We Sign-Wielding Primates.

We Sign-Wielding Primates. Mark Heyne

“That the principles of language and natural logic are known unconsciously and are a precondition for language acquisition is the general supposition of Cartesian Linguistics.” Chomsky 1966.

Noam Chomsky, in his book ‘Cartesian Linguistics’ states clearly the rationalist heritage from Descartes to Kant that supports his view of language acquisition and development. A ‘deep structure’ of syntax underlies the forms of language the child comes to use. This has become a commonplace in language teaching in recent decades, but it is an unexamined one.

Firstly, what use is the hypothesis of an innate structuring of language if this deep structure is so malleable and indefinite as to allow transformation into whatever structure applies in the child’s environment? If it can be triggered by any actual language in any direction, then it is as vague a concept as a ‘language instinct’, or predisposition.

Many of the observations that lead one to suppose pre-existent mental structures, such as the rapidity of acquisition and ‘creativity’ of children’s language use, have been exaggerated. They can be equally explained by the ten years of exposure to adult verbalisations that an average child needs to become fluent, and by an appeal to factors of general intelligence. I keep coming back to the idea that the growth in general intelligence in infants around 3 to 6 years leads to a growth in the ability to think metaphorically and symbolically. It is this new ability that is expressed phonetically in language.

Generalisation, abstraction and analogy are the processes that other linguists such as Bloomfield, Sassure, Jesperson and others claim provide the mechanisms for the creativity of language use.

I would note here a common definition of learning, that data should be classified first, then reapplied in a new context to demonstrate that it has been understood in the abstract, and not only in its original sense. This is what language learning means too, not just rote memorizing of lexical items, but the reapplication of words and phrases to new situations. And it is the meaning of those phrases more than their form that is picked up and repositioned in new discourse.

One of Chomsky’s arguments against behaviorist reinforcement as a means to the learning of usage is that parents will often approve utterances that are grammatically incorrect, such as ‘doggy sleep’ which would only be corrected if the dog were in fact not asleep. Chomsky says this shows that the child ‘knows’ the correct form from an innate syntax despite the reinforcement of a mistake.

This however might more simply point to meaning being the prime aim of the communication.When we think of those earliest sign-wielding primates it is the semantics of their signing, rather than the syntax, that was of primary importance to them. We are the inheritors of that semantic ability.

Borges on John Wilkins

I have a new-found soft spot for a gent called John Wilkins, who Luis Borges refers to with typical fascination for Wilkins' Quixotic pursuit of a Universal language.

" The words of the analytical language created by John Wilkins are not mere arbitrary symbols; each letter in them has a meaning, like those from the Holy Writ had for the Cabbalists. Mauthner points out that children would be able to learn this language without knowing it be artificial; afterwards, at school, they would discover it being an universal code and a secret encyclopaedia.
Once we have defined Wilkins' procedure, it is time to examine a problem which could be impossible or at least difficult to postpone: the value of this four-level table which is the base of the language. Let us consider the eighth category, the category of stones. Wilkins divides them into common (silica, gravel, schist), modics (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearl, opal), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insolubles (chalk, arsenic). Almost as surprising as the eighth, is the ninth category. This one reveals to us that metals can be imperfect (cinnabar, mercury), artificial (bronze, brass), recremental (filings, rust) and natural (gold, tin, copper). Beauty belongs to the sixteenth category; it is a living brood fish, an oblong one."

" In the universal language which Wilkins invented in the seventeenth century, each word is defined by itself. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1629, had already noticed that, using the decimal number system, it may take only one day to learn how to name all the numbers up to infinity and how to write them in a new language, namely that of ciphers; he did also suggest the creation of a language similar to this former system, a general language, organizing and covering all human ideas. John Wilkins, around 1664, started to work on this task."

http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html

Following up on Wilkins, who Borges rightly laments is no longer referenced in the Brittanica,
I found Wikipedia helpful as always: he was Warden of Wadham Oxford, my old college, for ten years, though he is usually given more credit for being Dean of Trinity Cambridge for one.
He was one of the originators of the Royal Society, and a supporter of that great British democrat, Oliver Cromwell. A proud engraving of him now resides on my office wall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkins

THE -ISMS OF HUMPTY

Humpty Dumpty, the egg who had a great fall in the nursery rhyme, claims

“ When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less”.

“The question is,” says Alice, a spirited visitor from the land the other side of the mirror

“ whether you can make words mean so many different things”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master, that is all.”

