This is a book that I have started reading twice already … Not a good sign ? More a sign of laziness on my part, as it is one of the most dense books I know. Each page holds more complex concepts and ideas per page than my brain and attention span can handle.
So before I give up reading it again, let me share the content of the piece I have managed to read through !
Steven Pinker (Wikipedia entry) analyses language as a window into the way we think. He starts by asking the profound question of ‘How do children learn language ?’, and especially focusing on how they know what NOT to say.
For example, one can say :
“I sprayed water onto the roses”
As well as
“I sprayed the roses with water”
We can imagine that hearing such multiple examples allows children to determine that there is a pattern, a rule. It could go like this : ‘if I can say “something actioned object a onto object b”, then I can equally say “something actioned object b with object a” ‘.
But that rule does not always work. For example :
While one can say
“I coiled a rope around the pole”
One cannot say
“I coiled the pole with a rope”
This is a very important issue, more than it first appears. We could try to explain that this is just an exception. But this itself poses another problem. How would children learn these exceptions ? They can determine patterns by listening to adults, but exceptions like the one above would require them to know what is NOT being said. The only way this could happen is for the child to make the mistakes, and get corrected. But this would require massive additional amounts of interactions which don’t seem realistic.
Fortunately there is another explanation offered by Steven Pinker.
We were looking for rules that would involve simple grammatical patterns. Instead it appears that the rule is about a mental picture of the action being performed. This is where the window into our underlying thought processes starts opening.
Our brain seems to classify verbs in categories that correspond to types of actions performed, but with distinctions far from obvious at first glance. For example, brush, plaster, rub, drip, dump, pour, spill all seem to pertain to getting some liquid or goo onto a receptacle. But the fact that you can “smear a wall with paint” while you cannot “pour a glass with water” tells you that you have to classify them in two different types of actions :
– the first type is when you apply force to both the substance and the surface simultaneously : brush, daub, plaster, rub, smear, smudge, spread, swab. You are directly causing the action, with a sense of immediateness.
– the second type is when you allow gravity to do the action : drip, funnel, pour, siphon, spill. You are acting indirectly here, and letting an intermediate enabling force do the work. There is also a sense of the action happening after you have triggered it, instead of immediately.
The fist type allows the “smear a wall with paint” construction, the second type does not.
Going further, the book explains how researchers have used non-existent verbs such as “goop”, telling children that it means wiping a cloth with a sponge, to test how they instinctively use these verbs, to test that the above rules apply … And they do !
So there IS a logical set of rules that explain how we talk, and these rules provide a glimpse into the mental models we use to conceive of reality, even before we verbalise our thoughts.
I hope I gave you a small taste of that fascinating piece of writing, and even more that you will become as curious as I am of this field of study. Another great book by the same author “How the Mind Works” attempts to explain the basic mechanisms we use to think, it is maybe an easier read, but is equally mind-provoking and fascinating.
Now for a sobering fact. When I tried to explain to Aouda what I had just taken hours to understand, she immediately latched on to the answer as something very natural and almost obvious. So some of us are more conscious of what’s happening inside our heads than others 🙂
What will it be for you ? Read one of these books and let me know !