The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

In the first chapter I introduced four ideas:
*The human mind can construe a particular scenario in multiple ways.
*Each construal is built around a few basic ideas, like "event," "cause," "change," and "intend."
*These ideas can be extended metaphorically to other domains, as when we count events as if they were objects or when we use space as a metaphor for time.
*Each idea has distinctively human quirks that make it useful for reasoning about certain things but that can lead to fallacies and confusions when we try to apply it more broadly.
--26

. . . .inspired Bertolt Brecht's "Questions from a Worker Who Reads":
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
--68

Though linguists often theorize about a language as if it were the fixed protocol of a homogeneous community of idealized speakers, like the physicists frictionless plane and ideal gas, they also know that a real language is constantly being pushed and pulled at the margins by different speakers in different ways. -74

"Put the new material last" and "Put the heave material last" are two of the most important guidelines for good style in writing and speaking. -74

It is the same strategy that wine dealers use when they stock an exorbitantly priced bottle on every rack. They know that insecure buyers gravitate to the middle of the range, so if there's a hundred-dollar bottle on display, they'll go for the thirty-dollar bottle, whereas if the most expensive bottle had cost thirty dollars, they'd maybe have been content to spend ten. -90

What is this meaning component? The computational linguist James Pustejovsky argues that Aristotle got it right when he proposed that the mind understands every entity in terms of four causes: who or what brought it about; what it's made of; what shape it has; and what it's for. -116

Let me say at the outset that language surely affects thought--at the very least, if one person's words didn't affect another person's thoguhts, language as a whole would be useless. The question is whether language determines thought--whether the language we speak makes it difficult or impossible to think certain thoughts, or alters the way we think in surprising or consequential ways. -125

I suspect that the dollop of additional retrievability and manipulability that a concept gains when it has its own word is a version of the Whorfian hypothesis that has a grain of truth to it and is not completely boring. But it is a far cry from Linguistic Determinism. -129

So one way in which language has to affect thought is that speakers attend to different things as they select words and assemble them into a sentence--an effect called "thinking for speaking." They question is whether a lifelong habit of attending to certain distinction and ignoring others spills over into tinking ofr thinking--that is, reasoning about objects and events for purposes other than just describing them. -132

A genuine demonstration of linguistic determinism would have to show three things. The first would be that hte speakers of one language find it impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to think in a particular way that comes naturally to the speakers of another language (as opposed to merely being less in the habit of thinking that way). Another would be that the difference in thinking involves genuine reasoning, leaving speakers incapable of solving a problem or befuddled in paradox, rather than merely tilting their subjective impressions in inkblot-style judgments. And most important, the difference in thinking must be caused by the language, rather than from other reasons and simply being reflected in the language, and rather than both the language and the thought pattern being an effect of the surrounding culture or environment. -135-36

One of the major discoveries in memory research is that people have poor memories for teh exact sentences that gave them their knowledge. This amnesia for form, however, does not prevent them from retaining the gist of what they have heard or read. 149

Kant's version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version that is most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskyan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. -160

Head-scratching about holes-real things in the mind, nothings in reality--is not just an occupational hazard of linguists and philosophers. A hole can be the answer to brainteasers like "What's the only thing you can put in a bucket that will make it lighter?" and "The more you take from me, the bigger I grow; what am I?" They are the source of trick questions, like "How much dirt is in a hole six feet wide, eight feet deep, and five feet long?" (Answer: None.) -181

The future tense is often used by flight attendants and waitstaff at fancy restaurants as a display of politeness. It pretends not to foreclose any possibilities, as if the listener's approval will be solicited at every stage, before anything is set in stone. As we shall see in chapter 8, it is an example of a common tactic of politeness in the world's languages: Pretend to give the listener options. -197

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. . . .
One solution to the webbiness of causation is a technique in artificial intelligence called Causal Bayes Networks. -215

[Causal Bayes Networks involve multiple variables that each influence the others in more than one way. Setting them up is a nightmare. Once it is set, it would be brilliant.]

Another fallout of the metaphor metaphor is the phenomenon of framing. Many disagreements in human affairs turn not on differences in data or logic but on how a problem is framed. We see this when adversaries "talk past each other" or when understanding something requires a "paradigm shift." -243

Even by these standards, Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor is a lollapalooza. If he is right, conceptual metaphor can do everything from overturning twenty-five hundred years of misguided reliance on truth and objectivity in Western thought to putting a Democrat in the White House. . . .
I think Lakoff takes the idea a wee bit too far. -246-47

Moving from philosophy to psychology, we discover a big problem with the claim that most of our thinking is metaphorical: people effortlessly transcend the metaphors implicit in their language. I have already mentioned the killjoy's point that many, if not most, conceptual metaphors are opaque to current speakers. -248

So the ubiquity of metaphor in language does not mean that all thought is grounded in bodily experience, nor that all ideas are merely rival frames rather than verifiable propositions. Conceptual metaphors can be learned and used only if they are analyzed into more abstract elements like "cause," "goal," and "change," which make up the real currency of thought. And the methodical use of metaphor in science shows that metaphor is a way of adapting language to reality, not the other way around, and that it can capture genuine laws in the world, not just project comfortable images onto it. -259

Language, by its very design, would seem to be a tool with a well-defined and limited functionality. With a finite stock of arbitrary signs, and grammatical rules that arrange them in sentences, a language gives us the means to share an unlimited number of combinations of ideas about who did what to whom, and about what is where. Yet by digitizing the world, language is a "lossy" medium, discarding information about the smooth multidimensional texture of experience. Language is notoriously poor, for instance, at conveying the subtlety and richness of sensations like smells and sounds. And it would seem to be just as inept at conveying other channels of sentience that are not composed out of discrete, accessible parts. Flashes of holistic insight (like those in mathematical or musical creativity), waves of consuming emotion, and moments of wistful contemplation are simply not the kinds of experience that can be captured by the beads-on-a-string we call sentences. -276-77


Language is a medium that is public and digital, and so must hide the aspects of our experience that are private and smoothly blended: our sensations, our emotions, our inklings and intuitions, and the choreography of our bodies. Still, we are gregarious animals who like to teach and gossip and boss one another around, and few aspects of our lives are unaffected by our dealings with other people. As the channel in which much of this information is trafficked, language is adapted to every feature of our experience that is sharable with others, and a large part of the human condition falls into its purview. -427

Humans construct an understanding of the world that is very different from the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them. They package their experience into objects and events. They assemble these objects and events into propositions, which they take to be characterizations of real and possible worlds. The characterizations are highly schematic: they pick out some aspects of a situation and ignore others, allowing the same situation to be construed in multiple ways. People, thereby can disagree about what a given situation really is even when they agree on how matter has moved through space. -428

Humans have a primitive concept of number, which distinguishes only one, two, and many, though they can also estimate larger quantities approximately. -429

Humans are touchy about their relationships. They maintain a "face" which emboldens them to stake out claims in negotiation and conflict. They are sensitive to their social rank, and also to their solidarity and empathy with others. With some of their fellows--typically kin, lovers, and friends--humans share resources, freely extend favors, and feel ties of empathy and closeness, which they blur with an intuition of being one flesh. With other people, they jockey for dominance, or show off their status, entitling them to teh exercise of power or influence. With still others, they trade goods and services on a tit-for-tat basis, or divide things and responsibilities into even portions. -432

People are not handcuffed to a single metaphor when thinking about something but can switch among them, sifting them for hte best match between the relations among the concepts in the metaphor and the relations among the things they are trying to understand. -437

The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations. --439