Links to pages: 56, 57, 60, 67, 68, 69, 72
Comments welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii
January 4, 1982
What is the nature of language? This note is not so much an attempt to answer that question as to make a start at interpreting it--at determining what kind of thing would serve as an adequate answer. What kind of information are we asking for when we ask what the nature of any phenomenon is? On that point some of our familiar patterns of paraphrase are suggestive. Our question about the nature of language seems to be adequately paraphrased by asking what kind of thing language is or what it is like. In general terms the kind of answer we seem to expect to questions about the nature of something will tell what that thing is comparable with either by specifying a genus to which it belongs (what kind of thing it is) or by identifying other things which are presumably fellow members of some common genus (what it is like). A more complete answer will then presumably go on to give some of the differentiae which would emerge from the suggested comparisons.
It is customary to think of language as belonging to a genus of communication systems. I have commented elsewhere on that view, but in any case to take any position on that question here would go counter to my purpose which requires that the question be left open. In previous notes in this series I have made some tentative and sketchy comparisons between human language and, respectively, Freudian primary process, other mammalian communication, and the cultivated language of science and information processing.
It must appear that I am having to reach pretty far to find anything with which to compare language. I believe that there are two reasons why that is not surprising. First, we do not know enough about the nature of language to know what other things are most like it. And second, there is nothing else which is very much like it, anyway.
In this note I want to suggest that one obstacle to our investigating the nature of language hitherto has been that we have assumed that the answer--the answer to what I take to be the real question--is obvious. This presupposed answer, though perhaps never overtly expressed, is that languages are essentially reflections of the nature of reality--a mapping of sign vehicles onto nature. A corollary assumption is that they might have been expected in the ordinary course of events to arise spontaneously whenever some very general conditions obtained.
All I will undertake to do here is to describe these assumptions well enough to make them recognizable. Any full account of their history or the many variant forms in which they have manifested themselves would go far beyond my competence. In any case, that is quite beside my point. What I will attempt to do here is show what kinds of assumptions would be involved in such a conception of the nature of language and then to compare language as I believe it to be with the hypothetical language which is implied by those assumptions.
After its long voyage from earth across the vast stretches of interstellar space, the space ship finally lands on a planet with an environment compatible with human life. The human space voyagers descend from their ship and encounter a race of intelligent beings native to the planet. Communication is soon established between the two groups, human and alien, of intelligent beings.
So might begin a story in the contemporary science fiction genre. Such stories might not seem to have much to do with the question of the nature of language, but there is one aspect of the story which merits our attention, namely, the fact that communication is established. That in itself is remarkable. In real life humans have never succeeded in establishing communication with any other species, at least not in establishing communication in the same way as they do with alien beings in many science fiction stories. In such stories it is often possible to communicate with the aliens as effectively as with a human group who speak another language. Are we to say, then, that these alien beings have language?
There, the question of the nature of language comes in. How do we tell whether a particular alien communication system qualifies as language? What questions should we seek to have answered about that communication system in order to decide? It is not clear what information we would need in order to decide whether or not such a system qualified as language, and it is probable that we would have difficulty obtaining the information anyway. Science fiction writers generally do not tell us much about how their alien communication systems work. When specific characteristics are mentioned, some of them sometimes turn out to be quite exotic. For example, a particular system might not employ the auditory channel (one such system which I have read about used smell). However, I think that we may, nevertheless, regard such differences as superficial.
What is important is that the alien system will almost certainly be like human languages in the crucial aspect of being mutually intertranslatable with them. Often, communication with such aliens seems to be as effective as communication with other human groups. In such conditions, it seems reasonable to conclude that those alien communication systems are capable of the same functions as human languages. Functionally, the two kinds of systems are equivalent. Of course, it is not surprising that that is the case since human language naturally provides the model on which the science fiction writers based their alien systems.
Under the circumstances it seems reasonable to apply the term "language" to all of these functionally equivalent systems. Since all of the languages of intelligent beings, alien as well as human, are functionally equivalent, we may infer that whatever it is that the evolution of human language has done for the human species could have been done equally well by any other kind of intelligent- being language. Thus, the differences are functionally of no significance, and we may assume that the languages created in science fiction are intended to be as representative of the essential nature of language as are actual human languages. They presumably are so unless, as I believe, their authors misconceive the nature of human languages.
