Lecture 05

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Our Next Big Problem

Recall from the previous lecture (yesterday) that our Next Big Problem is this. We've said that infants' competence with causes, objects and colours is not knowledge but something more primitive than knowledge, something involving perceptual processes, such as categorical perception. These processes exist in adults too and can carry information discrepant with what they know.

The Next Big Problem is, How does appealing to these early-developing capacities enable us to explain the origins of knowledge?

social interaction

My proposal is that the answer hinges on social interaction. Early developing capacities to deal with objects, causes, colours and the rest enable the emergence of knowledge only in combination with rich forms of social interaction.

But what are these forms of social interaction and how do they work? This is the question that will occupy us in the next lectures (today and tomorrow).

In the previous lecture (on categorical perception) I sketched a very rough answer. The idea is that categorical perception--and the perceptual processes associated with infants' capacities to deal with objects and causes--are important because they provide phenomenal markers. They do not reveal that there something has a certain categorical colour property, or that an event is a certain type of causal interaction. But they do allow infants to discriminate between these things. They are, if you like, highlighted in their experience, but not in a way that reveals their nature.

A key part of this picture is that these capacities only support the emergence of knowledge about objects or colours or causes in connection with social interaction and language. It is now time to consider the language part of this ...

Communication with Words: A Question

Linguistic communication is 'the indispensable instrument of fine-grained interpersonal understanding' (Davidson 1990: 326). It enables us to pool knowledge and coordinate our actions. Possessing language also allows us to share our lives in ways far more intimate than we could manage without it.

Today's question is,

How do humans first come to communicate with words?

This question is complex because language is complex ...

It is also complex because we're starting at the far end of a chain. You might think, before we ask about communication with words we should ask about communicative actions, and before we ask about communicative actions we should ask about actions. I wondered about aproaching it that way too, starting with action and working up. But in the end I thought that right now you most of you are probably most interested in language, so most of you would probably find it most interesting to go backwards.

There is reason to doubt that we can seriously discuss the nature of humans' abilities to communicate at all. Chomsky holds that ‘the topic of successful communication in the actual world is far too complex and obscure’ to say anything systematic about (Chomsky 1992: 120). It’s a mistake, he thinks, to try to understand language by focussing on communication (compare Chomsky 2000: 30).

‘the topic of successful communication in the actual world is far too complex and obscure’

(Chomsky 1992: 120)

I think Chomsky’s challenge is a serious one. We don't need to debate whether Chomsky is right. We merely need to note that, right now, not very much is actually known about the nature of communication with words.

So we are asking about the development of abilities to communicate with words, even though we know much too little even about what it is to communcaite with words.

If we are to make the topic of communiation with words tractabale at all, we must start by breaking the question down. To this end we need to ask,

What are the components of an utterance?

The truth is extremely complex.

But we need only a relatively simple picture ...

Consider an utterance of sentence like 'Isabel slept and Lily cried'. What is the structure of this utterance? First we can break the sentence down into two sentences and a connective. Then we break these into words. And the words break down into phonemes. Which are eventually realised in continous bodily movements and the sounds these produce.

This is a very simplified picture. But already we can see that comprehending an utterance will involve several steps.

Consider someone experiencing linguistic communication for the first time. She is experiences continuous bodily movements and their acoustic consequences. From these she has somehow to extract the phonetic gestures. And then she has to group the phonetic gestures into words. And finally she has to work out the syntactic structure of the words.

It turns out that the abilitues to make these different steps involves largely different mechanisms, and that the steps can be made independently of each other (not that there aren’t bottom-up and top-down effects, just that these appear to be inessential in some cases). Our question can be broken down accordingly.

Our question, How do humans first come to communicate with words? We can break the process of language comprehension into a series of transitions, from bodily movements and their acoustic effects to phonemes, etc. And we can think of language production as involving the same transitions, but in reverse. And then our question can be broken down accordingly.

We don't have to ask how humans come to have abilities to communicate by language all in one go. Instead we can ask how humans come to be able to identify phonemes in continous bodily movements and their acoustic effects, and how they come to identify words from uninterrupted sequences of phonemes, and so on. In this way, our question becomes tractable.

So our question,

How do humans first come to communicate with words?

Is much to large a question to consider. What I am going to--and what many researchers have done--is to focus on 1-word utterances. This means (a) ignoring syntactic structure; and (b) taking for granted that infants can identify various utterances of a particular word as actions of a single type. In effect, then, we are focussing on meaning in its simplest form.

This is not to say that questions about syntax, phoneme recognition and the rest are unimportant. On the contrary, if I had more time I would devote a lecture to each of these.

Preview: Shipwreck Survivor vs Lab Rat

\subsection{How do children acquire words?}

How do humans first come to communicate with words?

Two models:

shipwreck survivor
lab rat

shipwreck survivor:

‘children learn words through the exercise of reason’ (\citealp[p.\ 1103]{Bloom:2001ka}; see \citealp{Bloom:2000qz})

(Bloom 2001, p. 1103)

‘Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak.’