Though Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through The Looking Glass’ may be a nonsense story,

Humpty Dumpty, or HD as I shall refer to him, is not talking nonsense.

Alice is too puzzled to reply, but HD has prepared the ground for his claim that his interpretation of meaning is to be ‘Master’. He proclaims ‘glory’ for the superiority of his interpretation of the birthday gift-giving ritual. 364 Un-Birthday presents would obviously be better than one Birthday present. HD’s logic here is impeccable.

His contempt towards Alice attitude in imposing his interpretation is quite imperious.

He claims that Alice does not understand what he means “until I tell you.”

Synonymous with his triumphant ‘glory’ , HD describes his superior interpretation as

“ a nice knock-down argument”, with its undertones of agression and finality.

HD glories in his superior argument, and rightly asserts that his interpretation is to be ‘master’.

HD imposes his definition of a word on others, and Alice obediently accepts his mastery of such unruly objects as proud verbs and malleable adjectives.

“Impenetrability!” says HD, maybe expressing his frustration at his inability to penetrate fully the issue and implications of “might makes right” and giving up with “ we’ve had enough of that subject.” Nevertheless he continues to battle with unruly words that are reluctant to do his bidding by “paying them extra” for carrying more than one meaning. Fanciful as that is, to have a mecantile answer to a linguistic problem, at least HD recognises the multiple meaning of words to be a problem.

When Alice first sees Humpty Dumpty, she recognises him as a character from a nursery–rhyme, and is certain of his identity: “ I’m as certain of it as if his name were written all over his face” she says. She immediately associates his shape, an egg with a face, with his name.

Later, HD complains that the name Alice signifies nothing to him: it is without associations,

and above all, it is not descriptive, as girls’ names like Daisy or Mary might be.

“With a name like that, you might be any shape, almost.” he says.

“Must a name mean something? asks Alice, and HD replies that it must.

“My name means the shape I am…” says Humpty.

“Must a name mean something?” Asks Alice

“Of course it must!” He says, betraying an early prejudice of naming:

HD shows a commonly mistaken conception of names, that they should be descriptive. Even though our own association with Humpty Dumpty allows us to see him as egg-shaped, without that specific cultural background we would not be able to do so.

Alice as a name is not pictorial like Daisy or allusive like Mary, but nowadays has cultural associations which give it a certain significance, in this case from Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books themselves.

Names are philosophically important for the link they show between sign and concept, and as a part of the whole importance of language as a medium of truth-telling.

“In ‘On Sense and Reference’ Frege appears to focus on the question relative to what value or aim the relation of proper names has to the objects they stand for - that is, their reference.

“ It is significant relative to the scientific value of truth alone, and this is a value that only sentences can have.” #

Names, nick names, patronyms, surnames, tribal names, all of these naming actions are attempts to define and so limit the person by claiming their identity with family, tribal or clan groupings. Above all, we see that naming of objects is an attempt to exercise control in some way, by sympathetic magic calling on an association of the word to the object which gives a power to manipulate reality through words.

It is this mystical connection between names and objects that is at the root of the Idealist confusion over essences, that named mental objects have an existence simply by virtue of being given a name. In Plato, this named object is the Idea, which is supposed to precede experience, just like the post-Kantian formulation by Chomsky of a mental template which preceeds actual experience of language.

These mental objects seem to have a stability and fixedness that is quite illusory.

Instead we realize that ‘ goodness’, ‘love’, ‘nation’, ‘the people’, do not refer to fixed entities, but are categories that are reconstituted each time we refer to them.

Wittgenstein objects to the descriptive view of names, specifically in Saint Augustine’s formulation that "individual words in language name objects," and that "sentences are combinations of such names" (PI 1). Instead he introduces the idea that how a word is used is its salient character. "For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language"(PI 1). And

"if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use" (BB 4).

Alice hits on a relevant observation when HD claims

“It’s my turn to choose a subject”, and Alice reflects that

“ He talks about it just as if it were a game!”

In fact this is HD’s game of interpretation, as he quibbles pedantically over the difference between “ How old did you say you were” and “ How old are you?”,

triumphantly pronouncing Alice’s interpretation “Wrong!”

Unlike HD, who was reduced to bribery in his effort to control unruly words, Wittgenstein embraces the countless uses of words, their un- fixedness, and their flexibility in a game called language: " The term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life" (PI 23)

This view is very like that of Vygotsky, in that language is seen as a social construct, and intrinsically opposed to the Chomskian view that language is something built-in to humans.

