April 29, 2012
Culture, Not Biology, Shapes Language
Barbara King in NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture:
There's no language gene.
There's no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language.
There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture.
So goes the argument in Language: The Cultural Tool, the new book I'm reading by Daniel Everett. Next week, I'll have more to say about the book itself; this week, I want to explore how Everett's years of living among the Pirahã Indians of Amazonian Brazil helped shape his conclusions — and why those conclusions matter.
The Pirahã are hunter-gatherers who live along the Maici River in Brazil's Amazon region. They fish, gather manioc and hunt in the forest. As is true with any human society, Pirahã communities are socially complex.
Everett first showed up among the Pirahãs as a missionary associated with the Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL), with the goal of converting the natives to Christianity by translating the Bible into the local language. He left many years later as an atheist, knowing that the Pirahãs "were not in the market for a new worldview."
In between, Everett found that the Pirahãs have no words for "please," "thank you," "you're welcome" or "I'm sorry." They have no color words, but instead deploy phrases such as "it is temporarily being immature" for green. They have a limited kinship term system, one that does not distinguish between parent and grandparent or brother and sister. And their sentences lack recursion. This means there are no embedded clauses, as in the English sentence "Bring me the fish that Mary caught."
Posted by Robin Varghese at 09:45 AM | Permalink
Comments
Make sure you read through the many comments after this piece on the original site. There is much less here than meets the eye.
Posted by: SeanM | Apr 29, 2012 11:43:46 AM
This makes me uneasy. I imagine over time they'd start treating temporarily-being-immature as a lexical unit, and if it's useful enough maybe convert it to tempim. In fact, isn't this sort of thing (shortening phrases, extending words like immature to different contexts) how new words are formed in most languages?
Posted by: prasad | Apr 29, 2012 12:42:54 PM
The Western European color vocabulary stayed rather simple for centuries, esp with regard to textiles: "stuff" was either dark or bright, luxurious or plain. A technique of working gold threads over shot silk was called "riccia sopra riccia" -- rich over rich. You could make competing claims about whether Aztec civilization was primitive -- read cruel -- compared to the civilization of the conquistadores, but the Aztecs had 12 distinct words for color, as against the 3 to 5 words for it used by those who brought down their empire.
At the time Chartres Cathedral was built and given windows, glaziers had noticed that the same mixture at different temperatures would make green or red glass, but they called it medium hot and very hot, not green and red.
Since no human civilization possesses more acute color vision that any other, I have to assume each is filtering what is sees in the color way, and describes it according to uses they want or need to make of the information. The color of textiles worn by nobles of medieval Europe was a highly articulated affair, for instance -- vermilion red, saffron yellow, and the deepest most luxurious black that could make a man look commanding were life and death matters, with sumptuary codes forbidding wearers with the wrong blood lines to go near them. But these colors were not only forbidden to most, but hard to get, and almost never seen but by a few.
Do you make these distinctions as new inputs arise? If so then a way to refer to "Chartres Blue" would have come into use very fast. Or do those inputs require fitting into a whole scheme, or world view, to become significant? To even get their own words? Textile culture was at the heart of Meso-american civilization -- they were among the most advanced dyers and weavers the world has ever seen, with the love and knowledge of color a society-wide affair going back to a Golden Age they posited, much like the Golden Age of Classical Western mythology, where humans at leisure drank nectar that was already squeezed. Only, among the Toltecs -- the pre-Aztecs -- the Golden Age of Tula was characterized by cotton that grew already dyed.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 29, 2012 2:43:37 PM
"This is no polite academic disagreement."
Well, I am going to stay polite, and share material so anyone can make their own decision.
There is no doubt that communication is biological in the sense that microbes communicate with themselves and with human cells (e.g. Microbial Hermeneutics).
There is no doubt that the great majority (~98%) of our genes are microbial, not "human" (e.g. One Man's Junk Gene Is Another Man's Treasure Gene?).
Thus it would depend on what language and genes we are talking about in order to determine absolutes.
No doubt there are cultural factors, above and beyond biological factors, that are the dynamics of languages in some contexts.
I can, therefore, understand both sides of the argument, depending on the context.
Posted by: Dredd | Apr 29, 2012 3:03:56 PM
Prasad, if I understand Everett's point correctly, it's not that there is anything intrinsic to the Piraha language or the Piraha themselves that prevents them from making the kind of leap you are talking about. It's just that, Bartleby-like, they would prefer not to. And they are still able to construct a perfectly serviceable human language while leaving out some of the features Chomsky believed to be essential to human language. Hence language as cultural tool rather than biology.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Apr 29, 2012 6:09:52 PM
There still needs to be a genetic source for the basic ability to make a sound mean a concept, thing, or location. Birds do it, bees do it. Not too sure about fleas.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 29, 2012 8:10:52 PM
I notice that he still has "nouns, verbs, and objects [] arranged in sentences" so maybe there is something inherent?
Posted by: Mike Cope | Apr 30, 2012 10:03:03 AM
There still needs to be a genetic source for the basic ability to make a sound mean a concept, thing, or location. Birds do it, bees do it. Not too sure about fleas.
Carlos, et tu!
What differentiates a human symbol from the kind of associative signs you find in the rest of Animalia (staying agnostic for the moment about whale and apes) is that the latter cannot be abstracted. Birdsong is not conceptual, nor bee-dancing. The signs may have some "meaning" (in the associative sense) but they lack the ability to conceptually "stand" for something, nor can they be syntactically recombined in such a way that requires conceptual parsing.
I'm not convinced that there must be a specifically genetic capacity for humans to assign meaning, except in the broad sense that our DNA build big complex brains allowing for emergent phenomena--but even if there is such a genetic capacity, the Chomsky-Pinker crowd theorizes more than just this, asserting innate linguistic universals (like recursion), without which, no language. Everett's point is that the Piraha seem to falsify this view. The implication would be that language is not genetically determined (as indeed so much of culture is not), even if it is genetically enabled.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Apr 30, 2012 2:36:38 PM
Vicki, Everett noted the Piraha didn't count higher than three to five, either. Back when I read the New Yorker article, it made me wonder whether numeracy and language were based on what they needed to count and say in a day. Would they have to have more complex survival needs to test this? Or does the lack of language for concepts mean the framework for certain ideas -- counting to 10, for instance -- would have to supplant the old framework that would never expand to include it. In pointing out a culture may not "see" colors it has no words for, and that do not yet have meaning to that culture, I was pondering this relationship -- whether an experience you could not classify would make it into your sensorium as something with features you could add to your world view, or whether it would be bundled with what you knew in a way that described it in a limited sense only.
Chris, great to see you here! Tell me more about birdsong -- how it is not "conceptual" yet meaningful to birds in marking territory and performing other functions. I don't get it, when a human can note what a bird means by "that" call. Is that still associative? Would love to know what Saint Saens says...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 30, 2012 3:32:54 PM
"how it is not "conceptual""
I was sitting out on my deck one evening, nursing a scotch and a cigar, when my biggest evergreen was suddenly invaded by thousands of small birds, all vocalizing at top speed and full volume for several minutes, whereupon they all shut up, and flew off.
My imagination interpreted this as every bird communicating to all the other birds the news of all the bugs they found that day, quantities, juiciness, and coordinates. Ha. I suppose that could be true. Why not? But I supposed this may have been thought about and tested. What else could have been the point, though?
But, so, isn't it established that bees can do a little dance to inform the hive where a good pollen harvest can be had? Aren't their little tail shakes, turns, wingflaps and waddles conceptual? Apian Charades?
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 30, 2012 4:34:20 PM
Hi Elatia,
We know what it "means" when a piece of litmus paper turns red; to derive from this that the paper is communicating with us is perhaps a sign of incipient schizophrenia. Because we are symbol-using creatures, we have a concept of acidity, but the paper turning red is just chemistry, not language.
Birdsong, likewise, is not conceptual in that there is no lexical component of it that designates an abstract concept. It is a form of complex signaling that would seem to communicate something about sexual fitness, but it does not "fix" the concept of sexual fitness in consciousness as a true symbol does. (The peacock's tail, allegedly, is also a sign of fitness, but we don't attribute to it a linguistic aspect.)
Symbols can be interrogated where signs cannot. Birds do not discourse. Dogs can "learn" what some of our words "mean," but they cannot formulate a reply, because they cannot abstract the immediacy of (for example) "dinner" or "sit" into a universal concept of cuisine or posture.
One way to indicate the difference is the ability of symbols to communicate propositions and conditionals. We can discuss litmus paper turning red or blue, hunky Adonis-like robins and thrushes, or leading brands of dog kibble in the complete absence of any of these experiences. That's the unique power of language (and other symbolic forms, including those Saint Saens might favor.)
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Apr 30, 2012 4:59:10 PM
Aren't their little tail shakes, turns, wingflaps and waddles conceptual?
See my response to Elatia. I would suggest what we normally mean by conceptual cannot be applied to this form of "communication," without positing a staggering level of cognitive power in those little bee brains. That is, unless the waggles refer to abstract and relational logical forms that can be held in consciousness, then we are talking about something else.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Apr 30, 2012 5:06:48 PM
Sorry, I meant Messiaen. Who did think about birdsong differently than most of us.
Not sure the litmus paper analogy is serving the point, because, except for that suffering person you mention having "thoughts of reference," there can be no question the litmus paper intends anything at all. Just as we find certain animals and their behaviors symbolic -- the Rajputs painted peacocks into miniatures to symbolize sexual passion in a scene where human facial expressions and bodily attitudes may not signal it -- animals recognize some non-hostile things we do as threatening (dogs who howl piteously at the sight of a suitcase, etc.) Just to be sure I understand your meaning -- the conceptual must be lexical? If so, would not British Sign Language, in which you finger-spell just about everything, be superior to ASL?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 30, 2012 6:27:07 PM
Animals recognize some non-hostile things we do as threatening (dogs who howl piteously at the sight of a suitcase, etc.
But surely you don't think that dogs have concepts about suitcases? Perhaps I need to elaborate more on just what I mean by concepts? (Not to suggest this is my personal definition, just that if we use the folk version we're inclined to anthropomorphize.)
I really fear that this expanding circle business of Mr. Singer has muddled things up pretty badly. Animals such as dogs have very complex perceptual apparatus--they are acutely aware of incredibly minute differentia. And they have profound feeling states, there's no doubt about that. But I would think it uncontroversial to deny they possess a capacity for abstract thought!
Anyway, there is surely no evidence for it. To howl at a briefcase is to have strong associative feelings about it, but these feelings are immediate and reactive. There's no need to impute more than that. It takes nothing away from our empathetic stance toward the dog to clarify he is not thinking "about" the suitcase, and indeed could not, by any plausible method.