\citep[15--16, §32]{Wittgenstein:1953mm}

(Wittgenstein 1953, p. 15--16, §32)

Does the view Wittgenstein is attacking sound like a mere caricature? Bloom explicitly endorses it, noting that ‘Augustine’s proposal is no longer seen as the goofy idea that it once was’ \citep[p.\ 61]{Bloom:2000qz}.

Both pictures miss social interaction. On one picture the infant is an outsider who might as well be observing those around her through a telescope. On the other picture the child is a blank to be shaped by those around her. There is no meaningful interaction between the infant and adults around her; or, if there is, it makes no difference to her development. But could there be a role for social interaction in learning the meanings of words?

social interaction

We can tell that both pictures are missing something important by noting the role of creativity in childrens' (and adults') uses of words.

Children acquiring language create their own words before they learn to use those of the adults around them.

‘Some children are so impatient that they coin their own demonstrative pronoun. For instance, at the age of about 12 months, Max would point to different objects and say “doh?,” some¬times with the intent that we do something with the objects, such as bring them to him, and sometimes just wanting us to appreciate their existence’

(\citealp[p.\ 122]{Bloom:2000qz}; see further \citealp{Clark:1981bi,Clark:1982hj}).

Even where children have mastered a lexical convention, they will readily violate it in their own utterances in order to get a point across.

‘From the time they first use words until they are about two or two-and-a-half, children noticeably and systematically overextend words. For example, one child used the word “apple” to refer to balls of soap, a rubber-ball, a ball-lamp, a tomato, cherries, peaches, strawberries, an orange, a pear, an onion, and round biscuits’

\citep[p.\ 35]{Clark:1993bv}

children create and creatively adapt words before (and after) learning those of the adults around them

INVESTIGATOR: what is that called?

SHEM: dat's uh vam.

INVESTIGATOR: a vam?

SHEM: yeah.

INVESTIGATOR: why is it called a vam?

SHE: it vams all duh room ups all the water up ...

source: Eve Clark's CHILDES data

(Clark 1982; MacWhinney 2000)

Children with no experience of others' languages can create their own languages.

\citep{Kegl:1999es,Senghas:2001zm,Goldin-Meadow:2003pj}

We know this from studies of profoundly deaf children brought up in purely oral environments and therefore without experience of language (Goldin-Meadow 2003; Kegl, Senghas and Coppola 1999; Senghas and Coppola 2001).

Individually or in groups these children invent their own signed languages.

These languages are not as rich as those of children with experience of other people's languages but they have all of the essential features of language including lexicons and syntax (Goldin-Meadow 2002, 2003).

The children invent gesture forms for words which they use with the same meanings in different contexts, they adopt standard orderings for combining words into sentences, and they use sentences in constructing narratives about past, present, future and hypothetical events. Thus one profoundly deaf child, Qing, describes how swordfish can poke a person so that she dies, and how they have long, straight noses and can swim (Goldin-Meadow 2003: 170).

Children with no experience of others' languages can create their own languages.

I started this section by contrasting two views on lexical acquisition, the shipwreck survivor view and the lab rat view.

We've seen that neither is the whole truth because children learn in part through a process of creation.

Why is this interesting?

The creative activity is a rational, goal-directed activity; so it's not merely training.

The creative activity does not obviously involve mapping words onto concepts, or even having the concepts.

(After all, the child might try out a pattern of use that others see as appropriate for a concept before the child actually has that concept.)

And this creativity with words involves social interaction: the aim is coordination between two or more individuals.

So:

Language acquisition is neither merely a matter of training, nor merely a matter of reasoning about the meanings of words. Rather, it involves social interaction from the first utterances of words.

How do humans first come to communicate with words?

outline:

the lab rat
why the lab rat view is wrong
the shipwreck survivor
why the shipwreck survivor is wrong
a problem

The problem is that we don't have a good answer to our question, How do humans first come to communicate with words?

Does being able to think depend on being able to communicate with language?

Our question is, How do humans first come to communicate using words?

I want to step back from this question to consider an argument about thought and language.

Here's an argument to show that being able to think depends on (or is interdependent with) being able to communicate by language.

I take this argument from Davidson.

\begin{enumerate}

\item

If someone can think, she must be capable of having a false belief.

\item

To be capable of having a false belief it is necessary to understand the possibility of false belief.

\item

Understanding the possibility of false belief entails being able to communicate by language.

\end{enumerate}

Conclusion:

If someone can think, she can communicate with language.

This premise seems straightforward to me.

Note that by think we mean desire, intend, wish, guess, believe ...

There's a quote on your handout in support of this.

'belief is central to all kinds of thought. If someone is glad that, or notices that, or remembers that, or knows that, the gun is loaded, then he must believe that the gun is loaded. Even to wonder whether the gun is loaded, or to speculate on the possibility that the gun is loaded, requires belief, for example, that a gun is a weapon, that it is a more or less enduring physical object, and so on. … it is necessary that there be endless interlocked beliefs'

\citep[p.\ 157]{Davidson:1975eq}; cf. \citep[pp.\ 320--1]{Davidson:1982je}

Why accept the second premise of the argument? Consider Davidson's reasoning:

Why accept the second premise of the argument, that to be capable of having a false belief it is necessary to understand the possibility of false belief?

