I like the idea that we are born with a developing suite of instincts
which become accented by the local environment. As with language
accents, 200 or more human drives are probably accented in various
ways. But I doubt if instincts determine everything nor does learning
determine everything, it is probably some combination of nature and
nurture that results in a limited range of possible worldviews.
The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate.html
- Overestimating the Power of Language as a Prisonhouse, Linking
Concepts to Words
OF ALL THE faculties that go into the piece of work called man,
language may be the most awe-inspiring. "Remember that you are a human
being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech," Henry
Higgins implored Eliza Doolittle. Galileo's alter ego, humbled by the
arts and inventions of his day, commented on language in its written
form:
But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was
his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts
to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and
time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who
are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand
years; and with what facility, by the different arrangements of twenty
characters upon a page!
But a funny thing happened to language in intellectual life. Rather
than being appreciated for its ability to communicate thought, it was
condemned for its power to constrain thought. Famous quotations from
two philosophers capture the anxiety. "We have to cease to think if we
refuse to do it in the pris-onhouse of language," wrote Friedrich
Nietzsche. "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,"
wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein.
How could language exert this stranglehold? It would if words and
phrases were the medium of thought itself, an idea that falls
naturally out of the Blank Slate. If there is nothing in the intellect
that was not first in the senses, then words picked up by the ears are
the obvious source of any abstract thought that cannot be reduced to
sights, smells, or other sounds. Watson tried to explain thinking as
microscopic movements of the mouth and throat; Skinner hoped his 1957
book Verbal Behavior, which explained language as a repertoire of
rewarded responses, would bridge the gap between pigeons and people.
The other social sciences also tended to equate language with thought.
Boas's student Edward Sapir called attention to differences in how
languages carve up the world into categories, and Sapir's student
Benjamin Whorf stretched those observations into the famous Linguistic
Determinism hypothesis: "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts,
and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to
an agreement to organize it in this way-an agreement that holds
throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our
language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one,
but its terms are absolutely obligatory:" More recently, the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that "thinking consists not of
'happenings in the head' (though happenings there and elsewhere are
necessary for it to occur) but of a traffic in what have been
called ... significant symbols-words for the most part."
As with so many ideas in social science, the centrality of language is
taken to extremes in deconstructionism, postmodernism, and other
relativist doctrines. The writings of oracles like Jacques Derrida are
studded with such aphorisms as "No escape from language is possible,"
"Text is self-referential," "Language is power," and "There is nothing
outside the text." Similarly, J. Hillis Miller wrote that "language is
not an instrument or tool in man's hands, a submissive means of
thinking. Language rather thinks man and his 'world'... if he will
allow it to do so." The prize for the most extreme statement must go
to Roland Barthes, who declared, "Man does not exist prior to
language, either as a species or as an individual."
The ancestry of these ideas is said to be from linguistics, though
most linguists believe that deconstructionists have gone off the deep
end. The original observation was that many words are defined in part
by their relationship to other words. For example, he is defined by
its contrast with I, you, they, and she, and big makes sense only as
the opposite of little. And if you look up words in a dictionary, they
are defined by other words, which are defined by still other words,
until the circle is completed when you get back to a definition
containing the original word. Therefore, say the deconstructionists,
language is a self-contained system in which words have no necessary
connection to reality. And since language is an arbitrary instrument,
not a medium for communicating thoughts or describing reality, the
powerful can use it to manipulate and oppress others. This leads in
turn to an agitation for linguistic reforms: neologisms like co or na
that would serve as gender-neutral pronouns, a succession of new terms
for racial minorities, and a rejection of standards of clarity in
criticism and scholarship (for if language is no longer a window onto
thought but the very stuff of thought, the metaphor of "clarity" no
longer applies).
Like all conspiracy theories, the idea that language is a prisonhouse
denigrates its subject by overestimating its power. Language is the
magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to
another, and we can co-opt it in many ways to help our thoughts along.
But it is not the same as thought, not the only thing that separates
humans from other animals, not the basis of all culture, and not an
inescapable prisonhouse, an obligatory agreement, the limits of our
world, or the determiner of what is imaginable.
We have seen that perception and categorization provide us with
concepts that keep us in touch with the world. Language extends that
lifeline by connecting the concepts to words. Children hear noises
coming out of a family member's mouth, use their intuitive psychology
and their grasp of the context to infer what the speaker is trying to
say, and mentally link the words to the concepts and the grammatical
rules to the relationships among them. Bowser upends a chair, Sister
yells, "The dog knocked over the chair!" and Junior deduces that dog
means dog, chair means chair, and the subject of the verb knock over
is the agent doing the knocking over. Now Junior can talk about other
dogs, other chairs, and other knockings over. There is nothing self-
referential or imprisoning about it. As the novelist Walker Percy
quipped, a deconstruc-tionist is an academic who claims that texts
have no referents and then leaves a message on his wife's answering
machine asking her to order a pepperoni pizza for dinner.
Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling
them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the
conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and
thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around
them. In the song "Christmas" from their rock opera, The Who described
the plight of a boy without language: "Tommy doesn't know what day it
is; he doesn't know who Jesus was or what prayin' is."
The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate.html