Just to be sure I understand your meaning -- the conceptual must be lexical?
Any universalizable symbol can be conceptual; but language will do, since no one (I hope) is suggesting that birds and bees do math.
I don't grok in what sense the spelling of words in British sign language might be superior to ASL. The fact that words have subunits like letters or phonemes seems a technicality here, since words, not letters, are where the semantics reside. I likewise don't see how Chinese ideograms would be more or less superior to Western alphabetics or Japanese syllabics. What's your rubric?
(By the way, since you raise the topic, I'll mention, perhaps interestingly, that the experience of Helen Keller was very instrumental in confirming, for theorists like Ersnt Cassirer and Suzanne Langer, the notion I am outlining here. She writes very explicitly in her memoir that she did not experience conceptual thought until she was taught language by Anne Sullivan. An n of 1, yes, but it's suggestive.)
Anyway, this is all far afield from the basic point I wanted to make to you and Carlos, which is that no organism we know of besides ourselves manipulates symbols (with the exception of those apes we have directly taught sign language, and who have only taken to it in a very rudimentary fashion. I'm not trying to suggest a hard barrier between homo sapiens and the rest of creation.)
The point of the litmus test was to warn of the fallacy of suggesting that because we know what birdsong "means," therefore that meaning is present in bird consciousness. That's a proposition that requires some unpacking. Is it proper to talk of intensionality in birds in the same sense we speak of it in ourselves? (I bet the birds in Carlos' tree aren't having this conversation).
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Apr 30, 2012 7:27:43 PM
Well fine, then ;-)
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 30, 2012 8:12:30 PM
Well, put that way, a dog would have to fetch your suitcase out of the closet by the handle in its jaws, and mean "Please go away more often," before it could be said to properly conceptualize departure and the role of the suitcase in that. I think you can say that smart animals are planful, and can surmise what will probably happen given (on purpose or accidentally) the right stimuli, without being capable of abstraction. In that case, however, "the future" cannot be an abstraction. Is it as Benjy in The Sound and the Fury put it about the passing of time? "And then we went along the fence a little more..."
I have had to wonder about ASL recently. A family member learned it to perform in a dual language version of a musical -- English and ASL. The show had actors for whom ASL was the first and only language, as well as performers who lip-read English. Up to then I had been concentrating on what ASL did have -- a grammar and a vocabulary that disresembles the syntax of any spoken language -- not what it didn't have. To cite one example, it was terribly hard to get across the concept of "collateral damage." And, I learned that many ASL speakers considered there was a huge quantity of double-talk in most spoken communication -- qualities like sincerity and intention were very hard for them to judge. "They should say what they mean," one of them said to me, via an interpreter, about people who speak, not sign. BSL by contrast is clumsy and takes a while, but you can learn finger spelling if you just put in the time, and say exactly what you mean unless your intention is to deceive. Finger spelling was the method that allowed Helen Keller to acquire language -- and she's a good enough n for me, except that she was obviously a genius.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 30, 2012 8:25:34 PM
I suppose my noisy birds would have had to choose to chat about what they had for lunch, and used unique descriptors (remember that oak with the split trunk on top of the hill up over there to the left (over that guy with the cigar's right shoulder)? as opposed to an involuntary data dump with bgps coordinates.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 30, 2012 8:37:12 PM
"no one (I hope) is suggesting that birds and bees do math."
Hmm. you might have me. Anything that flies and locates (and relates) things they can find later, has some pretty good on the fly relational, calculation and communication skills, but I suppose there is no reason to impute intentionality. Mathematicians might not be as smart as they think they are.
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 30, 2012 8:47:55 PM
OK, good. Phew. You guys had me worried.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Apr 30, 2012 9:16:47 PM
All online discussions of linguistics must include a debate about whether animals can talk. It's the law!
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Apr 30, 2012 9:23:35 PM
Vicki, when animals communicate with us, or with one another, to mean something by noises they make, what is it? And what is a gestural language -- a language that like every other has its limitations -- in humans?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 30, 2012 9:43:41 PM
@Elatia:
Re. your comment: "Since no human civilization possesses more acute color vision that any other..."
That claim might actually be debatable.
Posted by: M73 | May 1, 2012 3:43:37 AM
Darn. I'm late to this conversation. 3QD is like that. Turn you head away for a moment and you'll miss something important.
Anyway, this discussion will not be complete without a reference to Buckminster Fuller. His insights about language development were as impressive as the geodesic dome. Check this...
http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s12/p0000.html
I love this part about three-fourths of the way down --
Since the Polynesians lived on the sea
And were naked,
Anything upon which they wrote
Could be washed overboard.
The Polynesians themselves
Often fell overboard.
They had no pockets
Nor any other means
Of retaining reminder devices
Or calculating and scribing instruments
Other than by rings
That could not slip off
From their fingers, ankles, wrists, and necks,
Or by comblike items
That were precariously
Tied into the hair on their heads
Or by rings piercing their ears and noses.
These sea people had to invent ways of calculating and
communicating
Principally by brain-rememberable pattern images.
They accomplished their rememberable patterns in sound,
They remembered them in chants.
With day after day of time to spend at sea
They learned to sing and repeat these chants.
Using the successive bow-to-stern,
Canoe and dugout, stiffing ribs and thwarts
Or rafters of their great rafts
As re-minders of successive generations of ancestors,
They methodically and recitationally recalled
The experiences en-chantingly taught to them
As a successive-generation,
Oral relay system
Specifically identified with the paired ancestral parents,
Represented by each pair of ship's ribs or rafters.
When they landed for long periods
They upside-downed their longboats
To provide dry-from-rain habitats.
Posted by: John Ballard | May 1, 2012 5:48:37 AM
Delightful, John -- it looks to me like they were using the "Memory Palace" technique of the Greeks and Romans as an aid to oratory. Whatever idea or sentence you must remember, you "store" it in an actual location -- a column, a room, a drawer; revisiting that place mentally or physically will prompt you. Your comment is the first I've heard of this being used outside peoples who would have learned that tradition in or from Europe -- many thanks!
M73, that's a wonderful video -- thanks. I believe it reinforces my point that color and culture (language) are inextricably linked, so that we see colors we have words for, and may not distinguish colors we have not classified. Perhaps we do not classify what is not culturally important to us. In medieval Europe, blue became an important color when it was found the pigment used to make it was very lasting in frescoes, and not incidentally when it was acknowledged as the color of The Virgin's cloak. One group, or one civilization, having an innately better ability than others to see color, period, would have to be biologically based, and not a matter of acculturation. Helen Keller has written movingly about what it might be like to experience color, btw...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 1, 2012 10:22:20 AM
Elatia, you're welcome. I agree, the video supports your overall thesis of culture and language influencing cognition (and in this case, perception). But on the specific point of color, how would one rule out the possibility that genetic factors (that influence color sensitivity in a presumably endogamous group) are driving the creation of linguistic terms, and not the other way around? I wonder if the researchers looked at possible instances of Himba children being brought up by other tribes and not having the perception qualities of the Himba. Or children of other tribes being brought up by the Himba and acquiring Himba color-perception through Himba language.
Posted by: M73 | May 1, 2012 12:13:26 PM
But on the specific point of color, how would one rule out the possibility that genetic factors (that influence color sensitivity in a presumably endogamous group) are driving the creation of linguistic terms, and not the other way around?
One reason to suspect culture, not nature, is that the Himba can be and have been taught to see blue shades that they originally could not distinguish without difficulty. If their color sense was genetic, this would not be possible (people with red-green color blindness cannot learn to see the missing colors). Likewise, non-Himba have demonstrated an ability to learn to distinguish colors that Himba easily pick out of a chart. We're not in strong Sapir-Whorf territory here, where language completely constrains perception; we're just talking about a language's influence on perception. (Or, perhaps, a language's reflection of other cultural--non-genetic--influences on perception.)
Linguistic conflation of Blue and Green is common among non-western languages/cultures (including Japanese); the Himba are not unique in this regard. On the other hand, Russian has two categories for blue where we just have one. Some studies have suggested that the Crayola 64-pack has had an influence on color perception.
As Elatia observes, we notice what it is important to us to notice. (Which is not the same as having an ability to notice). That's going to vary depending on what kind of culture you live in. There seem to be a few universals (all languages have a word for red, I believe), but it would be rash to draw from this that our brains tell us what to see, with so much evidence to the contrary.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 1, 2012 1:18:56 PM
Elatia, I believe the future manifestly is an abstraction. But as I've had trouble being clear on this, I'll let Susanne Langer do the talking (PDF).
"A symbol differs from a sign in that it does not announce the presence of the object, the being, condition, or whatnot, which is its meaning, but merely brings this thing to mind. It is not a mere "substitute sign" to which we react as though it were the object itself. The fact is that our reaction to hearing a person's name is quite different from our reaction to the person himself. There are certain rare cases where a symbol stands directly for its meaning: in religious experience, for instance, the Host is not only a symbol but a Presence. But symbols in the ordinary sense are not mystic. They are the same sort of thing that ordinary signs are; only they do not call our attention to something necessarily present or to be physically dealt with – they call up merely a conception of the thing they "mean."
The difference between a sign and a symbol is, in brief, that a sign causes us to think or act in the face of the thing signified, whereas a symbol causes us to think about the thing symbolized. Therein lies the great importance of symbolism for human life, its power to make this life so different from any other animal biography that generations of men have found it incredible to suppose that they were of purely zoological origin. A sign is always embedded in reality, in a present that emerges from the actual past and stretches to the future; but a symbol may be divorced from reality altogether. It may refer to what is not the case, to a mere idea, a figment, a dream. It serves, therefore, to liberate thought from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world; and that liberation marks the essential difference between human and nonhuman mentality. Animals think, but they think of and at things; men think primarily about things. Words, pictures, and memory images are symbols that may be combined and varied in a thousand ways. The result is a symbolic structure whose meaning is a complex of all their respective meanings, and this kaleidoscope of ideas is the typical product of the human brain that we call the "stream of thought."
[...]
Language need not be vocal; it may be purely visual, like written language, or even tactual, like the deaf-mute system of speech; but it must be denotative. The sounds, intended or unintended, whereby animals communicate do not constitute a language because they are signs, not names. They never fall into an organic pattern, a meaningful syntax of even the most rudimentary sort, as all language seems to do with a sort of driving necessity. That is because signs refer to actual situations, in which things have obvious relations to each other that require only to be noted; but symbols refer to ideas, which are not physically there for inspection, so their connections and features have to be represented. This gives all true language a natural tendency toward growth and development, which seems almost like a life of its own. Languages are not invented; they grow with our need for expression.