Here is Davidson's reasoning ...

‘We, observing and describing … a creature …, say that it discriminates certain shapes, objects, colors, and so forth, by which we mean that it reacts in ways we find similar to shapes, objects, and colors which we find similar.

But we would be making a mistake if we were to assume that because the creature discriminates and reacts in much the way we do, that it has the corresponding concepts.

The difference, as I keep emphasizing, lies in the fact that we, unlike the creature I am describing, can, from our point of view, make mistakes in classification.’

Davidson (2001: 11)

\citep[p.\ 11]{Davidson:2001np}

Here's an analogy for Davidson's argument.

I think it would be appropriate to say the yellers and stampers are making a mistake only if they themselves can see things that way.

I suggest that Davidson's claim is based on a similar intuition.

Note that the analogy I've offered isn't an argument for Davidson's claim.

At most, it's a challenge to someone who rejects it.

If you reject the premise, then you have to explain what makes it appopriate to assign blame or apply correctness conditions.

‘We, observing and describing … a creature …, say that it discriminates certain shapes, objects, colors, and so forth, by which we mean that it reacts in ways we find similar to shapes, objects, and colors which we find similar.

But we would be making a mistake if we were to assume that because the creature discriminates and reacts in much the way we do, that it has the corresponding concepts.

The difference, as I keep emphasizing, lies in the fact that we, unlike the creature I am describing, can, from our point of view, make mistakes in classification.’

Davidson (2001: 11)

So here's the argument again.

If someone can think, she must be capable of having a false belief.
To be capable of having a false belief it is necessary to understand the possibility of false belief.
Understanding the possibility of false belief entails being able to communicate by language.

Conclusion:

If someone can think, she can communicate with language.

So far we've considered the first two premises.

What about the third premise?

This is really difficult.

I'd happily spend a lecture on it, but that would take us too far from the question that occupies us today.

So let me, for now at least, just put the claim in Davidson's own words ...

‘we grasp the concept of truth only when we can communicate the contents---the propositional contents---of the shared experience, and this requires language’

Davidson 1997, p. 27

\citep[p.\ 27]{Davidson:1997wj}.

Now just focus on the conclusion.

Recall that our overall question is, How do humans first come to communicate by language?

The conclusion of this argument provides one answer: Not by means of thinking.

To see what this rules out, consider this view from Higginbotham ...

two directions

Let me be clear about what I'm saying.

There are two claims ...

If someone can think, she can communicate with language.
Acquiring language involves thinking from the start.

I am saying that if the first is true, the second is false.

If 1, then not 2.

So if Davidson is right, we know something about how langauges are not acquired.

But I'm not saying that Davidson is right.

Indeed, there is a remarkable lack of convincing argument for (1) and claims like it.

I am also saying that if the second is true, the first is false.

If 2, then not 1.

So one way to argue that Davidson's position must be wrong would be to argue that acquiring language involves thinking from the start.

I want to consider this direction first.

Suppose Davidson is right. Can we give a plausible account of language acquisition?

Training

For now I'm assuming that Davidson is right that somoene who can think communicate with language.

What account of language acquisition is consistent with this assumption?

A clue is given by Davidson ...

‘The ability to discriminate, to act differentially in the face of clues to the presence of food, danger or safety, is present in all animals and does not require reason. Nor does the learning, even of complex routines, require reason, for it is possible to learn how to act without learning that anything is the case.’

\citep[p.\ 326]{Davidson:1982je}

Davidson (1982b, 326); cf. (1995c, 207)

So we might suppose that acquiring a language involves learning how to act without learning that anything is the case.

This is the general idea. How can we make it concrete?

Our question is, How do humans first come to communicate using words?

Let's start with Bertrand Russell.

‘A child learning to speak is learning habits and associations which are just as much determined by the environment as the habit of expecting dogs to bark and cocks to crow’

\citep[p.\ 71]{Russell:1921ww}

(Russell 1921, p. 71)

But how does the environment determine habits and associations?

Wittgenstein suggests that the habits are determined by training.

‘[t]he child learns this language from the grown-ups by being trained to its use. I am using the word ‘trained’ in a way strictly analogous to that in which we talk of an animal being trained to do certain things. It is done by means of example, reward, punishment, and suchlike’

\citep[p.\ 77]{Wittgenstein:1972lj}

(Wittgenstein 1972, p. 77).

But how does this training work?

But now what are these habits and associations?

One answer is suggested by Quine.

‘the child’s early learning of a verbal response depends on society's reinforcement of the response in association with the stimulations that merit the response’

(\citep[p.\ 82]{Quine:1960fe}; compare \citep[pp.\ 28--9]{Quine:1974rd})

(Quine 1960, p. 82)

So this is the picture.

For each word, there is a set of 'stimulations' in response to which an utterance of that word would be appropriate.

For instance, we might suppose there's a set of banana stimulations in response to which an utterance of the word 'banana' would be appropriate.

The child then comes to use the word 'banana' in response to the bananana-stimuluations by means of being trained.

