I spend a lot of time these days watching YouTube. I watch classical music performances, I watch clips from The Big Bang Theory, I watch short lectures on life 300,000 years ago, 1 million years ago, 2 billion years ago, I watched TYT (The Young Turks), and lately I have been watching videos of Noam Chomsky talking about Linguistics. Yesterday, I was watching an interview Noam did 20 years ago in Portland Oregon in which he cited the fascinating fact that when little children are about two years old they learn words at the rate of one per hour, frequently, as he noted, after having heard the word only once. He offered this as evidence that the behavioral explanation for language acquisition cannot possibly be true.
When I heard him say that thing about two-year-olds, I
thought to myself “I have heard him say that before, on several occasions.”
More generally, after I have listened to Noam talk about language five or six
times, I note that there are a number of things he says repeatedly, some of
which, of course, he himself discovered. How could it be otherwise? He is not
an entertainer doing standup improv; he is a scientist who has devoted his
entire life to the study of language. Of course he repeats himself.
I find this quite reassuring. I have been blogging for 11
years now, in the course of which I have put up more than 4500 posts. Some are
brief, some are middle length, and some are quite long portions of multipart
essays which may run to 30,000 words or more. Over the course of that period of
time, I have on many occasions repeated myself, always with a nagging sense of
embarrassment.
But if Noam does it, so can I. Needless to say, this does
not mean that what I am repeating is as important as what Noam is repeating but
that goes without saying. After all, as I am very fond of repeating, Socrates
replies to Callicles’ complaint in the Gorgias that he is saying the same
things again and again, “yes, and in the same way too.”
22 comments:
Another defense of repetition: Talking to new people / a new audience who didn't hear it the first time.
'..when little children are about two years old they learn words at the rate of one per hour, frequently, as he noted, after having heard the word only once. He offered this as evidence that the behavioral explanation for language acquisition cannot possibly be true.'
'the behavioral explanation for language acquisition' -- that is, Skinner's account, one of the earliest scientific explanations of language acquisition. We might say here, that language learning is not a matter of being trained what to say -- instead, children learn language just from hearing it spoken around them, and they learn it effortlessly, rapidly, and without much in the way of overt instruction. And, these insights were to drive linguistic theorizing for the next fifty years. And in particular, the idea that children learn language essentially on their own was a radical challenge to the prevailing behaviorist idea that all learning involves reinforcement.
Chomsky is reaching, to my eyes, when he tosses off notions of some kind of a quantum leap in evolution or a specific area of the brain, and anyways, probably it makes sense, that language acquisition researchers should first attempt to use these well-understood learning mechanisms, but on the other hand, Chomsky’s theory had the impact of a large rock thrown into this, like, previously tranquil, undisturbed pond of empiricism, and Chomsky continues to believe that language is “pre-organized” in some way or other within the neuronal structure of the human brain.
I enjoy watching old Dick Cavett shows on youtube, particularly this show on which Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal exchanged words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb1w_qoioOk
You said this about a dozen posts ago when writing about Rawls. Is it age? I don't know but keep on writing. I used the Freud quote "the narcissism of small differences" like a charm with my daughter and it was what she needed to hear so thank you for that. You are still educating meaningfully.
glottal phonemes. God bless korzibski.
I was not familiar with who Korzybiski (1879-1950) was, so I Googled his name. He was a Polich-American linguist who developed a filed he called “general semantics,” the premise of which is that humans cannot learn the true nature of reality because they are limited by their neurological system and their language. (A hybrid of Kant and Wittgenstein?)
The Wikipedia article included the following anecdote:
“One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter." (Footnote omitted.) I am not sure what epistemological point he was making, or if he was even intending to make an epistemological point.
I suspect we've all run out of a lecture hall to the toilet, back in college, not necessarily because of anything we've just eaten (or think we've eaten), just too damn hung-over.
Danny,
I suspect Chomsky is correct in postulating that language is pre-organized in the brain. I think music is, as well. The earliest musical instruments are 43,00 yr. old flutes and from bird bones and mammoth ivory. They are tuned to a pentatonic scale which used in early civilizations that appeared on the scene 38,000 years later (the Japanese version is a pentatonic scale in the Phrygian mode). That suggests that tonal structure is ‘pre-organized’ in the brain, so why not language?
MS: That's a wonderful anecdote. I don't know anything about Korzybski, but it sounds like the point he's making - "People don't just eat food, but also words" - belongs to that family of ideas to the effect that seeing is seeing-as, all observation is theory-laden, etc., and whatever linguistic relatives they might have. I'm not sure if there's an official term for these ideas; I've just come to loosely associate them through reading and conversation.
("Eating words" also seems to be a pun there: The expression "eating one's words" means discovering that one's initial expectations (e.g., "This biscuit is for humans") were wrong.)
The upshot of these ideas, I believe, is that what we think about X, the conceptual/interpretative framework through which we process X - and by extension, the linguistic framework - determines how we experience X; and there are no "undistorted" or "pure" or perspective-neutral encounters with X. (See also Kant: "Concepts without intuitions (~i.e., thoughts without sensations) are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.")