In contrast, animal "speech" never has a structure. It is merely an emotional response. Apes may greet their ration of yams with a shout of "Nga!" But they do not say "Nga" between meals. If they could talk about their yams instead of just saluting them, they would be the most primitive men instead of the most anthropoid of beasts. They would have ideas, and tell each other things true and false, rational or irrational; they would make plans and invent laws and sing their own praises, as men do."
(With apologies to Rex Harrison).
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 1, 2012 2:18:41 PM
I believe it reinforces my point that color and culture (language) are inextricably linked, so that we see colors we have words for, and may not distinguish colors we have not classified. Perhaps we do not classify what is not culturally important to us. : Elatia
I agree. You don't have to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries to observe this. How many men of your acquaintance, unless they make their living through an artistic pursuit, have you heard say that something is 'pearl gray with a touch of lavender,' unless they are talking about a car they want to buy? Yet I am sure they see the subtle shades and we know that they have the necessary vocabulary. Yet they rarely feel the need to classify too finely when the colorful object doesn't interest them.
Posted by: Ruchira | May 1, 2012 6:51:48 PM
Such a good point, Ruchira!
M73 and Chris, I think we are talking about the difference between retinal perception of color, which would not vary from one person with normal vision to another, and the association of color with meaning, which is a matter of cultural interpretation. The retina for instance will take in luminence at least as much as hue. As red and green are equiluminent (and other "color wheel opposites" are not), they perfectly serve the traffic light functions they are associated with by being equally easy to see yet meaning opposite things. If you were looking for contrasting color only, not for equiluminence, and chose blue and orange, the orange light would put the blue light in the shade -- literally. So if orange and blue were your hopefully widely accepted signals -- which have come to have symbolic value in the sense Langer means -- for Stop and Go, you would find a powerful impediment in whether the retina could accept symmetry where there is none. The mind roams and roams, but the retina seeks two things -- survival info, and repose, the better to go back to scanning for survival info. The most truly restful harmonies are pale gray and pale gold, to which other colors resolve in our distance vision.
Chris, my parents were reading Langer in the 60s -- but I wasn't, particularly. She was a clear and beautiful writer -- thanks for the excerpt. In the same era, Dummett and Flew were debating retrocausation, and in the last 20 years Jan Faye has chimed in to develop that. I am attracted to this thinking because it posits that what has already happened and what is yet to happen are observer-contingent and therefore not a la Hume. I must be careful to be humble here, because I only read and think well outside the discipline of philosophy, but if Faye's arguments led somewhere non-speculative, whether the future were an abstraction would could not be resolved as Langer says.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 1, 2012 11:51:33 PM
Elatia
I hadn't heard of Jan Faye; thanks for the tip. Got any links for further research?
I just read the SEP article on backwards causation, and while it's very compelling, I'm not sure I understand the relation to the question of whether the future is conceptual (or abstract.)
It might be valuable to analogize time to space here. I'm pretty confident that Cambridge is real; but as I'm not in Cambridge right now, my current relationship to it is strictly conceptual. I'm a Cambridge-realist, but until my next visit, I can only apprehend it in abstract terms--something that requires language (this is non-speculative) and something in which my cats cannot join me. A freakishly smart cat or dog might, might, understand the train conductor when he says "Next Stop Cambridge," (is which case "Cambridge" is a sign, not a symbol, in Langer's usage), but neither dog nor cat will ever understand the train conductor's next sentence (in confidence to the porter): "When I get to Cambridge, I think I'm going to drown myself in a bowl of chowder." He is not here announcing the presence of Cambridge, but calling it to mind--abstracting it--in order to entertain his gustatory fantasies. And yet Cambridge is none the less real for it.
Similarly, as one never inhabits the future or past, they must be mediated conceptually by their relationship to the present. One cannot be in the past or present in an immediate or concrete way. (Whatever we might say of memory--or even of soothsaying!--we can distinguish these things from actual time travel. They happen to us in our experience in the present).
And so I don't see how retro-causation, if real, could have any bearing on the matter at hand (whether or not the future--or past--is an abstraction). The question that remains is how we can have a direct, immediate, or concrete relationship with something that is not present in our experience. My answer is that we cannot, and that it is only through symbolic thought (language and other forms) that we can undertake anything that deserves the name "planning."
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 2, 2012 11:53:15 AM
Chris, Jan Faye co-edited a book, Perspectives on Time -- real good stuff if you ask me. Other than that, there are learned papers in mainstream journals but for nearly all you have to have access to several pay walled archives, which for many years I did have. The late Dan Pedoe, perhaps an unlikely source, wrote about x, y, z, t... in a way you would enjoy reading, in Geometry and the Liberal Arts, I think.
Is it that the future has to be conceptualized as something happening in the absence of concrete cues about how it will soon unfold? (Dog sees food bowl taken from shelf, knows dinner will occur...) So that you can't just know it as the far edge of the present, almost but not entirely beneath the horizon? When I mention planful dogs, I mean dogs who form intentions about what to do next -- but that too could be filed under "being in the moment" for a very long "now." Certainly it's different than dogs with checklists.
If memory of experiences in the deep personal past can be tweaked by later-coming events and even thoughts, so that what we recall as a phenomenological occurrence may not be, then might not a certain idea of the future create actions that bring about that future? So that, as a concept, it acts on the present? One reason having a president who believes the End of Days could easily happen on his watch would be difficult.
If one needs symbolic thought for these ideas to be entertained or discussed, and no chit-chat for entrained cats awaiting the chowder cue, then should we understand the visualizations of the future -- "visions" as some people would say -- as a form of symbolic thought?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 2, 2012 1:02:00 PM
Elatia,
I think we're mostly on the same page here. You grok my sign/symbol distinction, and its implications for the foundation of language. I grant that there is no firm bright line across which certain animals may not pass (apes, for example, have used rudimentary sign language, and we have yet no clear idea what whales and dolphins are up to.) And I don't think there's any longer any real confusion between human and bird "languages."
Still there's the matter of what dogs are up to. I think our terminology needs to be very clear here to avoid inadvertent anthropomorphism. Is it really true that dogs "form intentions about what to do next?" What might that mean? Not the same thing as it means in reference to ourselves, where the prospect is bound up with all sorts of conceptual concerns. I'm proposing that any kind of rich inner life among dogs or cats is about as evident as the Abrahamic god, and we have no need to hypothesize it.
Since we humans respond to signs, it is not that difficult to imagine what the experience is like in canines. There are many things we "know" non-conceptually, that we experience emotionally. (Things we "know" instinctively, or "in our gut," though we may be wrong, as dogs often are.) Since we are able to further articulate these emotions conceptually, and communicate them, it's not always easy to say where one ends and the other begins. But analysis is not thereby impossible.
In Langer's terms, non-human animals have minds, characterized by feeling states, which are generally responsive to signs, signals or other stimuli. Intelligent animals like mammals and birds are extremely attuned in this way. But only certain anthropoids (and maybe cetaceans) are intelligent enough to fix these signs in consciousness long enough to employ them representatively.
In the case of the dog bowl, the suitcase, these are present experiences with associative meaning that the dog can feel--they attach to important "stakes" of sociality and survival. We don't need concepts to experience hunger, affection, abandonment, fear, arousal--these all occur in a pre-verbal mode of awareness. What humans can do, that dogs cannot, is consider the bowl and suitcase when absent, when merely speculative. This is the critical move, from actuality to potentiality, and as Kant saw it is what makes us "human." Our pets can't travel there with us, but luckily there is more to being human than just being conceptual. We are still mammals, and relate to our fellow mammals (and each other) importantly in the empathic realm we share.
I'm agnostic on whether dogs and cats "picture" things . They certainly seem to chase imaginary quarry in dreams. But if so, these "visions" alone are not symbolic, because they do not persist in consciousness when the experience is over, and because they are not universalizable. It is the representation of those visions, discursively though language (or math), or non-discursively through the arts, that crosses the boundary dividing experience itself from consideration of experience.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 2, 2012 2:07:54 PM
Kidding, but just saying
http://www.myfoxny.com/story/18058426/pet-parakeet-returned-to-japanese-owner-after-telling-police-his-address
Posted by: Carlos | May 3, 2012 11:56:50 AM
Carlos, a prescient bird! Chris and others, I will come back to this tonight. I love this -- it's like 2007-8 all over again!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 3, 2012 12:09:58 PM
Chris,
Good to see you here. I enjoyed the Langer piece you linked to. It is a plausible theory—written in clear and beautiful prose, as Elatia says—but I have many concerns. For instance, Langer writes:
How can Langer be so sure? Can we know this reliably about other species? I mean how would we know that the migratory crane does not carry in its head a certain symbolic representation of its destination (based on last year's memory of smells, dampness, heat, type of worm food)—and which it intentionally refers to in its calls / communication during the long migratory flight with other birds? Or when a chipmunk stashes away nuts for the winter, is that purely instinctive or is a certain symbolic conception of a cold, nutless future mixed in? My sense is that Langer, based on a specific ontology of language, finds it too easy to exclude non-humans from having any language at all. If birds and mammals fall on a continuum with us—implying that varying abilities with signs and symbols are sprinkled across it—can we make such sweeping statements?
You claim that "dogs cannot ... consider the bowl and suitcase when absent" and when dogs "howl at a briefcase [they] have strong associative feelings about it, but these feelings are immediate and reactive. There's no need to impute more than that." I can turn around and ask: what makes us so sure? If we take the continuum seriously, what grounds do we have to not impute more than that (incorrect though I may be about what I impute)?
Our knowledge of what other species "think", "picture", and "speak" may be horribly inadequate, and may always remain so. Consider this tantalizing detail about a little Indian bird.
Or consider this awesome detail about the tool-using, self-aware European Magpie:
Or this amazing detail about European Starlings:
Or this phenomenal detail about African Grey Parrots:
Posted by: Namit | May 3, 2012 3:17:25 PM
Great stuff, Namit...and good questions. Hope Chris is coming right back. It's nice to all be here together again.
I live, and have always lived, with non-human mammals, and a close relative whom I visit often lives with an African Grey, among other birds. The uncanniness of their behavior is a daily fact of life. The more I watch and think, the more my assumptions fade. Of course I anthropomorphize, but in dealings with humans we are often in some pretty weird territory between empathy and projection too. That there are deep ambiguities that we may never resolve in human-human relations does not prevent our guessing or theorizing, all while admitting that both known and unknown unknowns must bear heavily on any conclusions we work towards.