She is rewarded for using 'banana' correctly or punished for using it incorrectly (or both) and so she gradually zeros in on the correct pattern of use.

infant

stimulations -> utter 'nana'

rat

stimulations -> press lever

This seems to be approximately Davidson's own view.

‘Before we have an idea of truth or error, before the advent of concepts or propositional thought,

‘there is a rudiment of communication in the simple discovery that sounds produce results. Crying is the first step toward language when crying is found to procure one or another form of relief or satisfaction. More specific sounds, imitated or not, are rapidly associated with more specific pleasures.

Here use //p. 71// would be meaning, if anything like intention and meaning were in the picture.

‘A large further step has been taken when the child notices that others also make distinctive sounds at the same time the child is having the experiences that provoke its own volunteered sounds. For the adult, these sounds have a meaning, perhaps as one word sentences. The adult sees herself as doing a little ostensive teaching: “Eat,” “Red,” “Ball,” “Mamma,” “Milk,” “No.” There is now room for what the adult views as error: the child says “Block” when it is a slab. This move fails to be rewarded, and the conditioning becomes more complex’

(Davidson 2000: 70-1; see also Davidson 1999: 11).

\citep[pp.\ 70--1]{Davidson:2000mt}

Understanding

For now I'm assuming that Davidson is right that anyone who can think communicate with language.

I've just been asking, What account of language acquisition is consistent with this assumption?

The answer was: some kind of training.

One problem for this view is that training does not seem sufficient.

To see why, let's ask paraphrase a famous question of Michael Dummett's (What do I know when I know a language?) and ask:

What do I know or understand when I can communicate with language?

What training gets you is just an ability to use words in certain circumstances.

But communicating with language seems to involve more than this.

It seems to involve understanding.

This, anyway, seems to be Davidson's view:

‘You can deceive yourself into thinking that the child is talking if it makes sounds which, if made by a genuine language-user, would have a definite meaning.

’ … If a mouse had vocal cords of the right sort, you could train it to say “Cheese”. But that word would not have a meaning when uttered by the mouse, nor would the mouse understand what it “said”.’

Davidson 1999: 11

\citep[p.\ 11]{Davidson:1999ju}

This is just a hint, but I take it that Davidson is suggesting that communicating with language involves being able to understand what you've said.

And merely being trained in the ways Russel, Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson envisage clearly doesn't provide any understanding at all.

I think this point is nicely made but Dummett.

I want to outline Dummett's view in three quotes.

There's no argument here. I just think Dummett has hit on a datum about communication with language.

'to attribute to a speaker no more than knowledge of how to play … interlocking language games is to make him a participant in an activity he cannot survey (‘cannot see what is going on’).'

Dummett (1979: 224)

\citep[p.\ 224]{Dummett:1979fb}

Understanding a word can’t be purely a practical ability because this would ‘render mysterious our capacity to know whether we are understanding.’

Dummett (1991: 93)

\citep[p.\ 93]{Dummett:1991yj}

Language is ‘a rational activity on the part of creatures to whom can be ascribed intention and purpose’. So we need to distinguish ‘those regularities of which a language speaker, acting as a rational agent engaged in conscious, voluntary action, makes use from those that may be hidden from him.’

Dummett (1978: 104)

\citep[p.\ 104]{Dummett:1978zv}

I'll probably skip this, but it's a good example of the magic moment view.

It's also an interesting case where a serious philosopher says something which is empirically testable and where there no evidence for it but quite good evidence against it.

‘A child at this stage has no linguistic knowledge but merely a training in certain linguistic practices. When he has reached a stage at which it is possible for him to lie, his utterances will have ceased to be merely responses to features of his environment or to experienced needs. They will have become purposive actions based upon a knowledge of their significance to others.’

Dummett (1991:95)

\citep[p.\ 95]{Dummett:1991ug}

So what am I saying?

Communicating with language involves being able to understand what you've said.
Being trained in how words are used does not enable one to understand what would be said in uttering those words.

Conclusion:

We cannot fully explain how humans become able to communicate with language by appeal to training.

Note that this is a point about suffiency. It's not an objection, but it is a lacuna.

And it's a lacuna that's hard to fill

It seems like, on this view, there has to be a magic moment when all that training somehow turns into the expression of thought.

Let me put this another way.

On this view, there is a gap between rat-like abilities to use words and thoughtful expression.

And no good account of how the gap could be crossed.

But this isn't the worst problem for the view. Creativing is a far worse problem ...

‘Whenever I think I understand what he [Davidson] is trying to say, I am told by the Davidson scholars that it is all much more subtle and interesting than that, though very difficult to articulate except by quoting more Davidson.’

Gopnik, “How to understand beliefs” (1995: 399)

Creativity

I'm assuming that Davidson is right that anyone who can think communicate with language.

recap

Assumption:

If someone can communicate with language, she can think.

Consequence:

Acquiring language cannot involve thinking at the outset.

Question:

How could someone begin to acquire words without being able to think?

Answer:

By being trained to utter a particular word in response to certain simulations!

Observation:

There is a gap between what training achieves (use) and what language acquisition requires (understanding).

