If I appear to have a bit of an obsession with David Berlinski's writings, it may be because I share one or two of his obsessions (don't ask); or just that I have been charmed by his politically incorrect persona. But let me make it clear that I disagree utterly with his ultimate conclusions about human life and science – with his basic view of the world, in fact.
In a way, he is my ideal interlocutor, a deft articulator of a point of view I respect but reject.
He sees the scientific view of the world (which most of us implicitly accept) as being essentially ideological, as a set of commitments
… conceived without justification, the commitments determining the evidence rather than the reverse, and this by means of a psychological process as difficult to discern as it is to deny. The largest of these commitments, and the one least examined because most tenaciously held, is that the universe is nothing more than a system of material objects. Beyond this system – nothing. A universe of this sort might seem repugnant to most men and women, but many physical scientists have proclaimed themselves satisfied by a world in which there is nothing but atoms and the void, and they look forward to their forthcoming dissolution into material constituents with cheerful nihilism.
An uneasy sense nonetheless prevails – it has long prevailed – that the vision of a purely physical or material universe is somehow incomplete; it cannot encompasses the familiar but inescapable facts of ordinary life. A man speaks, sending waves into the air. A woman listens, the tiny and exquisite bones in her inner ear vibrating sympathetically to the splashes of his voice. The purely physical exchange having been made, what has been sound becomes what has been said; heated by the urgency of communication, the sounds begin to glow with meaning so that an undulating current in the air can convey a lyric poem, issue a declaration of war, or say with terrible finality that it's over. Making sense of sounds is something every human being does and that nothing else can do. More than three generations of mathematical physicists grew old before their successors understood black-body radiation; the association between sound and meaning is more mysterious than anything found in physics. And we, too, are waiting for our successors.*
Part of his method, evidently, is to exhaust (exasperate?) us with his rhetoric. But here are a few unrhetorical points in reply.
Firstly, let's accept that old fashioned, commonsense materialism is, in the light of quantum mechanics and a computational perspective on the world, no longer viable. Even so, the world can still be seen as a physical, if not a 'material', system. The 'atoms' of this world can be seen as (physical) events or processes rather than as little bits of stuff.
Is such a view incomplete? Of course. It is concerned only with what underlies and ultimately generates and powers the pageant, not with the pageant itself. The pageant of life needs to be suffered or enjoyed or analysed or interpreted in its own terms.
Berlinski is right to suggest that human language is wondrous and unique, but wrong to see deep mystery in the meaning of sentences. If there is a deep mystery of meaning, it resides also in animal communication systems, surely. And those more primitive systems would lie closer to the mystery's source.
In fact, in my view, the mystery lies – if it lies anywhere – with subjective experience rather than with communication; and, of course, in the broader question of why there is anything at all.**
* The Advent of the Algorithm (Harcourt 2001), pp. 249-250.
** By the way, the latter question is connected to the first, because, in a sense, a world of inanimate objects, objects without a subjective sense (in other words a world with no one to see it, even to observe its traces as we do the early universe) is equivalent to nothingness, is it not?
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Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
Williams syndrome, language and the brain
In recent posts I have made a number of claims about language and the brain. Allow me to clarify and develop a couple of points.
I don't really want to buy into the debate about various versions of modularity or other theories of mental functioning. For one thing, I don't know the science well enough. I don't have a theory, but I don't know that I need one either.
Which is not to say that it is not important to have a basic understanding of how our minds work. My point is that such an understanding needn't take the form of a theory. It may simply develop from a general (or specialist) knowledge of pertinent disciplines (such as psychology or linguistics), and as a considered response to various kinds of evidence. I am particularly interested in the evidence provided by injuries and genetic disorders which affect cognitive and emotional functioning.
Certain genetically-caused disorders and brain injuries seem to provide evidence that language is in some sense a distinct system - or rather a set of systems - even if it interacts (as it obviously does) with non-linguistic processes. How else can you account for people who have a language deficit but can think well in other respects, or, conversely, who may be seriously cognitively impaired and yet maintain excellent language abilities?
Take Williams syndrome, for instance. It is a genetic disorder characterized by a range of medical problems, developmental delays and learning disabilities. Children with this condition seek interaction with others but are very vulnerable as they lack normal caution and social understanding. They are typically unable to cope with numbers and abstract reasoning. They also have impaired gross and fine motor skills.
On the positive side, they often have an affinity for music (and perfect pitch). And they also tend to do well linguistically, at least in certain respects.
Williams syndrome, like so many other conditions which impact on brain function, is selective in its effects. If specific aspects of thinking are adversely affected while other specific aspects are not affected or are enhanced, then this certainly supports the view that the brain consists of many (interacting) systems and sub-systems.
Linguists, of course, see language from various points of view corresponding to various sub-disciplines: phonetics (where the focus is on the actual sounds of language), phonology (more abstract), morphology and syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc. In other words, language has many aspects, so it is misleading to talk about language ability without specifying exactly what one is talking about.
Likewise, it is not particularly helpful to talk about the brain's capacity for language per se. Better to focus on the particular processes which language use requires, like hearing (or seeing in the case of reading); interpreting the raw data (identifying phonemes and lexemes, parsing, etc.) and so understanding; or speaking (which involves not only mentation but also a very complex sequence of fine motor processes).
