The most important thing I have learned in working on this blog has been the relationship between language and attention. Language, I have concluded, works by sharing and directing attention to a topic. It is really that simple, yet it is rich in implications.
Evolvability
Attention is widespread in the animal world and all primates, certainly all apes, are well endowed with the ability to direct their attention to different points in their environment and stay focused on a task for an undefined length of time. Thus, any special human attention tasks such as joint-attention, interactive attention, etc. that language might demand only call for tweaks of the system, not wholly new mechanisms. Anybody interested in language origins should find this approach to language simplifies the evolutionary puzzles.
Demystify meaning
Meaning has always been a mysterious concept, rather like that of the soul, only meaning is the soul of the word rather than the body. How does meaning get into a word or sentence in the first place. Is it in the speaker’s head? Does the sound carry meaning to the listener’s head? Or is the meaning outside the body altogether?
These questions, which come up when considering thought experiments like the Chinese Room, carry their own alarm bells. Where is the meaning? That question can only make sense if meaning is a thing. We can get rid of the confusion if we say meaning is not a thing but a response. Words pilot attention. All the many mysteries about where meaning is, how it is communicated, what changes it, etc. begin to look ridiculous as we see that all such questions assume that meaning has some kind of presence.
People can be said to understand a language when their attention is directed by the words and sentences of that language. Computers may be able to translate languages perfectly decently, but we can still maintain that they don’t know the meaning of what they are doing because their processing never involved directing attention. Any philosopher of language should appreciate the firmer basis on which to consider meaning. (Personal note: It was my recognition of the demystification that persuaded me to grab the attention idea and see how far I could run with it.)
Grounds language in perception
Attention is a function of perception, so it should not be surprising if language has many of the features of a perception.
- Perceptions are always perceptions of something and language is always about something.
- Perceptions always have a point of view and speech does too.
- Perceptions organize sensations into a foreground and background, and language can do the same. The foreground of an utterance is the focal point of attention. For example, if a person focuses auditory attention on a honking goose while only being vaguely aware of other sounds, a speaker can restrict an utterance to the focal point—A goose honked angrily—or include background details—A goose honked angrily over the hens’ clucking sounds.
There is enormous room for exploration here and this grounding in perception should provide much fodder for critics, gestalt psychologists, and psychologists of the newer, embodied-mind school.
Explains syntactic structure
Perception redirects attention and syntax works by controlling shifts in the listener’s attention.
I argue this case in detail elsewhere and am confident that attention based syntax can explain even the strongest observations made in favor of a Universal Grammar and it has the extra benefit of making sense. Syntactic structure reflects the limits of attention and memory and is not merely an arbitrary set of rules. Linguists with an interest in syntax should appreciate the approach and composition teachers should like the way it provides students with a way to use grammar as a help rather than a stumbling block to clear writing.
(See Attention-Based Syntax and Reflexive Anaphora in Attention-Based Syntax.)
Learnability
The fact that children master speech so easily has long been a mystery. Is it inborn or learned? It turns out the innate part comes from our ability to attend, to shift attention, and to remember. Anybody interested in children’s acquisition of language should find that the approach simplifies the task to be explained.
The greatest objection to this approach is likely to be that it depends on conscious rather than mechanical or computational processes. Attempts to model attention on computers generally treat attention as a passive filter of input, whereas attention here is seen as an active power that selects elements for conscious contemplation. But the dogma that the mind is the brain and the brain is a computer, is only an assumption. When a different approach can make sense of so many aspects of a problem, it should take more than stubborn dogma to defeat it.
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