Now:

How do children actually acquire language?

homesigns

Try to imagine you have never communicated linguistically with anyone. You realise that other people interact much more easily that you can. You're sitting here and everyone else is concentrating or making notes and obviously getting something out of being here that you aren't. But what? What is it that they are doing and how are they doing it?

Some deaf children in North America are brought up in purely oral environments without any sign language and therefore don't experience language at all. These children invent their own sign languages, which are called homesigns. Their invented languages are not as rich as those of children who experience other people's languages, but they have many of the same features (Goldin-Meadow 2002, 2003). These deaf children have somehow worked out for themselves what linguistic communication is and they have found a way of doing it. They have invented languages with no prior experience of language, and they have invented languages in a modality that people around them barely use in linguistic communication. These linguistically isolated deaf children have answered in practice the questions that these lectures are about.

What are their languages like? Here are some examples ...

“Pointing at the Present to Refer to the Non-Present. David points at the chair at the head of the dining room table in his home and then produces a “sleep” gesture to tell us that his father (who typically sits in that chair) is asleep in another room. He is pointing at one object to mean another and, in this way, manages to use a gesture that is grounded in the present to refer to someone who is not in the room at all” (Goldin-Meadow 2003: 74, figure 1)

Goldin-Meadow (2003, figure 1)

“Examples of Conventional Emblems Whose Meanings Are Not as Transparent as They Seem. In panel A, David is shown producing a “break” gesture. Although this gesture looks like it should be used only to describe snapping long thin objects into two pieces with the hands, all of the children used the gesture to refer to objects of a variety of sizes and shapes, many of which had not been broken by the hands. In panel B, Marvin is shown producing a “give” gesture. This gesture looks like it should mean “put something small in my hand,” but all of the children used it to request the transfer of an object, big or small, to a place that was not necessarily the child's hand. Thus, many of the gestures that the deaf children used were not as transparent in meaning as a quick glance would suggest” (Goldin-Meadow 2003: 76, figure 2).

Goldin-Meadow (2003, figure 2)

Goldin-Meadow (2003, figure 11)

“David is holding a toy and uses it to point at a tray of snacks that his mother is carrying = snack (the tray is not shown in the drawing). Without dropping the toy, he jabs it several times at his mouth = eat. Finally, he points with the toy at me sprawled on the floor in front of him (not shown) = Susan” (Goldin-Meadow 2003: 110, figure 1).

“With this long string of gestures, all produced before she relaxed her hands, Qing is indicating that swordfish can poke a person (proposition 1) so that the person becomes dead (proposition 2), that they have long, straight noses (proposition 3), and that they swim (proposition 4)” (Goldin-Meadow 2003: 170).

In more detail: “Complex Gesture Sentences. Qing [Chinese child] produces five distinct gestures that she combines into a single complex gesture sentence (that is, she produces the string of gestures without breaking her flow of movement). The five gestures are illustrated in this figure: Qing points at a picture of a swordfish (= swordfish). She jabs at her own chest as though piercing her heart (= poke-in-chest). She crooks her index finger and holds it in the air (this is an emblem in Taiwan that hearing speakers use to mean dead). She holds her index finger on her nose and extends it outward (= long-straight-nose). She wiggles her palm back and forth (= swim).” (Goldin-Meadow 2003: 171, figure 22)

Goldin-Meadow (2003, figure 22)

Can we say something about the general features of homesigns?

Gesture forms are:

stable

'gesture forms do not change capriciously with changing situations'

i. ‘The gestures are stable in form, although they needn’t be. It would be easy for the children to make up a new gesture to fit every new situation (and, indeed, that appears to be what hearing speakers do when they gesture along with their speech, cf. McNeill, 1992). But that’s not what the deaf children do. They develop a stable store of forms which they use in a range of situations-they develop a lexicon, an essential component of all languages (Goldin-Meadow, Butcher, Mylander, & Dodge, 1994).’ \citep[p.\ 1389]{Goldin-Meadow:2002dq}

arbitrary

'gesture--meaning pairs have arbitrary aspects within an iconic framework'

systematic

'the gestures the children develop are composed of parts that form paradigms, or systems of contrasts. When the children invent a gesture form, they do so with two goals in mind-the form must not only capture the meaning they intend (a gesture-world relation), but it must also contrast in a systematic way with other forms in their repertoire (a gesture-gesture relation).' \citep[p.\ 1389]{Goldin-Meadow:2002dq}

Gesture forms are used:

with different forces (to ask questions, make comments, request things, ...)
to talk about past, future and hypothetical things
to tell stories
to communicate with oneself
to talk about gestures (metalanguage)

Goldin-Meadow 2002

Children can create their own first languages.

I haven't explained the evidence for this claim here, but children in ordinary linguistic environments are also extremely creative from the beginning of their attempts to communicate.

What children do with words is, from the very beginning, purposively directed at sharing with others conscious attention to objects and events in their environment.

This means that there's no prospect at all of describing characteristically human antics without mentioning psychological notions like purpose, understanding, consciousness and attention.

