Babel's Dawn

Consciousness, Attention and Meaning

In the early days of this blog I came across a paper by Giorgio Marchetti titled A Presentation of Attentional Semantics. It immediately became apparent that Marchetti had found a way out of the hall of mirrors and paradoxes that emerge if you think of meaning as a thing with properties. Thus, I immediately declared myself for this new understanding (see: Attention! It's a Revolution). Looking back at that post of four years ago I see I ended with a list of things I still believe (although I would rephrase them slightly):

• The function of speech is joint attention.
• The elements of speech are words, the tools for directing attention.
• Speech arose as part of general evolution from joint attention on the ape level to joint attention on the human level.

I see that Marchetti has published a new book Consciousness, Attention and Meaning summarizing his work of the past eight years. Check it out!

Big Mysteries Remain

Henry James has a grand passage in The Wings of the Dove in which a "great man" grants a young woman his ear, a "great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table." Now there is a metaphor for attention.

I'm putting the last touches on my book. Combine that with four years of working on this blog and I feel like I have come a long way. At least I now understand language origins as the emergence of a cooperative system for directing joint attention to topics and their details. No part of that definition was included in my thinking when I began the project, so Babel's Dawn has either taught me aplenty or driven me mad.

How Attention Might Work

A little story in the New York Times about bats might be more promising than it seems. The word "attention" isn't even mentioned, but the story is about how bat brains might work to pay attention to some sounds while ignoring others. Briefly, they work as a team, with different members performing different functions. The team work might include responding to a sound, quieting down other sounds, and heightening the important sound. Attention is such a mystery and so important to language that we ought to make a note of every clue as to its workings.

Apes Ain't Us

Applause! Applause! How strange people are. We will work our hearts out for praise.

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Last week’s post (here) looked at a recent paper by David A. Leavens and Timothy P. Racine which discusses the prerequisites of joint attention. The paper’s principle conclusion was that apes are capable of every element of joint attention, so they already have any intellectual abilities needed to support it. The most sustained and productive form of joint attention is speech, however, apes do not have voluntary control of their vocal systems. But they can make sign-language words with their hands, and they have good voluntary control of their gestures. So why don’t they combine joint attention with gesture to have some kind of simple exchanges of words? The authors of that paper seem to think the explanation is in the different “sociocultural contexts” [249] of chimps and humans. In other words, it has nothing to do with biology, which is why, even though I was generally impressed by the paper, I suspect their explanation for the difference between apes and us is incomplete.

10 Hypotheses About Language and Thought

Ardi and I wish you happy holidays.

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This is my last post of the year. I’m taking Christmas and New Year’s weekends off, so barring some unexpected heaven knows what, I’ll be silent. I thought I go out with a list of hypotheses that I’d like to see tested

This blog disagrees with mainstream linguistics in a fundamental way by having a functional definition of meaning. For most people meaning is a bit mysterious. It seems to be some kind of content that is passed from speaker to listener, but all sorts of paradoxes appear when you investigate that idea closely. Meaning becomes as mysterious as mind. On this blog, the meaning of words comes from their ability to pilot the attention of both the speaker and listener (Thanks to Giorgio Marchetti for that insight.), and the meaning of sentences comes from a series of focused points of attention (provided by words) that create a perception. In short, language is perception by other means. This view of language and meaning has left me with a different question from many other people who ask how language began.

I want to know how the ability to pilot one another’s attention began and developed, while many people want to know how we came to have the ability to express and understand strings that carry meaning. Thus, many of the technical questions that underlie orthodox quests for language origin have no testable answers. For example, the question of how we evolved a parser that lets us interpret a sentence is stymied by the fact that we have no idea how said parser works in the brain. Thus, orthodox researchers are forced to fall back on assertions that the parser did evolve and shrugged shoulders over what kind of system must exist to transfer these meanings. It is very rare to see theories of meaning that are specific enough to allow for hypotheses that let us get into the brain and see if the structures are there and how they differ from non-human brains.

