Answer to Spectacular

Steve Long Salinas17 at AOL.COM
Fri Dec 6 06:17:49 UTC 2002


In a message dated 12/5/02 3:18:42 PM, dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU writes:
<<so reference, in and of itself, doesn't seem unique to language. And
recombination, in and of itself, is not unique to language. But, the language
ability displayed by a typical adult human being is greater than the some of
such parts....call it an "emergent" phenomenon...something spectacular that
happens when you have the right confluence of capabilities.>>

This is the core of the illusion.  That the bulk of the language capability
of a typical human arises from that individual.  And there's something of
"manifest destiny" about the notion.  As if we could drop our hypothetical
experimental culture-free infant in a cave somewhere and have him come out as
an adult having built his own television set, domesticated a variety of
food-producing plants and, of course -- speak a language.

I'd have to ask Dianne Patterson whether she finds a working television set,
going to the moon or advanced calculus any less spectacular than typical human
 language ability.  No animal I know ever carved anything close to
Michaelangelo's David or even built a reasonably profitable shopping mall.

The point is that Diane sees the difference between human and animal
communication as an individual matter, but it may be the part that impresses
her does not originate in "individual humans."

If we did find an individual who could go off and build, say, a television
set from scratch all by himself, should we conclude that its an "emergent
phenomena" -- an ability that was inside him all along and just happened to
pop out under the "right confluences."

Or should we conclude that his "ability" to make a television set was
dependent on the accumulated knowledge of hundreds of thousands of other
people over thousands of years for the circuit boards, the capacitors and
resistors, the chips, the vacuum tube, the very concept of a vacuum, the
electron gun, the very concept of electrons, wave theory, the electrical
cord, the very concept of electricity, glass-making, plastics, wood-working
(if in a wood cabinet), coaxial cable (where available) and of course
something to watch.

We've so internalized human culture that we are almost totally blind to its
ominpresence.  And it seems very much what is present when a "typical" human
speaks.  A individual human armed with only syntax and grammar in his brain
doesn't have the survival tools of a dodo "in the wild."   What gives
language effectiveness and survival value is the accumulated information it
carries.  The speech of an individual human independent of culture should be
about as "spectacular" as dog barking.

<<I've never met an animal that has a hope of understanding this email...>>

Again, we're forgetting that no human on earth for most of human existence on
this planet could understand that e-mail.  Writing is not more than 6000
years old.

In all the early literature of humankind, there is not a single reference to
the fact, for example, that cattle were domesticated by humans through
selective breeding from wild species.  (And this happened only extremely
recently in the overall time humans have been around.)  Most of that
literature acts as if domesticated animals were placed here by the Diety, up
until Darwin et al.  We just didn't believe we did it ourselves.  What really
brought about language and what it is really about seems just as
inconcievable to us.  So we reach for deus ex.  An "emergence."  (I
personally find it inconceiveable that 120 tons of steel, electronics and
overused seat cushions can go up 10 miles in the air and get from here to LA
in 4 hours. Now HOW is it possible that humans thought that up?  It is about
as believeable that a "crude, primitive people" built the pyramids!)

It may be that syntax and grammar are to some degree "pre-wired."  But that
is not language anymore than the beer glass is beer.  Beer glasses are
wonderful things, but they are pointless without beer.  The main function of
language appears to be to carry the accumulated information that we may call
"culture."  Without it humans would be forgetting and re-learning the same
things every generation.  If it were not for cultural content (the beer),
there would be nothing particularly spectacular about human (versus) animal
communication -- (the beer glass).

<<It is interesting that when Chomsky dismissed Skinner's explanation of
language, that somehow, (some) linguists decided that the claims of
behaviorism...the dismissal of an internal life...continued to apply to all
non-human animals.>>

I'm not sure what inner or outer life had to do with Skinner's explanation of
language. (I know he had as a problem with how an "internal life" could be
observed.)  My problem is picturing what an animal's inner life would be
like, given that it is without language.

Whenever we portary "internal life" (e.g, Hamlet's or Molly Bloom's
soliloquy, or in a movie like "Look who's talking"), we humans are always
talking to ourselves in a language we also speak out loud.  It is a real
trick picturing what an "internal life" would be like without being able to
"talk" to oneself.

Steve Long



More information about the Funknet mailing list