The basic features of our mental lives can't be factored out of discussions by waffle about “forms of life” or “social practices” or “deontic scorekeeping”.

Children can create their own first languages.

How does this bear on our position? Recall ...

recap

Assumption:

If someone can communicate with language, she can think.

Consequence:

Acquiring language cannot involve thinking at the outset.

Question:

How could someone begin to acquire create words without being able to think?

Answer:

By being trained to utter a particular word in response to certain simulations!

Observation:

There is a gap between what training achieves (use) and what language acquisition requires (understanding).

Now:

How do children actually acquire language?

So here's my challenge to Davidson and others who hold that anyone can communicate with language can think:

explain how someone could begin to create words without already being able to think.

As I've been explaining, the challenge arises because children who have no language and no significant experience of language can create languages of their own.

So we have to reject this answer.

For my part, I think it's probably time to drop the assumption.

Not because we've shown it's wrong, but because there's no good argument for it an a significant obstactle to accepting it.

So let's return to our overall question without that assumption.

(Recall that the question was, How do humans first come to communicate with words?)

This is an aside. Take a break, don't listen. But things are worse for Davidson and others than you imagine.

aside

Recall Davidson's argument.

If someone can think, she must be capable of having a false belief.
To be capable of having a false belief it is necessary to understand the possibility of false belief.
Understanding the possibility of false belief entails being able to communicate by language.

Conclusion:

If someone can think, she can communicate with language.

‘Intentional action cannot emerge before belief and desire, for an intentional action is one explained by beliefs and desires that caused it.’

Davidson 1999, p. 10

\citep[p.\ 10]{Davidson:1999ju}

So Davidson's view is that intentional action is impossible without language.

I think it's right to link intentional action to intention, and intention to thought.

So I think Davidson is right to this extent: if anyone who can think can communicate with language, then anyone who can act intentionally can communicate with language.

This underlines the difficulty of meeting that challange, of explaining how language creation gets going.

If Davidson is right, it must get going without either thinking or acting intentionally.

Mapping words to concepts

fresh start (the shipwreck survivor)

Our question is, How do humans first come to communicate with words?

Let's make a fresh start and consider another approach.

‘children learn words through the exercise of reason’ (\citealp[p.\ 1103]{Bloom:2001ka}; see \citealp{Bloom:2000qz})

Bloom 2001, p. 1103

‘much of what goes on in word learning is establishing a correspondence between the symbols of a natural language and concepts that exist prior to, and independently of, the acquisition of that language’

Bloom 2000, p. 242

\citep[p.\ 242]{Bloom:2000qz}

‘to know the meaning of a word is to have:

1. a certain mental representation or concept

2. that is associated with a certain form’

Bloom 2000, p. 17

\citep[p.\ 17]{Bloom:2000qz}

‘Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak.’

\citep[15--16, §32]{Wittgenstein:1953mm}

(Wittgenstein 1953, p. 15--16, §32)

Does the view Wittgenstein is attacking sound like a mere caricature? Bloom explicitly endorses it, noting that

‘Augustine’s proposal is no longer seen as the goofy idea that it once was’ \citep[p.\ 61]{Bloom:2000qz}.

This view on language acquisition is not new.

Eve Clark quotes a book from 1958 which apparently suggests that children learn words by formulating and testing hypotheses about their meanings:

'The tutor names things in accordance with the semantic customs of the community. The player forms hypotheses about the categorical nature of the things named. He tests his hypotheses by trying to name new things correctly. The tutor compares the player's utterances with his own anticipations of such utterances and, in this way, checks the accuracy of fit between his own categories and those of the player. He improves the fit by correction.'

Brown (1958, p. 194) as quoted by Clark (1993, p. 19)

(Brown 1958, p. 194 as quoted by \citep[p.\ 19]{Clark:1993bv})

One consequence of this view ...

Assumption:

If someone is in a position to learn a word, she already has the corresponding concept

Consequence:

Learning words cannot ever be a route to acquiring concepts.

Case study:

Kowalski and Zimilies on colour terms and concepts.

The problem is ...

This is not enough for us to reject the Assumption. But it shows at least that the advocates of the Assumption have to explain how this case is possible and why they think there are no other such cases.

Recall this idea:

‘much of what goes on in word learning is establishing a correspondence between the symbols of a natural language and concepts that exist prior to, and independently of, the acquisition of that language’

Bloom 2000, p. 242

Incidentally, this isn't only Bloom's view, it's incredibly widespread.

Here's another example:

‘One of the first problems children take on is the MAPPING of meanings onto forms … They must identify possible meanings, isolate possible forms, and then map the meanings onto the relevant forms.’

Clark 1993, p. 14

\citep[p.\ 14]{Clark:1993bv}

I want to suggest that this idea is wrong because acquiring language is in significant part a creative process, as Eve Clark herself emphasises \citep[in][]{Clark:1993bv} .

Let me show you a particular case ...

‘puttaputta’

June, age 1;3.0

Is mapping illuminating?

Thanks to Roy Higginson's CHILDES data (1985) we can trace June's use of the novel word puttaputta over six months in fourteen conversations with her mother.

