed and progressed. So, you're all here to hear him and not me. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Noam Chomsky for this mini course. Thank you. What I'd like to do in these lectures, which is actually just one continuous talk, break it up into parts and get as far as we can up to contemporary work and problems if we make it. I'd like to discuss the state of the generative enterprise as it's been called by some of its leading practitioners, what's been accomplished, what the problems are, what we can hope to see in the future. From the origins of this initiative, which incidentally revived tradition that had long been forgotten and was unknown at the time, but from the origins, the holy grail was a genuine explanations of fundamental properties of human language, of the faculty of language. And that's not such a simple matter to capture properly and to the extent you can. It's been an elusive goal. And I think the present moment is unusual in the history of the long history of the field, 2,500 years, and that goal I think seems perhaps within reach. And if that's the case, it would be a matter of no slight significance, not just for linguistics, but the end. Well, these are the questions I'd like to explore in this extended lecture. So to begin with, we have to clarify some basic questions, highly contested questions about what the field is about, what's the nature of the enterprise. I've personally always found it helpful to rethink these matters over and over. I hope you will too. So to begin with, let's begin with the simple, what sounds like the simplest question. Namely, what is language? Well, that question is plainly consequential. The answer to it will determine what we focus on, what kind of work we do, how we proceed, what counts as a result, and critically, what counts as an actual explanation, a genuine explanation. There have been many proposed answers over the years. They differ in interesting ways. And if we think about it a little, the question turns out to be not so simple. So suppose, for example, we ask the question in some other discipline, let's say physics. We ask, what is the physical world? What is energy? What is mass? What is work? Any such question. The answer that we'll get is some technical definition, internal to an explanatory theory. So we won't get an account of what people intuitively think of as the physical world or think about energy and so on. That's not to the point. We'll find answers within a particular explanatory theory. Suppose we ask biologists, what is life? There it'll be a little bit more ambiguous because the theoretical understanding has not reached the point where it's obvious what the essential conceptual notions are. So it's exploratory. Suppose we ask, what is thinking? Well, here it gets a little more complicated. Actually, as you know, the question was posed by Alan Turing in a famous paper in 1950, which initiated the field of artificial intelligence. And he papers about whether machines think. And he starts off by saying that the question is too meaningless to deserve discussion.  When he's asked what thinking is, he says it's some kind of buzzing in the head, but nothing much more to say than that. So what he does is something quite different. He proposes a notion which he says might be somewhere within the range of what people call thinking and maybe it's a useful notion. He suggests that it is, and in particular it might stimulate the development of new software and new machines. That's the famous imitation game, so-called Turing test. Well, so let's go on and notice that when you ask the question, what is thinking, what is language, what is meaning, what is belief, and so on, the answers that you get are really philosopher Charles Stevens once called persuasive definitions, saying here's what I think is interesting in the general domain of this loose notion. Here's something I think it's worth looking at. Well, go back to the Turing test. Notice that it's not an attempt to explain and understand anything about meaning, or thinking, it's about an attempt to simulate some of the aspects of thinking. That's quite a crucial difference. Didn't seem so crucial in Turing's day, but now it's highly crucial since a good part of what goes on in the study of language and cognitive science, the up north, the Silicon Valley version of this is basically simulation, not efforts to understand and explain. And in fact, that's the direction that AI and deep learning have taken. There's a lot to say about that, but I'll put it aside unless it comes up later. Well, so when we ask about these things, we're basically told here's what I think is interesting. Okay, then the next question is, is it interesting? Is it a sensible choice? And if it is a sensible choice, how can you proceed to place it within the framework of some kind of explanatory theory? And insofar as you can do that, you can discuss the validity of the concept that's proposed. Other than that, there is lively debate about what is language, what is meaning, what is belief. But it's basically, here's my preference. It's not a clear thing that you can give an answer to. You can ask if the preference is a sensible one, where can we develop it and so on. But there aren't questions of sort of validity or invalidity. Sometimes it's useful to develop a new technical term to make that clear, that's what I'll be doing here. So let's go back to the question what is language and have a look at some of the preferences over the centuries. I think if you look, you can roughly say that they fall into two major categories. One approach to what is language considers the concept that we're focusing on to be something internal to a person. So my language is something that's up here. It's the buzzing that goes on up there in Turing's terms. That's one concept of language. The other concept of language is it's something external to any person which people make use of somehow. I think we can, terminology is often imprecise, but I think you can roughly see this