The Science of Language (16 page)

There are other factors. I know from particular cases – I won’t mention any names – that there are distinguished figures who think it is necessary to accept this point of view to block religious fanaticism, and literally can’t see any difference between adopting what's called “
innatism” – meaning
scientific rationality [in the study of mind] – and belief in God.

NC:
That's my feeling. It's quite striking how sensible people, [even those] embedded in the sciences, just take a different approach toward human mental faculties and mental aspects of the world than they do to the rest. There's no issue of innatism regarding the development of the visual system in the individual; why is there an issue regarding cognitive growth and language's role in it? That's just
irrational.

NC:
. . . Those are
internal systems; they're something that's going on in your head and my head.

 

JM:
Those are internal systems. OK, but I'm trying to get clear about what role language has in contributing to agency, action. Let me put it this way: philosophers like to think of people as agents, as decision-makers who deliberate, who take into account various kinds of information and bring them to bear on making decisions in ways that satisfy desires, and the like. What about that notion of an agent? To a certain extent, it seems as though language is being given some of those roles (of gathering information, etc.)
.

NC:
Language can be conceived of as a tool for agents, for agency – whatever that is. It's Descartes's point, basically, that you can use your linguistic abilities to say anything you want about any topic which is in your conceptual range, but when you do it, you're acting as a human agent with a human will, whatever that is.

Most scientists tend to accept the
Cartesian dogma that only humans have this capacity, so that insects are automata. But we don't know that. If you ask the best theorists of ants why an ant decides at one point to turn left rather than right . . . well, the question can't even come up [for a scientific answer]. You can talk about the mechanisms, you can talk about the motivations, you can talk about the external and internal stimuli, but they don't predict what the ant's going to do. Maybe that's because we don't know enough and the ant's really an automaton. Or maybe we just haven't captured the notion of agency properly.

NC:
Well, it is
clearly a concept of common sense. So when Locke devoted a chapter to trying to figure out what a person is, he's discussing our commonsense understanding of what a person is. He's not discussing something in the outside world. He's discussing an internal, mental conception that we have. And it turns out to be a very strange one.

NC:
. . . his forensic notion. There is a chapter in the
Essay
, chapter 27 of the first book, or somewhere around there, where he devotes himself to explorations through thought experiments, asking – say – when would you say that somebody is the same person? Well, he basically concludes – what's quite plausible – that it's some manner of psychic continuity – that the whole body can change, and so on; but as long as it remains a continuous psychic entity, you think of it as the same person.

And he does raise questions to which there is probably no answer, such as what would we do if two bodies had exactly the same psychic constitution: is it one person, or two people? Or what about if one of them changed into the other? Well, at that point you're getting to places where our intuitions just break down. There's no reason whatsoever that our commonsense
intuitions should give answers to every question. There's a long tradition going back to Plato, Heraclitus, Plutarch, and on and on about the ship of
Theseus. Over the centuries, people have made up impossible conundrums about when we would say that it is the same ship. A standard thing that you learn in your philosophy 101 course is that if you keep replacing the planks at sea, it's the same ship, and if somebody takes those same planks that you threw away and makes a replica of the original ship, somehow it's not the same ship. You can make up case after case like this.

These questions were throughout history typically discussed as
metaphysical questions – so, is it the same ship, or thing in the world? Well, the ship is not a thing in the world to start with; it's a mental construction that, of course, relates to things in the world when we so use it. The thing that you're discussing is the mental construction. And that mental construction has some answers, but not other answers. And those answers don't really tell you a lot about metaphysics. They just tell us that that's the way we think about the world. We think about the world as involving certain kinds of continuities. They mean nothing to the physicist. As far as the physicist is concerned, if you take out a nail, it's a new ship.

Well, the physicist's way, that's not the way
we
think about it. All this shows that we're just inquiring into our own internal
conceptions, what we call common sense. It has a relation to the world, of course, but it's not the same thing. If these questions – what's the ship of Theseus, what's a person, what's a tree, and so on – if they're re-interpreted as they should be, cognitively, epistemologically rather than metaphysically, well, then, they can be explored as topics of cognitive science. What's the nature of our conceptual systems? And then we discover that it's true that persons have responsibilities and obligations, and trees don't. That's not because we made a discovery about the world. It's because that's the way we think about the world. Persons, apart from infants and the mentally ill, and so on, have responsibilities, deserve praise and censure, and so on, and a dog doesn't, unless you personify it. Is it because we've discovered something metaphysical? Well, there may be something metaphysical underlying that – in fact, there probably is – but that's not what we discover. We discover that this is the way we look at creatures. And in fact, if you go back in pretty recent history – say, again, the seventeenth or eighteenth century, when a lot of these topics really became alive – people are really confused about whether we regard, say, orangutans and negroes as persons. They seemed more or less the same, and they weren't like us; they're creatures of some kind. Were any of them persons? Were all of them persons? You get huge debates about all this because the internal concept
PERSON just isn't going to carry you very far in figuring out how the world works – just as [Descartes's] contact mechanics carried you pretty far, but not past Newton, who showed you can't figure out how physical objects [as understood by contact mechanics] work.