June's first recorded use of puttaputta occurs when she was fifteen months (1;3.0).

At first, her mother mistakenly takes “puttaputta” to mean Peter Piper and uses it as a noun:

JUNE: puttaputta.

MOTHER: puttaputta … ok.

MOTHER: this puttaputta?

MOTHER: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickle peppers […]

[…]

JUNE: puttaputta.

MOTHER: puttaputta?

MOTHER: where's puttaputta?

MOTHER: can you show me puttaputta?

June turns the page.

[…]

JUNE: puttaputta.

MOTHER: that's not puttaputta.

Note that the mother corrects June because at this point she mistakenly takes “puttaputta” to mean Peter Piper.

But that isn't what June has in mind, and she persists in using the term differently.

June persists in using “puttaputta” to mean something like tell me about this or read me this one and her mum quickly gets the hang of it (within the same conversation):

Roy Higginson's CHILDES data (1985)

JUNE: puttaputta.

MOTHER: puttaputta?

JUNE: puttaputta.

MOTHER: ok … Doctor .

June takes the book, looks at it and the hands it back to her mother.

MOTHER: Foster went to Gloucester in a shower of rain … he stepped into a puddle right up to his middle and never went there again.

JUNE: puttaputta.

MOTHER: ok … the late Madame Fry wore shoes a mile high and when she walked by me I thought I should die.

In this first conversation, June uses “puttaputta” 20 times (3 of these are just “putta”). Most the other 15 words she uses appear only once and none appear more than twice.

So not only do infants coin new words, they will also persist in using them despite initial misunderstandings (even despite being 'corrected' by an adult) and they may rely heavily on their own words.

Roy Higginson's CHILDES data (1985)

In a later session (June is now seventeen months (1;5.0)) June continues to use “puttaputta” and to be understood as she intends:

JUNE: putta .

JUNE: puttaputta .

MOTHER: am I supposed to read that ?

MOTHER: you have to come over here then .

JUNE: puttaputta .

MOTHER: what do you want me to puttaputta ?

MOTHER: what's this ?

JUNE: car ?

In this same session, June's mum uses “puttaputta” as a verb herself.

June continues to use “puttaputta” frequently in until around eighteen months (“puttaputta” occurs 45 times in a conversation recorded when June was 1;6.0) and then drops it abruptly (“puttaputta” doesn't appear in any of the seven conversations recorded over the next three months).

Roy Higginson's CHILDES data (1985)

Why am I telling you about June's use of puttaputta.

One thing to note, of course, is that June isn't learning to map a concept to a word.

If she is doing anything with a word-concept mapping, she is inventing and teaching it rather than learning it.

This is one ammendment to the claim that acquiring language depends on coming to know word-concept mappings.

But there is a second point I want to draw from 'puttaputta'.

June uses puttaputta purposively, to a particular end, to get others to read or interact with her in certain contexts.

But I'm not sure that this involves mapping the word to a concept.

Is mapping the word to the concept is the key to understanding what June is doing?

I'm not saying it's not; I'm just saying that there's a challenge to Bloom here.

‘children learn words through the exercise of reason’

Bloom 2001, p. 1103

‘much of what goes on in word learning is establishing a correspondence between the symbols of a natural language and concepts that exist prior to, and independently of, the acquisition of that language’

Bloom 2000, p. 242

‘to know the meaning of a word is to have:

1. a certain mental representation or concept

2. that is associated with a certain form’

Bloom 2000, p. 17

So what am I saying?

I've been considering the mapping idea, the idea that children have to establish a correspondence between words and concepts.

I agree that this the right way to think about some language learning; in particular, learning colour words like 'red' is well modelled in this way.

But I've offered two qualifications.

First, in at least some of these cases it may be that the concept comes after the word.

Second, while it's appropriate to think of abilities to use language as requiring word-concept mappings in some cases, like the case of 'red',

I used the example of 'puttaputta' to suggest that there are at least some cases of communiation with words which don't seem to involve learning or inventing word-concept mappings.

I'm not claiming to have shown that the mapping idea is wrong.

I merely want to offer you an open challenge: can we make sense of the mapping idea and do we need it?

Note that the mapping idea depends on a philosophical claim about what it is to know the meaning of a word.

This is something we should question, I think. (But not now.)

Summary

How do humans first come to communicate with words?

Assumption:

If someone can think, she can communicate with language

Consequence:

Acquiring a language cannot involve thinking at the outset.

Problem:

Humans can make the transition from to communicating with language by creating their own language.

So there is a challenge for anyone who holds the Assumption.

The challenge is to explain how someone can start creating a language without being able to think

Aside:

Becoming able to communicate with language does not always involve being trained or shown.

So the first part was about trying to meet this constraint.

In the second part we made a fresh start and examined how you might answer the question if you dropped the constraint.

What do I know when I can communicate with words?

word-concept mappings

How do I come to know word-concept mappings?

‘through the exercise of reason’ (Bloom 2001, p. 1103)

Consequence:

Learning words cannot be a route to acquiring concepts.

Question:

Is coming to communicate with language essentially a matter of learning or inventing word-concept mappings?