Chomsky holds that language is something built-in to the brain, without which language learning could not take place. This is a Kantian view of the remarkable progress young children make in the learning of their mother-tongue. Where Kant has categories of understanding built into the brain to process time, space and causation, Chomsky suggests that linguistic capability is also built-in, and accounts for our almost instinctive grasp of the inner transformations of language. Thus knowledge of a language must depend on an inner template of language structure which is activated by actual examples of language being heard by a child.

However, seeing that mental activity preceeds linguistic activity in the child by at least a year or more, what rather might be innate is the system of discrimination and organisation that can carry the verbal information provided by speech, and this is actually a genetic inheritance from the first language-using tribe that came out of Africa. The ‘deep grammar’ that Chomsky and others see in the relations between widely-dispersed languages are directly attributable to this fact, that we descend from this original language-gifted tribe.

A system of perception, comparison, categorisation, association and synthesis is active from the beginning in newly-born children, and even in pre-natal infants. Given that information is being processed by the brain from the very first perceptions of the mother’s heart beat, fluctuations in warmth and the sounds of language penetrating the walls of the womb, it seems unnecessary to posit a separate language-structuring device in the brain. Rather, the structure, inherited from forebears, that forms and orders all perception is Ratiocination. Some would like to call it Reason

but that would imply a large number of relationships which must have developed from some few primitive groupings of perception, such as present/absent, one/plural, which would be the beginning of numbering, and, deriving from the instinct for survival and reproduction, interesting or not interesting. This sense of some things being more ‘interesting’ is notable in babies, and can be experimentally verified.

Whether it is actually necessary to assume an innate Language Acquisition Device to account for eventual outcomes in language performance seems to me a matter that could be experimentally tested. If we can account for L1 learners’ linguistic behavior entirely in terms of input of thousands of vocalisations by parents and siblings over a number of years, the LAD is redundant.

On the other hand, investigation of gender differences in language learning, since it seems that females have an advantage in this matter, may provide ammunition for the other side. If structures in the brain could be isolated which aid language learning, then a nativist argument would be supported. All the same, these structures are more likely physical than metaphysical.

The popularity of the innate theory is hard to overcome, as it fits easily with other widespread beliefs in non-physical aspects of the human being such as souls, spirits and minds.

The nativist view of language learning may be comfortable and reassuring, but the evolutionary view is humanist and confers value on human learning. Above all, the LAD seems to me to downgrade the value of a specifically human construct, that is the codification of information in a symbolic communication system called language.

Mark Heyne. June 2006

FOOTNOTES

*HD is a well-known children’s nursery-rhyme character who is in fact an egg.

He suffers an unfortunate Fall which can never be remedied. As the nursery rhyme has it,

“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”

In Carroll’s version, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men “ couldn’t put HD in his place again”, a variant reading which may well reflect the political allegory behind the nursery rhyme….

“Humpty Dumpty was in fact an unusually large canon which was mounted on the protective wall of "St. Mary's Wall Church" in Colchester, England. It was intended to protect the Parliamentarian stronghold of Colchester which was in the temporarily in control of the Royalists during the period of English history, described as the English Civil War ( 1642 - 1649). A shot from a Parliamentary canon succeeded in damaging the wall underneath Humpty Dumpty causing the canon to fall to the ground. The Royalists 'all the King's men' attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall but even with the help of ' all the King's horses' failed in their task and Colchester fell to the Parliamentarians after a siege lasting eleven weeks.” www.famousquotes.me.uk

REFERENCES:

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass. 1872

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations (PI), 1953,

http://heyne-satz.blogspot.com/

Matrix Unloaded

THE MATRIX UNLOADED

What if you were told your whole life was an illusion, and in fact you are being used as a human battery, a source of chemical energy plugged into a computer, like some sort of Energizer Bunny?

Scary though it is to imagine, this is the state of the people in the world of the Matrix, exploited for their electrical potential, while dreaming that they are going about their normal lives as husbands and wives, office workers and good citizens. The Matrix of computers they are plugged into provide them with a virtual-reality experience from which they never wake.

What everyone remembers about the Matrix films is the stunning visual imagery, with ultra-rapid fight scenes and death-defying leaps and jumps over buildings. However this is not their main quality. The subject of the films is the subject of Western philosophy from Decartes to Kant: how can we know our world is real if all we know is our own minds? The Matrix movies deal with this puzzle and decide: our present reality is mental, not physical.

The main characters are Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, Oracle and Cypher.

