The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
by
by
Steven Pinker (Goodreads Author)
How To Tell If You’re a Horse
I remember seeing, perhaps 30 years ago, a chart of a design for an artificial intelligence computer programme by academic engineers at a university somewhere in Texas. The chart showed an enormous logically ramifying hierarchy of various sorts of events, experiences, and actions which their computer was intended to understand. Everything that the engineers could imagine happening was included somewhere in a sort of organisational chart of existence. At the very top of the chart was a single box that stood for exactly that, existence itself. From that box, the designers had drawn an upward facing arrow pointing to a word without a box:. ‘REALITY.’
The Stuff of Thought brought back memories of that AI chart. ‘Reality’ is something that Pinker refers to frequently as that which keeps language on the straight and narrow: “ The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.” Like the AI designers, Pinker has a little arrow that points out of language, to something other than language to which language is tied. But also, just like the AI designers, the only thing Pinker’s arrow actually points to is... well another word.
Pinker doesn’t like the idea that words, language, have a life that is only loosely and unreliably connected to that which is not-language. He does recognise that ‘reality’ is an awkward thing for a linguist to talk about: “[T]he nature of reality does not dictate the way that reality is represented in people’s minds,” he says. So, according to this logic, despite our conviction that the world consists of more than human minds, it would be impossible to determine what reality is except by consultation with other minds. How does Pinker arrive at such a confused place?
Pinker likes to be very precise in his semiotic descriptions and examples. But not when it comes to this business of reality. For that he plays fast and loose, conflating semantics (the connection of words to things that are not-words), syntactics (the relations among words and the ways in which they can be used with each other), and pragmatics (the effect that words have on human behaviour, including what and how words are used) into a very imprecise theory of language. He knows that only words define other words, that these definitions slip and slide continuously in the way they are used with each other, and that their effects on human activities are consequently uncertain in many critical situations. Yet he says: “The logic of names, and of other words that are connected to events... allay these concerns [about misidentifications and falsehoods] by anchoring the web of meanings to real events and objects in the world.”
If only it were so. At any given time much of what we refer to as reality simply doesn’t exist (the sun doesn’t actually rise; the moon doesn’t shine). Quite aside from the casual use of everyday language, when we try to be very precise about what we mean, we find ourselves in a pickle about reality. For example, for centuries Isaac Newton’s gravitational ‘action at a distance’ was an important scientific ‘thing.’ Turns out it never was anything at all except a phrase used by scientists. Now we say that what we see astronomically is all down to relativistic time-space distortion. Perhaps in resolving the contradictions of quantum physics, we will find that time-space distortion isn’t a thing either. That AI arrow, in other words, points not toward somewhere ‘out there’ but something ‘in here.’ Most probably what is in here is a residual religious hope that the universe is as orderly and benign as our cultural legacy says it is.
So we can, and frequently do, have serious conversations about absolutely nothing. We accept the possibility of an ontological faux pas with reasonably good grace. Yet we worry constantly about the somewhat lesser linguistic sin of ‘error,’ either accidental or intentional, which is the subject of epistemology. Here we are culturally proud of ourselves that the ‘scientific method’ can ultimately sort out the factual core from the fictional chaff of any assertion and that through unrelenting ‘objectivity’ we can distinguish Trump’s lies from his covfefe’s (it seems safe to presume all his statements are somehow defective). Pinker calls this philosophical realism in the sense that people “... are tacitly committed, in their everyday use of language, to certain propositions’ being true or false, independent of whether the person being discussed believes them to be true or false.”
But this sort of realism gets sorely tested to breaking point more and more frequently. Beliefs about Trump, climate change, Russian assassinations and cyber-attacks, abortion, as well as my neighbour’s intentions regarding the shaping of our shared hedge, to name just a few examples, are beliefs held by many as true or false without a fact in sight. Assertions about these topics tend to be true or false precisely because they are believed not because they can be proven. Facts emerge as a matter of faith.