Now the question which I want to ask is how science fiction can imagine languages to occur in such proliferation about the universe. It is true, of course that the interactions of beings who can communicate with one another make better stories than those of beings who cannot communicate. That certainly provides writers with a motive for introducing languages into their stories. But the science fiction genre normally shows concern for verisimilitude. Should we regard such a proliferation of languages as plausible? Apparently these authors and their readers do. What kinds of assumptions does this imply?
I believe that this willingness to accept such a proliferation of languages is connected with another assumption-- the assumption that there is a unilinear plan of evolution which is applicable to life in the universe as a whole. As a basis for discussion, I will propose some hypothetical assumptions for a syndrome which I will call "unilinear evolutionism". This set of assumptions is reminiscent of the evolutionist beliefs of the nineteenth century, for example, Lewis Henry Morgan's scheme whereby humankind passed through the stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. But my scheme is intended to apply to the entire universe. It would have a universal evolutionary sequence in which life forms, given enough time and favorable circumstances anywhere in the universe, would pass through certain stages on a unilinear scale.
I will identify only three such stages, those of "intelligent beings", civilization", and "advanced civilization" (Only the intelligent-being stage concerns us here, but the other two may serve to make the context more recognizable). The civilization stage closely resembles our present cultural conditions, especially in the existence of institutionalized science and something closely resembling our scientific knowledge and technical capabilities. The characteristics of the advanced civilization stage are less clearly defined, but they would include all of the scientific and technical accomplishments of the civilization stage and some beyond. The intelligent-being stage is the earliest of the three, and the crucial characteristic of this stage is language--i.e., the kind of intelligent-being language which I have been discussing.
But intelligent-being languages other than human languages are an invention of science fiction writers. And they are informed (I am proposing) by the assumptions of unilinear evolutionism. Therefore, the nature of intelligent-being language is what unilinear evolutionism assumes the nature of language to be. And what does it assume it to be? I would like to suggest that it has only one key requirement for languagehood--intertranslatability with human languages.
But why should we take these views seriously? What reason is there to put any credence in a unilinear evolutionist scheme in this day and age? (My answer is that I know of none). And why should we take seriously a notion of the nature of language which is part and parcel of such a scheme? My answer to this last question is somewhat different. I concede that the intelligent- being languages invented by the science fiction writers do not accurately reflect the nature of language. What they reflect are assumptions about the nature of language. But these assumptions are, themselves, of interest because the writers seem to believe that they are plausible, and because no segment of their readership seems to be raising any serious objections. Therefore, it seems that the assumptions about the nature of language embodied in these intelligent-being languages are identical with or at least highly compatible with assumptions made generally within our culture.
But if these assumptions about the nature of language are wrong, what has led the science fiction writers and their readers to make them? Most especially, why should they expect systems of such striking functional equivalence to emerge automatically once a set of highly general preconditions obtains?
A complete answer would apparently involve us in the entire history of Western thought from as far back as Greek times. However, a short answer to the immediate question would be that unilinear evolutionism assumes the essential function which language performs to be a very simple one. According to this assumption the essential function of language is conceived of as that of capturing reality in words (or other signs). Or, in a somewhat more sophisticated version it might be described as the representation of reality (or aspects of reality) by signs. I have no objection to that, as such. However, this representation seems sometimes to be conceived of as a simple relationship in which there is an almost perfunctory translatability from reality to the representation of that reality in some language, and again from its representation in one language to the corresponding representation in another, etc. What I do question is the assumption that the function of representation is so simple.
Now, I do not pretend that my hypothetical unilinear evolutionism corresponds exactly to what anybody actually believes. The reason that I think it is relevant is that I think it corresponds in a general way to what a lot of us are willing to assume. That is, we may not actually believe these assumptions, but we are quite accustomed to suspending disbelief as far as they are concerned.
Assuming, then, that my hypothetical unilinear evolutionism is to be taken seriously, what we have said so far is this: unilinear evolutionism disposes of the question of the nature of language by presupposing that its answer is obvious. The answer, although perhaps never explicitly stated, is that languages arise as spontaneous reflections of the nature of reality. But I believe that this conception is entirely misleading.
The point which I want to make here--and it is a main point-- is that reality is not well designed to be encoded in signs. The encoding which languages are able to accomplish is really based upon an ingenious strategy of inventing more tractable hypothetical realities and having the signs represent them. Supposedly, it is only because the invented realities can, by dint of experience, be made to bear some resemblance to aspects of real reality that we can even imagine that real reality is being represented in language.
