Comments On Some Comments

America's first astronaut was Ham, a very young chimpanzee. He didn't know about the outer space part of the trip, but he knew how to take tests during the flight.

Last week’s post drew an unusually large number of comments for this blog. One, by JanetK, ended with, “I can see how syntactic structure can be independent of the meaning of words, but I have difficulty imagining a sentence without any words at all.” This objection is standard when contemplating Chomsky’s theory that language began as a medium of thought and only later became a medium of communication. There is, however, a rebuttal. Thought seems to be older than language. After all, chimpanzees can act intelligently even without using either machine logic or syntactic strings.

Vertebrate thought is perceptual. Instead of using logical symbols or sentences,its basic elements are sensations. One sensation by itself is meaningless but they can produce associations so that a smell sensation can evoke a visual one. For example, stepping into a house where cooking is going on can evoke an image of that food. Humans tend to verbalize their associations, smelling something and saying, "Spaghetti." But animals can have the sensory associations even without the words. The meaning of a sensation is its associations. I often wonder if Pavlov's dogs, upon hearing a bell, visualized the food that made them salivate.

For a highly verbal thinker like me, imagining thought without language can be difficult, but even I can watch a sporting event and react to the perception without having to translate it into words. In a tense duel between batter and pitcher, I relax the moment I see the third strike. I react with a jolt the instant I see a home run ball hit. When I see an especially important player come to bat, I become more alert. These physical changes are all the result of perception, not of translating the perception into words. Animals, it seems, can live this life constantly, living in the moment, alert to what is going on, reacting to what may happen or has just happened.

Language without perception, however, is problematical. The point was made in another recent comment, this time about one of the oldest posts on this blog. Adrian Morgan recently quoted Terry Pratchett:it's very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell the other monkeys where the ripe fruit is. But the challenge from quantum mechanics is more profound than that because quantum physics contradicts the world experienced through perception. The amazing thing is that we can "talk quantum" using the peculiar logical symbols we have invented for the purpose. We can make amazingly accurate predictions about quantum experiments, but we cannot understand, or at least we cannot visualize the events they refer to, not even metaphorically, because the world they predict is nothing like the one we perceive.

Particularly odd is the way space appears to work very differently at the quantum level. We cannot describe an electron's motion using the normal prepositions. We cannot say that an electron went through something, or around it, or that it did both at the same time, or that it did neither. As the philosopher of science David Z. Albert puts it in his book Quantum Mechanics and Experience

Electrons seem to have modes of being, or modes of moving, available to them which are quite unlike what we know how to think about. [p. 11]

To put it in Pratchett terms: it's very hard for us to think about a quantum world when we evolved in a world where fruit is either here or there or in between.

The evolution of perception and perceptual thought is an absolute requirement for organizing words into sentences. That point might seem obvious, but it is absent from the algebra of Chomsky's syntax and from efforts to equate machine logic with vertebrate intelligence. It is possible that humans have some powers of perception that are lacking in chimpanzees, but if we do, those talents have yet to be discovered. On the whole, apes seem to live more in the moment than we do, which is to say they are more engaged with their perceptions than we are with ours. We live in a metaphorical, mythical world and although those metaphors and myths are based on perception, they distract us from the here and now.

Returning to the question of last week's post—which came first, words or syntax?—the answer seems to be the ever-popular, ever-frustrating: it depends.

Syntax came before words IF you understand syntax perceptually. One-year-old children speak in single words, but they can respond appropriately to more complicated speech. You can tell a toddler, for example, to turn off a television and off goes the TV even though the toddler cannot speak any of the words he recognized. Similarly, I can read and understand Shakespeare, but I cannot use language so brilliantly.

Syntax came after words, however, IF you understand syntax as a set of rules for organizing strings. Strings of what? Quoting the master: Words, words, words.

Comments

[Uzza]

what's a word?
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BLOGGER: A word is a tool for piloting attention.

