Pooh’s Think

George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is back in the news.  Mind Hacks has directed attention  to the recent article ‘Tongue Twisters’, published by the The Economist December 17th. Mid-stream, the article modestly notes Lakoff’s memorable contribution to the intellectual history of the 20th century:

 Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”.

 But one cannot mention Lakoff without also mentioning the orthodox:

A fierce debate exists in linguistics between those, such as Noam Chomsky, who think that all languages function roughly the same way in the brain and those who do not. The latter view was propounded by Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist of the early 20th century, who argued that different languages condition or constrain the mind’s habits of thought.

 Whorfianism has been criticised for years, but it has been making a comeback. Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University, for example [you can see Boroditsky recently discussed at Newsweek here  -MPM ], points to the Kuuk Thaayorre, aboriginals of northern Australia who have no words for “left” or “right”, using instead absolute directions such as “north” and “south-east” (as in “You have an ant on your south-west leg”). Ms Boroditsky says that any Kuuk Thaayorre child knows which way is south-east at any given time, whereas a roomful of Stanford professors, if asked to point south-east quickly, do little better than chance. The standard Kuuk Thayoorre greeting is “where are you going?”, with an answer being something like “north-north-east, in the middle distance.” Not knowing which direction is which, Ms Boroditsky notes, a Westerner could not get past “hello”. Universalists retort that such neo-Whorfians are finding trivial surface features of language: the claim that language truly constricts thinking is still not proven.

The author of this article (I cannot find the author’s name) provides evidence for the fact that language does indeed constrict thinking, and references to Lakoff, Boroditsky, and Whorf are not counterbalanced by the hat tipped to Chomsky. Even this tipped hat is a gesture too kind, veiling what is really no kindness at all. Coyly left unsaid – a quality of good journalism I have come to appreciate – is the fact that a universal language of thought is more strikingly “not proven” than its competitor. 

Yet, I would wish to frame the issue a little differently.  I do agree that language constrains thought. Inserting oneself into another language community will constrain how one will or must think.  And it seems right that language development will form ways of thinking particular to that language. As Boroditsky concludes in Cognitive Psychology 43, 1–22 (2001): “When sensory information is scarce or inconclusive (as with the direction of motion of time), languages may play the most important role in shaping how their speakers think.”  Alternatively, the experience of speaking and hearing a language can influence overall ‘world view’, for lack of a better word – an idea I had years ago as my dark, inner warrior came alive to the tune of my friend’s recitation of Homer’s Illiad in the original language.

But what currently appears to me a more important point is that observable language provides evidence for the sort of cognition responsible for producing and sustaining it. So I would want to emphasize the photo-negative of Boroditsky’s thesis: the culturally developed mind/brain constricts what form of language is observed. In other words, thought conditions speech, at least as much as speech conditions thought. Whether or not the chicken comes before the egg is here an empirical question. Boroditsky (2001) does not address this question, but she does provide reason to consider it relevant. For example, the age of acquisition determines the extent to which a Mandarin’s concept of time is influenced by learning English (Mandarins speak more often of time along the vertical axis than English speakers). This suggests that once a conceptual system is in place, language acquisition might have little influence (although, Boroditsky does provide mitigating evidence here to preserve her original thesis). But regardless, the mature conceptual system will continue to produce the form of language that originally evidenced that very conceptual system, a point I will return to momentarily.

Boroditsky appears to agree that a direct, universal experience of the world provides the semantic grounding of any language, whereas language and other cultural conventions, such as direction of reading (the Mandarin read along the vertical axis), determine the unique features of more abstract thought. So in reality, Boroditsky has shown that language is one powerful environmental influence on how we think, whereas I want to emphasize that language is likewise a powerful source of empirical data that provide evidence for the more general cognitive mechanisms language makes use of.  ”Language is, after all”, as Lakoff put it, “an aspect of cognition” (1987, 21). Lakoff expands the point later: “Linguistic categories, like conceptual categories, show prototype effects . . . I take the existence of such effects as prima facie evidence that linguistic categories have the same character as other conceptual categories” (67).

Speaking of Lakoff, women, and other sundry dangerous things, I make further note of how our basic-level domain of experience grounds, metaphorically (metaphorically speaking), higher level cognition, as this article from The Economist evinces:   

The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.

I have pictures of myself while naked (and three years old) peeling bark from a large pine tree, and I think it probable that this experience, hardwired into my brain (and perhaps body), has helped me conceive of the disintegration of asteroids as they plummet through the earth’s atmosphere and of the force binding the negative and positive charges of a penny (separate them the diameter of the earth and still, even given the inverse proportionality of distance and force, we are left with thousands of tons of pressure – from what I recollect anyway).  More strikingly here: the cultural attire of baggy trousers and the adverse effects of getting plywood wet are conceptualized, as evidenced by an observable noun class, in terms of this basic level experience with trees and bark. But these Tuyuca users were not poetic softies. If you are a user of Tuyuca you are constrained to be more of a scientist and a philosopher than 80 percent of the current U.S. population:

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

______________

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) offered a fresh understanding of an old saying: Life is a journey. Well, to travel back up into the article a bit we can land on a section that has something to teach us a bit more about this fact:

Slavic languages force speakers, when talking about the past, to say whether an action was completed or not. . . And to say “go” requires different Slavic verbs for going by foot, car, plane, boat or other conveyance. For Russians or Poles, the journey does matter more than the destination.

When asking someone from Ojibwa how they got to the party, they would say something like “I stepped into a canoe” (Lakoff, 78). In addition to metonymy this might show a conceptual similarly with people speaking Slavic languages, in contrast with the American’s life: ‘I do not know how I am going to get there, baby, but I am on my way.’  It might prove fruitful to formulate some experiments comparing different language communities’ abstract use of both vehicle of travel and destination.

Posted by metzler on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, at 8:41 pm.
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