So how do humans first come to communicate with language?

We've seen that there are challenges and objections to two prominent views.

Do I have to end with the conclusion that we don't know the first thing about it?

Or is there anything positive to say?

Maybe just a hint ...

So are we merely saying this, or can we go further:

‘What a strange phenomenon that a child can actually learn human language! That a child who knows nothing can start out and learn by a sure path this enormously complicated technique.’

Wittgenstein 1980: 2.24 [§128]

The quote is from Wittgenstein, … Philosophy of Psychology (1980: 2.24 [§128])

Yet Another Problem

If the shipwreck survivor view were right, communication with words would not help us to explain the emergence of abilities to know things about objects, causes, colours and the rest. After all, it presupposes some knowledge of these things. And, anyway, the shipwreck survivor view seems not to get at the hardest parts of how children come to communicate with words because it cannot handle their creativity. It is based on a mistaken view about the nature of words as being conventionally linked to concepts.

The lab rat view would help, since it presupposes no knowledge in the acquisition of abilities to communicate with words. But the lab rat view is as clearly wrong as any view in philosophy.

So our Next Big Problem was to understand how early developing capacities lead to knowledge. My proposal was that we tackle this by thinking about social interaction, and language acquisition in particular. But this has merely led us to Yet Another Problem.

The problem is that we don't know how children might first come to communicate with words.

To make progress with this problem it may be useful to switch from thinking about communication with words to thinking about non-verbal communication ... (But in the appendix I try to sketch a rough idea.)

Appendix: Grice/Tomasello (optional)

Is there an alternative picture of communication by language, one without mapping or training?

communication by language without mapping or training

In thinking about the alternative picture, I'm guided by two thoughts.

The first concerns social interaction.

social interaction

So far we've considered two pictures of how children learn to communicate with words: training and reasoning to word-concept mappings.

Both pictures miss social interaction.

On one picture the infant is an outsider who might as well be observing those around her through a telescope.

On the other picture the child is a blank to be shaped by those around her.

There is no meaningful interaction between the infant and adults around her; or, if there is, it makes no difference to her development.

But could there be a role for social interaction in learning the meanings of words?

If you think about the examples of creativity --- homesigns and puttaputta --- this seems plausible.

Communication with words happens in the context of joint action, and it is a tool for joint action.

The alternative picture is based on the ideas of Michael Tomasello and his colleagues.

‘children acquire linguistic symbols as a kind of by-product of social interaction with adults’

Tomasello 2003, p. 90

\citep[p.\ 90]{Tomasello:2003fk}

Infants ‘begin to comprehend and use … linguistic symbols on the basis of their skills of social cognition and cultural learning’

Tomasello, Striano & Rochat 1999, p. 582

\citep[p.\ 582]{Tomasello:1999en}

‘language is itself one type-albeit a very special type-of joint attentional skill’

\citep[p.\ 1120]{Tomasello:2001ic}

‘the kind of rational activity which the use of language involves is a form of rational cooperation’

Grice 1989, p. 341

\citep[p.\ 341]{Grice:1989ha}

The second guiding thought in creating the alternative picture concens creativity.

language creation

It's standard to suppose that creativity is a side-issue and that learning from those around us is the norm.

This view is encouraged by the idea that language is fundamentally a system of conventions, and that coming to communicate with words is a matter of getting into those conventions.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Acquiring the ability to communicate with words is an essentially creative process.

Conventions in the surrounding culture can be useful, but they are no more than useful accessories.

‘it is an error to suppose we have seen deeply into the heart of linguistic communication when we have noticed how society bends linguistic habits to a public norm.’

… But in indicating this element of the conventional, or of the conditioning process that makes speakers rough linguistic facsimiles of their friends and parents, we explain no more than the convergence; we throw no light on the essential nature of the skills that are thus made to converge.’

Davidson 1984 [1982]: 278

\citep[p.\ 278]{Davidson:1982uu}

‘convention does not help explain what is basic to linguistic communication, though it may describe a usual, though contingent feature.’

Davidson 1984 [1982]: 280

\citep[p.\ 280]{Davidson:1982uu}

‘An utterance has certain truth conditions only if the speaker intends it to be interpreted as having those truth conditions.’

Moral, social or legal considerations may sometimes invite us to deny this, but I do not think the reasons for such exceptions reveal anything of importance about what is basic to communication’

Davidson 1990: 310

\citep[p.\ 310]{Davidson:1990du}

So these are my two themes.

I'm going to create a view out of them.

social interaction

language creation

Grice on meaning

'A speaker S non-naturally means something by an utterance x if and only if, for some hearer (or audience) H, S utters x intending:

(1) H to produce a particular response r, and

(2) H to recognise that S intends (1).

Grice 1957

***todo update diagram (no meanings, past intentions)

*Utterances of words are gestures ... (link to non-verbal communication)

Origins of Mind

[email protected]

Communication with Words: A Question

Preview: Shipwreck Survivor vs Lab Rat

Does being able to think depend on being able to communicate with language?

Training

Understanding

Creativity

Mapping words to concepts

Summary

Appendix: Grice/Tomasello (optional)