Chapter 1. An Instinct To Acquire An Art
以下段落引自 William James (威廉·詹姆斯，20世纪美国实用主义哲学家) What Is An Instinct
Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some animals’ instincts may appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them. And we may conclude that, to the animal which obeys it, every impulse and every step of every instinct shines with its own sufficient light, and seems at the moment the only eternally right and proper thing to do. What voluptuous thrill may not shake a fly, when she at last discovers the one particular leaf, or carrion, or bit of dung, that out of all the world can stimulate her ovipositor to its discharge? Does not the discharge then seem to her the only fitting thing? And need she care or know anything about the future maggot and its food?
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因此，我们可以肯定，无论某些动物的本能在我们看来多么神秘，我们的本能对它们来说也同样神秘。我们可以得出结论，对于服从本能的动物来说，每种本能的每一个冲动和每一个步骤都闪耀着它自己的光芒，而且在那一刻似乎是唯一永远正确和合适的事情。当一只苍蝇终于发现世界上所有东西中，有一片特定的叶子、腐尸或粪便可以刺激它的产卵器排泄时，它怎么能不感到兴奋呢？那么，排泄对它来说难道不是唯一合适的东西吗？它需要关心或了解未来的蛆虫及其食物吗？
In this century, the most famous argument that language is like an instinct comes from Noam Chomsky (诺姆·乔姆斯基, 美国语言学家, 1928-), the linguist who first unmasked the intricacy of the system and perhaps the person most responsible for the modern revolution in language and cognitive science. In the 1950s the social sciences were dominated by behaviorism, the school of thought popularized by John Watson and B. F. Skinner. Mental terms like “know” and “think” were branded as unscientific; “mind” and “innate” were dirty words. Behavior was explained by a few laws of stimulus-response learning that could be studied with rats pressing bars and dogs salivating to
tones. But Chomsky called attention to two fundamental facts about language. First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words. That program may be called a mental grammar. The second fundamental fact is that children develop these complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence constructions that they have never before encountered. Therefore, he argued, children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a Universal Grammar, that tells them how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents.
Chapter 2. Chatterboxes
- aphasia / SLI (specific language impairment): cases where language is impaired and the rest of intelligence seems more or less intact. But this does not show that language is separate from intelligence. Perhaps language imposes greater demands on the brain than any other problem the mind has to solve. For the other problems, the brain can limp along at less than its full capacity; for language, all systems have to be one hundred percent.
- Williams syndrome: a defective gene on chromosome 11. They are significantly retarded, with an IQ of about 50, and are incompetent at ordinary tasks like tying their shoes, finding their way. But like Denyse they are fluent, if somewhat prim, conversationalists.
Chapter 3. Mentalese
Wynn’s experiment: it proofs five-month-old babies can do a simple form of mental arithmetic.
Vervet monkeys analysis. // More: How monkeys see the world: Inside the mind of another species.
People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they (humankind, and also animals in some degrees) think in a language of thought (mentalese). This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languages; presumably it has symbols for concepts, and arrangements of symbols that correspond to who did what to whom.
Mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others, then the spoken languages:
- richer:
- several concept symbols must correspond to a given English word like stool or stud.
- There must be extra paraphernalia that differentiate logically distinct kinds of concepts, like elephants’ tusks, vs. a specific (the one with a name) elephant’s tusks.
- simpler
- conversation-specific words and constructions (like a and the) are absent, and information about pronouncing words, or even ordering them, is unnecessary.
Newspeak (1984) will NEVER be a reality. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (“words determine thoughts”) is NOT truth. // Linguistic relativity
So where does all this leave Newspeak? Here are my predictions for the year 2050. First, since mental life goes on independently of particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality will be thinkable even if they are nameless. Second, since there are far more concepts than there are words, and listeners must always charitably fill in what the speaker leaves unsaid, existing words will quickly gain new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses. Third, since children are not content to reproduce any old input from adults but create a complex grammar that can go beyond it, they would creolize Newspeak into a natural language, possibly in a single generation. The twenty-first-century toddler may be Winston Smith’s revenge.