We are learning machines. The fuel for our mechanism is curiosity, directed by pleasure and pain.
A child left to her own devices might wander about in her yard, and be drawn by scent and sight to a rosebush by the fence.
Reaching our cautiously, she brushes her hand against a thorn and pulls back.
That was a lesson.
From birth all living things are governed by two impulses. One is to avoid discomfort; the other is to seek comfort. Our body is genetically disposed to respond to what it senses as pleasing or disturbing. We have many words for these responses, but the one I consider most precise is “reflex”.
Steven Pinker points out in his book The Language Instinct that research has shown that a three-year-old child can remember a new word after one hearing. Pinker also writes “that an average six-year old commands about 13,000 words.” And the average high school graduate owns about 60,000 words. If this number were distributed evenly over 19 years of life, it would come to over 8 new words a day. What would explain such a rapid acquisition of information? Pinker explains it as a mental predisposition for language acquisition, a genetic “instinct”. He supports this hypothesis with compelling research and logic.
Pinker’s ideas are fascinating, brilliant. But a linguistic lapse unnecessarily limits the extent of his research. Pinker assumes that language is a walled room. In his lexicon (and that of most western thinkers), language is a category and does not overlap with other disciplines such as mathematics or riding a bicycle or getting dressed in the morning. Pinker does give a cautious nod of his head to the possibility that mathematics has a language and his research might be applicable in some way.
Language is a vehicle of an action. It is “walled off” from other procedures of action by the word communicating. “Language”, as used by Pinker, appears limited to “hearing, reading or seeing words and interpreting them” and “saying, writing or signing words for others to interpret”.
Actions, themselves, are responses to either external or internal stimulus. To be memorable, the information must have a place in our mind that it attaches to. The process of associating response to stimulus, which – when limited to grammar – is what Pinker describes in his book. But it is a mistake to distinguish the sequence of I am hungry so I say “may I have a sandwich” from the sequence of I need to put on my shoes so I put on my shoes. More fundamental than a biologic imperative to create language is the imperative to create a structured set of responses to stimuli. Any stimuli.
Our brain is not hardwired only to create a grammar. Pinker is not saying that it is; but he seems to be avoiding the larger implication that learning a grammar is only one aspect of learning anything. What is dangerous about “The Language Instinct” is that most readers probably miss the potential of Pinker’s research, the broader applications. I am not challenging Pinker’s implication that language acquisition is genetically embedded in us. I am merely saying that this process of learning anything is genetically embedded in us, in all living things.
Why did I just spend so much time discussing Pinker’s book? Because, in addition to what I have already said, there is a “meta-quality” to it: is also a perfect example of the failure of “you know what I mean.” Despite the author’s determination to restrict himself to an explanation that would have the same meaning to any literate person who reads his book, he is either missing the awareness of — or else avoiding expressing the fact that — his book is affected by the same problem we all face in communicating ideas: that YKWIM is never perfect.
No one will understand exactly what I mean; nor will I understand exactly what they are mean to say.
Most of us, when thinking of language, think of words and sentences, expositions of one sort or another. But try this: Don’t think of words as being a thing, but as an action that allows us to control a process. Speaking a sentence, then, is essentially the same as riding a bicycle. We are engaged in an action that is intended to produce a result. Communication is the act of producing sounds or images that have consequences. Language/grammar is the particular internal mechanism for implementing communication. Communicating is the action, and language is the vehicle, the “bicycle”, by which we achieve a desire.
If we do this – think of language as a brain/body function to achieve a goal – we no longer need to differentiate between language and all the other methods of achieving that we utilize to read a goal. That means we can look at a goal-based process that work in one context and see if suggests processes that might work in different contexts.
How that child (in the beginning of this dissertation) learned something important to her regarding roses and thorns, and how that knowledge informed her future behavior — that knowledge might be invaluable in learning how to learn anything. And how to teach anything.
Consider the following experiment: Think of a noun or a verb. Look up the meaning of that word in a dictionary. Now within that definition, look up any nouns or verbs that have fewer letters in them. Continue doing this until you can go no further. Wherever you end up, call that definition the “prime definition”. At that point, you must understand every word in the definition on your own without recourse to subsequent (i.e., based on longer words) definitions. The point of this is to avoid circular definitions (a “boy” is a “male who …”; a “male is a human with chromosomes that are …”; “a human is …”; “a chromosome is …”, etc.
At some point, a parent teaching a child would have to resort to pointing at something, perhaps, and saying “like that” or else resorting to the old standby “you know what I mean”. Unfortunately, that agreement (if the exchange even gets that far) is contaminated by the truth that no one person knows exactly what some other person really means. In fact, no one knows exactly what oneself means. All thought is approximations of what we think of as reality.
Define the color “blue” without pointing to something that is “blue”. Blueness is not absolute. It ranges in frequency and magnitude (which defines blue). There is no way to absolutely define blue. At what point does blue segue into another color?
Even that most precise of all subjects – mathematics – is deeply flawed. All the way back to its foundations. Consider the primary grade student who is taught that “one plus one equals two”. What does this mean? What does one glass of water plus one dream equal add to? If asked this question, the teacher might say “This is a rule for adding two of the same things. For example, adding two apples.” The smart student might then ask “If I add a fresh apple to a rotten apple, do I get two apples?” The teacher – a good teacher – might respond “well, yes, sort of, but you couldn’t use both of them to make an apple pie.” “Well,” says the bright student, “why am I adding them?”
This is not coyness. In the real world, no two things are exactly alike. In fact, nothing at one moment is exactly the same as itself one moment later or earlier. Is this important? Of course it is. At some point, an object that is safe can change to the point of not being safe. “Hot” becomes “cool”. “In” becomes “out” for this umpire, but not for that pitcher or the same umpire with the next pitch.
Because we have no choice but to do so, we accept this reality and try to accommodate to it. An entire branch of branch of mathematics called “fuzzy logic” is used by engineers to work out a way to make an elevator stop within a small enough gap from the elevator’s height to that of the floor that no passenger with trip on the gap either getting on or getting off.
Forget math. Does your love partner share the same definition of “love” that you have? Does your definition of love include remembering your partner’s birthday? Does their definition match yours. You both say “I love you”, but do you both mean exactly the same thing? And now think back: Has your definition of “love” always meant exactly the same thing?
Is it safe to believe in YKWIM? ::shrug:: Well, do we have any choice? In order to function, we must assume that we know what we mean and we know what “they” mean and we know what “that” means. But we also must accept that we will always to a bit off and hope that we are not “too far off”.
John Barth wrote two entertaining books with this idea at their core, the inability to make a decision: “The Floating Opera” is humorous, insightful, and highly satisfying. “The End of the Road” is deeper and more desperate. His short stories are delightful and mind-bending; many of them verbal Moebius Strips.