This goes right on into contemporary philosophy. A crucial, exciting topic in contemporary philosophy is [still] Kripkean essentialism –
Putnam's version – which is based on questions like is water H
₂
O? Well, it's like your intuitions about the ship of Theseus. You have whatever you have. It's not going to tell you anything about H
₂
O (the stuff described by scientists) any more than talk about the ship of Theseus is going to tell you about ships from a physicist's point of view. It's telling you about how you look at and interpret the world. And these discussions are particularly odd, for one thing, because the alleged intuitions are mostly inside a philosophical cocoon. People have to be trained to have those intuitions by taking graduate courses in philosophy. And also it's very unclear what the
intuitions are even supposed to be about. So take the sentence,
water is H
₂
O
; that's the core sentence of the whole discussion. We've all learned – or maybe we've been taught – that a sentence has no meaning outside a language. So what language is this sentence in? It's got to be in some language. Well, it's not English. English doesn't have [the concept] H
₂
O in it; that's an invented concept that you bring into English.
It's not a sentence of physics, or chemistry, because they don't have the concept WATER. It's true that when a chemist writes an article, he or she will use the word
water
, but he or she's using informal discourse. You're not doing everything in a precise formalism, even if you're doing mathematics. But chemistry has no concept WATER; it has a concept of H
₂
O, and you can informally call it “water,” if you like, but WATER is not a concept of chemistry. So the sentence is not chemistry, it's not English, it's not French, it's not German; in fact, it's no language at all. It's some amalgam of languages – or rather, symbolic systems and languages – that we pick up. But we can't have any intuitions about things like that. It's meaningless. It's like having intuitions about quantum physics. So far as I can see, the entire discussion on all sides is basically vacuous. And that's a primary theme in contemporary analytic philosophy. It's just not about anything.[C]

NC:
Sure. You can investigate [the concept] H
₂
O. We don't know the answers. We know
how
to do it. We try to place it in an explanatory framework that we make as precise as circumstances require. There's no point in formalizing beyond the level of understanding that we have. And then we work within that. That's the way the sciences have always been.

Take, say,
mathematics, the clearest case. We all know very well that up until the mid-nineteenth century, when a large part of the great mathematics was done, they didn't even define their concepts. No one had a clear notion of limit. Gauss was proving all these magnificent theorems where a limit just meant ‘getting closer and closer to.’ In fact,
Berkeley was finding contradictions in
Newton's proofs – a topic that English mathematicians took seriously, standing in the way of progress. One line of the proof treats zero as zero, and three lines later, it treats zero as something that you can get as close to as you want. Those are different concepts, so it's equivocation; the proof is based on an equivocation – it doesn't show anything. Well, on the continent, mathematicians knew it and didn't pay much attention to it and went ahead developing rich mathematics. Finally mathematics got to the point where you just had to understand what a limit is; you couldn't get along any more on these
intuitive conceptions. So you get delta-epsilon definitions, Weirstrauss, Cauchy, and so on. OK, at that point, you know what a limit is. But you know it because it's been made explicit. And so it continues. Euclid in a sense had a real geometry. But it wasn't formalized until thousands of years later.

JM:
But then to investigate the concepts of science, in effect, you learn the science
.

NC:
You learn the science, and you try to get as close as you can to a proper kind of scientific theory, whatever that means. We have all sorts of intuitive criteria that we use all the time to decide whether this is or is not a sensible
scientific explanation.

NC:
I think that there should be. Here is where I tend to disagree with the line of thinking that
Sue Carey (
1987
,
2009
) is developing, although she could be right; I don't really know. Her basic position is that there's nothing new to say about how science is done; it's just more of the same. It's a more sophisticated version of what children are doing when they learn how to build houses out of blocks. Maybe; but my guess is that it's something quite different. There is a science-
forming capacity that is – to
some
extent – put to use throughout human history when people make up mythological stories about creation or engage in magic – the transition between magic and science is not so clear. But it takes on a very different form in the modern period when it becomes a very self-conscious endeavor, trying to establish both empirical and epistemological criteria it's supposed to meet. It may change; it's not fixed. But at least it's being pursued as a systematic effort to gain a certain kind of explanation and insight. You can't just tell stories about something; you have to show that those stories have some substance. That's why so much talk about evolution is basically uninteresting; it's just stories. It could have happened that way; it could have happened twenty different ways. You don't know how to formulate the question in such a way that you could answer it. That's storytelling – in the
framework of scientific ideas, but still storytelling. If you're serious about it, you try to prove it. Instead of just concocting stories, try to figure out ways in which you can study it [and get evidence for it]. And it's not so
simple.