When I say my dog is planful, I mean I observe her thinking about what she will do next. Which piece of furniture to leap onto and occupy, for instance. When she does the thing, I take it her decision is made. This may just be restlessness and self-appeasement on her part, not planning, but if she enters a room and starts scanning for preferred seating -- which she does in other rooms not our own, too -- then is she not living in the hope of some future good? That she can conceptualize, sort of? Not to insist on a cute pet story having validity, but it looks to me like she's thinking a bit ahead and rejecting options. To do this, would she need some notion of "comfortable seating" that would draw her into a room that offers it, when there are other places to go? Or would she have to be thinking abstractly of comfortable seating, the idea, without entering that room in the near future, so that she has considered and rejected the idea. We do this, when we are too lazy, or too something else, to pull curtains, fluff pillows and make other adjustments for our comfort.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 3, 2012 6:55:53 PM
Hi Namit. Nice to see you join the discussion!
The Langer quote I offered earlier first appeared in Ms. Magazine. It was meant to be illustrative, not definitive. In her scholarly writing (which is exhaustive) Langer was careful to note that language and cognition are directly linked to earlier forms, tracing all the way back to the first metabolic acts of the first organisms. She was very explicit that language "may have had no true beginning at all." Trying to "exclude" other animals from its history was not her intention, which was rather to explicate the extraordinarily developments of human culture (unique among all species) in terms of a theory of symbolic forms.
The fact remains that language exists in no other societies besides our own, except in those few cases that we have been able to teach it (in a very rudimentary form) to some of those intelligent and sociable species also marginally suited to it. Apes, dolphins and (perhaps) parrots. Not, notably, dogs or horses. (Note also that no animal so taught has been able to communicate at a level more advanced than that of a human toddler, so while we don't know what is possibly phylogenetically down the line, the idea of expanding this faculty outward beyond our own species, is, for today, a bit of a non-starter in any case).
So let's restate the thesis in a more cautious way, less likely to come across as human imperialism: Symbolic thought and communication first arose in human minds, and while it was later able to be transferred, in a much-limited form, to other species whose intelligence and sociability were conducive to experimentation, at present it is only typified and given full expression among homo sapiens.
You've objected that we can't know what happens in the minds of other creatures, and indeed we can't. But what are we to infer in the complete absence of evidence symbolic thought barring the cases I have mentioned above? We have as much evidence for god, the soul, entelechy, phlogiston, memes, and morphic resonance as we do for symbolic cognition in non-human animals. Reason and parsimony counsel us to infer no more than is warranted in either case.
That's not to dismiss out of hand your provided evidence (for which, thanks!) of intelligence in birds. But I'm not trying to deny animal intelligence. I'm specifically interested in the faculty of symbolic thought, which none of your examples touches upon (except for the last one, and since that example [Alex the parrot] falls into a category I've already accounted for [creatures taught rudimentary language by humans], it doesn't really propel the conversation, and I'm going to skip over it.
So let's turn to the other three, to show why they, too, don't properly bear on the question at hand.
Let me start by saying that when it comes to theorizing higher forms of cognition in birds, I think many researchers fail to take into account the ability of evolution to bestow "intelligence" upon the behavior of individual organisms and species. If we can refrain from the urge to anthropomorphize, we can describe the behavior of the bower bird, for example, without having to really consider that he is engaging in "art" in the way we'd mean it about ourselves. Bower birds are born to build bowers, and cannot refrain from building them, if it's mating time.
Migratory birds, similarly, do not "navigate" in the sense that we do; they have an innate faculty that we do not possess. If we want to fly to Mexico and back, we have to take several hours of flight school, and use machines and instruments that were designed and built by other humans who took countless hours of engineering courses, and on and on. The amount of learned culture required for one person to make one flight is staggering, and takes enormous commitment and discipline. Cranes, and other birds, by contrast, are born "knowing" how.
We can even make similar statements about much less intelligent species if we like. Butterflies also migrate great distances. Spiders spin elaborate webs of great complexity, and their knowledge of these webs is intricate (ensuring they are not ensnared along with their prey), though they, like butterflies, have no real brains to speak of. Just a ventral nerve chord, a couple of ganglia, less than a million neurons overall. And yet they are able to make structures that we are not able to emulate without a great deal of training and technical assistance.
Which is just to say we need to be very careful in ascribing interiority to observed animal behavior, where much more parsimonious explanations will do. Take the bee eaters, for example. The researchers observed that the bee eaters seemed to be less hesitant in flying to their nest when the (human) observers' view of the nest was obstructed, and furthermore when it could be seen from the bird's vantage point that the observer's view of the nest was obstructed. From this the researchers inferred that the birds "judged" whether or the observer could see the nest. Here, in this judgement, is the unnecessary postulate. We don't suggest that spiders make "judgments" on how much stress their silk strands can bear, or that butteflies make "judgements" on whether they are on or off course. They somehow "know" what they are doing, but we don't mean this knowledge in any kind of literal sense. It is instinctual, and most likely genetically encoded.
It is, I grant, somewhat remarkable that a bird can correctly estimate the geometry of predator sight angles! But this doesn't mean that this bird needs a "theory of mind" or other sort of picture in its head to accomplish this, any more than a spider needs to visualize its web. (And, importantly, even a mental picture or vision is not itself symbolic, if it lacks the persistence in consciousness and universalization that typifies abstraction). The bird merely needs a means to reliably recognize the pattern. It is adequate to describe this behavior with reference to signals, rather than symbols. The obstruction of a predator's field of vision by a rock or shrub is a very complex sign, needing excellent visual acuity. I'm impressed by these birds ability to respond to it! But that complexity alone doesn't make it symbolic or conceptual.
The case of the magpie is perhaps a little more revolutionary, since birds are supposed to be dumber than primates as a matter of course, and yet here's a bird that can (apparently) make a cognitive leap that a macaque cannot--recognition a mirror image of itself. This is an intriguing finding, but it really isn't germane to the question of whether a bird can think symbolically. We don't know exactly what level of intelligence this behavior indicates, but nothing in it demands conceptualization. All we can really say for sure is that the image in the mirror points the magpie to his own body. Inferring an advanced concept of "magpie self" is not warranted by the parameters of the study. (Let's remember that ethnographic studies have shown that not all human societies can easily conceptualize images captured photographically; we should be modest in any inferences of cognition based on reactions to mirror reflections).
The starling study, while interesting, is strictly relevant to the phenomenon of recursion; It has no bearing on whether starlings can communicate symbolically. Let's recall what this would mean: the ability to discourse using abstracted, codified representations about phenomena that are not physically present. Nothing in the paper comes close to positing this. The authors make some noises about recursion being a typically human linguistic property, and therefore attribute "language" skills to a form of (signal) communication that employs recursion. This is fine if you're into Chomskian deep structure, I guess, which I'm not, particularly. I frankly think the paper is full of invalid assumptions about what language is.
As I said, I'm not making the argument that no other species can employ symbols. I'm arguing that none do, unless we go out of our way to facilitate it, and even then, only with a minute fraction of the complexity. For all I know in 100 years we'll have a bird president and chimp secretary of state. But in the state of affairs we find ourselves in today, there's no reason to think that any animals besides ourselves think symbolically except in the most rudimentary way, in very unnatural formalized situations.
None of this is to deny that our concepts of animal intelligence are not up for revision, as they surely are in many cases. But we can surely do this in parallel with an examination of what it means to be human, and how we came to be as we are.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 3, 2012 7:47:44 PM
Elatia,
You of course don't have to abide by this distinction I have offered between sign and symbol, though I am curious how it strikes you in the abstract when the evaluation of treasured companions does not seem to be on the line.
If we go by the definitions I have proposed (following Langer, as well as Cassirer and Peirce), then your pup is responding, as far as we can tell, in the realm of signs, not symbols. You are, I would suggest, supplying concepts where they aren't needed to explicate her actions. This can be easily seen by observing (or imagining) our own behavior when we, for example, get up in the night to use the bathroom or get a glass of water. Our mind might be on some other thing--we might have a "sense" (feeling) of thirst, or a full bladder, all the while thinking about the meaning of the dream we just had, or making a mental note to mail the rent check in the morning. We don't need a concept of getting water or going to pee, or of what it will be like if we refrain from either action. That is to say, we are capable of forming those concepts, but they are not necessary to motivate us, and in most cases probably quite absent.
Concepts tend to come into play (massive generalization alert) where our habitual or instinctual motivations are inadequate or thwarted by a higher purpose. We might wake up thirsty, and then remember that we are scheduled for surgery the next day and not supposed to drink anything for 24 hours prior. Back to bed, with the concept of our future surgical experience to motivate us not to answer our body's pleas for hydration.
There is nothing planful about our getting up to adjust the hydration of our bodies. We become planful when we actively consider alternatives, something we probably do much less than we like to think we do, but which, when we do, requires an abstract conceptual hypostasis that, I'm sorry to observe, your and my pets betray no signs (and definitely no symbols!) of being capable of. All of which is to the good: We didn't adopt them for their reasoning skills, after all, but for better reasons than that.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 3, 2012 8:21:01 PM
Chris, I'll respond over the weekend. For now, enjoy this cartoon.
Posted by: Namit | May 4, 2012 3:05:04 AM
Looking forward. I'm going to predict that we largely agree, once it becomes clear I'm not positing a Cartesian Animals-as-Automatons model.
The thought/feeling distinction can be a tricky one, in part because the terms are so often used interchangeably (William James, for example, often used "thought" to describe what is much better characterized as feeling.)
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 4, 2012 1:44:31 PM
Funny cartoon, Namit! Chris, I was using my dog as an example of how any smart animal might entertain options, reject some, pursue others, with an eye to what will happen, a bit later, if option A is pursued and not option B. We don't know this of course, but I am not sure we can know for a certainty, either, that nothing more than the "inclination of the moment" prompts the animal's behavior. Is it about my dog? No it's about other dogs, because my dog is Jesus.
We are used to conceiving of animals as having needs and inclinations, not thoughts and feelings, but, while being as careful as possible not to anthropomorphize, we might also consider that our bad treatment of animals is enabled by our belief that language and reason are not theirs, but ours. If this bad treatment is to continue -- torture, slaughter, consumption -- then it's a good thing we cannot think of them as fellow creatures. One way plantation owners in the antebellum South justified their treatment of slaves was by believing that slaves, while indisputably human, had no souls. I have had some major experiences with animals (apes, dolphins, dogs) that make me see them as fellow creatures -- it's a feeling, but it's also what I think. And I know it's not grounds for anything philosophical except decisions that may partake of moral philosophy. I am suggesting that if we systematically understand animal behavior, including cognition, as less than, we may not be acting from the loftiest motives, or from a 99% pure spirit of philosophical inquiry. Without going all "Watership Down" on everyone, I cannot but wonder whether we reason our way out of according animals the ability to -- somehow -- intuit a future, we do this because the future we are free to conceptualize for most of them is so truly hideous.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 4, 2012 4:03:18 PM
This interesting discussion has helped me clarify many things, in good measure because of you, Chris. You are one of the smartest people I know and as I have mentioned offline to some, I wish you were writing for 3QD!