It is probably worth taking a few moments to consider what is involved in what I called the representation of reality. Reality, of course, is a continuum in time and space. I will simplify matters by restricting the problem to the reality encountered in one sharply defined time and place. I think it will be instructive to consider the problem in the light of a task which I assigned to a freshman class a couple of years ago.
A portion of the class were instructed to imagine that they were beings from a distant world who were viewing our classroom on a television screen. The images were being transmitted by a television camera which had been placed in the classroom at random by a space probe. The beings had had no previous knowledge of anything about any world other than their own. Most importantly, the beings themselves were sentient trees who communicated by telepathy and had created a technology by psychokinesis. They had no knowledge of any beings capable of spontaneous movement.(1) The students were instructed to write a brief description of what they saw.
My reason for describing this experiment is that I want to call attention to the fact that the representation of even a bit of reality circumscribed in time and space as this one was is not determined by the nature of that reality itself except to a very limited extent. On the contrary the nature of the representation depends to a great extent on the assumptions and interests brought to the occasion by whoever formulates it. The particular task in question was deliberately designed to require the students to abandon many of the assumptions which they would ordinarily bring to the description of a classroom.
What were the results? Of course, each response differed substantially from each other one, but none of the students succeeded in freeing him/herself from his/her own habitual way of looking at the world to the extent that the situation described was designed to require. For example, all of them somehow found the people in the room to be that part of the scene which was most deserving of attention, although the sentient trees who were supposed to be making the observations should have had no reason to single them out. In fact, a tree might have been expected to feel a more spontaneus identification with the wooden chairs in the room. Moreover, even though everyone remained seated during the period of observation, some students were somehow able to distinguish the persons from the chairs in which they were sitting and even to report that the normal posture of the persons was one in which they were straight and vertically oriented. Several observers inferred that the motions that the students made in writing were deliberate, even though these observers were totally unacquainted with the phenomenon of motility. Some observers even commented upon ethnic, sex, and age differences among the persons under observation.
The point, then, is that the representation of reality in language is far from a simple relation between the reality and the code. There are a number of different steps which we must take to go from reality (or, more exactly, from the sensory data which constitute our only information about reality) to linguistic representation:
(1) We cannot deal with the whole of reality at once--some more limited segment of it must be singled out. The assignment given to my students, simply to report what they could see, although perhaps an unusually open-ended one, still was focused on a narrow segment of reality in place and time. And each of the students' reports necessarily analyzed that segment into smaller aspects.
(2) Even in such a narrowly confined segment of reality, it is impossible to report everything which presents itself to one's senses. One decides what is of interest and what is not and on the basis of that decision leaves entirely out of the account much of the actual array of sensory impressions.
(3) One perceives relations in what has been singled out to be reported, i.e., one makes sense of it. For example, imagine a scene which contains among other things (a) a dog running hard and making abrupt sharp turns as it runs, (b) a squirrel sitting on the branch of a tree, (c) a bird flying overhead, (d) a cat somewhat in front of the dog running hard and making abrupt sharp turns which correspond approximately in timing and direction to the turns the dog is making. It would not be surprising if a human observer in such a case inferred that there was a relation between the actions of the dog and those of the cat, attributed purposes to both (the cat having the purpose of escaping the dog; the dog having the purpose of catching the cat), and reported (a) and (d) as a single unit: a dog chasing a cat. In fact, it would be more surprising if he/she did not do so.
In fact, it is quite misleading to speak of the representation of reality as though linguistic utterances were about reality directly. They are not, they are about thoughts. Furthermore, many thoughts could only with difficulty be said to be about any identifiable segment of real reality.
I think that the fact that we can imagine the existence elsewhere of intelligent beings with whom we could communicate can be traced back to a more general assumption which, I believe, we have never subjected to careful scrutiny, but which we do take seriously. This assumption is that thought generally takes a form such that it is all ready to be put into some language, but is not in any language yet. So perhaps, as I argued above, reality itself does not have a ready-to-be-encoded form, but now we have seen that what is encoded (represented) in language is not reality anyway. It is thoughts. This leaves us with the fall-back position that it might be the thoughts which occur in a ready-to-be-encoded form.