distinction. And what kind of work we do and how it's evaluated, all of that's gonna depend crucially on which of these enterprises is undertaken. So a classic illustration of the first kind, language as an internal object is, I think one of the best clearest exponents of this is great linguist Otto Jesperson about a century ago. He was actually the last representative of a long tradition. So for Jesperson, I'll quote him, a particular language is a system that comes into existence in the mind of a speaker on the basis of finite experience. This internal system in the mind yields a notion of structure that is definite enough to guide the speaker in framing sentences of his own, crucially what Jesperson called free expressions that are typically new to the speaker and the hearer. And then there's a more general concern of linguistic theory. That is to discover what he called the great principles that underlie the grammars of all languages. That's not generalizations about them, but the principles that underlie them. That's the first approach that regards language as a property of the person. The second approach is illustrated by the structuralist, behavioralist approaches to language of the first half of the 20th century, still of course continuing. That took language, and that's the object of study to be say a corpus of materials that a field worker would elicit from an informant or perhaps an infinite set of sentences or some other entity that's external to people. So if you look at the actual formulations for a disassured founder of structural linguistics, a language is a kind of a social contract in a community. Some collection of word images in the minds of the people of the community. Go to the leading American linguist of the early half of the 20th century, Leonard Bloomfield. The language is, he asked the question, what is language? Language is the set of utterances that can be spoken in a speech community. So something out there. Go to philosophy of language, perhaps the leading philosopher, most influential philosopher of language of the mid 20th century, Van Quyne. Language is a fabric of sentences associated with one another and with stimuli by the mechanism of conditioned response elsewhere. He said a language is an infinite set of sentences which people use. David Lewis, another influential philosopher, took the same view in his important article, Language and Linguistics. Language is an infinite set of sentences used by a population. Both Quyne and Lewis, very good logicians, incidentally, have both concluded that while it makes sense to say that a population uses this infinite set, it doesn't make any sense to say that there's a particular way of characterizing the set. In fact, Quyne said it would be folly to look for that. If that's what language is, then what's linguistics? Well, linguistics naturally would be a way of taking data, however you get it, typically from an informant, applying various procedures and methods and getting an organized form of that data. The most sophisticated version of this was, as Tim Stoll mentioned, Zellig Harris's methods and structural linguistics in Europe, Prometzkoe's Principles of Phenology was constructed on similar grounds. Well, that's, these are all, this characterizes almost completely the structuralist-behavioralist approach to language. There are something kind of paradoxical about it. So what is, what are these entities? What is the set of sentences spoken in a speech community? How can you, how can members of a population use an infinite set unless they have some way of determining what's in the set or out of the set? In fact, how can we even coherently talk about an infinite set unless we have a method of characterizing it? So it seems to me at least that this, the approach of leading philosophers and logicians was kind of confused. It's really the opposite. You have to be, if you want to talk about an infinite set, you first have to discuss the, what the internal mechanism for characterizing that set, what's been called an I language in internal and modern terms. Well, whatever these ideas are supposed to mean from the structuralist-behavioralist period, which I think is not easy to answer, but whatever it is, there's something external to people which people have some relation to. Now that by no means has ended. So right up till the present, there are strong currents that take very similar views and I think one can ask the same questions about them, including within, roughly speaking, the genre of enterprise. Well, suppose instead we adopt Jesperson's view, which I think which I will do, then the linguist is studying something that's in the mind of the speaker, namely the mature state that has been attained by, that has, in Jesperson's terms, come into existence and also the innate endowment of the speaker, the faculty of language, which makes possible the, which first of all determines what Jesperson's called the great principles that underlie the grammars of all languages and also makes possible the transition from finite data to the state attained to the I language in modern terms, it's the, as I said, the mature state attained is called the I language, internal language, technical terms and the innate principles are nowadays called universal grammar, UG, that's taking a traditional term and adapting it to a new context. Well, it's the term, the letter I in I language is convenient, it refers to the fact that the internal language is first of all internal, secondly it's individual and thirdly it's intentional within S. We're interested in the actual procedure, the actual algorithm, not the set of things that it does. So for example, if you're studying, say knowledge of arithmetic of a person, say you wanna know exactly how that person carries out addition, you're not talking about the set of triples X, Y, Z, such that Z is the sum of X and Y, here too, we wanna understand the generative system in intention. Well, I should say that with regard to universal grammar, there's a good deal of confusion