Morpheus, and the name suggests a dream-maker or shamanistic shape-shifter, is awakened and aware of the diabolical situation humans are in, and can awaken others from their computer-programmed illusion. Such a person is known in India as Boddisatva, one who turns back from enlightenment to enlighten others. In Christian terms, he is like John the Baptist, who announces the Messiah, and wakens others to the truth. He has himself been awoken from his dream or trance of illusion by the Oracle, who we discover later in the story is herself a glitch in the Matrix program. Morpheus awakens Neo, who he believes is ‘The One’ prophesized, born and destined to be the savior of the enslaved human race.

If this all sounds vaguely Biblical, you are not mistaken. The Matrix trilogy of films are science-fiction with a mythic ring. There is a whole level of the Matrix movies that is based on a Christian narrative structure of redemption, Messianic return and salvation. The haven of the fight against the Matrix is called Zion and the main female character is called Trinity. In Catholic theology this is the three-fold nature of the godhead: essence, incarnation and creative energy in movement. She is ironically named for representing the essential but elided female aspect of the creation, known to all good Catholics as the Mother of God. She is Neo’s lover and is his reason for rejecting the opportunity to destroy the Matrix. Instead he chooses love over victory to save her from death.

This sort of framing of the characters is well designed for the Western audience, who will be quite familiar with the underlying mythic structures from stories like The Parable of the Cave, Orpheus in the Underworld and the role of prophesy in the Bible. The bros. Wachowski seem to have given up on the idea of sacrifice though , as both Neo and Trinity get saved at the last moment when they are about to die ‘for the cause’. Morpheus in Christian terms is John the Baptist, who announces the Messiah, and wakens others to the truth. He has himself been awoken from his dream or trance of illusion by the Oracle, whom we discover later in the story is just a glitch in the Matrix program. In fact, there are a number of glitches in the program, which make it possible for those once awakened to fight back against it. For a start, they are able to hack into the Matrix code, and the illusion the system provides is not always perfect. There is even reference to another version of the matrix that failed, as it was too perfect…the illusion it provided was too satisfying to the humans entrapped within it, which says something the machines misunderstood about human nature; that it thrives on conflict and problem-solving.

Apart from this structure of slavery and redemption, there are other elements in the Matrix , such as the whole aspect of illusion, delusion and enlightenment that the writers, the Wachowski Brothers, borrow from a different tradition. If we look at the Parable of the Cave as told by Plato, we see a basic source of the concept that we are living in illusion, that what we take for reality is but a shadow of the Real. Plato took the ‘real’ to be the world of ideas and mathematical concepts that are independent of our sensory experience, and that idea is modified in the Christian tradition by Saint John and Saint Augustine, who say that “now we see but through a glass, darkly, but then we will see face to face”. In simple terms, they say the spiritual world of Heaven and Hell is real, while our physical experience is not. Morpheus, in contrast, awakens people from the illusion of a mental construct to confront a harsh but actual physical reality.

What Morpheus teaches Neo is that he can have mental control over his reality. This is a higher consciousness that Neo develops gradually, until he can stop bullets by willpower, heal the dying and fly like Superman. This may seem ludicrous, but it comes from his own mental capacity and greater concentration which can overcome the virtual-reality projected by the Matrix computers. Morpheus’ message here is that reality, our everyday experience of the world, is a mental event, and we can learn to control it.

The character Cypher is the Judas of the story, betraying his friends as he opts for the comfort of the Matrix-illusion rather than face the everyday reality of synthetic food and constant peril.

He enjoys his gourmet restaurant food even though he knows it is not real. He is an ammoral hedonist, but we have to ask ourselves, is his choice so illogical? What does he lose if what he enjoys is a mere representation, when the same can be said of all experience? The fact is that we know only what we perceive in our brains, the input of our senses, so what’s the difference? The answer is suggested by another character in the film, the Oracle.

Neo is prophesized to be the One, though he doesn’t believe it himself. He discovers his mental powers gradually, through instruction and practice. The Oracle also predicts that Trinity will die, but when he has the choice, Neo exercises his freedom to save her rather than destroy the Matrix. So, the prophesy can be subverted by the exercise of free will. The same goes for Cypher. What he loses is the difficult but rewarding exercise of response to actuality, rather than the passive acceptance of an illusion.

Wittgenstein's can of worms.

Comments on Pathways Language and the World, Unit 1. Dec 1 2006

Wittgenstein’s questioning our ‘pointing inwardly’ to a sensation and labeling it, his calling this a ‘ceremony,’ presumably a ‘mere’ ceremony without real value, opens a can of worms in the heart of western philosophy.