Epistemology is, consequently, as political as any other investigation. Interests - personal, material, psychological, familial, religious, reputational - are a dominant force in any attempt to connect words and things. That’s just the way it is. And the way it is is being demonstrated as I write in the impeachment trial in the US Senate. Trump’s innocence or guilt is a purely political conclusion, as indeed is every ‘fact’ provided by any investigation, criminal, civil, scientific, or corporate.
This is distressing to some people including Pinker. Bertrand Russell’s famous quip, “I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded,” is the epitome of the politics of language. It seems too obvious to need saying but apparently it does need saying yet again: Reality is nothing more (or less) than a transient political consensus about what constitutes facts. And facts are those assertions which, at least for the moment, are not contradicted by any other facts. And just as no one is quite sure what they mean by ‘scientific method,’ no one is any wiser about what constitutes the definitive rules of language and how to tell fact from fiction - except through politics. So Pinker is certainly right to suggest that the language we use discloses our model of reality. In fact it is our model of reality tout court (his analysis of verbs in shaping thought is exemplary).
Reality is the elephant in Pinker’s rather elegantly laid out phenomenological room of language, however. There are a multitude of lovely linguistic furnishings, the erudition of extensive research lines the bookshelves, quirky incidental knowledge is apparent in the quaint knickknacks strewn throughout, and there are even quite a few saucy paintings on the walls. And all this is set off by a veritable Aubusson carpet of lucid and witty prose.
But right in the middle of that carpet sits an enormous turd of that which is not-language. The odd thing is that Pinker put it there. He could have written about the quaint vagaries of (mostly English) language semantics and its implicit politics and left it at that. But by insisting on this strange thing he calls reality, a deus ex machina of absolute rationality, he leaves a strange smell around his entire enterprise. I wish I could remember the names of the AI engineers. I’d send them a copy asking them where they think Pinker’s arrow should point.
I am also reminded of an important Yiddish saying which might have originated with Isaac Breshevis Singer but I can’t be sure. It sums up the politics of reality nicely, and shows where the arrow really points: ‘If one person calls you a horse, ignore him. If two people call you a horse, look in the mirror. If three people call you a horse, YOU'RE A HORSE.’
I remember seeing, perhaps 30 years ago, a chart of a design for an artificial intelligence computer programme by academic engineers at a university somewhere in Texas. The chart showed an enormous logically ramifying hierarchy of various sorts of events, experiences, and actions which their computer was intended to understand. Everything that the engineers could imagine happening was included somewhere in a sort of organisational chart of existence. At the very top of the chart was a single box that stood for exactly that, existence itself. From that box, the designers had drawn an upward facing arrow pointing to a word without a box:. ‘REALITY.’
The Stuff of Thought brought back memories of that AI chart. ‘Reality’ is something that Pinker refers to frequently as that which keeps language on the straight and narrow: “ The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.” Like the AI designers, Pinker has a little arrow that points out of language, to something other than language to which language is tied. But also, just like the AI designers, the only thing Pinker’s arrow actually points to is... well another word.
Pinker doesn’t like the idea that words, language, have a life that is only loosely and unreliably connected to that which is not-language. He does recognise that ‘reality’ is an awkward thing for a linguist to talk about: “[T]he nature of reality does not dictate the way that reality is represented in people’s minds,” he says. So, according to this logic, despite our conviction that the world consists of more than human minds, it would be impossible to determine what reality is except by consultation with other minds. How does Pinker arrive at such a confused place?
Pinker likes to be very precise in his semiotic descriptions and examples. But not when it comes to this business of reality. For that he plays fast and loose, conflating semantics (the connection of words to things that are not-words), syntactics (the relations among words and the ways in which they can be used with each other), and pragmatics (the effect that words have on human behaviour, including what and how words are used) into a very imprecise theory of language. He knows that only words define other words, that these definitions slip and slide continuously in the way they are used with each other, and that their effects on human activities are consequently uncertain in many critical situations. Yet he says: “The logic of names, and of other words that are connected to events... allay these concerns [about misidentifications and falsehoods] by anchoring the web of meanings to real events and objects in the world.”
