EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF COGNITIVE SYSTEMS 27-29 August 2009, Linz, Austria
ABSTRACT
Robin Allott
Steven Pinker is a prolific author on topics bearing on the relation of brain and language. His books are always thought-provoking and at the same time easily readable and amusing. His latest book The Stuff of Thought is an ambitious attempt to explore how language constructs or forms the mind. Much of his study is concerned with words, their link to reality, their origin and development, though he also explores the minutiae of grammar in an attempt to understand how thought is ordered. The starting- point for this presentation is a close look at what he says about words; the following is a condensation of his discussion:
Words and reality: a word must leave some trace in the brain. Every one of the half million words in the Oxford English Dictionary had to be thought up by a person at some point in history, accepted by a community and perpetuated through the ages. How this tacit agreement was forged across a community is mysterious, a real puzzle. Words for many kinds of things are rigidly yoked to the world by acts of pointing, dubbing and sticking together; words ‘are fettered’ to reality. The meaning of a word for a natural kind is not a description or definition, but a pointer to something in the world. How do people conjure up a new sound to label a concept? Where do new words come from? new roots? The most obvious source of a new root is onomatopoeia. Somewhat handier than onomatopoeia is sound symbolism and phonaesthesia (sneeze, sniff). Examples of words invented by a child for butterfly – “as if the words are supposed to act out the flapping of the wings” and also recognising “the ‘motor component’ of ‘hit’”.
Human characterisations of reality are built out of a recognisable inventory of thoughts. The notions of space, time, possession and goals appear to make up a language of thought (Kant was surely right). A first approach is to look at the elements of thought through the complexities of grammar; the combinatorial apparatus of grammar mirrors the combinatorial apparatus of thought but thinking is rooted in physical experience with a finite stock of signs which entangle us in the world outside our heads. Emotionally laced words can “fool us into thinking” that the words have magical powers rather than being arbitrary conventions. The most remarkable thing we do with language is learn it in the first place - how a raw stream of noise could conjure up concepts in the child’s mind out of nothing is a mystery. Ever since Darwin and Wallace people have wondered how the human mind evolved the ability. to reason about abstract domains such as physics etc. which have no relevance to reproduction and survival.
Steven Pinker 2007 The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature London:Allen Lane.