I'll start by agreeing that language, as we know it, requires the use of symbols (aka words). But something else is needed too: syntax. No syntax = no language. As this very insightful review by Nick Enfield of James R. Hurford's The Origins of Grammar posits, after the early humanoid use of mere symbols came the gradual development of syntax (and this may well be uniquely human, led by a suitably higher underlying cognitive apparatus and social needs), the combined result of which was language as we know it.
So what I'm suggesting is this:
(1) A species can have symbols and still not have language (due to lack of syntax). So certain animals may well use symbols of some kind (including abstract concepts, notions about the past, imagining the bowl and the suitcase) but not have whatever else it takes to acquire language.
(2) A species can have a rudimentary language (with requisite symbols and syntax) that is invisible to us across the species barrier. While this is more speculative than (1), can we rule it out in some non-human species?
I am all for not anthropomorphizing and using reasonably parsimonious explanations, but I worry about being unreasonably parsimonious and shortchanging other animals. We have limited ways of being certain, and most species may not respond as much to our experiments / tutoring as African Greys. What lends (1) and (2) credibility today—especially (1)—is not scientific data, which, though tantalizing, isn't conclusive either way, but three other things: the context of evolution (so much else is evidently shared: social behavior, intelligence, memory recall, problem-solving, rule learning, tool use, even grieving), the fact that some species can learn to use the symbols that we teach them thereby showing a capacity for it, and spending time with and observing animals.
I suppose my difference with you is less about whether other species have language, but whether they have symbols. Unlike you, I consider the latter almost certain for a lot more species than those in your tiny shortlist (and, for people, as Elatia astutely points out, this inevitably has implications for how we ought to relate to those species; for e.g., to have symbols is to not be a creature who lives purely in the moment). Since the pre-Darwinian era of Kant (who you cited to make a point about what divides us from other animals), we've learned so much about non-human species that I daresay my stance has become likelier over time. Either way, agnosticism is a safer bet—not denial of symbols in other species, which seems to me closer to positing a divine origin for humans. :)
Posted by: Namit | May 4, 2012 4:49:12 PM
Chris, here is a relevant passage by Mary Midgley, from Animals and Why They Matter (page 57), in a subsection "Understanding without Words":
She then cites some animal behaviors that support Elatia's point about her planful dog and "how any smart animal might entertain options, reject some, pursue others, with an eye to what will happen, a bit later, if option A is pursued and not option B."
Posted by: Namit | May 5, 2012 5:13:50 PM
Namit, that's a beautiful and arresting passage from a philosopher not enough people read. Thanks!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 5, 2012 6:53:06 PM
Namit, thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Taking your comments in order:
(Elatia, this goes to some of your remarks as well.)
1. I am really not that smart. I'm just stubborn.
2. I completely agree that symbolic thought on its own is not sufficient for language development. Syntax is also needed, as you point out. Symbolic thought is, however, like syntax, necessary for language. When evaluating why humans alone of all species have developed language, we want to look at what elements there are that only humans possess. As you noted with your starling example, we know that we are not the only species to use grammar (recursion being an instance of grammar.) Birdsong is inflected (not only starlings but also finches have been found to use grammar in their songs) but it is not language in the sense we use that word for human communication. What is missing in birds, as in all species save our own, is the ability to conceptualize signs--that is, to fix them in consciousness so they can persist even when the signified object is no longer present.
As both you and Elatia have noted, we can't ask our pets--or the birds in the yard--if they have thoughts. Luckily, though, we can ask a few select humans who developed language late enough in life that they can still recall their state of consciousness when they were pre-linguistic. The two classic examples are Helen Keller and Laura Bridgeman (There may be others in the literature I'm not aware of, thought I'd like to hear of them if there are, even if they conflict with the account give here.) Here's Helen Keller, describing the watershed moment when she first became aware of the possibility of conceptual thought:
"[Sullivan] brought me the hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure." [She then describes the famous scene at the pump, with Anne Sullivan signing W-A-T-E-R into one hand, while pouring actual water on the other.] "I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful and cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul […] Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object I touched seemed to quiver with life [because] I saw everything with the strange new sight that had come to me."
She also wrote: "When I learned the meaning of 'I' and 'me' and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me."
We must be cautious in taking one account to demonstrate empirical, universal fact, but it is striking to note the radical transformation from sign to symbol. Before Keller grasped the function of the concept, of the word, she was only able to respond associatively. The hat "meant" a trip outdoors, but this is a very different thing than the concept of "outdoors" which might be grasped even when no trip was imminent. This is dog-like thought. (I hope it's clear this is not meant disparagingly). The suitcase "means" the owner will leave, the dinner bell "means" food is coming--we can feel all of these associations without conceptualizing them, and indeed we humans respond to signs all the time, especially now, in our age of never ending beeps, buzzes and alarms, which signify without conceptualizing.
The revolutionary step, so hard to see because we switch back and forth so seamlesslessly between sign and symbol, is in letting a sign *stand* for its object of signification. Only humans can do this (with the caveats I have given earlier, where we teach some limited aspect to other creatures.) Only humans use names, which are so much more than mere signs. As Langer writes,
If I mention a Mr. Smith of our common acquaintance, you may be led to tell me something about him "behind his back," which is just what you would not do in his presence. Raised eyebrows and a look at the door, interpreted as a sign that he is coming, would stop you in the midst of your narrative.
Is it not easy to see that no dog or horse or elephant or nightingale could share this experience with us?
Here's another, final example before I move to point 3. Five years ago I wrote on Underverse about the NYer article on Clive Wearing, the amnesiac who couldn't make new memories more than a few moments old. If you asked him where the bathroom in his own house was, he would not be able to tell you. And yet he does not need any assistance finding the bathroom. When he needs to go there, he goes. I think this points to a distinction in ways of knowing that are pre- and post-conceptual. I was reminded of this in my earlier response to Elatia regarding dogs and couches and getting up in the night for a glass of water.
3. I adore Mary Midgley. I think she is a hugely important and invaluable (and giantly undervalued) moral philosopher. I have most of her books, and there are few people who have had more influence on my thinking than she. But one area that she gets wrong, I'm sad to say, is the nature of thought. She subscribes, with Fodor and Pinker, to some variant of the "mentalese" model. Her justification for it is not very thoughtful. She writes in passing, in similar fashion to Pinker, that because we have a "gist" of what we want to say, this indicates a conceptualization prior to linguistic semanticization. It is no slam on her to call her out on this; philosophy of mind is not her field. It is not the most developed area of her otherwise very realized study of human nature. Midgley is simply wrong that the species she mentions need conceptual abilities to survive, and provides no compelling evidence of its necessity.
The fact is that we don't need to invoke a "thinking" faculty on the part of non-human animals to value the moral importance of those animals. It is enough that they can "feel" (and suffer) in a complex way not different from our own. Her emphasis on the articulate feeling state of animals is an important contribution to moral philosophy, in large part because the articulate feeling state of our own species is so often pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic. I want to be careful not to make the error that Kant made in restricting the categorical imperative to those who can reason alongside us, and Midgely is very insightful in this regard, even though her specific reasons why falter, to my mind.
I assent to the general bias Elatia refers to with her analogy to racism and slavery. But simply because we might have a bias to exclude other humans from the fullness of humanity, as slavery apologists did in the 19th century, is not sufficient argument to grant all suffering species the same status. Even if our pets are Jesus, we can still without moral error differentiate them from ourselves on the grounds of symbolic ability just as we can observe that some species can fly and some cannot, and some breathe under water. There is no harm in making observations of difference if they are not accompanied by a justification for cruelty or exploitation. My appeal to you both is to keep simultaneously in mind our capacity to observe biological differences while also remaining mindful of our duty to all of creation in a moral and purposeful regard.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 6, 2012 2:02:41 AM
Beautifully argued, Chris. However, that clear-sightedness about how animals differ from ourselves may not be truly achievable -- that is, intellectual rigor might not suffice for it -- as long as we deal animals their present hideous fates, based on our view of their uses, based on how much of their habitat we need to arrogate unto ourselves. Analogizing them to slaves doesn't go all the way, of course, because any analogy will let you down if you demand too much of it. I intend it only to go this far: once we have conceived of a fellow creature a certain way, so as to steal his liberty and his labor, or help ourselves to the flesh of his protesting body -- yes! extinction! he gets it! -- then perhaps we study that creature more like Dr. Mengele finding out all about Jewish twins than like Alexander von Humboldt with fresh fields to conquer. I doubt whether the objectivity to understand but truly is available, in the circs that are, if only because we are guided by values we don't really want to rattle and shake to some highly assumptive reasoning.
Also, without suggesting Helen Keller is an outlier -- for how should we know? -- there are bountiful examples of children born deaf who not only do not learn to lip-read, or to sign and be signed to, or to read and write, but who cannot after a certain point in late childhood acquire language -- at all. They mime their way through life, they manage by living with caring people. We'd have a rough time figuring out their potential for abstract thought. Yet we know they are not animals and we know they are not stupid. Since they have opposing thumbs, and we see they use tools -- is that trainability, or do we suspect them of some other concept of why the weather vane needs to go on the roof of the barn?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 6, 2012 11:52:50 AM
Elatia,
I still don't see the necessity for such a stance. Your point seems to be that given a lack of certainty on whether animals think or not, better to give them the benefit of the doubt, since this will foil any tendency to exploit them on the basis that their fates don't matter. I have already offered that we can appeal to the fact of their suffering regardless of their power of cognition.
That is to say, we can have truth and duty. Isn't that desirable? It seems to me that making conceptual thought the shibboleth of rights-granting just recapitulates the same error as the Enlightenment crowd: without Reason there is just dullness and galvanic response.
If it were shown conclusively that that your dog had no "thoughts" as we conceive them, I'm confident you would love her no less, nor would you be any less aggrieved at the treatment of livestock, or work horses, or the great mammals cruelly hunted in central Africa. Cannot whatever reason you would not become Mengeleian upon such news also be extended to others? Do we need a noble lie of Doctor Doolittle-ism just to keep humanity from ravishing all of creation, or are there are ethical schemes we can imagine that would encourage us to live harmoniously with our kin?
I hesitate to form an opinion about children who never acquire language without knowing more of the particulars. I'm not aware of any such cases, though obviously they would be possible in theory, given that Keller would never have learned language without Sullivan. Are there any studies on this you can point me to?
