This blog has begun well, by my humble standards, receiving visitors throughout the day and I see there has been a steady number of subscribers, although the first few mailings have been a day late with the post. (I’m trying to fix that.) There is a bit of a backlog of news right now as I try to bring readers up to date on what has been happening in this broad field, so I have been citing already-published articles rather than just-published ones. I expect that to change as we move along. Sometimes, of course, the news is a little weird because the news sources have their agendas, which may not match the readers’ interests. In particular there is one central topic of language studies that scholars work hard to avoid mentioning.
Which metaphor for the obvious do you prefer: the elephant in the room or the crazy aunt in the basement? In either case, we all know that speech is only useful because utterances mean something, yet meaning is the reality that dare not speak its name, the elephant everyone prefers not to mention.
The reason for the silence is a second crazy aunt who also goes unmentioned, the problem of the brain/computer metaphor. These days you can hardly call yourself scientific if you do not embrace the notion that the brain is a computer. Since brains do an extensive amount of information processing, the doctrine seems bland enough until you realize that the brain/computer metaphor is to be taken literally and accepted as complete. Things that are irrelevant to computer actions are irrelevant to brains. In particular, computers do not respond to sensations and it is impossible to program a computer to avoid pain or pursue pleasure. In brief, computers never act for subjective reasons, so if our brains are literally computers and only computers with nothing left over, then neither people nor animals can ever act for subjective reasons. As for language, its meanings can never be even partially subjective.
Put that bluntly, the notion sounds crazy. Therefore, the doctrine is seldom put that bluntly. Serious people talk around it, but they also balk at saying we speak for subjective reasons.
Here’s the problem, there is no physical way for the subjective things of the mind to interact with the objective features of the brain. To believe otherwise is to believe in magical causes that allow non-physical things to have physical effects. It would be as wondrous as saying ‘Open sesame’ to move a rock. Put that starkly, the belief in subjective effects also sounds crazy, so again we do not put it that starkly.
The paradox that embarrasses all these mad notions is meaningful speech. I take pleasure in a piece of candy and report, “Sweet, with just a tease of bitter.” How have I managed to say that? Either I have magically transformed a private feeling into a public statement or I am deceived in believing that I have described a subjective sensation.
When theory leads to nothing but absurdities, it is time to theorize again, but where to start? Better to stop talking about meaning.
Almost 50 years ago Noam Chomsky made a laughing stock of the psychologist B.F. Skinner by showing how Skinner used technical-sounding jargon to hide a traditional, “mentalist” picture of what we say (essay available here), but Chomsky side-stepped the matter himself by focusing on syntax and shunning semantics, the study of meaning. When it comes to the evolution of language, Stephen Pinker has been Chomsky’s most public disciple, but he speaks about meaning as though it were as objective as computer output.
In 1995 Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal’s textbook Knowledge of Meaning argued that semantics is limited by the syntax. Understanding (“interpreting”) a sentence depends entirely on the sentence’s syntax. Neither the listener nor the environment contributes anything. The text does not try to prove this by showing how syntax enables the listener to get a joke, experience the shock of recognition while reading a poem, or follow one of William Gaddis’s novels (available here), but something like this “strong” doctrine is necessary if you are going to argue that humans are computers and subjective faculties have nothing to do with human/computer behavior, including speech.
The problem of subjective meaning is not new, although the computation-centered answer now accepted by many people is. It used to be agreed that there was something profoundly human about our ability to speak about our interior lives. The antiquity of this mystery is voiced in a Sanskrit hymn thousands of years old, quoted in Nicholas Ostler’s excellent Empires of the Word (p. 181).
When, O Lord of the World, the Wise established
Name-giving, the first principle of language,
That which was excellent in them, that which was pure,
Hidden deep within, through love was brought to light.
Here we see the basics. Language brings something “hidden deep within … to light.” And what is the source of that power? Nothing so Aristotelian as a soul. The hymn says love.
That’s the old view. The modern one is that it is sheer vanity to suppose there is anything unique about humans, except in the trivial sense that every species is unique. But anyone who insists on that doctrine must ignore the possibility of speaking subjectively.
A man once said to me: “Just now things are good, but I fear for my children.”
Of course, no computer could ever truthfully say that about itself. Besides having no children, computers have neither fear nor interior life of any sort. That absence distinguishes them from animals as well as people. Many animals know the feeling of fearing for their children. It is the contrast between the perceptual gestalt — just now things are good — and the emotion — I fear for my children — that seems peculiarly human. Somehow this speaker was able to break away from the world of the here-and-now and still find something to say. But to do that he had to speak of subjective rather than objective things. Possibly he could have gone on to explain himself by referring to abstractions, but he could not point to any concrete thing in his world. In that objective situation, things were good. His meaning brought something hidden deep within out into my view. And what was the source of that hidden world? In this case it was just as the Vedic hymn said, love.
This blog begins with the strong suspicion that the rise of an interior life gave our ancestors something new to talk about and talking about it required the evolution of a new tool, speech. Very likely the evolution of the two intertwined: interiority led to speech, speech led to more interiority, more interiority led to more controlled speech, better speech led to deeper interiority, etc. I will be surprised if it turns out we can account for language while ignoring the pink elephant of interior meaning, but who knows what tomorrow’s post will bring?
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