which is right up to the present, which is worth dissolving. It's very common to hear that UG has been refuted or that it doesn't exist. That presumably means, what people presumably mean by that is that generalizations about language have exceptions which is of course true, that's true of generalizations but that's not what UG is about. UG in the contemporary sense is about the innate endowment that enables this transition that Jesper hasn't talked about from finite data to the concept, the structure in the mind. The concept, the structure now is what we call the I language. So should be clear that to deny the existence of this is not debatable, it's senseless. If it doesn't exist, language acquisition is magic. There is a kind of coherent version of this common claim, Tomasello, many others. A coherent version would be to claim that there is some general learning mechanism which has nothing specific to do with language or maybe some collection of cognitive capacities which integrate somehow to make it possible to achieve the properties of language what the faculty of language did. There's a couple of problems with these proposals. One problem is simply that they reduce to hand waving or if they're made at all explicit they're very quickly refuted. A second problem is that you can expect in advance that they're not gonna work for reasons that were discussed by Eric Lenerberg in his classic book on faculty of language, back biology of language 50 years ago in which he pointed out, he discussed the fact that there are double dissociations between language and other cognitive processes. This work has since been greatly extended by Susan Curtis, the person who's done the most extensive work on this. In fact, there are many examples of cognitive capacities intact but no language and conversely. So it's pretty clear in advance that it's not gonna work but it's nevertheless a widely held view. The, so I think it doesn't really make sense as far as I can see to claim that there's some problem, UG. Well, go back to Yesperson, the position that I wanna continue with. Yesperson was the last representative of a very interesting tradition which goes back to the originates back in the 17th century scientific revolution which set the course of modern science in a sharply new direction. The great thinkers of the 17th century, Galileo's contemporaries, others, they simply refused to accept what happens around them as being a natural self-explanatory, not requiring explanations. They recognized that the phenomena of nature were puzzling, mysterious and demanded explanation whether it was objects falling to the ground or perception of a triangle or anything else. That willingness to be puzzled about phenomena was actually something pretty new that had happened under the Greeks. It was kind of a dark ages that followed but it was revived by the 17th century thinkers and as soon as they began to look around them they found that everything was really puzzling and things that seemed obvious did require explanation. Actually something similar happened in the 1950s. If you go back to that period, linguists generally assumed that everything was more or less understood and that there was nothing general that you could say about language. Famous characterization by theoretical linguist Martin Joe's, what he called the Boazian principle named after the great anthropological linguist Franz Boaz is that languages can differ in arbitrary ways. Each one has to be studied on its own without preconceptions. There's nothing to say about language except applying the procedures to a corpus and you could do that. So essentially the field was terminal. Actually I was a student at that time the general mood among students was this is fun but what do we do when we've applied the procedures to all the languages then it's over. As soon as he began to undertake the, to look at the phenomena seriously to try to construct actual generative grammars which would work you found out that you didn't know it's not that you understood everything you understood almost nothing. Everything was a puzzle that didn't seem as if there'd be any termination to the field and that's what's happened since. By now the, it's just exploded since and the kinds of problems that students are looking at today you couldn't have even formulated little on dealt with not many years ago. That's an enormous change. Well let's go back to the 17th century. Among the many phenomena that intrigued and puzzled Galileo and his contemporaries one actually was language. So they were struck by, in fact they expressed their awe and amazement at a quite remarkable fact that as they put it with just a few symbols couple dozen symbols it's possible to express an infinite number of thoughts and to convey to others who have no access to our minds all of the workings of our minds. And they asked how that magical accomplishment could be made. I like to quote their own words which puts it evocatively they were awed by the method by which we are able to express our thoughts, the marvelous invention by which using 25 or 30 sounds we can create the infinite variety of expressions which having nothing in themselves in common with what is passing in our minds nonetheless permit us to express all our secrets allow us to understand what is not present to consciousness, crucial point in effect everything we can conceive and the most diverse movements of our soul. And if you stop to be willing to be puzzled it is a pretty amazing fact, it's by no means seems natural, we do it all the time but it is quite amazing. Furthermore there's nothing similar to it in the organic world which they recognized which raises very crucial questions. How did this unique human achievement come about and how can it be understood and explained? Well, for Galileo the alphabet was he said the most stupendous of all human inventions comparable to the achievements of Michelangelo and nothing like it. The reason was first that it captured this amazing property and secondly because it allowed