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 6, 2012 6:38:04 PM
Chris,
Your considered views and remarkable facility with prose, when combined with stubbornness (a trait I share :), often result in stimulating exchanges. You've stated your position well and, on the role of language in thought, I think you identify with the "language first" hypothesis (correct me if I'm wrong), which holds that conceptual / symbolic thought is possible only for those who possess language. This contrasts with the "thought first" hypothesis, which holds that certain conceptual / symbolic thoughts precede language (i.e., a prior 'language-of-thought', aka 'mentalese', provides the preparatory ground for language). Both happen to be in the realm of metaphysics.
Keller's example (and Wearing's) seems to me misplaced in this discussion. In citing it I suspect you meant to argue that animals lack symbols because they lack language; instead, you assume it a priori. I mean think about it: Keller, denied any shared social communication, first learned symbols at 7 years of age, acquired syntax and language, and transformed her world. What makes you think that monkeys are like Keller in her shut-in state? Monkeys grow up in a socially communicative world and may well possess symbols commensurate with their evolutionary needs (even without language). Isn't Keller's situation closer to a smart bird's or monkey's that also got isolated from the communicative sounds of its own species? So it's not at all clear why hers was "dog-like thought" rather than the thought of a human child without language. Your "dog-like" assertion requires supporting evidence that you have not provided. Instead, you have derived it from theoretical commitments that, to channel Mencken, may be "clear, simple, and wrong."
For instance, this study suggests that a Capuchin monkey, quite distant from us, uses symbols. The fact that he learned the symbols we taught him doesn't mean that he was previously in a wholly symbol-less state. In other words, the monkey was not like the shut-in Keller until meeting our intrepid researcher. The monkey likely had some use of symbols already, and his routine exercise of that native capacity allowed him to also learn our symbolism. Indeed, why are you so sure that he didn't have symbols before? Take another study, cited in the SEP entry on Animal Cognition:
Or consider this research in memory recall in some birds and mammals. And this one on episodic memory, which says:
In the face of such suggestive data, how you can maintain that "What is missing in birds, as in all species save our own, is the ability to conceptualize signs—that is, to fix them in consciousness so they can persist even when the signified object is no longer present." How do you know this? The studies above clearly tell me that there is more going on in the minds of animals than many of our rationalized linguistic theories can account for.
Finally, Susan Schaller studied a Mexican immigrant, Ildefonso. His case casts doubt on just how symbol-less we think human adults without language actually are (unlike the child Keller); he and other adults like him function well above the abilities of 4-year-olds. This article describes the study and also questions our current theoretical postulates:
Posted by: Namit | May 6, 2012 7:04:19 PM
The internet is messing things up. Courts to decide what constitutes "speech."
Posted by: Ruchira | May 6, 2012 8:40:12 PM
Good one, Ruchira!
Namit, I looked in vain for the decades-old research that would support my point about people who grow up language-free but not as compromised as we might think -- Idelfonso is an even better example.
Chris, I might be putting things backwards. As Jeremy Bentham famously argued -- the question about animals should not be whether they have reason or speech, but whether they suffer. I think this is so, but it's not what I meant. We could indeed stop treating animals as we do, if the certainty that they suffered overcame us, and the significance of that were something we cared to take in. To know a thing is different than to be convinced of the significance of that thing. What I mean is that investigating the lives of animals, including how they think, might be a different sort of inquiry than it is at present, IF we did not take it as read that our present uses for animals were necessary. I am indeed making a side point about animal welfare, but my main point, and I am sorry if I garbled it, is about the bases of our own freedoms of inquiry, and whether they involve assumptions that we attach less than due significance to. Dr. Johnson was once trying to persuade someone of the utterly plain truth of Christianity. "By God, sir," he said, and I am going to paraphrase, "The evidence for Jesus being our Savior is far greater than the evidence that Canada is taken!" That remark has haunted me all my adulthood, as a model for how we are always wrong about some things we are perfectly certain of.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 6, 2012 9:41:43 PM
Wise words, Elatia.
Posted by: M73 | May 6, 2012 10:17:35 PM
I'll have more to say about Ildefanso tomorrow. The comparisons to Keller and Bridgeman are striking, and do more to confirm my outlook than anything so far offered. That's my preview. More to follow.
Elatia, I'm afraid I now understand you less than ever. I'm interested in the truth of the matter on whether animals think (whatever that may be) as well as establishing a solid foundation for their serious ethical consideration (regardless of the findings of the above). So where do we differ?
If you are saying some biases impede my view of animal nature, well surely that is the case! But we can't make a general point of it. Biases will always cloud our vision. This is just a high school debating point unless we can show each other where the obstructions lie. Can you? Because it's really not a foul, otherwise.
None of my argument about animals' cognitive abilities is in the slightest way linked to "our present uses for them." I say with Dr. Johnson, who was right about so much that his companions could not warrant, here's to the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies; (replace livestock and agribusiness as needed.) If we need to replace dogs and horses and apes with animals we seem to have little use for, say giant squid and vultures, so be it, whatever it takes. I just ask we are allowed to be concrete about it. What am I certain of that I should not be?
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 7, 2012 1:46:40 AM
Chris,
Endowed as I am by a superior ability to make Google respond to my symbols, I've found a short video clip of an adult Nicaraguan woman without language. Her name is Maria Noname and the researcher is Judy Kegl. Does the clip suggest that Maria has absolutely no concepts?
I also read about congenitally deaf dogs, who are considered "very dumb". As I suggested above, I think Maria Noname's disability parallel's the disability of a deaf dog, not the life of a normal dog. These profoundly disabled and socially isolated human individuals may tell us something about the role of language in human thought but still tell us little about the nature of thought in normal animals well integrated into their social lives.
Posted by: Namit | May 7, 2012 3:50:41 AM
Namit,
We can always apply pressure to our given definitions and categories, but I think this must be done in good faith. There is a kind of gliding employed by "flying" squirrels, which we would be rash to equate with the powered flight of birds. Some fish have rudimentary lungs and can breathe air, but as it tends to reduce their fitness, they only do it under duress. I have said many times in this thread we should not expect a clear bright line between species who have some conceptual faculty and those who do not. Almost all traits in nature are transitional; cognition is no different. This is why it is important to define our terms carefully, as I have tried to do. A symbol, in the sense I mean it, is a sign that has been detached from the immediacy of its referent in nature, such that the referent can be contemplated anew in the mind without being actually present. That's what we're on the hunt for.
Having said that, I don't think we've settled on a specific definition for "concepts" and that could account for some of the ambiguity in our dialogue. Is a concept merely the organization of elements into classes, as baboons supposedly do? Or does it require something further, some kind of marker? I'm not wedded, at this juncture, to either definition, since I want to allow that baboons are up to something complex, but I'm inclined to agree with Cassirer that differentiae need some kind of substrate before they can be categorized. That is to say that concepts reside *in* symbols, or they don't exist at all. How could they? The alternative is that they are directly correlated to neural states, which is what the LOT/mentalese theorists propose. I think this is hugely problematic theoretically, for reasons I don't have time to get into now. In either case concepts must have some sort of formal structure, whether it be a structure of mind (symbol) or brain (mentalese), through which they can persist through time.
This is where the road splits. If we are to say that concepts are intrinsically symbolical, then we need to look for some evidence of that symbol. If the symbol is what "fixes" the concept, it needs some mode of expression to do so: a vocalization, a gesture, a mark, an image. Without some fixed structure, the concept cannot be "held" in the mind. If the structure is not perceivable, we can't infer it, nor can we infer the concept it points to.
If, on the other hand, we are to say that concepts are encoded neurally in "mentalese," then we are relieved of the need to find expressive evidence for them, but we are now faced with the larger problem of how concepts are shared in a society (of baboons, for example), and why these innate concepts did not lead to language formation in these species, as they did in our own.
If you are advocating a form of LOTH/mentalese, then I'll have to bow out of the discussion for now; there's just too much separating our views, and I'd have to address a whole different set of considerations, which I don't have time for, at least today. (Though I'd like to return to it later). But it doesn't sound to me like you take the "nativist" Chomsky/Pinker/Fodor approach. (Or rather a variant of nativism, since I don't think these theorists propose that non-human animals have concepts in the sense we are using it here; they believe that human brains are uniquely adapted for language, which arises emblematically (though speech, e.g.) wherever LOT is present in the brain). So how would you resolve the dilemma of how we might infer thoughts with no expressive correlates?
I conclude that if LOTH is false, as it must be (for reasons I can't develop here), we can only hypothesize symbolic thought where it is evident, through language, myth, iconography, art, religion, science, math, logic, and philosophy, none of which exist outside our species. I am not arguing a priori here. If there is a potential emblem of symbolic conveyance I have overlooked, please correct me. I only ask it be empirical. So far none of the examples you have given have met this standard.
A related point that may help clarify my view: symbolic thought in humans did not emerge one day fully articulated. We can trace through history and anthropology the development of human language and cognition to greater and greater standards of abstraction. Science and formal logic have only become possible in recent centuries. The (abundant) evidence suggests that earlier forms of symbolic perception was much more concrete, much less variable and universalizable. Think of the difference between proper and common nouns, by analogy: common nouns permit a much greater freedom of generalization and abstraction.
Our brains haven't changed in that time. The evolution has been cultural, not biological. And yet it took millenia to move from the first instances of naming, through a long period of magical thinking where names were intimately identified with their objects, up to our own age of deep and elaborated abstraction.
In other words, the fullness of what I describing as symbolic, abstracted, conceptual thought is extremely recent. Given how much conceptual distance there is between ourselves and our earliest ancestors to use language, how much more great the gulf between ourselves and our fellow primates that have not become linguistic? If even early humans could not reason as we do now (again, for reasons of cultural evolution, not biological deficiency), do we not want to be very cautious about how much of our interiority we project onto intelligent animals around us, whether in our homes or in wildlife refuges?
I still owe you a response on Ildefanso, hopefully later today. The article you sent is very rich and I want to respond to it intelligently. As I said before, the parallels to Keller and Bridgeman are striking, and I think Schaller's work strengthens my case, but I want to prepare my remarks on this more thoroughly.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 7, 2012 1:38:22 PM
Chris, it's Monday and that means 100,000 shallots stand between me and the intellectual rigor required to reply. It could be worse -- it could be as many chickens.