In the assumption that I am describing, then, it is thoughts of this kind that we imagine a language, when one is made available, to give expression to. But that is only half of the assumption; the other half is that a language is a sort of universal encoder which takes thoughts of the kind that we have postulated (presumably any such thoughts whatever) and converts them into speech. I will call this the "universal encoder" conception of a language. It is necessarily associated with the assumption of the occurrence of thoughts in ready-to-be-encoded form.
Many of the stories about automatic translators and the like are not intended to be taken quite seriously, of course, but the fact that we make up such stories at all means that we can at least imagine things working that way. That is, we can imagine the thoughts of different kinds of beings as being of such a sort that they are ready to be put into a language, and we can imagine languages to be very versatile encoders which can easily encode whatever thoughts they may be called on to encode.
Is there any reason to question this conception? Is there any serious alternative to the conception of languages as universal encoders of ready-to-be-encoded thoughts? The answer is that there is; we sometimes hear a very different idea about the relations between language and thought. People often find it quite difficult to translate what has been said in one language into another. If a language were just the kind of simple encoder that we have been talking about and if thoughts occurred in such ready-to-be-encoded form, translation should be easy. If translation is not easy, it must be that people speaking (or better, intending to speak; or even more exactly, thinking in terms of speaking) one language have thoughts which differ in some way from those of people using a different language.
What is more, such difficulties of translating are found even when the cultural background of the two languages is very similar-- for example, in the case of two different European languages. The problem becomes much worse when the two languages come from very different cultures--for example, one European language and one American Indian language. If human beings of other cultures have thoughts that are sufficiently different from ours that they are difficult to encode in our language, how much more different should we expect those of the alien beings of science fiction or of different kinds of animals here on earth to be? When we consider these questions, we come to a quite different idea about the relation of language to thought. According to this second idea, a language would be an encoding of just one particular way of thinking, one particular pattern of thought, or one particular culture. I will call this the "cultural-encoding" conception of a language, and it has as its counterpart an assumption that the thoughts which are expressed are already-culturally-encoded thoughts.
We have, therefore, two conceptions of the functioning of languages. In one conception they are encodings of particular cultures--encodings of the world as the world is conceived and perceived by the speakers of the language. In fact, the language is assumed to have a crucial role in the construction and maintenance of the particular view of the world. In the other conception languages are universal encoders capable of encoding anything whatsoever no matter how well or how poorly what is to be encoded accords with the view of the world held by the speakers of the language in question.
How is it that both of these views have been able to persist alongside each other? I think the answer is that each is essentially valid--that each expresses a truth about the nature of languages. A language is, first of all, an encoding of a conception of reality--of what has been called the "world" of its speakers. That it is, is essential to the nature of language. A language must begin with an inventory of concepts representing elements of reality--the "names" for various kinds of objects, states, acts, etc. which are assumed to exist, which are what reality (the world) is supposed to be made up of. And it is in terms of these elements that the speakers of the language are able to characterize whatever they may see or otherwise experience in their lives. It is ultimately only in terms of these elements that they are able to talk about what they experience; it is to a great extent in terms of the same elements that they perceive it in the first place. Moreover, the language is intimately involved in designing this conception of reality (this "reality construction", as it is generally called) to begin with.
Thus, a language is an encoding of the world of its speakers-- of their particular culture. On the other hand, in order to function as languages are required to it must also be able to encode new messages. That is, no human language is limited to a fixed inventory of messages; any language can be used to tell about new experiences which have not been previously reported in that language. Thus, there must be a machinery for putting together novel utterances to express these novel thoughts. In fact, it is generally assumed that a sentence is usually a new construction, possibly something that has never been uttered in that exact form before, but in any case something that the speaker made up him/herself and not something that he/she pulled from his/her memory.
Now, having this machinery for encoding new thoughts means that thoughts deriving from the worlds (cultures) of other languages can also be encoded. These are novel thoughts just as thoughts that result from new experiences within the framework of one's own society are novel thoughts. Obviously, a thought originating in a particular culture may not be expressed as economically in a language belonging to a quite different culture as it is in its own language. However, we do ordinarily assume that with some ingenuity it can be more or less satisfactorily expressed. It is often asserted as a truism that anything can be said in any language. Of course, it is not clear just what is being claimed in that assertion; it is not clear just what the "things" are that are embraced in that "anything", and it is not clear just what criteria would be applied in determining whether or not one of the "things" had been satisfactorily said in a particular language. Still, the fact that the assertion persists suggests that there is some interpretation according to which it both still embodies a significant claim and is true.