us to express all the wisdom of the ages and beyond that it included the answers to any question that we could pose all in this small collection of symbols it was kind of like what we would call these days a universal touring machine. The Port Royal Grammar and Logic which followed shortly after gave many serious insights into logic and linguistics became the basic logic text for many centuries. It initiated a tradition in linguistics of what was called a rational and universal grammar rational because it was seeking explanations not descriptions, a universal because it was trying to find the principles that underlie all languages. Yespersons, great principles that underlie the grammars of all languages. Well the traditional formulations are not precise but I think it's fair to interpret them as recognizing that the capacity for language as well as individual languages are internal properties of persons. Yespersons says quite explicitly and it was also generally assumed without much evidence but as we know now quite reasonably that this capacity whatever it is is a human characteristic shared among all human groups. There are no known group differences in this capacity and it's furthermore unique to humans in all essential respects. There's nothing analogous in the organic world so it's a true species property and as they recognize it's the foundation of human culture and human creativity. Well these ideas actually had a very substantial impact on philosophy and general intellectual culture mainly through the influence of Descartes who adopted similar views roughly at the same time. Descartes' famous dualistic approach to the idea that in addition to the material world there's also a mental world was based very substantially on the recognition that this unique capacity of ability to create an infinite number of thoughts is somehow unique to humans and it cannot be captured by machines. Machines for early modern science Galileo through Newton and beyond meant the kinds of artifacts that were being created by skilled artisans and were proliferating all over Europe very complicated artifacts that could do all sorts of intricate things and their approach to science is well that's what everything is. It's called the mechanical philosophy. Philosophy of course meant science so mechanical science is that's real explanation. The criterion for intelligibility for Galileo and his contemporaries was a bill that was constructing or at least devising in principle a machine that could account for something. If you could do that, you had an intelligible theory but Descartes recognized quite correctly that this capacity, this amazing capacity couldn't be captured in those terms so postulated a second substance, Bracecogaton's thinking substance which would capture this capacity somehow and be linked to the material world. That's Cartesian dualism. Well the Cartesian scientists took the snack this is all scientific program, perfectly sound science based on correct observations about the limits of mechanical objects. The Cartesian scientists took the natural next step especially Jacques de Courdemois leading Cartesian philosopher, scientist. De Courdemois designed experiments, series of experiments to determine whether some other creature could exhibit the capacities that a human can exhibit. This sounds sort of like the Turing test but with a crucial difference. Turing was trying to find something that would simulate aspects of human behavior. De Courdemois was pursuing a scientific project. It's kind of like a litmus test for acidity. Does some other entity, some other object or organism have a particular property? That's similar looking project but very different in character. This is real science. Well what happened to these developments? Their fate is commonly misinterpreted. It's often believed that science as it developed got rid of what Gilbert Royall called the ghost and the machine, the second substance. But what happened actually is the exact opposite. What happened is that Isaac Newton, much to his dismay, exercised the machine but he left the ghost intact. Newton showed that there are no machines, that there's nothing, the material world simply cannot be captured in mechanical terms because of interaction without contact which is inconsistent with the mechanical philosophy. Newton himself regarded this result as a complete absurdity which no one with any scientific understanding could contemplate. He agreed with the other great scientists of his day, Leibniz and Huygens, others that this was utterly absurd but couldn't seem to find a way out of it. So the end result is we have theories like Newton's that we can understand but no intelligible world. What they describe is simply unintelligible. Now that was understood and science just changed. It stopped seeking intelligible accounts, an intelligible world and just moved to the weaker objective of finding intelligible theories of the world which is quite different, quite unacceptable to early modern science. It's a major shift in intellectual history and it was understood, very well understood at the time. So shortly after David Hume, who regarded writing in his history of England as a chapter on Newton, greatest genius in history, he says, while Newton seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy and thereby restored nature's ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain and they do in fact remain in that obscurity. Science just stopped looking for them after some period. John Locke shortly after Newton's great volume appeared the great treatise, the Principia. Locke carried the information further in a highly consequential way. He expressed it within the theological framework of the day but we can change the terms, point is correct. He argued that the incomparable Mr. Newton as he called him had demonstrated that God had added to matter properties that are inconceivable to us, specifically interaction without contact and so perhaps God had super added to matter the capacity of thought, a