Babel's Dawn

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."

Does Language Exist?

 

Noam Chomsky lectures on the existence of language

The University of Cologne has posted a couple of videos of lectures by Noam Chomsky, one of them on language. The language lecture is titled What Is Special About Language? The lecture runs a bit over an hour and a follow up Q and A adds another half hour, so it is not a quick distraction, but the video is well worth studying. Chomsky is a clear speaker and gets to the heart of his matter. I always come away from his work with a stronger sense of what makes my own thinking different. In this case I'm particularly struck by our contrasting views over what evolved..

Big Shots Discuss Artificial Intelligence

Thanks to the Replicated Typo blog I've been alerted to an MIT page summarizing a recent panel discussion on artificial intelligence. Besides Noam Chomsky, giants like Steven Pinker, Marvin Minskyand Sydney Brenner. The topic was artificial intelligence, not something this blog focuses on, although my latest post seems to have sparked some such comments. But it was interesting to see that the linguists complain that machines won't get anywhere until they can penetrate to language's meaning.

• Barbara Partee: "Really knowing semantics is a prerequisite for anything to be called intelligence,"
• Noam Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don't try to understand the meaning of that behavior. [Of course there is a big difference between the meaning of a sentence and the meaning of a behavior.\

Speech, Community and Power

Checkpoint. It is not the lack of a shared language that creates the barrier, but the barrier that creates the lack of a shared language.

In the early days of this blog I reviewed a book by Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word , in which I quoted its “critical thesis” that a language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community [p. 556]. (See: Words Rubbing Together) The remark seemed important and I’ve cited frequently, but as I have explored its ramifications a variety of mysteries have opened up. For one thing, how does “a larger human community” create something without asserting power?  I finally faced up to that question when a couple of voices came together. One was a recent comment posted on this blog (here):

let's [think] back to a time when human societies had no sophisticated hierarchical structure or when there was no elite or domineering group telling the others how or what 'language' they had to speak …

The other was a study by an Italian team found in the June 10 issue of the Publications of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that shows how individuals without a sophisticated hierarchy can agree on a way to speak about the world. The Italians not only offer a rebuttal to the commenter’s thoughtful remarks, but seem to show how a community can have effects without resorting to power. It would all seem quite mystical if the study had not used those anti-mystical tools, computers.

Benjamin Lee Whorf Revisited

The National Science Foundation sent out a press release that forced my attention back to one of the basic mysteries of speech origins: which came first the word or the idea?

Any blog like this one, devoted to the study of origins, is subject to these chicken-and-egg loops in which each thing causes the other. Whenever such a loop appears you know that the direction of causality remains unclear. To solve it, you may need more data, but even with that data what you really need is a new idea, one that will make sense of what is causing what. Today, for example, we know that the egg came before the chicken, not because we know more about chickens or about eggs but because we have a new idea: evolution. It strikes me that this blog has stumbled across an idea that may solve the word-or-idea loop.

Necessary and Sufficient (Part 1)

Yesterday’s post listed three ideas developed on this blog that seem open to investigation. They were:

• Pedomorphosis/Neoteny
• Attention triplet
• Cognitive advances yield syntactic advances

Yesterday’s post looked for evidence that neoteny (delayed maturation) lies behind the evolution of the human capacity for speech. Today’s post looks at the proposed basis for that capacity, the attention triplet, and asks what challenges might be raised against it.

The Metaphor Wars

Yesterday’s post was a response to the charge of incompleteness brought against the position that words are tools for piloting attention. The argument runs that attention cannot be directed toward unknown things; therefore, attention cannot be directed to ideas that are only imagined by the speaker. The listener cannot know what the speaker means.

This blog’s reply looked at metaphors. They direct the listener’s attention to some already-known feature of a new idea. They also provide a way of escaping the tautologies of logical systems; however, there are objections to claims for metaphors as the powerhouses of language.

Into the Unknown

Regular visitors to this blog will know that two weeks ago we devoted a series of posts to exploring the proposition that words are tools for piloting attention. Then last week one of the final posts about presentations at the Stellenbosch conference cited a paper by Peter Gardenfors that rejected as incomplete the thesis ,“that symbolic communication is the process by which one attempts to manipulate the attention of, or to share attention with another individual.”

Dr. Gardenfors said this could not be the whole story because:

One aspect that is missing in his characterization is that depending on the character of the “outside entity” different cognitive demands on the individual whose attention is manipulated will be relevant.

Conference: Music Creates Community

Music co-evolved with language, allowing communication that language itself impedes, says University of Cambridge reader in Music and Science, Ian Cross. Speaking at a session devoted to music and language at the Cradle of Language conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa, Dr. Cross told the assembled scholars that musical interactions typically involve the unite “action and attention” in a “pulse.” (Abstract here)

Showing Without Telling

This week Babel’s Dawn has been discussing the implications of an article by Giorgio Marchetti in the current issue of Cognitive Processing. Marchetti argues that attention is an active process, the sine qua non of consciousness, and that words are tools for piloting attention. Speech thus becomes a means of directing consciousness.

Marchetti’s article also discusses the work of an American professor of rhetoric at Case Western Reserve, Todd Oakley, who writes: