[lit-ideas] Re: Nicholas Wade on the development of language
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- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 07:21:45 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 5/26/2014 4:27:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Even more remarkable was language, a wholly novel system for conveying
precise thoughts from one individual’s mind to that of another.” [Kindle
Locations 662-672]
Comment: I am ready to accept or at least be open to the early part of
what Wade writes, but fell into a coughing fit during his last sentence, “
conveying precise thoughts”???? Has he never been married? Has he never
been in a discussion forum on any subject? Has he never ready Gadamer or any
of the other philosophers who describe the difficulty of communicating, or,
if I recover sufficiently from my coughing fit and read on, will he define
“precise” in some new way I’ve never thought of?
--- Yes, we should proceed slightly ad hominem and find the credentials of
Wade!
Of course I read this all Griceianly!
The miracle of language was not so much the 'transmission of "more or
less" definite" thoughts, but rather the open-endedness, if I may follow Grice
following Chomsky. The fact, or argument, as deployed by Davidson, that
language allows for a finite system of 'rules' to generate 'infinite'
messages.
I did some little research on Wade. He was born in England, and educated at
Eton, and has worked it seems mainly for the New York Times. I don't think
he ever followed a course (whatever that means) in philosophy. At least he
must have studied the classics at Eton and then he went to King's Cantab.
but I'm not sure what degree he acquired there (if 'acquire' is the word).
It seems it's the book AFTER the one referred to by Helm that is causing
all the controversy: a 'troublesome inheritance' he calls it, and the
references to language in "Troublesome inheritance" seem minimal: although who
refers to an African tribe who lost the original language, and there is one
mention of an idiolect, or rather, dialect.
In the "Faith" book, after the passage that puzzled Helm, Wade goes on to
explore this idea of language. His query is:
is religion dependent on language?
Having defined religion (or 'faith') as a 'belief' in the supranatural, he
wonders. He decides, and I follow Wade there, that the fact that only men
can dance in 'unison' (unlike monkeys) proves that there is a communal
religiosity in men. He goes on to show that grunts and groans are enough for
an
alpha male chimp to prove his power, and I suppose the 'enthymeme' here is
that the same should apply to homo sapiens sapiens sapiens.
I write 'homo sapiens sapiens sapiens' because most critics to Wade's
second book question the idea that evolution is 'regional': a 'race' while not
wholly 'cultural' as the PC-views (as Wade calls them) of the Sociological
Association and the Anthropological Association, is best understood as a
subspecies. Homo sapiens sapiens, and so on.
Wade indeed stresses at at least two points the idea of language as
connected with the transmission of precise thoughts. He goes on to refer to
what
he thinks psychologists call a 'theory of mind', but which I prefer to call
a mind-reading theory -- Wittgensteinian at that: the fact that pirots, as
Grice calls them, are able to _infer_ the psychological attitudes of their
companions (in conversation but also in pre-linguistic or non-linguistic
analogues). I think Wade means 'precise' as oppose to a groan or grunt by a
chimpanzee (which the argument should go) is less precise (but it isn't) as
to the 'politics of power' the alpha male chimp is displaying.
The issue is of course very complicated philosophically and Grice was aware
of this. If we grant a 'precise thought' -- in terms of logical form, say
(x)Fx.Gx
(all Fs are G)
which is then expressed verbally,
"Every F is G"
We have variants:
We can say,
"Every thing has some property"
or
"Most swans are white"
--- These are more or less precise thoughts and we find more or less
precise ways of expressing (Grice's famous 'way of words' that correspond to
'way of ideas' which correspond to 'way of things'). But what then about
ambiguity which was Helm's original puzzle:
"I am ready to accept or at least be open to the early part of what Wade
writes, but fell into a coughing fit during his last sentence, “conveying
precise thoughts”???? Has he never been married? Has he never been in a
discussion forum on any subject? Has he never read Gadamer or any of the
other philosophers who describe the difficulty of communicating, or, if I
recover sufficiently from my coughing fit and read on, will he define “precise”
in some new way I’ve never thought of?"
I don't think he does, but he does wonder if the supernatural or
supranatural (which is the focus in his book) does depend on language. I think
his
focus is on the 'communicating' and "SHARING" of those 'more or less'
precise thoughts: presto, religion. Religion presupposes some common ground
although the idea of a private religion is not as absurd as that of a private
language ('absurd' for Witters, anyway, since he laughed at the simplistic
dialogues between Robinson Crusoe and Friday conceived by Daniel Defoe).
But again, if Wade then goes to refer to the chimp's grunts and groans, he
is being Griceian. We have some 'evolution' if not 'development' of things
here. Take a grunt more closely.
Grice would say that there's a factive level and a non-factive level. If a
chimp GRUNTS he means he is annoyed, say. Rather, the grunt is a NATURAL
SIGN (not a word Grice would use) of the chimp's anger. In the case of
humans, there's prevarication. Of course, there's prevarication in some animal
systems of communication. Not bees, which apparently cannot 'lie' -- but a
few water birds can. They can scream to let the potential predator THINK that
they are approaching their nest when they are NOT.
So, we have some 'precise thought' that is possible to get represented
without language (vide Peacocke, "Language and Thought" in his Thought -- this
was the old polemic of psychologists at the turn of the
nineteenth-century). For a philosopher, the question is whether we can analyse
a 'precise
thought' without the aid of language.
The level of logic helps, but is not the last answer. If a 'precise
thought' is prior and more primitive and predates language, then it makes sense
to say that language serves to communicate and share 'precise' thoughts. It
may be that both abilities (thought and talk) originated simultaneously
(Wade should revise the pooh-pooh and all the other delightfully named
theories
on the origin of language. My favourite the 'ouch' theory). The
philosopher Davidson (who taught with Grice at UC/Berkeley) thought that the
abilities are SYMMETRICALLY from an epistemological (way of knowing) and a
metaphysical (or ontological) point of view: not one without the other. The
topic
was hot enough back in the 1970s to have Anita Avramides write her DPhil for
Oxford on this.
Eton and King's College are different animals, and since Wade then was
concerned with "Nature" and "The New York Times", he is not going to quote your
favourite Griceian philosopher -- but then, as Judas Maccabaeus said, 'you
can't have everything'.
Cheers,
Speranza
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