Saturday, September 27, 2008

Language III

Since the days of the Greeks we have had a science of logic which uses terms like deduction, induction, syllogism, etc. I am not so much interested in the structures of logic as what it is, how it works, and anyway I think many of the logical conundrums that have puzzled philosophers over the centuries are really linguistic problems and not true logic problems at all. My idea of logic depends on a given truth from which consequences are drawn. Medieval philosophers started with the premise that the universe was created by God, that he was a God of love, and that He was all powerful and all knowing, infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and all loving. (These attributes, taught to me in catechism, puzzled me from an early age. It was equally hard for me to imagine a universe that didn't end as one that did. If it ended, then what was left? Even empty space is something. Yes, I really did spend a lot of daydream time thinking about this when I was ten years old or so.) From that foundation Medieval philosophers built their arguments. Whatever eternity was, it was a fact. God was a fact. That he was Good was a fact. Subsequent philosophers,unable to accept those premises have tried to find something that is ultimately true from which to proceed, and more recently they have decided that there is no real truth. That in itself is a premise which has led them, and the world, into a strange wilderness of the soul. The Eastern religious view of the world as a recurring illusion from which we should try to escape only carries the logic further.
By logic I mean the steps that follow a given set of premises. It doesn't mean the logic leads to truth. Quite often it leads to insanity. The logic is not necessarily at fault but sometimes it is. In this way it mimics language. Some would say that logic is language but that argument falls down when you realize there are other types of logic. Musical logic comes to mind, or mathematical logic. There are others, and as far as language goes it is often claimed that each language has a different logic that is related to vocabulary and language but separate from it. the example I am thinking of is Classical Greek which is said to lend itself to subtle differences in meaning impossible to express in translation. Could the language of a people shape the way it thinks? That by absorbing the logic of his native language actual changes in his neurophysiology are made? This is something that might be testable and thus acceptable to scientists as 'proof.'
Standard logic is just one species of the genus. A book I picked up the other day on logic provides this example of a standard logical problem: The Queen is rich/Either the Queen is rich or pigs can fly. This formulation the author calls a disjunct because the second statement doesn't follow from the first. But how do we know it's a disjunct? Because we already know that queens and pigs have nothing to do with each other and in any event pigs don't fly. But there is nothing wrong with the two statements from a linguistic point of view. All the words are valid, and the grammar is correct, allowing the person uttering the statement to convey the thought with perfect clarity. If it was spoken to someone from another planet who had a perfect understanding of the language but knew nothing about pigs, queens or flying he would have no reason to question it.
I think a reconsideration of what logic is can clear up a lot of that confusion, because at the root of the confusion is the interaction of grammar with vocabulary, as in language. It is absurd to try to find meaning based solely on grammar, which is what logicians try to do. It is equally absurd to try to understand the meaning of a string of words without a knowledge of the grammar. This is what scientists do. Scientists try to infer the grammar by studying the words, logicians try to understand the words by studying the grammar. To put it in semi -mathematical form, words + grammar = meaning. We humans crave meaning. We find meaning through the evidence of our senses mediated by reason. And reason seems to be the faculty we use to perceive patterns that are not directly related to the proverbial four senses. So is reason our fifth sense" Do we perceive patterns directly and are they just as real as rocks? In life we are more certain of what our senses tell us because our senses boil down to two: pain and pleasure. We try to get it right because being wrong can result in pain or worse. But to make sense of the world we have to use reason which enables us to perceive patterns that are not the material objects but which sometimes inhere, sometimes not, in the objects themselves. Furthermore, before we can judge the validity of a statement, we must already have an understanding of what truth is. We may not know what the truth is until we experiment, and it may be exceedingly difficult to know the truth, but we have no doubt that there is such a thing as truth. Unless you are a modern French philosopher.
Important point:
Meaning isn't the same thing as truth.
Of course we know about lies and deceptions but people are surprisingly easy to mislead. The science of logic began as a way of helping to determine the logical validity of a statement and avoid being misled. Numerous logical pitfalls were discovered.
Take the liars paradox. There are many variations but the simplest goes like this: I am lying. Obviously, if I am lying I am telling the truth in which case I am lying...by telling the truth. It's very interesting to explore the ambiguities of language and often commentators are so shocked they are led to deny the possibility of knowledge.
True it is, as any writer can attest, that conveying a precise picture in language of something he sees is immensely difficult if not impossible. So he might bemoan the deficiencies of language. But that would be to miss the bigger picture, which is this: language is incredibly effective. It is truly miraculous how much information can be conveyed with language. Civilization is made of language. Not even the simplest of human cultures could exist without language.
In effect we no longer inhabit a world governed solely by material processes. We also inhabit a universe of our own creation which we breezily refer to as culture- and language underlays all human culture. If there is such a thing as natural selection then the environment we now select for is one of our own making, and this environment is composed of thoughts, ideas and a multitude of things we don't even have words for. This is what language does.

