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 only hardwired to create a grammar. Pinker is not saying it is; he is simply avoiding the larger implication that learning a grammar is only one aspect of learning anything. What is dangerous bout “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, 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 or else avoiding expressing the fact that his book is trapped 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 saying.
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 might be invaluable in learning how to learn anything. And how to teach anything.