What is Language About?

Einstein in his favorite hat. Einstein disagreed with Chomsky over how symbols work.

Sixty minutes into his Cologne lecture, Chomsky discusses the elementary unit of meaningful language. What is it? He says the standard answer is "comes from the referentialist doctrine." Tiger refers to a tiger. Chomsky surprised me by saying that this idea seems to be true for animals. A vervet monkey, for example, makes different calls in response to specific stimuli. Chomsky doesn't specify, but vervets are famous for making different calls in response to snakes, leopards, and eagles. (I don't know if referentialist doctrine really works when it comes to lion roars, wolf howls, zebra barks, etc.) But, says Chomsky, the referential doctrine does not "seem to be remotely true for the simplest elements of human language."

Having made such a bold statement, Chomsky urges us to think about it for a few minutes and we'll see his point. Flattering as that description of our mental powers is, I would have welcomed a real discussion of what has been the standard position on meaning for the past several millennia. I know a few problems and mysteries associated with reference but I would like to hear Chomsky's complaint.

We do get a clue. "References of thought," Chomsky tells us, "are not independently linked to mind-external entities." I've encountered more cryptic assertions—someone once told me, 'The world is all that is the case'—but it's time to think some more.

The most ardent assertion on the other side came from Einstein who said that symbols worked like the number handed you at a coat check. The token with the number was nothing like the coat, but every token matched up with a coat. There's the reference doctrine with spirit. Thus, in Einstein's famous equation e refers to energy, which exists, m refers to mass, which also exists, and c² refers to the speed of light squared, which, to Einstein's way of thinking is also out there in reality.

But Chomsky, as I divine his argument, might have had a retort to Einstein. "What," he could have asked, "matches up with another symbol in the famous equation, the equal sign?" There even Albert should have blushed. The equal sign is a token without a coat; it designates a relationship between things out there among the mind-external realities but is itself a mind-internal reality that cannot be detected by a sensor.

In his presentation Chomsky refers to gestalt, cause and effect, sympathy of parts, psychic continuity, and other "mentally imposed properties." From these clues, I take Chomsky's position to be that words are intimately entangled with thought processes and do not refer to just to the objects of the world. He does not spell out how it all works, probably because he doesn't know precisely.

Einstein is my hero, but I have to go with Chomsky on this one. In fact it was years of banging into the sorts of puzzles that Chomsky alludes to that made me an instant convert to the notion that words get their meaning by piloting attention.

Attention is often pointed outward, say at a tiger, so it is not at all surprising that one's first thought is that words refer to things. But attention can also be focused inward as well. The aspects of thought that Chomsky listed—gestalt, cause and effect, etc.—are part of perception. In his lecture Chomsky says it is impossible to know whether animals think or not/ However, it seems to me that it ought to be possible to design experiments to determine whether animals perceive these things or not. If they do, thinking about them is at least conceivable.

For example, it should be fairly straightforward to train an animal to respond one way to a moving object. Then show the animal the gestalt illusion in which one light goes off and immediately another goes on. Depending on the animal's response we should be able to say whether it did or did not see the light move. I suspect that gestalt psychologists have already conducted such experiments.

The working hypothesis of this blog is that language is a means of sharing perceptions by directing one another's attention. Sometimes the perception is concrete, sometimes imaginary. During the evolutionary period that concerns this blog, most of the perceptions were probably concrete. So it seems I agree with Chomsky that language is not independently linked to mind-external realities. It is intimately entangled with the way we perceive and experience life, and that's why we will never run out of new things to say.

Comments

[Joe Martin]

Words don't mean: they evoke. The telementation model of language has been thoroughly debunked by Roy Harris. When we hear (or see) a word it evokes a mental image--more technically activates a stored neural pattern--and those stored patterns are the results of cumulative personal experiences. Crucially, they are different for every person.

Evoked images may or may not match some external object, and may or may not prompt a hearer to direct their attention to such an object in the environment. The evoking and the directing are two different things, and perceiving a word only accomplishes the former.

What you mean by "directs attention" is not clear, but seems inadequate to account for both these two things. Words could be said to "direct our attention to" a mental image of a referent, but we still have free will and can ignore it and direct our attention elsewhere.
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BLOGGER: I'm standing by my post.

[Raymond Weitzman]

It is not sufficient to say just that "e", "m:, and "c" exist in Einstein's equation. They must also be measurable quantities. Otherwise, the equation is vacuous. The "=" sign is stipulating that the two quantities e and mc^2 are equivalent.It should be emphasized, however, that the equation is not an equation relating an dependent variable to one or more independent variables. Einstein's equation is an equation of equivalence or conversion, like 2.54inches = 1 meter. One should be aware that not all "=" signs are equal. A word is not equivalent to whatever it is suppose to refer to. A word is a dependent variable whose likelihood of expression, either in thought, speech, writing, etc. depends on a multitude of independent variables.

In any case, Chomsky's argument against the referential theory of meaning seems moot, since most scholars of language abandoned the theory a long time ago.

[Raymond Weitzman]

Sorry. Big mistake in last message. 2.54 centimeters=1 inch.

[Sulphys]

I welcome your support for my contention that Einstein's equation is a dimensional equivalence, and as an equation is 'vacuous'. There are no values for e or m, and c^2 is not even a measurable physical quantity. Yet it has validity as expressing the rate of expansion of a wave as the ratio between a certain e and a certain m, all of them variable. The meaning of the words is heavily dependent on their interpretation in physical terms. Otherwise it is pure theory.

[Dan Manthey]

It seems entirely wrong to say that "=" has less of a referent than does "m", let alone "e" or "c**2".

In what sense does "m" mean a real thing? In the sense that the concept "mass" picks out a subset of the aspects of the tangible world, and that those aspects have some coherence over a wide body of possible experiences we have with the world. That is to say, mass is operationally defined. You can't very well take the mass out of something in the same way that you can take the tiger out of the jungle.

But "=" has exactly the same correspondence to the world; it picks out a set of aspects that are useful to think about together. It is real in the same way that mass is, though the set of operations that you need to consider to tell whether you've found an instance of equality are rather more complicated than those needed to detect an instance of mass.

But if "m" has a referent "mass", and mass is deemed real because things in the world can be observed to behave in the set of ways we call "having mass", then "=", which has a referent "equality", must also be deemed real because we can find things that behave in ways that fit what we call "being equal".

(We can of course decide that fitting a highly abstract set of operations doesn't count as "real" or that the set of operations don't constitute a referent, but then "m" is just as much to a reference as is "=".)