property of certain kinds of organized matter. That's thought. That idea was pursued extensively through the 18th century into the early 19th century. Darwin mentions it in his notebooks, was then forgotten completely and it's been revived in recent years as what's called a radical new idea and philosophy of mind. It's now a commonplace of the cognitive and brain sciences, picking up a forgotten tradition that followed directly from Newton's demonstration that there are no machines. It's a crucial part of intellectual history, not too well understood and it's worth remembering that as Hume and Locke correctly recognized, Newton had in fact left issues in mysteries and obscurity in which they remain. That's quite an interesting question. Well, let's put that aside and go back to the tradition of rational and universal grammar, cultivating and culminating in yes prison. All of that was swept aside completely by the 20th century behavioral structuralist currents which typically in fact, I think universally adopted the second approach I mentioned, taking language to be something external to people which people somehow grasp. The whole tradition was totally forgotten, still unknown, which is unfortunate I think. There's a lot of wealth and richness there. It was so forgotten that even yes person, famous linguist of the early 20th century was gone. There's an interesting article by a historian of linguistic, Julia Faulk who reviews this and points out that it was just even the major linguists like Bloomfield and others just knew nothing about it, essentially nothing. Well, that general program that culminates say from roughly Galileo to yes person, that falls within the natural sciences. It was revived with the generative enterprise in the early 1950s. It's called the biolinguistics program but it should be understood that this is only one current within the generative enterprise. Much of the ongoing work within the generative enterprise does not accept this internalist view but that's the one I'll keep to. Well, the early efforts and the tradition it ran into plenty of difficulties, empirical difficulties, conceptual difficulties. The empirical difficulties where there just wasn't enough evidence. What was understanding of language was pretty thin. The conceptual problem was that there was no way of really understanding this notion of concept of structure in the mind that enables this achievement of expressing an infinite number of thoughts to be captured. Well, all of that was somehow there is, they recognize there is what we may call the basic property of language reformulating it in our terms. Somehow this concept of structure in the mind is capable of generating an infinite array of structured expressions, each of which captures a thought to the extent that we understand the notion thought and each of which can be externalized in some sensory motor modality. Typically sound but as we know now very well could be some other modality. Could be sign, sign is virtually identical to speech even with some reservations could be touch. So it's modality is basically irrelevant. A matter of some significance that I'll come back to. Well, by the mid 20th century the conceptual problems had been overcome. That's why the generative enterprise was able to take off and revive the tradition. Touring Emil Post, Gertl of course other great mathematicians had given a precise clear understanding of what became the theory of computability which allows us to understand very clearly how it can be that a finite object like the brain or your laptop for that matter can capture within it the basic property. Now that's well understood which means you can proceed with the enterprise that had lapsed with Jesperson. Well, that you can deal with what sometimes is called the Galilean challenge, the original formulation of what the field I think ought to be about. It's a persuasive definition again but you can decide whether you like it or not. Well, if you want to meet the Galilean challenge there are several tasks. First task is to try to discover the I languages for languages of the widest possible typological variety. It's a huge task of course. Second, having done to the extent you can do that you can turn to the next problems, theoretical problems. The first one is to determine how a speaker of a language when he's producing a sentence, how does the speaker select a particular expression from the infinite set that's generated by the I language. The next question is, how is that expression externalized in some sensory motor system? Third question is the inverse of that. For the hearer, how is the expression processed, mapped from something in say sound to an expression of the I language? Well, the second and the third tasks are input-output problems. Kind of problems we know how to handle. And in fact, a great deal has been learned particularly about processing, also about externalization of the internal object generated. How about the first task? How does the speaker select a sentence from an expression from the infinite array generated by the I language? That's another total mystery there's nothing to say about it. In fact, that's true of voluntary action generally of which this is an instance. There's basically nothing to say about it. This fact is captured kind of fancifully if they put it by two of the leading neuroscientists who deal with voluntary action, Emilio Bicci, Rob Adajamian. They have a recent review of the state of the art in the field of voluntary action. And what they say is we're beginning to understand the puppet and the strings, but we have absolutely nothing to say about the puppeteer. We can't say anything about why one or another action is selected. In particular, that holds for the first task. So there's another mystery that so far is beyond. It doesn't even have bad ideas. There's nothing to say about it. Well, the I language is clearly a property of the individual by definition. And the same is true of the faculty of language. Although it's a shared property of humans