The collapse of dialogue creates ideal conditions for the Big Bang of Bullshit (BBB) in which language becomes the first casualty. In a certain sense, language is also the most tragic casualty of the BBB.
A few months ago, I started developing the argument that this loss isn't just metaphorical, but also biological. The propaganda that begins where dialogue ceases doesn't just mislead, offend or hurt; it spills blood — it kills. It's a crime against humanity, and the path to the next Nuremberg Moment begins with meticulous attention to the biology of language and the health of our media ecology.
Through this inquiry, I came across a 1977 interview with the famed linguist Noam Chomsky where he argues that, contrary to the popular and generally unquestioned belief, language isn't taught. It isn't even learned. Instead, language grows in the mind the way physical organs grow in the body. In fact, we can regard the mind as a system of mental organs that includes the faculty of language.
Behind the paywall, I provide annotations of this interview and a couple of related sources. I recommend this video to anyone interested in:
The relationship between language and the world.
The biology of language and the interplay between the preprogramming of the language faculty and the capacity for creative thought.
Chomsky's challenge to tabula rasa behaviorist conceptions of language acquisition.
The enduring influence of behaviorism. (In my view, behaviorism faked its own death decades ago while continuing to broaden its influence.)
The metaphors we live by.
The limits of evolution as an explanatory framework for the development of the language faculty.
The rules of specific languages vs. the principles of Universal Grammar (UG).
Annotations
The View of Language Beyond Disciplinary Silos (3:30)
Chomsky’s study of language weaves together linguistics, philosophy and biology. The project had to be a hybrid, Chomsky says, because it dislodged a paradigm that had established its dominance across disciplinary silos. This paradigm saw language as a system of habits, skills and dispositions acquired through training.
The Organismic Foundations of Language (5:25)
Chomsky develops the argument that language is neither taught nor learned (except in the most trivial sense), but that it grows in the mind the way physical organ systems grow in the body.
We begin our interchange with the world with our mind in a certain genetically determined state. And, through interaction with experience — with an environment — this state changes until it reaches a mature state, which we call the state of the knowledge of language.
This sequence of changes from the genetically determined initial state to the final state in which we have quite a complex system of mental computations — this series of changes seems to me very much analogous to the growth of organs. And, in fact, I think it’s not inappropriate to regard the mind as a system of mental organs, the language faculty being one, each of a structure determined by our biological endowment, with interactions also generally determined by the nature of our biological endowment, growing through the triggering effect of experience, which shapes and articulates the organs as they develop in the individual through the relevant period of his life.
From this perspective, language acquisition and the development of the language faculty overtime seems analogous to genetically programmed biological milestones such as puberty and death. And the study of language is, in a certain sense, a study of a biophysical system (e.g., vision or digestion or circulation).
Organs of the Mind (8:53)
Chomsky acknowledges that we can’t rigorously map the correspondences between psychic faculties and biological organs.
We are not at a stage now where — in the study of the neural basis for higher cognitive processes — where it’s possible to identify physical structures that are involved in these operations. Correspondingly, the actual study of this organ remains at an abstract level. We can try to investigate the principles by which it functions, but there’s very little to say right now about the ways in which these principles are physically realized in the structures of the brain.
Quite correspondingly, one might study the visual system (as was done for a very long period) knowing nothing about how the principles that we are led to attribute to this system may be physically realized in neural structures. I think it’s quite appropriate to think about the contemporary study of language as being analogous to the study of vision at a period when it remained impossible — technically or through the limits of understanding, technique, etc. — to determine the actual physical elements that entered into these systems which could be studied only in an abstract fashion.
Arguably, despite the staggering progress since 1977, we still can’t map the processes whereby organs of the mind are “physically realized in neural structures,” and we risk lapsing into promissory materialism when we embrace the faith that this cartographic breakthrough will occur…that it is somehow inevitable.
Freedom through Constraint (15:13)
The programming of our language faculty naturally constrains our understanding, but Chomsky argues that this constraint is the foundation of our freedom.
While it’s true that our genetic program rigidly constrains us, I think the more important point is that the existence of that rigid constraint is what provides the basis for our freedom and creativity. If we really were plastic organisms without an extensive preprogramming, then the state that our mind achieves would, in fact, be a reflection of the environment, which means it would be extraordinarily impoverished. Fortunately for us, we are rigidly preprogrammed, with extremely rich systems that are part of our biological endowment. Correspondingly, a small amount of rather degenerate experience allows a great leap into a rich cognitive system, essentially uniform in a community and, in fact, roughly uniform in a species.
The Limits of Evolution (18:18)
When asked if the language faculty may still be evolving, Chomsky points to the limits of evolution as an explanatory framework for the development of the language faculty.
One has to be very cautious here. While it’s true, in a very vague sense, to say that the systems we now have developed through evolution, through natural selection, it’s important to recognize how little we are saying when we say that. For example, it’s certainly not necessarily the case that every particular trait that we have is the result of specific selection — that is that we were selected for having that trait.
In fact, there are striking examples to the contrary. Take, for example, our capacity to deal with abstract properties of the number system. Now, that’s a distinctive human capacity, as distinctive as the capacity for language. Any normal human — in fact, down to the pathological levels — can comprehend the properties of the number system and can move very far in understanding their deep properties.
It’s extremely difficult to believe that this capacity was the result of specific selection. That is, it’s hard to believe that people who are a little better at proving theorems of number theory had more children. That didn’t happen. In fact, through most of human evolution — in fact, all of human evolution — it would have been impossible to know that this capacity even existed. The contingencies that allowed it to be exercised never arose.
Nevertheless, the trait is there. The capacity is there. The mental organ, if you like, has developed. Presumably, it has developed as a concomitant of some other properties of the brain, which may have been selected. For example, we can speculate that, say, the increase in brain size was a factor in differential reproduction — hence, in evolution. And it may be that, because of physical laws that we presently don't know, an increase in brain size under the specific conditions of human evolution simply leads necessarily to a system which has the capacity to deal with properties of the number system. Well, then that's a matter of physics, ultimately. And then the mind that evolves — the brain that evolves — will have this capacity, but not because it was achieved through selection.
Now, I think it’s certainly likely that something of the sort is true of human language. Surely, if it were dysfunctional, it wouldn't have been maintained. It's obviously functional. But it's a long leap to claim that the specific structures of language are themselves the result of specific selection. And it's a leap that I don't think is particularly plausible.
Related: The Delusion of Language
In this interview, the following stands out to me:
First time I heard about the symbol-grounding problem as the “hard problem of meaning”.
Introspection, just as all perception, is a very limited tool for the study of our experience.
Consider the idea that suffering comes from desire. Somebody being tortured suffers, but it would be silly to attribute the suffering to desire, unless we make a tautological claim that the desire is not to be tortured.
The symbol-grounding problem deals with how symbols are used in language or any other system. An infant learns words very rapidly at peak periods of language acquisition (around 2 years of age). But what’s the relationship between the symbol and the external world? What are the core principles that define a “tree” or a “person”. We don’t investigate these questions because there’s an illusion of a simple associative relationship between the symbol and aspects of the real world.
We are the drunk at a lamppost. “I’m looking where I see light.”
Related: Chomsky on AI, Neural Networks, and the Future of Linguistics
A recent post on M2D developed two intertwining themes: AI and Narcissus as Narcosis. This interview with Noam Chomsky helped me think about the biological foundations of this intertwining.