"Let us Prey" was the caption of a famous political cartoon. Puns like that are a feature of rhetoric that enables people to hear things not in the words.
This coming Thursday, September 18, marks Babel’s Dawn’s second anniversary. I thought I would take note of the date by posting a couple of pieces about what I have learned from the experience of maintaining this blog. I’ll start by considering what I have learned about language.
Language is perception by other means. Granted, language builds on words instead of sense organs, but the words organize sensations into perception. Language depends on attention, uses much of the brain’s sensory cortex and organizes its data according to space and time.
Another perceptual trait found in language is the gestalt or recognized whole. In music, for example, we can hear a melody and recognize it again even when the melody is played in a different key and at a different tempo. Visually, objects retain a recognizable consistency despite changes in input. Thus, when we walk beside a round table, the table shape looks stable even though a measurements made along the path of the walk would show that the table appears elliptical. The most famous gestalt is our capacity to perceive a series of separate still photographs as continuous motion when the pictures are shown rapidly enough. Melody, shape stability, motion … these are all recognized without being deducible from the parts. They are not out there in the physical world, nor are they in the sensations triggered in the brain. Verbal gestalts occur as well.
Jokes are probably the best known illustration of verbal gestalts. The laughter is almost always about something that was not said. Understanding a joke does not depend on logic or syntax. You just have to “get it.” Getting the joke, for example, in the famous Thomas Nast cartoon about New York’s mayor “Boss” Tweed requires more than the ability to interpret its drawings. The cartoon shows Tweed and associates as vultures and is captioned, “Let us prey.” Taken literally, it says the Tweed ring is predatory and vulture-like. But those who get the prey/pray pun and who also take prayer seriously understand something that is not there in the words, the pictures or the grammar. Boss Tweed was not just predatory; he was diabolical.
Other examples of verbal gestalts include poems and stories that are said to evoke an effect. Evoke means they produce a sensory understanding not literally present in the words. Modern syntactical studies have also shown that understanding ordinary sentences often requires a gestalt construction. A famous example is the pithy saying: Time flies. We “get” the meaning of this proverb as easily as we hear a Beatles melody, but the meaning is not out there in the words. For a computer it could just as easily be a command telling us to time the speed of the flies. A sentence like An epilog jumps us from April to August (discussed here) makes sense despite the fact that the verb to jump does not refer to a motion and the subject epilog is not a causative agent. You cannot parse this sentence by looking up the words in a dictionary.
Another feature of perception is the distinction between background and foreground. The foreground is where the perceiver’s attention is focused; the background provides context. A sentence like I’ve brought back an orange from Florida puts the foreground (I brought an orange) in a context (back from Florida). Skilled artists know how to use the foreground/background distinction to highlight what the artist wants to show. Skilled writers know the same thing. An inexperienced writer might say I’ve been to Florida and brought back and orange. Where should listeners focus their attention? The first sentence makes it clear; pay attention to the orange.
Gestalt dog appears as foreground that is somehow distinct from the background.
The senses that support perception are not just data sources, or fields in a data record. They are sources of delight and revulsion. Stink and perfume, glare and vibrant—words like these tell us about the sensory experience itself rather than the information detected by the sense. Likewise, language can be a source of enjoyment or displeasure, and not just because of the meaning of a remark. A song with a lyric like Gibraltar may tumble / The Rockies may crumble … is half way to being pleasing even before the music is even set. Meanwhile, even if we know nothing of Macbeth’s troubles, something is a little wearying about whatever it is that creeps in this petty pace from day to day. In short, it is not surprising that language meant to delight is part of every culture. It’s like putting spice in the food—something added for the pleasure of it.
The fact that perceptions carry some mixture of pleasure or pain means that evolution of a new form of perception introduces a new way of experiencing the world. Oliver Sacks’ books and articles are filled with accounts of how the opening or changing of a sensory modality changes the lives of the individuals who experience them. We can feel pretty certain that bats using echolocation to fly through the darkness experience the night in quite a different way from humans. Birds are said (here) to have some kind of magnetic sense. We can use a compass to orient ourselves, but it is naïve to suppose that birds do no more than carry a compass with them. They must be involved in the world’s magnetic field in a way we cannot imagine, just as squirrels cannot imagine our own involvement in a world of color. Likewise, language gives us a new way of experiencing the world, one that is known only to humans. Language began as a cooperative adaptation to life in a community, and it involves us in the lives and thoughts of our co-linguists to an extent unimaginable to the apes or even to the dogs that live with us.
Two years ago, as I thought about this blog, I had no such conception of language, and if somebody had proposed to me that I think of language as a kind of communal organ of perception I would have considered the idea metaphorically rather than literally. Working on this blog, however, has persuaded me that the Western philosophical tradition that defines human distinctiveness in terms of an abstract rationality is misguided; true, apes are not given much to abstract reasoning, but their limits come more from their ego-centrality than their irrationality. Instead, human distinctiveness comes from the way we are members of a community. That membership does not mean individuals must be selfless. Individuals can be completely egoistic, but they still cannot escape the involvement with mankind that John Donne meditated upon.
Next week I will say something about what I have learned about our peculiar evolutionary history, but for now I am avoiding the tangent of what that community is or where it came from. The fundamental problem facing any biological community is dancing in step, so to speak. Insects solve the problem with an elaborate system of pheromones, but insects do not perceive the world. Their sense organs work as a system of triggers and lack the elements of gestalt, delight/revulsion, and background/foreground that are part of ape perception. For us, pheromones would merely confuse the situation; we have reduced them, not increased them. The tool that keeps perceptive primates dancing in step is the communal perception enabled by language.
... AND: the language enabled by the communal perception! Great post.
Posted by: JoseAngel | September 19, 2008 at 03:41 AM