It occurs to me that I’m in a different position. I don’t have a mysterious definition of meaning, so I ought to just lay out a series of hypotheses about how this non-mysterious power arose, and suggest what might be sought in order to disprove the hypothesis. So here is my list of what I’d like to see tested.

Three Years On: Transforming Our Natures

A painting of Lord Byron dressed in an Albanian costume. (See Byron’s Letters.)

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Last week’s post was the first for my third anniversary summing up of what I’ve learned by maintaining this blog. It focused my the main psychological lesson: the great break between apes and us is that humans have voluntary control over their attention, enabling us to think about things. In fact, a working definition of thinking might be the voluntary shifting of attention in an effort to understand (i.e., know more about) a topic. This week I want to look at how that psychological discontinuity produces a sociological discontinuity, leading to a decisive break between ape societies and human communities.

Three Years On: Voluntary Redirection of Attention

In the pre-digital days this ugly machine, the Movieola, was the secret of the movie's power. Using this machine, film editors could cut scenes, so that the movie forces our attention here and then there, turning a simple scene into a thoughtful story.

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This blog’s third anniversary is about to roll around, inspiring me to post a few general remarks about what I have learned about the relation between speaking and being human. There is always the possibility that this blog is an exercise in futility, but it does seem to me that, thanks to this project, I have gained a much greater sense of what was critical to turning an ape into a speaking person. Three points in particular have caught me by surprise: one psychological, one sociological, and a third evolutionary.

Poverty of the Stimulus: Part 3 Non-Nativists

"Angelina Jolie" has at least three meanings: (1) the name of an actress; (2) any beautiful woman; or (3) any unattractive woman.

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The past two posts have looked at the poverty of stimulus argument. Post 1 (here) showed how Chomsky used it to overthrow Skinner’s operant-conditioning based theory of language learning. Post 2 (here) explained why I argue on this blog that while the poverty of the stimulus argument destroys Skinner, it does not mean that Chomsky’s defense of an innate, universal grammar (UG) is required.

In this post I want to look at an alternate empiricist response to Chomsky. In an earlier post I wrote about the spontaneous creation of tools by a form of crow, and what this might imply about speech and motivation. (See: Motivation and Speech)

The post inspired a lively exchange. Commenter Raymondw said in part:

What Bird and Emery have demonstrated, as has been demonstrated thousands and thousands of times, is the power of operant conditioning as a learning tool in most species of life.

And I replied:

I'm not sure what in the abstract leads to the suspicion that operant conditioning was used, unless one argues that everything done by anyone at any time is the result of operant conditioning. That was the doctrine Chomsky exploded 50+ years ago.

And Raymondw responded (in part):

it is highly arguable that Chomsky exploded anything. It has never been experimentally demonstrated that operant conditioning is not the basis for language learning. All Chomsky did is argue verbally in a way that convinced many people that operant conditioning couldn't be the basis for language learning. Let's clear about this. This isn't an issue of competing ideologies but of empirical fact.

Well, that woke me up.

Poverty of the Stimulus: Part 2 Solutions

Which will it be? He hit the ball she threw, or The ball hit him she threw.

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Yesterday’s post (here) summarized Noam Chomsky’s victory over behaviorism with his “poverty of the stimulus” paradox, holding that you cannot determine the rules for organizing sentences simply by studying the physical organization of sentences. Today I want to look at possible solutions to the paradox.

Chomsky himself had a solution: between the input and the output lies computation, and the computational system has been preprogrammed to accept certain structures and reject others. This “universal grammar” (often called UG) is inherent in all natural languages. Although there are many conceivable objections to this proposed solution, Chomsky won himself pride of place in the struggle by having overcome the old champion, B.F. Skinner and for many years the dispute was framed between Skinner’s learning theory and Chomsky’s notion of an innate universal grammar.

Harper's Link

I noticed that Harper's magazine has a brief meditation on the origins of language:

...  The first characteristic of consciousness was the language of the soul! In this way, human language came into being.

The whole passage is here.