Children with Williams syndrome are typically slow to start speaking. This is presumably related at least in part to their fine motor problems. Most reference sources say that older children and adults with WS speak fluently and grammatically and have a good concrete, practical vocabulary (though abstract vocabulary remains deficient).
I picked Williams syndrome to focus on in this post because of an anecdotal report I remembered reading about a profoundly retarded girl with WS who nonetheless had an unusually extensive vocabulary and was able to invent strikingly original stories and fantasies. But the more I read about Williams syndrome the more complicated - and equivocal - the picture looks.
For example, consider this (from a recent research report* abstract): 'Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder, often referred [to] as being characterized by dissociation between verbal and non-verbal abilities, although a number of studies disputing this proposal is emerging.'
And in their own study the researchers found significantly more speech disfluencies (hesitations, repetitions, pauses) in the WS group than in a typically-developing group.
So the lesson of my story is that everything concerning the human brain is likely to be more complicated than it seems, and that only scientific findings - rather than models or theories - can give specific answers to specific questions. Of course, science requires its models and theories, but they are always provisional, a means to an end.
And, in the context of such reflections, it is hardly surprising that I find myself becoming more and more skeptical about certain Chomskian assumptions which have been part of my mental furniture since I took a linguistics course taught by one of the Master's protégés a couple of decades ago.
* Rossi, N.F. et al. 'Analysis of speech fluency in Williams syndrome.' Res. Dev. Disabil. 32(6) (2011): 2957-62.
I don't really want to buy into the debate about various versions of modularity or other theories of mental functioning. For one thing, I don't know the science well enough. I don't have a theory, but I don't know that I need one either.
Which is not to say that it is not important to have a basic understanding of how our minds work. My point is that such an understanding needn't take the form of a theory. It may simply develop from a general (or specialist) knowledge of pertinent disciplines (such as psychology or linguistics), and as a considered response to various kinds of evidence. I am particularly interested in the evidence provided by injuries and genetic disorders which affect cognitive and emotional functioning.
Certain genetically-caused disorders and brain injuries seem to provide evidence that language is in some sense a distinct system - or rather a set of systems - even if it interacts (as it obviously does) with non-linguistic processes. How else can you account for people who have a language deficit but can think well in other respects, or, conversely, who may be seriously cognitively impaired and yet maintain excellent language abilities?
Take Williams syndrome, for instance. It is a genetic disorder characterized by a range of medical problems, developmental delays and learning disabilities. Children with this condition seek interaction with others but are very vulnerable as they lack normal caution and social understanding. They are typically unable to cope with numbers and abstract reasoning. They also have impaired gross and fine motor skills.
On the positive side, they often have an affinity for music (and perfect pitch). And they also tend to do well linguistically, at least in certain respects.
Williams syndrome, like so many other conditions which impact on brain function, is selective in its effects. If specific aspects of thinking are adversely affected while other specific aspects are not affected or are enhanced, then this certainly supports the view that the brain consists of many (interacting) systems and sub-systems.
Linguists, of course, see language from various points of view corresponding to various sub-disciplines: phonetics (where the focus is on the actual sounds of language), phonology (more abstract), morphology and syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc. In other words, language has many aspects, so it is misleading to talk about language ability without specifying exactly what one is talking about.
Likewise, it is not particularly helpful to talk about the brain's capacity for language per se. Better to focus on the particular processes which language use requires, like hearing (or seeing in the case of reading); interpreting the raw data (identifying phonemes and lexemes, parsing, etc.) and so understanding; or speaking (which involves not only mentation but also a very complex sequence of fine motor processes).
Children with Williams syndrome are typically slow to start speaking. This is presumably related at least in part to their fine motor problems. Most reference sources say that older children and adults with WS speak fluently and grammatically and have a good concrete, practical vocabulary (though abstract vocabulary remains deficient).
I picked Williams syndrome to focus on in this post because of an anecdotal report I remembered reading about a profoundly retarded girl with WS who nonetheless had an unusually extensive vocabulary and was able to invent strikingly original stories and fantasies. But the more I read about Williams syndrome the more complicated - and equivocal - the picture looks.
For example, consider this (from a recent research report* abstract): 'Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder, often referred [to] as being characterized by dissociation between verbal and non-verbal abilities, although a number of studies disputing this proposal is emerging.'
And in their own study the researchers found significantly more speech disfluencies (hesitations, repetitions, pauses) in the WS group than in a typically-developing group.
So the lesson of my story is that everything concerning the human brain is likely to be more complicated than it seems, and that only scientific findings - rather than models or theories - can give specific answers to specific questions. Of course, science requires its models and theories, but they are always provisional, a means to an end.
And, in the context of such reflections, it is hardly surprising that I find myself becoming more and more skeptical about certain Chomskian assumptions which have been part of my mental furniture since I took a linguistics course taught by one of the Master's protégés a couple of decades ago.
* Rossi, N.F. et al. 'Analysis of speech fluency in Williams syndrome.' Res. Dev. Disabil. 32(6) (2011): 2957-62.