If we associate a sign ‘S’ with a particular sensation, Wittgenstein doubts that in the future we will be able to correctly assign this same marker to a repeated occurrence of the same sensation. He doubts that there is any way to be sure that the sensation labeled S is exactly the same as any other perceived sensation we think identical to S.

“Whatever is going to seem right to me, is right.”

In other words, there is no have repeatedly shown. However, we do trust it and build on it, and we might ask how far a memory would have to stray from an original fact to become false.

An experience identified as ‘S’ would take place in a certain context. As Heraclites put it, you can’t stand in the same river twice, not least because apart from the water of the river being in flux, you too are in flux, and changing from one moment in time to another. So a repeated experience of ‘S’ would have to be called ‘S1’, ‘S2’, ‘S3’, and so on, each existentially different from the other. How these can be related in memory however, would be by their shared qualities, their membership of a set: as David Hume said, “When we have found a resemblance among several objects that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them, whatever differences we may observe in the degree of their quantity and quality, and whatever other differences may appear among them.”

Hume, Treatise, I. i. 7.

Let’s agree that the main functions of language are firstly to represent our thoughts to ourselves, and secondly to convey those thoughts to others.

For the first function, maybe I can decide to call a certain taste “S” and that serves as an adequate reference to myself. In that usage of ‘language’, the representation of thought to myself, the internal labeling can be as arbitrary as I like, so long as I remember what label I attached to which thought. If we make the mistake of assuming that our private code is going to serve the second function of language, we will be sorely disillusioned. One viewing alone of the execrable Jodie Foster film “Nell” should be enough to convince us of this. However we could say a representation can be private and for oneself alone and can be trusted if it is in some constant propositional language with its own internal syntax against whose criteria a logical or factual error would be seen to diverge.

For the second main use of language we will need common agreement that when I say “S” I mean the 19^th letter in the alphabet, and not something else. If we talk about communication with others then a social dimension is necessary in which agreement is reached by a community on the usage of a sign. If George Bush says “It’s so hot some of us are going to fall out”, and no-one but a solitary Texan standing nearby understands that he means “keel over”, then the social requirement of language communication has nevertheless been met. If there are no Texans nearby, the communication will not succeed, and we might say that the President is only talking to himself.

If this were all there is to Wittgenstein’s misgivings, we might turn to a number of language theorists such as Roman Jacobson to find a similar argument, but it seems that more is at stake here.

When he doubts the identity of an experience with a similar one stored in memory and labeled ‘S’, Wittgenstein may be questioning more than just the accuracy of our memory or the lack of external verification. He is questioning more than just the value of subjective judgments. He is really doubting the value of the introspection itself. And his unhappiness with the labeling of sensations is really a mistrust of that method of philosophizing in which internal judgements stand without any means of verification. The self that is known by looking within and the certainties that are obtained by mentally stripping away all doubtful elements, to Wittgenstein are still fundamentally unstable.

What this signifies for us is the undermining of an established identity in the Lockean tradition where continuity of memories entails the continuity of a Self. This is a conception reflected in common usage like

“He is no longer the man he was,” said of an Alzheimer’s victim or a forgetful elderly person. Alongside the Christian idea of an immaterial ‘soul’ as identity, this materialist concept of the self consisting of the accumulated memories of a person is very widespread.

[Not that it is universal however: some groups of people such as the Piraha tribe apparently do not value memories of the past or locate events linguistically in a past tense. Their identities reside almost exclusively in their ongoing present experience.]

Wittgenstein’s radical doubt has serious ramifications for our knowledge of the world and for our own sense of personal identity.

Stuart Hampshire RIP

Stuart Hampshire was my "Warden" at Wadham College Oxford. I once met him
when he was considering 'sending me down', which means back down to London in the local lingo. Reasons for that may appear later...

" Do try to remember you are at Oxford, not on the Left Bank" was his advice.
He was a real gent.

This link is to his obituary:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/obituary/story/0,12212,1239716,00.html

As Daniel Dennett says in his Philosophical Lexicon, there were hidden depths to the apparently placid Hampshire:

Hampshire, n. A scenic bit of English countryside, providing broad prospects and distant horizons, but one must foot one's way carefully; under the marsh there is a bog.

A

This is the first article I published back in 1998 while living in Oman. It's about "teaching thinking in class", and is really a disingenuous attempt to suggest that we might stimulate our young charges to analyze their situation, without completely calling into question the implications of their religion and culture.