Pixar's latest gem reminds us all that humans are not alone in having a sensuous life.
The longest—and most exhausting—portion of Christine Kenneally’s new book, The First Word, looks at the question of what language is. Traditionally the definition has been abstract and axiomatic. Ferdinand de Saussure began modern linguistics by saying, "Language is a structure, a functioning whole in which the different parts are determined by one another." Noam Chomsky had language pegged as the set of sentences generated by its rules. Kenneally has no sympathy for these kinds of dicta. She doesn’t even bother to dismiss them, but she plainly does not believe that language is something that can be abstracted from its speakers and studied like a conic slice on a piece of graph paper. Nor is it a "whole" system. Language in her book is a "suite" of physical abilities that enable us to converse.
A few months ago this blog explored at length the book Why we Talk by Jean-Louis Dessalles. He too saw conversation as speech’s defining function, but he looked at what is new and peculiar about conversing. Kenneally looks in the other direction, at what “old parts” (i.e., pre-human abilities) to produce the capacity to converse. My own instinct leans toward Dessalles, but the point of reading is to get beyond one’s own prejudices so that you can learn from others. Kenneally’s work is invaluable at getting down to certain biological supports of language that are easily forgotten if you stick entirely with Dessalles (or me).
I don’t think Kenneally is ever this direct about it, but, except for a few motor skills, all the old parts she refers to as sources for our linguistic skills come from perception. Western philosophy has never had much use for perception. Logic holds the higher regard, but perception (concrete, sensuous thought) can be highly imaginary and creative. Novelists, poets, and playwrights tend to think perceptually. Scientists and mathematicians often think this way as well, but they can also succeed by manipulating symbols in accordance with logical procedures. In this discussion we can set symbolic, abstract reasoning aside. Animals reason only slightly, but they have much perceptual knowledge:
Perception plus life leads to individuality. “In most studies of long-lived animals with elaborate social systems,” she quotes somebody as telling her, “the individual is important because they have extremely varied experiences.” [p. 101] It’s not just the grown-ups in human societies that use experience to confront changing circumstances. Elephants, baboons, and dolphins learn from experience as well, suggesting we are not the only species for whom wisdom comes with age. And of course some learn better than others, or learn different things. Kenneally leaves off mentioning that language turns this experience into a form of intellectual capital denied other species.
Perception associates sensations. The behavioral psychologists whom Chomsky scorned did a fine job at showing that many animals, notably rats and pigeons, can associate any pair of experiences. Tapping a lever and getting a piece of food? Sure, rats can learn to do that? Tapping a red lever and getting a shock; tapping a blue lever and getting food? Yes, pigeons can learn to avoid the red lever and tap the blue one. Humans do this kind of associating all the time, including associating sounds with perceptions to produce names. Animals can do that too. Dogs learn their names and can learn some other names as well. The capacity to create names/words is fundamental to language, and Kenneally does mention that, “While other mammals appear to be very good at making meaning from sound-plus-reference combinations, they don’t necessarily produce new sounds in connection with new objects in the way we do.” [p. 121]
Perception pays attention. A forest scene contains thousands of details. How do you determine what to look at? Sometimes a motion draws attention to itself. Other times some subjective interest or appetite steers the observer to give something special notice. Every perceiving animal pays attention to things. The peculiarity, which Kenneally discusses at some length is the peculiar habit people have of directing one another’s attention. “At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.” [p. 129] Regulars on this blog will know that I marked the margin beside that passage.
Perception is alert to context. The old “Laugh In” show had a recurring bit of business in which robots went about daily life, doing their mechanical tasks, like lifting glasses and pouring water. As they proceeded, they got increasingly out of harmony with reality, pouring water where the glass should be rather than where it was, picking up a pie instead of a hat and placing it on their head, etc. To avoid that fate perceiving animals take the context into account. They are located in the here-and-now in a way that robots are not. Thus “chimps can suppress [seemingly involuntary] calls in dangerous situations where a loud noise would draw attention to them.” [p. 139] And there are many social situations where animals respond to identical behaviors differently, depending on the status of the individual doing the behaving. Conversation requires close attention to context too, but this recognition is much older than humanity.
Perception builds on categorical units. Perception takes a physical continuum such as the band of visible light and breaks it into categories (red/green and blue/yellow). Sounds are heard as either this note or that note, never part of the in-between physics that comprises the sound continuum. So it is not surprising that we have phonological categories—e.g., hearing pa or ba but never a mix of the two. This ability is part of “a much more general feature of the animal auditory system.” [p. 151] Animals were perceiving the world in categories long before language came along to start naming the categories.
Perception enables coordinated behavior. Many machines can be programmed to perform a series of steps. Some machines can get feedback that enables them to adjust their steps as they proceed. Perception raises feedback procedures to another level by allowing animals to imagine an outcome and then alter their actions according to how they are doing. Chimpanzees make these alterations routinely during social interactions and people do them when they construct a speech by uttering one word after another.
Perception supports empathy. The central empathic event is the recognition of oneself in others. Empathy need not be doleful (“there but for the grace of God…”); it can be admiring or informative. Those last two can spark imitation which is useful for humans learning speech, apes learning gestures, and elephants learning how to get through the day. We have long known that people can imagine themselves in another’s place, and now that we know about mirror neurons we see that other animals can do the same thing. With that discovery the ability of mammals generally to learn the ways of their elders is less of a mystery.
Set in a biological context, the idea of linguistic foundations resting on a suite of perceptual functions redefines the nature of language. It becomes a species-specific capacity arising from a "language-ready brain" that, before humans began, could already provide individual experiences, associations, attention, contexts, categories, coordinated actions, and empathy. Such a detailed study of the biological foundations tells us nothing of the origins of speech, but it provides a rich appreciation of the evolutionary heritage we started with.
These details show us something else as well. Dr. Kenneally is mounting a ferocious assault on the view of language as a whole, coherent system.
If we think of language as the ordering of symbols according to structured rules, none of Kenneally's biological points seem relevant, and the reason Chomsky has been so uninterested in evolutionary accounts of speech becomes apparent. Animal knowledge is concrete and ad hoc—a very poor foundation for symbolic or syntactic structures. Thus, some kind of evolutionarily-implausible, big-bang account in which language just explodes onto the scene appears natural to the Chomskyan perspective.
Pinker and Bloom, the Chomsky disciples who said that evolution must have something to contribute to the story of language origins, hold the role of Gorbachev, a believing reformer who did not understand that his reform would forever subvert the old dreams. “Having evolved,” writes Kenneally, means that you are less a creation than an accretion … a piled-up assemblage of systems and organs.” [p 202] The back cover of her book has a friendly blurb from Pinker and she describes Chomsky as the world’s greatest intellectual, but it looks to me like she’s in a fight to the death with these guys.
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