Babel's Dawn

Avoiding the Devil

Serious temptation in the science world comes not from sex or food, but from ideas that look too luscious to pass by.

Einstein used to imagine interesting solutions to old puzzles all the time, but upon investigation they would come apart. He would joke about how “the devil” had him going for a few days, before he got wise and gave it up. The past two posts have discussed a radical paper by a philosopher, Don Ross, in the September issue of Language Sciences (paper here).  It turns out that many long-standing puzzles can be explained if we accept Ross’s solution, but many old ideas and trusted observations seem to argue against it.  So, has the devil been giving the blog a run for its money the past few weeks?

For this blog the key points of interest in Ross’s paper are:

• In humans there is a disconnect between sensory input and motor output that makes our actions uncertain.
• The solution to this disconnect is the creation of a culture (virtual and real artifacts) that can cue our behavior and orient us toward the world.
• Language is the foremost feature of this cultural solution.

If this idea is not a devil’s joke, we are in for many more upheavals of thought. Neither Noam Chomsky’s metaphysics nor Stephen Pinker’s psychology can endure if this alternative account takes hold. On the other hand, Ross’s proposal remains theoretical and could be a will-o-the-wisp. It must be tested.

A New Suspect in an Old Case

The spirit (I hope) of this blog.

When I was a college freshman in St. Louis three friends of mine went downtown to see a movie. They were attacked by a mugger who came at them wielding a pipe. Two of my friends began to flee; the third one (a giant of six foot four who was used to standing his ground) stood still in surprise. One of the two others called out, “Run, Sheidler,” and Sheidler began to run. Speech had saved him from serious harm. I haven’t thought about that story in decades, but it comes back to me now as an example of how speech can substitute for reflex.

Last week’s post on this blog reported on a paper by a philosopher, Don Ross,  in the September issue of Language Sciences (paper here) that suggests, to me at least, a solution to the question of what had to happen to make speech possible. Ross, basing his thought on the work of Australian philosopher Kim Sterelny, proposes what I called “abstract attention” and he calls “decoupled representation.” Whatever the term used, it refers to a break in the connection between stimulus and response. If you prefer computational terms, it’s a divorce between input and output.

Normally, such a break would be a personal disaster. A leopard that recognizes a baboon and does not immediately chase it, or a baboon that recognizes a leopard and does not immediately flee is in trouble, desperate trouble. Whatever genetic oddity led to the slowed behavior would be rapidly deselected from the gene pool. But the human line turned it into something triumphant, a species that lives in a community shaped by a culture. Language, in this view, is not a useful tool whose benefits are so great and obvious that we can only wonder why no other species evolved it. Language becomes the evolutionary solution to a normally ruinous predicament. Without speech Big Dave Sheidler’s abstract attention would have been a disaster; with it he had something to laugh about.

Some Answers at Last

The Structure of Speech. It is obvious that speech requires a speaker, a listener, and a topic. But each of these things seems unlikely to evolve. Why should either one care about a neutral topic? Why should the listener care what the speaker has to say? Why should the speaker reveal what is on his mind?

Ape language has been back in the news. Washoe, the first chimp to learn any sign-language words, has died. (NY Times obit here). And eSkeptic has published a piece arguing that primates don’t have language because none of them use or really understand syntax (essay here). But the syntax argument is looking a little off-point these days, especially after a path-breaking paper by Don Ross in the September issue of Language Sciences (abstract here; paper here). The essay brings progress to some of the most persistent questions that have come up on this blog.

Family Emergency

Thanks to everybody who made a congratulatory comment last week. It was most encouraging.

I'm sorry to respond with no post this week, but I am out of town dealing with a family emergency. Back next week.