This post begins a three-part examination of just what it is that evolved when we got speech. The answer might seem easy. In 1669 William Holder, a founding member of the Royal Society who is credited with being the first person every to teach a deaf boy to speak, defined language as “apt signs for the communication of thoughts.” (Elements of Speech).
That definition still sounds good although these days we tend to stress a word’s arbitrariness rather than its aptness, and many philosophers now distinguish between signs and symbols. “Thoughts” too are more controversial than you might suppose; many scholars prefer to talk about propositions, which are more objective and available for computational processing. The one word we all agree should be there is communication, and that is where all the confusion lies because that word’s definition has been radically altered since Holder’s day.
Johnson’s Dictionary gave as its prime definition of the verb to communicate:
To impart to others what is in our own power; to make others partakers; to confer a joint possession; to bestow.
But when we speak of biological communication today we are referring to control.
In his famous assault on B.F. Skinner, Chomsky laughed at Skinner’s effort to understand all parental efforts to help their children speak as driven by a need for control: “Underlying [Skinner’s] modes of explanation is a curious view that it is somehow more scientific to attribute to a parent a desire to control the child or enhance his own possibilities for action than a desire to see the child develop and extend his capacities. Needless to say, no evidence is offered to support this contention.” (See review.)
Chomsky was responding to Skinner’s statement that, “In all of these cases [of parents interacting with their children] we explain the behavior of the reinforcing listener [i.e., the parent or adult who is encouraging a child] by pointing to an improvement in the possibility of controlling the speaker [i.e., the child] whom he reinforces.”
Skinner was a psychologist who routinely reduced plausible positions to the ridiculous, but in this case he was following the mainstream. Ever since Norbert Weiner hailed the computer age in his 1948 book, Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, machine communications has been understood as being about control.
Mechanical communication — i.e., communication between machines — is control at a distance. Mechanical information in this system changes the probabilities of an action.
And remember, the word machine is now understood very broadly. Your arm is a machine; your brain is a machine. The sensory information your arm sends your brain, therefore, changes the probability of an action. When your brain communicates with your arm, it is controlling the arm.
The DNA molecule is also a machine. It uses genetic information to control its replication. Communications between DNA and RNA molecules control the construction of the proteins that form our bodies.
Insects are machines. They use pheromones (chemical triggers) to control one another’s behavior. Computers, of course, are machines and when users communicate with their computers — via keyboard, mouse, or even microphone — they are controlling them. When computers are linked into a network, the machines are controlling one another.
I stress this obvious point because it is important to realize that although mechanical, biological, genetic, and cybernetic communication is about control, speech communication is about something else. Therefore speech is not simply an advance in communications that had been evolving for billions of years. Speech is different, and the study of biological communication — while admirable and even fascinating in itself —has little or nothing to contribute to the study of speech origins.
Chomsky was right to laugh at the illusion that there is anything scientific about insisting on control as the essence of human communication. Insistence on control makes it hard for us to think about ordinary exchanges like this one:
“Man alive; it is pouring rain out there.”
“Your pants are soaked.”
“The wind is so bad, the sidewalks are cluttered with broken umbrellas.”
“Maybe you should change into something dry.”
“I’ll be alright after I fix myself some tea.”
Nothing like this kind of speech will ever take place between two computers on a network. DNA will never pass this sort of message to another generation. Insects won’t ever develop pheromones for messages like these. That conversation was all about making private experience public. It is communication in the self-help guide's sense of sharing thoughts, but not in the technical sense exemplified by cybernetic and genetic control.
Ordinary speech is really a terrible system for controlling things. It is far too ambiguous. Its elaborate syntax permits too many irrelevancies. Its tendency toward novel expression merely adds to the interpretive workload, while its use of tone of voice to alter meanings simply complicates the job of decoding the control signal. One of the great and ongoing projects in making computers easy to use has been the continuing effort to make computers controllable through ordinary speech. The ambiguity, novelty, and range of the input that must be transformed into machine language has made this job terribly difficult. So we can forget about the idea that language is the latest in evolution's effort at controlling one another.
Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions asserts that it is not good enough to show that the old “paradigm” is false. Most people will not abandon an idea just because it is plainly untrue unless they can simultaneously embrace some other paradigm. In the next post then, we will examine an alternative to the communication/control paradigm.
I recently wrote a post on my blog regarding the Chomsky-Skinner takes on the language acquistion (triggered by the chomsky-skinner post on this blog) and in that post I propose that while drives to control, empathise and instruct may have been instrumental for language production (one aspect of communication as outlined in your post above), the purpose of language comprehension (and the ability to do so) is to understand and predict the world.
Would love your commnets on my post the URL of which is http://the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2006/09/chomsky-vs-skinner-role-for.html.
A nice blog and kudos to you for taking on biggies like Chomsky and stressing the need for deemphasising the linguistic preoccupation with Grammar!
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THE BLOGGER RESPONDS
<> Oops. Is that what I've done? I do think grammar is really important.
And kudos back at Sandeep for posting such a full report on his blog. I take his central sentence to be, "I am unable to appreciate how concepts of Universal Grammar, however much relevant and innnate, could be a substitute for proper analysis of language acquisition in terms of an ability to not only master the grammar, but also the semantics."
the study of language acquisition has been an empirical science for about fifty years. Early on, in the 1960s, it was very much a syntax-driven inquiry as observers hoped to show that Chomsky's ideas about deep structure could explain early speech. This work established the insufficiency of syntax alone and for the past 30 or more years language acquisition studies have explored both syntax and semantics.
As for the "purpose of language," it is hard to assign purposes to so general a power that arose through an evolutionary process. I guess I can only urge visitors to stay tuned as this blog explores the pressures and issues behind the evolution of speech. In this case the purpose of our dialog is very much in accordance with Sandeep's idea. We want to understand the world a bit better.
By the way, Sandeep's own post tells a great story about a "speaking fast," ten days at a meditation camp where language (apart from some hymns) is denied. When people can speak to each other, everything suddenly seems so meaningful. Lots to contemplate in this parable.
Posted by: Sandeep Gautam | September 26, 2006 at 06:34 AM