Transcript No Slide Title

EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE
STUDY OF COGNITIVE SYSTEMS
Linz 26-27 August 2009
THE STUFF OF THOUGHT
Pinker: Language and the Mind
Robin Allott
Thought and Language: Pompeii
Steven Pinker is a prolific author on topics bearing on
the relation of brain and language. His books are
always thought-provoking and at the same time easily
readable and amusing. His latest book The Stuff of
Thought is an ambitious attempt to explore how
language constructs or forms the mind.
“Language as a window into human nature”
[Steven Pinker 2007 The Stuff of Thought. London:Allen Lane.]
Much of his study is concerned with
words, their link to reality, their origin and
development, though he also explores the
minutiae of grammar in an attempt to
understand how thought is ordered. The
starting-point for critical examination is a
close look at what he says about words.
[Pinker extracts or summaries are shown in
inverted commas]
“Words and reality: a word must leave some trace in the
brain.
Human characterisations of reality are built out of a
recognisable inventory of thoughts. The notions of space,
time, possession and goals appear to make up a
language of thought (Kant was surely right).”
“Every one of the half million words in the
Oxford English Dictionary had to be thought up
by a person at some point in history, accepted
by a community and perpetuated through the
ages. How this tacit agreement was forged
across a community is mysterious, a real
puzzle.”
“Words for many kinds of things are rigidly yoked to the
world by acts of pointing, dubbing and sticking together;
words ‘are fettered’ to reality. The meaning of a word for a
natural kind is not a description or definition, but a pointer
to something in the world. Thinking is rooted in physical
experience with a finite stock of signs which entangle us
in the world outside our heads.”
“How do people conjure up a new sound to
label a concept? Where do new words come
from? new roots?”
“The most obvious source of a new root is
onomatopoeia. Somewhat handier than
onomatopoeia is sound symbolism and
phonaesthesia (sneeze, sniff). Examples of
words invented by a child for butterfly – ‘as if
the words are supposed to act out the flapping
of the wings” and also recognising “the ‘motor
component’ of ‘hit’
“The most remarkable thing we do with language is
learn it in the first place - how a raw stream of
noise could conjure up concepts in the child’s mind
out of nothing is a mystery.”
“A first approach is to look at the elements of thought
through the complexities of grammar; the combinatorial
apparatus of grammar mirrors the combinatorial
apparatus of thought.”
“Emotionally laced words can “fool us into thinking”
that the words have magical powers rather than being
arbitrary conventions.”
What counts as thought?
What counts as language?
How do we think?
In words? Without words? In images?
How different from animals?
Word and meaning ?
Alex, Irene Pepperberg’s parrot, answering some
difficult questions
Creative thought ?
The New Caledonian crow tries with a piece of wire to get
some meat out of the tube. Failing to do so, it bends the wire
into a hook. Without training or any demonstration or
previous experience, it makes a hook and uses it to get the
meat.
Learning by trial and error ?
David Attenborough describes how crows in a
Japanese city found a new way to solve their
problem
The nature of mind
The unrecognised structure of minds
THE METHODS OF INVESTIGATION.
Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first
and foremost and always. The word introspection need
hardly be defined -- it means, of course, the looking into
our own minds and reporting what we there discover.
Everyone agrees that we there discover states of
consciousness. All people unhesitatingly believe that
they feel themselves thinking, and that they distinguish
the mental state as an inward activity or passion, from all
the objects with which it may cognitively deal. I regard
this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates
of Psychology, and shall discard all curious inquiries
about its certainty as too metaphysical for the scope of
this book.
[William James Principles of Psychology]
The dark cave of the mind (Virginia
Woolf)
The radius refluxus - the beam of light
that the human mind focuses on itself
(Francis Bacon)
lucidus ordo - an orderly clarity formed
by the mind in conjunction with Nature
But since William James we also have the
possibility for direct examination of the brain in
the process of using words, thinking, feeling and
acting.
Investigating mind directly
A lot of people think (have thought) about
thinking – Descartes Locke Kant etc
Wittgenstein
and a multitude of modern authors, Fodor,
Jackendoff, Chomsky etc. etc
“Ever since Darwin and Wallace people
have wondered how the human mind
evolved the ability. to reason about abstract
domains such as physics etc. which have
no relevance to reproduction and survival.”
