Okay--I was going to do read-only tonight (short on time), but I have to respond to the adjective-noun hypothesis. By instinctive knowledge, is it meant that this knowledge is present, though latent, literally at the time of our birth?I'd have a lot of trouble swallowing that.
If, by "instinct", it is meant that it develops as early language is acquired, yes, I can agree with that; no problem, because of the way we learn language. (Speaking of instinct--I'm writing based on my own, not out of having had any formal education on this subject.) Nouns are the easiest part of a language to learn, so we acquire them first, whether we are infants or students learning a foreign tongue. Teacher points..."chair"..."This is a chair". Mommy holds up a ball, and says, "ball". When the infant has mastered the noun, the descriptors come in, and I think this is a process that is both natural and necessary. We need to communicate, and we can only do that effectively if we can be specific. We can tell an infant, "I'm putting your socks on you", but if we say, "I'm putting your green socks on you", we are helping the babe to learn what we mean when, a couple of years later, we say, "Go put on your green socks".
I guess I could boil down what I'm trying to get across by saying that I think we learn nouns first, so that we know what's around us; "where we are", in other words. And the next thing we need to learn is how to differentiate between things that are called the same thing...say, shirts...for which the outcome of our actions would vary, according to our selection.