But first things first. It's not YOU -- whom I accuse of being open-minded -- whose "certainties" I am referring to. With this exception, to quote you quoting me from above: "None of my argument about animals' cognitive abilities is in the slightest way linked to 'our present uses for them'." That's where I don't agree, because I see that as an impossible claim to make soundly, and not just on account of the kind of general bias that could, at a high school debating society occasion, be cited to deflate or deflect an argument. When we consider the probable cognitive abilties of animals who live with us and resemble us in many ways, we know we are shooting with a sighted gun without knowing how that gun is sighted. It will take an awful lot of shots to deduce exactly how the gun is sighted, and I don't believe philosophers of mind, or analytic philosophers, have yet taken the requisite number of shots. My difficulty is with their certainties, therefore, not yours. Namit mentioned upstream that analytical philosophers -- disclosure: I am related to an important one, and I did NOT pick fights him! -- look at the question, whether animals use symbolic thought, differently from the way animal behaviorists do, so unless one POV is diamantine, and the other schmaltz, observation and rigor of different kinds need not resolve to similar conclusions. Maybe no one is wrong. Perhaps philosophers and animal behaviorists alike are "not even wrong," in the very way that men from diverse backgrounds judging a swimsuit competition in the '50s might have been not even wrong in the rather personal systems they used to award points to the young women on parade. Perhaps those were not the deeply meaningful errors made.
Namit, you are the Googler of all time. Is it nearness to Cupertino. Thanks so much however you found this stuff.
Must think harder, later!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 7, 2012 2:34:10 PM
Namit,
OK, about Schaller and Ildefonso.
I found the Greg Downey blog post at Neuroanthropology very poorly written and argued--full of undefended ideas and non sequiturs--so I just clicked through to the source material to see the way Schaller presented her story.
Here's the significant passage:
This rang very familiar to me, having just read similar accounts of the same, astonishing epiphany. Here's Anne Sullivan, describing the same moment with Helen Keller (the famous water-house scene):
Here are two of Laura Bridgeman's teachers. First, Mr Howe:
And Lydia Drew:
Here's Keller from her memoir:
Let's agree that in all three cases something remarkable is dawning here. This is not in itself proof that there are no thoughts or concepts (or consciousness!) before language, but at a minimum it suggests that a radical new type of thought and awareness emerges in this moment with the discovery of names.
By contrast, we get a small, inconclusive glimpse into the time before Ildefonso learned language. Schaller:
Keller, by contrast, does remember. She wrote:
This is an incredibly vivid and articulate account of pre-linguistic existence. The very strong implication is that we could not even call Keller conscious (by her own account) before she learned words and concepts, especially the concept of "I." (This is very similar to Julian Jaynes' idea that consciousness is the direct outcome of the invention of the "Analogous I," when narratization emerges.)
Now there's one thing I left out. Schaller writes in passing
We don't get any more information on this. It's hard to say what it means. We know that Ildefonso had no sign language before Schaller taught him, indeed he didn't even know sign language existed. So even if he had inner "concepts" (which I doubt), he would have had no forms with which to convey them. So in what sense did he "talk" with other languageless friends? Perhaps its just a metaphor for more general communication?
We know that non-linguistic animals "communicate," and we can communicate with them non-linguistically, especially our pets, who we get to know very well. Our dogs and cats don't know the meaning of our words, but they are able to read our disposition by facial expression and tone of voice. And they communicate with us their general emotional disposition--happy, angry, hungry, scared. No concepts pass between us, but we communicate our feeling states. So perhaps Ildefenso's "talk" was something like this? We can only speculate.
But I see nothing in Schaller's account that necessitates any conceptual content at all in Ildefonso's mind before he learns language, and much, in all the accounts above, that argues against it.
There is one area that has potential to cause me to significantly revise my thinking, and that is the case of autistic spectrum children and adults. Temple Grandin says she is able to think wordlessly, in pictures, and I must believe her. I'll need to think about what relationship pictoral thinking might have to symbolic thinking, and try to get more concrete accounts of what this thinking feels like from the inside. So this is an open challenge I don't yet know how to respond to. But none of the rest of the objections I've seen on this thread seem, ultimately very compelling to me, despite their origin in the minds of two of my favorite 3QuarksDailyians. Please feel free to keep on me--I'm really trying to keep my thought on this matter to a rigorous standard. But by the same token I'm going to continue to approach the idea of conceptual/symbolic thought in animals with enormous skepticism, which I hope you won't take personally.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 7, 2012 4:22:24 PM
Elatia,
After your shallots, le deluge.
I guess my question is how you can know my bias is not the garden-variety "we all have blind spots" variant without being able to say what my bias is. Or maybe that's what you want to wait until after the 10,000 to articulate.
I don't see how I could bend over any further backwards in my concurrence that we have a duty to treat animals ethically, that they are ends in themselves (to put it Kantianally) & not instruments to serve our desires. This is true whether or not animals think conceptually. Doesn't that go some distance toward calibrating my sights? If not, what would?
To your beauty pageant analogy, it is like saying the only way I can condemn the sexism of parading women evaluatively before the male gaze is to agree that men and women are the same in every regard. Perhaps they are, but it doesn't follow logically, and that's not how we adjudicate human rights in any case. If science were to show us that women really were more "nurturing" and men more "aggressive" (neither of which I subscribe to, FWIW) it wouldn't change my stance on feminism, which is grounded in something far more fundamental.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 7, 2012 4:44:10 PM
Chris, the shallot-processing has emboldened me beyond my usual submissive state; it has made me weep, and I am one of those women who feel better after shedding tears. So, now that I have changed back into my swimsuit...
The rights of animals -- or, even if we do not believe they have rights, and believe only that their welfare needs safeguarding -- arose as an issue stemming from our assessment of their cognitive abilities, not as an ethical dilemma which needs to be worked out more favorably to animals however they think. Which it also is. What I want to know is how the present (Early Modern onwards) state of human-animal relations could fail to influence our perception of their cognitive abilities. We could behave more ethically to them for no better reason than that they are furry. But can our very approach to the understanding of how they think be truly separated from how we value them in the era we are considering the question? I think you think this point is too wide to be compelling, while I think it's foundational, and does not easily resolve to a Shirley MacLaine type utterance about where one's head is at. The long history, and longer prehistory, of human-animal relations as fear, awe and worship being, over time, supplanted by factory farming and contempt, is a side issue, not to mention an oversimplification. What I am thinking of is thinking, not animals, and maybe not putting it well. And wondering whether values drive rational inquiry to an extent that can be corrected for, or if they undergird it too deeply for that. And, regardless of the answer, what would have to change for it to be any other way?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 7, 2012 6:40:32 PM
Perhaps, perhaps, but if it's simply a matter of my being inescapably blinkered by "the present state of animal-human relations," then I desire to know:
1) Wouldn't that impact you and I (and Namit) equally, since we share the culture in question? and
2) If you have an out, please share it with me, I want to be free too! and
3) If you don't have an out, shouldn't I just muddle through as best I can, given the constraints I can't get out from under?
I don't understand what I'm to do with the critique that my argument is bound up in cultural assumptions unless you have specific and concrete explications of the influence of those assumptions.
It threatens now to become the price of proving that animals think, that I cannot! (at least not clearly) and perhaps neither can any one of us, so commanding are our metaphysical priors, which of course snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
I beseech you for some *constructive* criticism!
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 7, 2012 7:30:41 PM
Chris,
There is no denying that language, as we know it, is not only profoundly central to our lives, it is so deeply interwoven into our existence that it is very hard to even imagine being without it—for how would we even think about that condition if not through language? The quotes you provide on folks who acquired language later in life are very moving. It seems even more dramatic than taking an isolated, windowless room for the world and later seeing the sky and the trees for the first time. It makes one part of a community in a way that the cliched term "community" can hardly capture.
So while it is clear that language does wonders for thought, these quotes are, as you rightly pointed out, "not in itself proof that there are no thoughts or concepts (or consciousness!) before language, but at a minimum it suggests that a radical new type of thought and awareness emerges in this moment with the discovery of names." Yes, I agree with this! So far so good.
You then cite Keller's own account as suggestive evidence for the lack of conceptual thought in pre-linguistic states. I think we need to be careful with self-reported accounts, especially when the transformation is so large and unidirectional. Keller was then only 7 and she wrote that passage much later as an adult. Might she have (inadvertently) misjudged or diminished her ex-state more than warranted? An instinct to "zero out" the earlier state to emphasize the magnificence of the present? I dunno. If the answer here is yes, it would be a fairly common psychological move (btw, other derivative/secondary accounts you cite seem even more ambiguous and inconclusive).
I say this because I see contrary suggestive evidence in the video of Maria Noname, an adult without language. You didn't comment on her case but what struck me is that she understood Kegl's question (a conceptual thought, no?). She seems to have the concept of death, of a father, killed with three objects—an event situated in the past and considered by her at will, as is the concept of her two children abandoning her, and the concept of "being alone". All of this she holds in her mind, recalls at will, and conveys with her own made up signs. How I wish the exchange had been longer but can we say it does not involve some conceptual / symbolic thought (and if this is "dog-like thought" as you wrote, dogs have a lot going on in their minds)? Indeed, is it possible for Maria to have a straight, eye-to-eye conversation without any concepts?
Like you, I too am frequently seduced by abstract analytics—definitions and logical relationships, how and when a term means one thing and not another, etc. And much good has come from this acquired habit of the mind. It can also be a snare; internal consistency often occurs alongside blind spots—and I know you know this well. Here, we may find that thought itself may work differently than we imagine today. It may work differently in animals than in socially isolated humans without language. Fwiw, I'm not drawn to LOTH based on what little I know of this computational model of the mind. But this doesn't mean I find an opposing model, yours, adequate, even as I don't know how to propose and defend a better model (if I knew, I wouldn't be a lowly blogger :-).
We still understand so little about how the mind works or its evolutionary history—the grey matter we know about, but there may be much dark matter in it yet. The world may have to wait for fresh ideas with greater explanatory power for the minds of humans and other animals. Meanwhile, I'll remain skeptical of all ambitious theories of the mind, especially those built on propositional logic (which, like reductionism, may yield results in certain frames and not others). In a distant age, folks may well look back and find our models of the mind closer to Descartes than to theirs.
Posted by: Namit | May 8, 2012 12:00:06 PM
A beautiful essay, Namit. I am with you wondering about Helen Keller. I consider her a literary genius, even though many things had to happen before she could find that form to be, spectacularly, at home in. I am not at rest with the idea that her memoiric writing is more literal than that of her sighted, hearing peers. I also believe that memory is created, on a continuous basis, by being revisited and reconsidered. Item: when I was two, my father tried to teach me how to add and subtract three-digit numbers without a pencil and paper, saying they would only slow me down. I remember it all so well, and so did my mother remember it, as long as she lived. I couldn't learn to do the thing. The feelings I sharply remember having, then and there -- the intense humiliation of failure, the fear that my father would now lose interest in showing me how to do things -- probably took me a long time to experience and name, and are more in synch with being older than two. Although I will never forget them, as attaching to that scene. So it was an important moment, emotionally, that may not have happened, and I would be left to ponder literal truth of it, if only I could ascertain that. While I don't believe Helen Keller was retrofitting a key moment for higher drama, I do believe she was as capable as anyone of conflating the epiphanial and the incremental. For her to do that, she would have had only to have thought again and again and again of that very moment, now legendary, with an understanding that changed as she changed and grew and learned and reflected.