Topics not discussed in this presentation
Language theories – logistic verbal approaches the mis-use of language: in thought, in philosophy,
in linguistics, in psychology, in the computational
approach, in logic - mechanistic approaches - the
narrowly rational use of language - mentalese etc not metaphor considered as a purely linguistic
concept
Pre-verbal thought only one aspect of mind – other
ways of mind functioning – and in other animals
Pre-verbal thought > language ?
The root of language – its relation to the world
ABSTRACT CONCEPTS
Wonder by Darwin and others how we came to
reason about abstract matters like physics etc,
not serving survival and reproduction?
Is there some form of hierarchical progression
in the brain ? The repetition of a similarly
structured process at successively higher
levels ?
Neuroscience research into abstraction ? (Abstraction of
Mental Representations: Neuroscientific Evidence
Christoff and Keramatian) Progressively higher degrees
of abstraction located in the lateral frontal cortex
Progress from a photograph, a picture, to a cartoon –
increasingly reduced – Hitler’s moustache
like abstraction – on and on to the minimum - the gist
as a brain process – a neuronal process
GRAMMAR?
Large parts of the innate “sets” which go to
constitute syntax will exist for pre-human organisms
Grammar has to manage the behavioural choices
and patterns of action of humans and of animals,
patterns of action that humans and animals must have
neurally represented (in the brain) long before language
emerged
Before the grammar of language, there is the necessary
grammar of action and perception with which every
language however apparently different has to grapple
One can look for an innateness of “grammatical” elements
which could converge in a (completely new and different)
WORDS?
Where do new words come from?
The motor component of ‘hit’ - the child and butterfly?
From noises to concepts in the child “a mystery” ?
“Magical words” - when only “arbitrary conventions” ?
A human being as a network of words? the mind as a
network of words? Perhaps not
Words come at their own slow speed - awaiting the
unavoidable words? The compact idea, the compact
word-set?
Words are anchored in the cortical motor patterning
and are expressible as actions. The brain can be
seen as a network of motor patterns lodged at
specifically appropriate places, as Pulvermuller’s
research has suggested.
ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR?
Is there anything to be learnt from:
animal communication and thought?
animal creative thought?
animal learning by trial and error?
Perhaps this, that apart from language, our brains
function in similar ways
It is speech and language that has made us
different, in some extraordinarily important ways
WHERE IS THE BRAIN GOING?
Maybe the brain has a direction (if not a purpose)?
a brain drive seen in thought and language
What is it like? what process does it resemble?
Can one see an evolutionary process in the brain ?
In some sense the survival of the fittest structures, the
fittest thoughts ?
The freedom of the mind, of thought, taking the form
of the
control of attention - the choice of what, out of many
possibilities, many possible thoughts, many possible
actions, we choose to centre on ?
What are we left with from Pinker?
Is language a window into human nature?
Words must leave traces in the brain?
A language of thought?
Each word emerging and surviving through time - “a real
puzzle” ?
A finite stock of signs ?
What conclusions can one reach?
The rudiments of thought exist in birds, apes, whales and no
doubt many other animals
There is no doubt a hierarchical pattern for animals for
thought and consciousness, dependent on brain size and
complexity
The hierarchy of thought (dependent on brain size and
structure) was a normal part of the evolutionary process
The brain was evolving, thought was evolving,
Language and speech is a step not taken by other animals
We can talk about our thought- observe (watch) our thought,
our thoughts, our thinking
The character of our thought, the content of our thought, the
VIRGINIA WOOLF talking about
the nature of words in a radio
broadcast in the 1930s
GESTURE INTO SPEECH AND LANGUAGE
The evolutionary origin of speech and language is to be
found in the human ability to imitate, to use gesture, that is
to use arm and bodily movements to point to something or to
model something.
Speech came when there was a change in the human brain
(perhaps related to brain changes associated with the new
ability to walk on two feet - bipedalism) which allowed the
neural motor programs which pattern all movement
(particularly movement of the hands and arms) to be
transferred (by motor equivalence, fully explained in many
earlier presentations) to become articulatory gesture,
movements of the mouth, the tongue, the larynx which
produced distinctive sounds, words, structurally related to
the structure of the originating gesture.
To conclude (provisionally):
Human thought is radically different from animal
thought because we have speech and language and
animals do not
But language is not the whole of human thought. We
think in images and in trial mental actions. We think in
core properties, feelings and emotions, which we no
doubt share with many animals.
So Pinker may be right in seeing language as a
window into the mind but not as the only route (or the
most important route) to understanding human nature.
[See the extensive material on language and evolution at
http://www.percepp.com]