with insignificant variations, it's essentially a property. It is in fact a property of each individual. And the faculty of language faces two empirical conditions, two crucial conditions have to be faced by any theory of the faculty of language of this internal system. One is the problem of learnability. Second is the problem of evolvability. So the faculty of language has to be rich enough so that it can account for the properties of all languages and even more strikingly for the remarkable property of this enormous leap from finite data to the internal system, which is carried out by the faculty of language has to be rich enough to overcome the very acute problem that's called the problem of poverty of stimulus, often unappreciated. So one demand on the faculty of language has to be rich enough to have to achieve these goals. But it also has to be simple enough so that it could have evolved, has to meet the evolvability condition and very more specifically to have evolved under the very specific conditions of evolution of language. Now these two goals are at least on the service of antithetical, enrich, you enrich it and you enrich the theory and you make the problem of evolvability harder and conversely and a lot of the field over the last years has been some kind of effort to overcome this apparent conflict. So let me stop for a second and talk about the specific conditions under which language evolved, which make the problem much harder and more striking. In general, not very little is known about the evolution of cognition. It's a very hard topic to study. One of the leading evolutionary biologists, Richard Lewontin, has a famous article in the four volume MIT invitation to cognitive science. He wrote the article on evolution of cognition and his basic conclusion is, I'm sorry you guys, you're never gonna learn anything about it. It just can't be handled by the techniques available to current science. Notice it's not that it's a mystery in the sense of the other things I mentioned, it's just that it's beyond the possibilities of research. If you had, say, tape recordings from 100,000 years ago, maybe you could learn something, but we don't and we're never gonna get them. So his conclusion was there's absolutely nothing to say about it. There's a lot to what he said and we're thinking about, but I think it's a little too pessimistic. There are a few things that have come to light and they're kind of suggestive. One is that we know that modern humans, anatomically modern humans, there's plenty of fossil evidence that shows that they appear roughly two or 300,000 years ago, essentially in that range. It's now known that human groups, which were very small at the time, began to separate roughly 200,000 years ago and the groups that separated have the same faculty of language as far as we know. SON people in Africa, first group that separated. Well, that tells us that the faculty of language was already established not very long after modern humans appeared. So it seems essentially something, a property of modern humans as they appeared. Notice that these periods of time are extremely small from the perspective of evolutionary time, which doesn't deal with notions like tens of thousands of years. So essentially we can say that the species characteristic appeared essentially along with modern humans. A second fact known from the archeological record is prior to the appearance of modern humans, there doesn't seem to be any serious evidence of any kind of symbolic activity in the archeological record. And not long after the appearance of humans, you start getting quite a rich record of complex symbolic activity. The Blombos Cave in South Africa is the most famous example. So there's more, there's further work on this by a very fine linguist, Rene Hoybrooks, most of you know, who discussed, found that the, he pointed out that the earliest separation, roughly maybe 150,000, 200,000 years of the Sun people in Africa, although they have, as far as we know, the same faculty of language, they have a somewhat different form of externalization. As he showed, these are all and only the languages that have complex clique systems. There's also a few exceptions, but I think he actually managed to show that they're meaningless. So what that suggests, Rene points out in his article, is that the faculty of language developed prior to the separation, but externalization took place after the separation in slightly different ways. Not, there's some minor physiological adaptation about clique languages, slight change in the structure of the palette, but not very much. Well, that's all very suggestive. If you put all of this together, what it strongly suggests is that whatever emerged along with modern humans and yielded the faculty of language must have been very simple, simple and such as something that nature would hit upon immediately as soon as some small rewiring of the brain made this task possible of satisfying the Galilean challenge. That converges with developments that have been taking place within the generative enterprise with in quite a suggestive and important way. Well, in order to fix it, I suppose that in fact something simple did develop along with modern humans, yields the faculty of language. We would expect it to be very simple in structure. And what about the person with dealing with, including a very simple modes of computation, which would satisfy the evolvability condition for a genuine explanation, then what remains to fix a language? Well, an individual has to fix a language on the basis of data, on the basis of simple data. And there must be some way to do this on the basis of very simple evidence. The reason is that we know now from cyclolinguistic studies that acquisition of the essentials of language has already been carried out very early. The fact about as early as you can test two or three-year-olds have enormous understanding of the fundamental principles of language. I'll come back to some examples of that. And the evidence available to them is very limited.  