We may ask how it can possibly be true that any language at all would have the capacity of encoding anything, no matter what, that can be encoded in any other language. That would seem to be a particularly crucial question for our understanding of the nature of language. The theoretically possible answers are of several kinds.
The answer which seems to be implied in the statement that anything can be said in any language is that languages are actually such marvels of design, that they do have such extreme flexibility, that their capacity is in fact unlimited in all respects. It is hard to know how even to start trying to evaluate such a claim, but it seems on the face of it surely not to express the whole truth.
A second, and less extravagant-sounding, answer might be that the range of worlds that we are capable of constructing is limited by the conditions of our lives, and since those conditions of human life which derive from our common genetic endowment or from our terrestrial environment are common to all of us, all human cultures are subject to many common constraints on the set of possible worlds. What that boils down to is that maybe there are things that would be impossible to express in a particular language but they would be impossible to express in any other human language for the same reason. In effect, they are unthinkable by earthbound human beings. As a consequence, all practically thinkable thoughts would be expressable in all languages.
A third possibility to consider is that it is not our genetic endowment and the conditions of life on earth alone which have produced the presumed universal translatability. It might also be partly the history of past contact among human groups. It is possible that there has been so much contact throughout history (including prehistory) that the diversity of human cultures is significantly less than it might otherwise have been. That is, perhaps there has been enough variation in the human condition as experienced by different human groups in history that it would be theoretically possible for some groups to think thoughts (and express them) that would be unexpressable in some other language, but perhaps subsequent contact has always been sufficient to bring deviant thought patterns back within the pale. That would mean that we are all too intimately related culturally for such thoughts to develop on a significant scale. This possibility also would mean just that all practically thinkable thoughts were expressable in all languages. However, the set of practically thinkable thoughts would be limited by cultural factors as well as by genetic factors and by the physical characteristics of the terrestrial environment. If this should turn out to be the case, of course, it would have as its corollary that the languages of the sample available at present would not be sufficiently independent to be representative of language as a whole--i.e., that the earth does not possess an adequate sample of the phenomenon, language.
This note has been concerned with explicating the question of the nature of language, with trying to provide some guidelines as to what an adequate answer to the question would have to talk about. I have tried to show that part of our difficulty in coming to grips with the question has been that we have tacitly assumed that we already knew the answer to what I take to be the real question. Therefore, we have tended, when we have thought we were talking about the nature of language, to permit our attention to be diverted to other questions which masquerade as the question of the nature of language.
I did try to make some points about what kind of thing human language actually is. I suggested that it is not closely modeled upon reality, and inversely, that reality does not have a readily encodable form. I suggested further that what language encodes is not reality, but rather thoughts. But I argued again that it is erroneous to imagine thoughts to occur in some universally ready-to- be-encoded form and to imagine languages to be universal-encoders such that each language is ready automatically to encode any thought. I pointed out that each language is also, and more immediately, an encoding of a particular culture, and that thoughts ordinarily occur in already culturally encoded form. Whatever universal-encoder capacity languages have is built upon the cultural-encoding foundation of that language.
Finally, I raised the question which is so central to any understanding of the nature of language: How might it possibly be true that anything at all can be said in no matter what language? The only serious answers which I was able to propose assumed some limitation on the universe of thinkable thoughts. However, that is certainly not the last word on the subject, but more nearly the first.
(1) Assume that you are watching a television screen. What you see on the screen is the interior of a room in which there is a hidden camera. That room is, in fact, this classroom at this moment.
(2) You are to assume that you have no acquaintance with this room; of course, therefore, you do not recognize it or the people in it.
(3) Your assignment is to write a brief report in which you attempt simply to describe what sort of place you are looking at and what seems to be going on.
(4) You live in a far distant world. Your technology is so advanced that you have been able to transmit the television camera through space and situate it on earth. However, it is the first camera that has been sent to another world, and its winding up in this room is due entirely to chance. Therefore, what you are seeing through the TV set is your first view of another world.
(5) Further background: You are a large tree on a world which does not have any animal life. Although your species has no ability to move, it does have highly developed extrasensory perception. Your powers of psychokinesis (the ability to control the movements of external objects by means of the mind) are so advanced that you have created a complex technology based on making tools move in precisely controlled ways. You communicate by telepathy with one another. Keep these facts in mind in writing your report. Back up
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