Chris, I am off KP and free to write and think. I've been trying to see how we are arguing points from opposite sides or opposite premises, and I don't see it. Or see even that I am arguing with you in a way that calls for me to cite chapter and verse. Really, I know better! As was said of Dr. Johnson -- paraphrasing again -- if he could not shoot holes in your argument, he would turn the gun around and defeat you with the butt of it. Now, that's NOT you -- but I would hope nonetheless not to get in a seminar table type of argument with you. I know I would lose, and would dislike locking knowingly into position for that, even though losing an argument is, most of all, learning something new. But! I will answer your questions 1.), 2.) and 3.) above, as best I can.
1.) Yes, you and Namit and I all live in technological culture, and are not less in it and of it for criticizing it.
2.) Oddly, math may be an out, because freedom exists in getting one's mind boggled, and really messed up, and truly reshaped. But language isn't an out, it's an in.
3.) Yes! Muddle through and don't stop, ever! The only real alternative is much more depressing.
Now, about those assumptions we cannot seem to get out from under. I actually do not believe we are going to get out from under them, for the same reason that flying far enough out into space, in in the right direction, would not get us a view of the backside of Orion. But -- this is defeat?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 8, 2012 1:29:14 PM
Namit,
I haven't had a chance to check out that video yet. I'll try to get to it tonight. Right now I have to catch up on all the work I blew off while writing those earlier comments!
I'm curious to see what you mean when you say she "understands Kegl's question." This suggests to me that she does in fact have language--how else can a question be expressed but with language? Especially since she conveys the concepts you mention with signs, which in this case would be symbols. I'll withhold judgement until I see it, but I go into it skeptical that Noname is as devoid of language as you say.
More to follow!
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 8, 2012 3:35:22 PM
Chris,
Watch the video (it's short!). As Kegl clearly says, Maria, deaf and isolated, missed the critical window for learning a language, and the communication happened using "simple and primitive gestures"—for instance, Kegl using fingers to outline a beard on her chin, and Maria getting the reference (counterparts of which abound in the animal world). What's interesting here is that biographical info about Maria's life is known from others, so Kegl can piece together what Maria conveys with her primitive gestures (if you suspect a private language, you'll have to reckon with Wittgenstein, who called that an incoherent idea). I've just written to Kegl to request more details on the case, since there don't seem to be any formal studies on her online. I'll report if I hear back.
Posted by: Namit | May 8, 2012 5:06:32 PM
Woo-hoo! I heard back from Dr. Judy Shepard-Kegl. This is what I asked her:
And here was her short but very unambiguous response. :-)
Posted by: Namit | May 8, 2012 5:39:32 PM
It was nice of her to write you!
I've had a look at the video, and I really think the material is too scantily covered to resolve what we're trying to resolve one way or the other based on this footage. If I had to make a judgement, I'd say the video showed Maria to have rudmentary symbolic abilities and corresponding conceptualization abilities. But I'd prefer to see more footage, and have access to a fuller analysis of Kegl's methodology.
One thing the video cannot show, though, is that Maria has concepts but no language, unless we bait and switch defintions of the latter. The reason is that this would be unshowable.
If Maria had no language, then by what vehicle would she be able to "understand" the questions Kegl put to her? Maria wasn't, presumably, calling to mind facts from her life (her father, her kids) for no reason. She was either doing so as part of a conversation. (Or because she got very lucky and just happened to start thinking of the very things that were on her interlocutor's mind!) You say the conversation was only carried on in non-linguistic "gestures," but the point is that they had symbolic import. Whether the gestures add up to a complete language is besides the point--I only argue that a symbol is needed for a concept to arise, not an entire language, though obviously the ability to conceptualize will be impoverished without the articulate power of the language-in-full. If Kegl was able to convey they concept of "Maria's father" to Maria, that's symbolic, since he obviously was not present. Whether or not it's "linguistic" is a technical question that doesn't bear on my proposition.
Put another way, it cannot be simultaneously true that:
1) "Expressing conceptual knowledge is dependent upon having language."
2) Marie "had no language" (at the time of the video, or before Kegl's instruction? This isn't clear from her response).
3) We know that "she has or had concepts in her mind."
If conceptual knowledge cannot be expressed, it cannot be known, unless we are going to start talking about telepathy--which I sincerely hope we are not.
Again, it's not clear to me what's happening between them in that video. Miming three bullet holes in succession is not the same thing of having a "concept" of three--it lacks universality and abstraction. And that's the problem.
The only way to demonstrate the leap from observation or recognition of a differentia to the abstraction and conceptualization of a differentia is by associating it with a word (or with other symbolic forms, but let's stick to words for now.) The concept might or might not be there; its association with a communicable word/symbol is the only way we can know. (The exception, in theory, would be subjective introspection, but if there is a method to discerning words from concepts in one's own mind, I do not know it.)
So when it comes to the question of whether non-language users have concepts, our only empirical answer can be "they might." That leaves exercises of reason to settle the matter (or not.) You suggested I was speaking a priori earlier, but that's not quite fair. I am trying to systematically describe a coherent picture of conceptualization. It might be incorrect, but you have not yet shown me it is inferior to any other competing description. In fact I have no idea what a coherent argument that animals can think would even look like.
Perhaps that is where our conversation ends, since you have said that you don't have a systematic view of your own. I'm disappointed, not because I have failed to convert you, but because I was hoping this was all leading to a broader debate--though I'm glad to read that you don't go for that mentalese mishegoss.
I continue to think that the best explanation for both human psychology and non-human ethology rides on the distinction between feeling and thinking--that symbol and concept are inextricably linked, and that only where there is language is there abstraction and conceptualization. I hope to do more writing on this in the future, so maybe I'll have another chance to convince you!
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 8, 2012 9:09:02 PM
I think the pig in the Tyson gestation crate is telling people she'd like to get the hell out of it.
Posted by: Louise Gordon | May 8, 2012 11:17:27 PM
Chris,
Sorry to disappoint! That I'm not proffering or defending a "systematic view" (which currently may be a virtue) doesn't prevent me from trying to demolish a badly misguided one! (Ha) To the extent I have failed to persuade you, it is surely due both to my lack of sufficient persuasive power and your reluctance to shift your views. :) As for Maria's video, let me make some final comments about your response, in which I see you backtracking a bit from your earlier commitments.
You ask, "If Maria had no language, then by what vehicle would she be able to "understand" the questions Kegl put to her?" Well, didn't you write upstream that we routinely communicate with our pets using gestures, which they often "understand", despite their being without language? This is no different. Of course, the repertoire of what can be communicated is limited without language. Unlike with pets though, we have some evidence here that Maria did in fact use and understand symbols, which strengthens the case for conceptual and symbolic thought without language.
You then write, "You say the conversation was only carried on in non-linguistic "gestures," but the point is that they had symbolic import." Surely they did! And all without language. The animal world is full of non-linguistic signs, sounds, and gestures of the kind Kegl employs. Since we do see symbols pass between Maria and Kegl, we, exercising reason, ought to conclude that:
This has been my position from the start (contrasting with your position that "symbolic thought and communication first arose in human minds" and that animals don't have symbols because they lack language—the point of you citing Keller's account—and so animals can't plan or imagine objects). If we now agree that there is no conceptual barrier to animals having symbols—that's progress!—what we need next is to study their actual behavior and decide what conclusion is warranted. Why put the theory-cart before the horse?
I'll stop here and give you the last word. I look forward to your future writings on this topic!
Posted by: Namit | May 9, 2012 2:32:14 AM
I suspected this misunderstanding might occur. I'm not saying that language qua language is needed for conceptual thought; I'm saying that symbolic use, generally, is necessary for conceptual thought. It's potentially confusing, because symbolic use (or, at least use of words) generally becomes language when it is systematized. So in casual conversation it's simpler to conflate symbolic use and language use. In the case of Maria, however, I believe that what we are seeing is something at the edge of language, which still has (or may have) some symbolic content. It doesn't matter, for my purposes, whether a linguist would call it "language" or not, based on syntactical and morphemic complexity, or whatever other parameter she would use.
My argument is that symbols are necessary for conceptualization, and only humans (so far as we know) use symbols; therefore only humans conceptualize. In most cases that symbol use is full fledged language use, but it need not be. (It was through the learning of names, not sentences, that both Keller and Ildefonso first learned to conceptualize).
For example: I know very little Spanish, and I walk into a town square with my clothes ripped saying "Policia! Policia!" Have I used language? All that matters is that I've used the symbol, demonstrating the presence of the concept of police--which differs from a perception of police because there are no police present in my ambient. It is an abstraction.
Of course the problem with my not knowing much Spanish is that I may be easily misconceived. I may be taken to mean "please get me the police" when what I want to convey is that the police have beaten me up, and now they're coming for everyone else.
This is the difficulty I have with the Maria Noname video. There is too much ambiguity to say what is being communicated in either direction. I'm not prepared to say whether or not symbols are being exchanged, and concepts expressed. They might be.
The point just is that if symbolic communication has taken place, it advances my argument, whether or not the symbols are fully "linguistic," since that's all I set out to show. Concepts need symbols. Those symbols will probably be constituents of language, but we can identify borderline cases where this language is undeveloped to demonstrate the principle.
I have never argued for a conceptual barrier to animals having symbols. Rather I argue that where we see symbols expressed, we should surmise they exist. Human culture is a sea of symbolic expression! No other species' culture features symbolic expression in any meaningful way (I will continue to defend against alleged counterexamples with great glee and brio. I am *not* trying to put the theory-cart before the evidence.) It would be odd for it to be so occluded, given how attuned we are to conducting ourselves symbolically.
All that is left is the prospect that even though animals don't use symbols, they have concepts anyway. I think this viewpoint relies heavily on a LOT hypothesis that is extremely misguided theoretically (and it's where the otherwise wonderful Mary Midgley goes astray). I don't see how it's possible to have concepts with no structural substrate--I don't just mean the epistemic problem of how we could know concepts without a mode of expression, but also the ontological problem of how they could even exist without form. Let those who believe in such things make the case for it.
I started out with something so much more modest, the point that birdsong in passiformes is non-symbolic and non-conceptual. Good lord I hope I succeeded in wrangling some consensus on that one. This is a tough room.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | May 9, 2012 4:14:14 AM
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