Re: deprogramming language

Steven Gabriel (sgabriel@willamette.edu)
Mon, 25 Oct 1999 15:20:42 -0700 (PDT) 

Hallo,

I take off for a few days and come back with nearly a hundred messages
from you silly lot.  It's always a pleasure to plow the thoughts you folks
throw about though.  I'm afraid though that I'm quite behind in this
interesting discussion we've been having about language.  Sean's email I
thought interesting and not too rude, though perhaps very generalizing and
vague.  I must admit I directly know very little of the theories you have
been talking of but I'm in the middle of digging into phil. of language
from a very different groundwork, that of the works of philosophers and
logicians of recent acclaim (Mill, Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine ...
all those lads).  The claims you fellows make interest me, but there's so
much to delve into on this subject that I don't have time (or energy) to
read up on all the author's you mention. Still I'd like to think myself
qualified to make a few comments.  Two points then.

Firstly, I think you completely missed the power of the contention I put
up against your theory.  I said that differentiation lacks informational
content.  I really meant that it lacks linquistic power.  A system of
differences is not "powerful" enough to generate the wealth of spoken
languages let alone the structure of cognition.  You say that naming
and/or differentiation is this basic from which these things come forth
but I just don't see it.  How can I explain this without risking folks
missing my point again?  Hrm.  

Euclidean geometry (the stuff you study in high school) can be defined
using only 5 axioms (rules).  These five rules are enough to generate any
rule in all of Euclidean geometry (rules like -- the angles of a triangle
add up to 180 degrees).  With simpler rules you wouldn't be able to
generate all the things that you would like to generate.  My point was not
that the definition of language you give demonstrates that language is
devoid of information (though I rather said it that way), it's that the
rules are too simple to generate any system of processing at all
equivalent to that of cognition.  I want to say it's like trying to
generate a context free grammar with regular expressions but ... that
probably won't make sense to anyone.  You want to say that simple naming
and differentiation leads to more complex linguistic relations, and that's
what I'm challenging.  I think that to do that you will need to add more
rules and these rules will be very important and necessary, and not just
naming and differentiation.

The search for a basis of cognition is really a biological search.  The
most basic rules are those of physics, not those of any large-scale
linguistic theory.  To demonstrate that any theory that truly gets at what
goes on with cognition is probably going to require tying reductionist
neuroscience to a well worked out, large scale biological theory.  This
isn't really something we're ready to do yet.  But it makes the search a
lot more interesting to realize that there are no easy answers, and to
excuse earlier thinkers that tried to get everything right, but ended up
only being very confused.  Classical physics is interesting, but the whole
ballgame got a lot more interesting when we realized that Newton was
wrong.

Finally, I want to defend Sean here.  I liked his comments, though they
were a tad vitriolic.  He dismissed your ideas without a qualitative and
exacting knowledge of what he was dismissing, in a way that is at least
somewhat appropriate.  Or at least that's what I saw, and I can't help
seeing the methods of Freud (of whom I don't know a lot but enough) and
the other lads you mention at times.  Freud didn't know very many exact
things about the brain, but he said a lot of things about it.  He did so
from the outside.  His comments were vague and generalizing, perhaps
hinting at truth but not demonstrating it (in my limited knowledge of
Freud.  If you want to give Freud a pat on the back, you should
take Sean's words directly as well.

S.

On Fri, 22 Oct 1999, Sean Draine (Exchange) wrote:

> 
> Matt:
> > Perhaps they haven't taught you much of anything about language in
> general.
> 
> I don't think Foucalt, Derrida, etc. have taught anybody much of anything,
> except perhaps how to come off as pat and pretentious. This thread only
> confirms my belief. I propose two explanations for their appalling failure.
> Either their work is so dense that it has collapsed into a black hole from
> which no information could possibly escape, or it is simply void of any
> information. 
> 
> > The typical response here goes something like "don't knock
> > it till you've tried it."  
> 
> Whence the assumption that I haven't tried it? Because I'm knocking it?  
> 
> > I'm not saying you should go out and read
> > "literary theory" (whatever it is), but as it is, your comments are
> > rude, dismissive and, well, naive.   
> 
> I was aiming for blunt, contentious, and, yes, "dismissive", but I regret it
> if I've managed to be "rude". 
> 
> Look, if you think repeated, careful readings of Saussure, Derrida, or Freud
> combined with a bit of high-minded introspection is going to tell you the
> exact nature of language, or whether thought precedes emotion, or whether
> the Whorfian hypothesis is true, or what are the capabilities of the
> unconscious mind, that's an unmistakable sign that it's time to put the
> sacred books down, slip out of the Academic compound when your thesis
> advisor has turned his back, and run like hell to the nearest investment
> bank or insurance company to plead for a job. 
> 
> -Sean
> 

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:   Steven Gabriel -- sgabriel@willamette.edu   :
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