ABSTRACT
Liz Bates gave a talk at ICIS, the International Conference on Infant Studies in 1996 and the conference organizers offered tapes of it, only $11. A bargain, as I have played it to my Developmental Neuroscience class ever since, and more than I bargained for, as the repetitions of this talk slowly restructured my thinking on developmental neurobiology. In my mind, the talk is titled “Unnecessaiy Entailments,” though Liz probably titled it something pithier. I have since discovered it touches on virtually all of the major themes that weave through her imposing volume of work. In this talk, she dissected the unnecessary identities that have proliferated in the conceptual structure of cognitive neuroscience. How a complex problem, mapping the structure of the world onto a string of speech, may produce a unique and complicated neural structure but not entail a corresponding structure of complicated innate rules. How the fact that somewherelocalized, physical changes in the brain must accompany any new thought (in this case, her husband George’s shoe size) neither entail biological determinism nor an impenetrable neural center for shoe size. How that the fact we can identify language as a unique human ability does not entail unique corresponding structure in the genome. And most important, this talk supplied the correct response to the “I can’t imagine how …” argument-Liz correctly pointed out that this argument entails only incapacity in the speaker, but nothing about the structure of cognition, the brain, or the genome. Her own imagination has consistently outrun the opposition.