[María]

“Thought seems to be older than language. After all, chimpanzees can act intelligently even without using either machine logic or syntactic strings”. So, the question of last week's post (which came first, words or syntax?) can be reformulated in the following way: Is there identity between perceptive compositionality and syntactic compositionality? This is a crucial question. Contra conceptual semantics or Fodor’s mentalese, my bet is that they are very different. Unlike in perceptive compositionality, in syntactic compositionality the elements are focused on separately (agent / action, or location / category, etc.)
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BLOGGER: Reformulating the question in terms of compositionality is interesting, but may obscure what I’m talking about. Compositionality, as I understand it, says that the meaning of a statement is fixed by the statement’s structure and the meaning of its elements. It works very well when we are talking about a mathematical statement. For example, the meaning of an equation like F=ma seems to depend entirely on structure and symbols. It is more problematical in natural languages. A sentence like, “Oh, sure, I’d love to take a job with low pay and no benefits,” may mean the exact opposite of what its structure and elements indicate. The meaning of a statement like, “Wow” seems to depend entirely on things outside the statement itself. If we say, as this blog does, that words pilot attention, natural language almost never gets its full meaning without referencing things beyond the statement itself. As for “perceptive compositionality” I’ve never encountered the term before so I suppose I should think about this a bit. My first reaction, however, is to recall the primary doctrine of gestalt psychologists who preached that perceptions are different from the sum of their parts. If that idea is right, perception is not compositional.

[Uzza]

*Sentences without words can be difficult to imagine if you've never seen it. For a description see Susan Schaller's A Man Without Words, where she recounts a group of languageless adults exchanging their personal histories. Still,

*the question is not at all clear. You can't really mean language is not compositional because prosodics are not elements of the message(?). You seem to say perceptual thought evolves a lexicon of words, aka tools to pilot attn. These tools would include mutual shared eyegaze, but definitely not nouns and verbs like doggie—if I just sign the word for doggie it rarely directs attention anywhere, even if an actual dog is handy. These tools would also presumably include other pointing gestures, affective facial expressions, and pantomimed actions. Then syntactic(?) rules would organize these elements, typically as object-agent if arranged linearly. Further social conventions would lead to stable form-meaning pairs used as symbols, which is what Chomsky means by word, or more accurately morpheme. So which are we asking came first—your lexicon of tools or his lexicon of morphemes?
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BLOGGER: The remark, "You seem to say perceptual thought evolves a lexicon of words" has it backwards. The lexicon directs attention, not attention the lexicon. The commenter may think that a word like doggie directs attention nowhere, but brain studies indicate that when a word like doggie is used, the brain’s visual area responds, suggesting that even in the absence of a physical dog, the listener/reader’s attention is directed to the image of a dog. As for not meaning “language is not compositional because prosodics are not elements of the message,” uh, no I didn’t mean that and don’t believe I said it. The problem I see with compositionality is that it does not allow for non-linguistic information to be included in determining the meaning of a sentence. But language typically casts attention outside the dictionary and outside the syntax. This problem comes up repeatedly when trying to program a computer to use everyday language. Typical solutions are some kind of commonsense database that covers lots of situations not included in the dictionary.

[Uzza]

if I just sign the word for doggie it rarely directs attention anywhere,

because few people know sign language. The majority of people will not realize that what I did is language, or even communication. If their attn is piloted anywhere at all, they look at my hand. Only the rare few who know the same sign language that the word is signed in, by having been taught the social convention that this production is meant to be linked to the image of a dog, will direct their attn as they have been taught. In speech as well, if I produce the Miluk word for doggie, since no one has learned the social convention of linking that sound to a dog image, since no one speaks Miluk, they will at best direct their attn to the source where the sound came from; my mouth, not a dog.

So in this sense words do not direct attention. In a possibly different sense, shared mutual eyegaze and pointing unarguably do direct attn, and possibly pantomime and facial expressions, establishing the speech triangle as the first step towards language. It would make sense to call these “words” or proto-words, and they organize into typical patterns that it would make sense to call “syntax”, or proto-syntax, or maybe perceptual syntax. All this is attested in communication prior to “linguistic information” with “words” as normally defined, so whether 'syntax' precedes 'words' requires a coherent definition of what is meant by these terms.
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BLOGGER: Sheez!

[Yauhoooo]

Hi, I found your site using http://www.yauhoooo.com Yauhoooo, does your site support Firefox?
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BLOGGER: I use Firefox to view my blog all the time.

[Yauhoooo]

Hi, I found your site using http://www.yauhoooo.com Yauhoooo, does your site support Firefox?