If only it were so. At any given time much of what we refer to as reality simply doesn’t exist (the sun doesn’t actually rise; the moon doesn’t shine). Quite aside from the casual use of everyday language, when we try to be very precise about what we mean, we find ourselves in a pickle about reality. For example, for centuries Isaac Newton’s gravitational ‘action at a distance’ was an important scientific ‘thing.’ Turns out it never was anything at all except a phrase used by scientists. Now we say that what we see astronomically is all down to relativistic time-space distortion. Perhaps in resolving the contradictions of quantum physics, we will find that time-space distortion isn’t a thing either. That AI arrow, in other words, points not toward somewhere ‘out there’ but something ‘in here.’ Most probably what is in here is a residual religious hope that the universe is as orderly and benign as our cultural legacy says it is.
So we can, and frequently do, have serious conversations about absolutely nothing. We accept the possibility of an ontological faux pas with reasonably good grace. Yet we worry constantly about the somewhat lesser linguistic sin of ‘error,’ either accidental or intentional, which is the subject of epistemology. Here we are culturally proud of ourselves that the ‘scientific method’ can ultimately sort out the factual core from the fictional chaff of any assertion and that through unrelenting ‘objectivity’ we can distinguish Trump’s lies from his covfefe’s (it seems safe to presume all his statements are somehow defective). Pinker calls this philosophical realism in the sense that people “... are tacitly committed, in their everyday use of language, to certain propositions’ being true or false, independent of whether the person being discussed believes them to be true or false.”
But this sort of realism gets sorely tested to breaking point more and more frequently. Beliefs about Trump, climate change, Russian assassinations and cyber-attacks, abortion, as well as my neighbour’s intentions regarding the shaping of our shared hedge, to name just a few examples, are beliefs held by many as true or false without a fact in sight. Assertions about these topics tend to be true or false precisely because they are believed not because they can be proven. Facts emerge as a matter of faith.
Epistemology is, consequently, as political as any other investigation. Interests - personal, material, psychological, familial, religious, reputational - are a dominant force in any attempt to connect words and things. That’s just the way it is. And the way it is is being demonstrated as I write in the impeachment trial in the US Senate. Trump’s innocence or guilt is a purely political conclusion, as indeed is every ‘fact’ provided by any investigation, criminal, civil, scientific, or corporate.
This is distressing to some people including Pinker. Bertrand Russell’s famous quip, “I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded,” is the epitome of the politics of language. It seems too obvious to need saying but apparently it does need saying yet again: Reality is nothing more (or less) than a transient political consensus about what constitutes facts. And facts are those assertions which, at least for the moment, are not contradicted by any other facts. And just as no one is quite sure what they mean by ‘scientific method,’ no one is any wiser about what constitutes the definitive rules of language and how to tell fact from fiction - except through politics. So Pinker is certainly right to suggest that the language we use discloses our model of reality. In fact it is our model of reality tout court (his analysis of verbs in shaping thought is exemplary).
Reality is the elephant in Pinker’s rather elegantly laid out phenomenological room of language, however. There are a multitude of lovely linguistic furnishings, the erudition of extensive research lines the bookshelves, quirky incidental knowledge is apparent in the quaint knickknacks strewn throughout, and there are even quite a few saucy paintings on the walls. And all this is set off by a veritable Aubusson carpet of lucid and witty prose.
But right in the middle of that carpet sits an enormous turd of that which is not-language. The odd thing is that Pinker put it there. He could have written about the quaint vagaries of (mostly English) language semantics and its implicit politics and left it at that. But by insisting on this strange thing he calls reality, a deus ex machina of absolute rationality, he leaves a strange smell around his entire enterprise. I wish I could remember the names of the AI engineers. I’d send them a copy asking them where they think Pinker’s arrow should point.
I am also reminded of an important Yiddish saying which might have originated with Isaac Breshevis Singer but I can’t be sure. It sums up the politics of reality nicely, and shows where the arrow really points: ‘If one person calls you a horse, ignore him. If two people call you a horse, look in the mirror. If three people call you a horse, YOU'RE A HORSE.’
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ February 01, 2020
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