That's been shown very well and careful statistical work by, especially by Charles Yang, who pointed out and showed that when you look at the effect of what's called Zip's Law, the rank frequency distribution of words, turns out that almost all the evidence that children are getting are just repetitions of very few things, even bigrams barely are repeated in millions of sentences, trigrams almost never, you know, very rarely. So the evidence is really very slim. The knowledge that's acquired is very rich. We conclude in general, what we expect to find is a very simple faculty of language and the actual acquisition of language should be based on some kind of capacity to pick out what's significant and important from quite impoverished data. That's what you'd anticipate. And more generally than what we, of course, always would be look in any field, would be looking for the simplest theory that's simply a general fact about explanation. It's clear that as the foundations of a theory become simpler, its explanatory depth increases. So if science is interested in explanation, not just simulation, it'll be, of course, looking for a simplest theory. There's a second reason for looking for the simplest theory, which is a kind of a precept that goes back to Galileo, again, who simply urged that we accept the idea that nature is simple and it's the task of the scientist to show it. That's true from study of folding bodies to the flight of eagles to whatever you look at. That's, of course, just what's called a regulative principle, a precept, but it's one that's been spectacular, successful in the sciences. So it's simply taken for granted in the sciences and there's every reason for us to take it for granted too. And thirdly, for linguistics, there's a third reason to expect a very simple theory of the faculty of language, namely the specific conditions under which this faculty appears to have evolved. Well, notice that it's often argued that evolution violates Galileo's precept. Evolution is what François Jacob called tinkering, a bricolage, which tries lots of different things, ends up with very complex objects. Whatever one thinks of that, it doesn't seem to apply to the special case of acquisition of language simply because of the specific conditions under which it seems that language evolved. Well, considerations like these arise very clearly in the development of the minimalist program to which I'll return. But the point I wanna emphasize here is that learnability and evolvability provide the conditions for genuine explanation. That's the Holy Grail. These are the conditions for meeting the Galilean challenge. So genuine explanation will of course be at the level of UG and it will be in a form that meets the demands of learnability and evolvability. That's a very austere requirement. Anything short of that is not a genuine explanation. Anything short of that is a partial account. Maybe a useful one, but not an explanation. It's a way of presenting materials as a problem to be solved. That's a very important endeavor. It's much better to have some organized presentation of some carefully structured problem. That's a great advance over just chaos, of course. So that's by no means denigrating those achievements, but we should not confuse them with genuine explanations. Well, any device that's introduced in linguistic description, any device to deal with some problem, whatever the problem is, has to be measured against these two conditions. Is it learnable? Is it evolvable? I think we're finally maybe in a position today to take the Galilean challenge seriously, which if true is quite important. That's a new step. So just to illustrate with a concrete example to which I'll return if there'll be time. There's a very interesting paper by a very good linguist, Djalko Baskovic, most of you know, on the coordinate structure and the adjunct island constraints. And in the paper he points out that each of these coordinate structure and adjunct island pose many problems, many mysteries. But his paper attempts and I think in a way succeeds in trying to show that these two collections of mysteries actually are the same mystery. What he does is try to reduce the adjunct island constraint and the coordinate structure constraint to a single mystery relying on a neo-Davidsonian event semantics, which in fact treats adjuncts as coordinates. So based on that idea, you can take two collections of mysterious phenomena, put them together into one collection of mysterious phenomena, which is a significant advance that leaves the mysteries, but they're now more susceptible to successful inquiry. And I think that virtually every achievement in the field is pretty much like that. It manages to overcome some, reduce some collection of mysteries to a simpler and more manageable collection, which is a major achievement, but it's not genuine explanation. So we're still searching for the holy grail. At least all of this is the way things look within the bilingual linguistics. In the biolinguistic program, if you're pursuing a different enterprise, there are different considerations.  The first proposals, now I'm talking to linguists who know all this, the first proposals back in the early, in the 50s were basically dual. There were two different problems that had to be faced. One was the problem of compositionality, how do you put structures together. The other was the very puzzling property of dislocation. Expressions are heard in one position, but they're interpreted both there and somewhere else. So what did John C, you interpret the WH phrase, the what as a quantifier ranging over the whole thing, but you also interpret it as the object of C where you don't pronounce it. That's a ubiquitous property of language. Very complex cases that have been studied over the years. Well, the proposals back in the 50s were two different kinds of mechanisms. A phrase structure grammar for compositionality, transformational grammar for dislocation. You look back at the proposals, each of these