The biscuit itself isn't what changes. My interpretation of it is what changes (from, "This is a tasty and presumably human snack," to, "According to the packaging, this is actually a dog treat"); and accordingly my experience changes: It suddenly goes from pleasure to disgust.
Michael,
That’ a very good analysis. Thank you. It reminds me of those scenes in some movies where the protagonist is eating a delicacy in a foreign country and appears to be enjoying it, until s/he is told that it is chocolate covered tarantula. The verbal identification alters the experience, so, instead of eating what was previously a tasty tarantula, the protagonist is now eating the words, so to speak.
On the subject of foreign delicacies, have you heard of yartsa gunbu, a fungus which grows in caterpillars in the Himalayas and sells for $50,000/lb.? You can read and hear about it here: https://www.npr.org/2011/10/09/141164173/caterpillar-fungus-the-viagra-of-the-himalayas
Yummy.
Interesting! I can't say I've tried anything that wild (or expensive).
This may have been what I was groping after in my previous post, by the way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
"The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, part of relativism, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism is a principle claiming that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. The idea was however not created by Edward Sapir or Benjamin Lee Whorf, but imported from German humanistic thinking by various American authors. Being related to the concept of the spirit or Geist, it is a core tenet of Völkerpsychologie and other versions of post-Hegelian philosophy and German romanticism."
Michael,
I believe this phenomenon is manifested in such linguistic characteristics as that of the Inuit, for example, who have multiple words for snow, so that they perceive snow differently than other cultures, noticing subtle differences in the condition of the snow that non-Inuits do not even see. I suspect there maybe similar aspects of other languages, for example desert dwelling populations, so that they see their environment differently than would those who did not speak their language or live in their culture.
Chomsky and his colleague Robert C. Berwick published a quite accessible little book--"Why Only Us: Language and Evolution"--in 2016. It lays out how he sees human language fit into the evolutionary scheme of things. It also has some nice coloured graphics of, e.g., the brains of a songbird, a chicken, a macaque, and a human showing their different internal connectivities, all part of his argument, I think, that the brain of the modern human has singular features.
PS I meant to say "singular language-related features."
RPW comes back to the topic of repetitions. I hope he doesn't think his blog is getting boring.
I think there are several reasons why we keep repeating some arguments, examples or explanations in the same way. One reason might be that an argument is true and that the example is the best that illustrates it.
However, the Internet has a large part in making these repetitions even noticeable in public space. If you look at the online editions of the daily newspapers, you can see how redundant the topics that are published are. You can see how limited the diversity of public discourse is in reality. Suddenly you discover politicians giving an interview in four different newspapers and always saying the same thing. A lot of articles look almost like paste and copy. Much ado about nothing
Youtube is another example. You look for certain topics, for certain authors. These people are people who are in public and who are invited to many events to give lectures. If you listen to the philosopher Slavoij Zizek on YouTube 10 times about Hegel, he explains the double negation over and over again with the same old joke. 30 years ago nobody would have noticed that. If he does this in his lectures or seminars at university, his courses are empty very quickly.
Isn't that the problem with the truth that it is almost always monosyllabic while the lie is constantly reinventing itself? For example Trump's new lie that the new Covid vaccine was developed by the US company Pfizer but in reality in Germany by the company Biontech in Mainz by Dr. Özlem Türeci and her husband Dr. Ugur Sahin.
MS, that stuff about Inuit language speakers and their 'supposed' ability to perceive states of snow that we can't because of the number of words for snow they have in their language was discredited a long time ago, not least by the observation that English-speaking scientist had no problem understanding and indeed describing the supposed 'cognitive' differences to begin with (Steve Pinker has written about this in The Language Instinct, if memory serves). In fact, hardly any (strong) version of linguistic relativity has ever stood up to proper scrutiny. There are loads of communicate gaps among the world's languages, but conceptual gaps are a completely different matter altogether.
And in any case, the claim regarding the number of words for snow in Eskimo languages is not quite right, either. See this short piece on Language Log for a clarification:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000405.html
DJL,
Thank you for this updated information. My comment was based on information which I had read decades ago and I was not aware that it had been debunked in the interim.
The idea that different languages can reflect a difference in how reality is experienced was used as a plot point in the movie “Arrival,” in which Amy Adams played a linguist asked by the U.S. military to interpret written communications being received from an alien vessel which had landed in the U.S. There were 12 separate alien vessels which had landed in different countries – China, Russia, Pakistan, Sudan, ...- each sending a part of a single message to the respective countries, using what appeared to be pictograms. A fascinating and creative movie.
Just a recommendation. If you really want to go deep into meaning and communicative intent, check out the books of MIT scholar Ray Jackendoff, a former student of Chomsky's (too bad about his last name).
Eqbal Ahmad attributed much of Chomsky's popular appeal to this repetition, likening him to Sufi mystics in this regard.
I remember B.F. Skinner's Harvard course on behavioral psychology as the most boringly repetitious I ever took.
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