systems was much too complex to meet either the conditions of learnability or evolvability, that is to provide genuine explanations. That was understood, but was very unclear what to do about it. It was generally assumed at the time that compositionality is something natural, that we can kind of handle. Dislocation seemed very strange. You don't build dislocation into formal systems, for example, it's just something that seems unique to language and very weird property of language was considered what's called an imperfection of language. Somehow it adds for odd reasons this complex notion. That's still widely believed, but I think it's exactly the opposite of the truth. As research has progressed, it turns out first of all that these two different, apparently different properties can be unified and that the more primitive of them in fact is dislocation. I'll come back to that. But it seems that the most primitive operation is dislocation. Compositionality is considerably more complex, although they can be unified into a single operation. Something I'll want to come back to. Well, turning to a couple more comments. Very structured grammar was very quickly recognized by the 1960s within, I'm talking within a particular current of the genre of enterprise, others don't agree, but within this current it was quickly recognized that phrase structure grammars are completely unacceptable. They're way too complex. A phrase structure grammar, for one thing, allows totally impossible rules. So there's nothing in a phrase structure grammar that says you can't have a rule, say sentence becomes a preposition verb phrase or something or anything else you can imagine. So it just allows a huge number of rules that are completely impossible. So there's gotta be something completely wrong with it. Also, I think in retrospect, we can now see that phrase structure grammar conflated three quite different notions. One is the notion of just hierarchical structure. A second is the notion of linear order. A third is the notion of what was called projection.  And over time it's been recognized that these are quite different properties. Well, a step was taken by the late 60s to overcome at least some of these problems with the development of what was called X-bar theory. I won't discuss it, I assume you know what it is, but X-bar theory did have a number of concepts and sequences which interestingly, we're not really understood very clearly at the time. Tim will remember this. For one thing, X-bar theory keeps the structure, has no order, okay? So you have the same X-bar theory in effect for say English and Japanese which are close to mirror images. Well, the significance of that wasn't really entirely grasped. What it tells you in the first place is you have to have a principles and parameters approach. There can't be a rule system, at least for compositionality. Took some years for that to kind of settle in but it's immediate once you look at X-bar theory. So it takes a English and Japanese, essentially the same X-bar theory but there has to be something distinguishing them something that says orders one way and one language the other way and another language but that's a principle, some parameters approach. Furthermore, if you look at that parameter, you see that it doesn't affect the meaning of the sentence. So whether you have a verb object or an object verb language, the meanings are exactly the same. The theta structure, the argument structure is the same. That at once suggests that the parametric difference, the linear order, simply doesn't have anything to do with the core of language, namely the construction of an infinite number of thoughts to put it in more technical terms. It doesn't feed the conceptual intentional level, doesn't yield semantic interpretation. That's an observation which has many consequences if you think it through. Well, it's elaborated in later work in other ways but it's already a bit of a hint that somehow things like linear order and other aspects of externalization don't strictly speaking belong the language. A lot of consequences though when you think it through all return to it. Well, these are some of the consequences that once of looking at X-bar theory should have been recognized instantly, gradually came to be realized later on. X-bar theory however does have problems. I'll mention these and then put the rest off till later. There's a fundamental inadequacy of X-bar theory which was not recognized. It still conflates projection and compositionality. It does separate order but it still conflates those two. And that runs aground as soon as you look at exocentric constructions which are unacceptable in X-bar theory rules out exocentric constructions. So you can't have say subject predicate or you can't have any movement because all movement yields exocentric constructions. So if you have WH movement it gives you a construction, WH phrase CP to just two structures. Neither one is dominant. Subject predicate if you accept say the predicate internal. Subject hypothesis, Dominic Sportation Koopman. So you have an NP nominal phrase and a verb phrase but they're just two parallel phrases. Well a lot of artificial devices were devised, were constructed within X-bar theory to try to get around this and to give you what you intuitively know is the thing you're after but that's not allowed, that's trickery. So there was a fundamental problem with X-bar theory that finally was resolved just not recent, a couple of years ago by the development of labeling theory which finally separates totally this problem of projection from compositionality, separates all three, tells you when some operation of dislocation must take place when it may take place when it need not take place. So that finally suggests breaks up the conflation of the three notions that were mixed up in the phrase structure grammar. A lot of interesting results, plenty of interesting problems. Well that brings us up until about the 90s so why don't I stop there and go on next time. Okay. We'll have a.