Language II

Just as living tissue has an identity (as dog, rhododendron, Aunt Mary...or bone, neuron, chloroplast) that is not intrinsic to the cell, words have roles aside from their dictionary definitions. It may be a noun, and if a noun it may be the subject, direct object, indirect object, of the sentence of which it is a part, which sentence has a significance beyond the meaning of the word. Furthermore, the word is a word in a particular language. And of course the word is really only a puff of air, a squiggle on paper, a series of 1's and 0's in a hard drive which also have no intrinsic value at all. Just like the DNA in a cell, a phoneme can express itself in any number of ways. Those ways may be finite in number but genes are the means by which every form of life on earth is transcribed into a living, breathing thing, just as that finite set of phonemes is responsible for every language humans have ever spoken.
As the terrestrial gene pool is shared among multiple creatures spanning generations, humanity's languages are shared among individual speakers spanning generations. Like genes, language is used to transform the material of the planet. Unlike genes, language has no true material existence, although material people are required to generate the language that turns clay into bricks and bricks into houses in the same way proteins are needed to transform the chemistry of the earth into cells and cells into livers. Except when it stops working properly we don't give much thought to our livers, but livers too have a significance beyond the materials from which they are composed. In Air and Angels, John Donne said,
..But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too..


And what exactly are the works of man other than words that have taken limbs of flesh? First comes the thought, the idea, the will, a dream, then theories are devised, plans made, activity organized, and the material of the planet is transformed into something that did not previously exist. All this would be impossible without language.
Complex social order does seem possible without language, as in ants, bees, termites, unless you want to label the sharing of information via pheramones language. It may very well fit some definitions of language, in which case you could say that language does not depend on the medium it uses. If we gain knowledge of extraterrestrial life we may find that it does not depend on the materials we are used to- carbon, water, oxygen, nitrogen- but expresses itself in entirely unforeseen ways. Such is the stuff of science fiction.
As it is, our human language is such a commonplace part of our existence we seldom think how marvelous it truly is. One of the most marvelous things about it is that it is not under any sort of central control, not even in France which has an academy dedicated to maintaining the purity of the language. Words and phrases may spontaneously erupt from who knows where and spread through the speech community like a virus, and a few years later they may disappear just as quickly. Conversely, speakers of Indo European languages who have been separated for thousands of years and thousands of miles, cut off from each other by geological and political barriers, retain words in common. The classical language of India, a country separated from western Europe by oceans, mountains, deserts, hostile political groups, and a vastly different climate, is called Sanskrit, a word easily understood in any language with a Latin heritage. 'San' means holy, as in saint, and 'skrit' means writing, as in script. Sanskrit, as classical Latin is to some extent an artificial language, refined and promoted by a priest-like class of scholars. Latin was for centuries after the demise of Roman power a common language for educated Europeans, and it would be hard to overestimate the importance to English of all those Latin words we have adopted. They came into our language by many routes, but without them we wouldn't be able to carry on the business of an advanced culture.
It is estimated that there exist 6000 languages on earth and attempts are being made to reconstruct a primordial language from which all are descended. This is based on the assumptions that language first appeared only once and that remnants of this speech can be recovered at this late date. Whether or not these assumptions are true, the effort should be hugely rewarding. However, I suspect that human communities are perfectly capable of entirely replacing the words of its language within a few generations. People are demonstrably capable of combining elements of several languages into new constructs variously called creoles, pidgins, jargons with which speakers of dissimilar languages use to communicate with each other, complete with simplified grammar and hybrid vocabulary. If the example of Chinook Jargon is any indication, cultures alien to each other have more difficulty hearing and pronouncing unfamiliar sounds than learning unfamiliar words and grammatical structures. Sometimes I think of English as pidgin French. Hybrid words, simplified grammar, and a very quick evolution characterize English. Our most common words are usually Germanic in origin, while our huge lexicon incorporates words from Latin, some directly, some indirectly through French. No child has any inkling of any of this as he learns to speak and yet he unknowingly learns the history of Rome at the same time.
Nobody set out to invent Chinook Jargon, or English. They evolved spontaneously, one as a trade language along the northwest Pacific coast the other as a way for a new set of overlords to communicate with a conquered people.
How has English been shaped? to a large extent it was shaped by literacy and the printing press. Even today England is rich with dialects. Londoners, Liverpudlians, Glaswegians, and Oxford dons are easily identifiable by their speech, but standard English comes from the London dialect Chaucer wrote. A few centuries later it was an instrument worthy of Shakespeare who transformed it. What astrologer or prophet could have foreseen that the son of a glover in provincial Stratford on Avon would be responsible for massively reshaping the English language? The king didn't appoint him to the task. Entirely on his own volition he wrote his dramas, comedies and histories to be performed on stage in front of an audience of riotous Londoners. For money. And ever after his phrases and vocabulary have become the common property of all English speakers. In a very real sense Shakespeare still lives, and we live in the word universe he created. But not even Shakespeare affected the cadences of our daily speech as much as the Authorized King James translation of the bible. Is it mere coincidence that as our culture has abandoned its reverence for the bible its literature has become impoverished?
This brings us to another point. The language, like the greater culture which is largely constructed with language, is bigger than any one person can contain. An infant is born with a predisposition to learn Language in the abstract, but with no knowledge of the specific language he is about to learn. Without that language he can never become a fully developed member of human society. Literally, a person without language is not a human being. For that matter, without language there would be no human beings. Oh, there might be human-like apes prowling the forests, gathering fruit, digging roots with sticks, killing the occasional unlucky wild goat for meat. But they would not be human, they would be another variety of chimp.
It seems that sometime in human history language itself became part of the environment to which we adapted and that it was this adaptation that changed us from being another type of chimp to being human beings who rule the world. From being a means of signaling the presence of a predator, or the location of ripe berries language allows us to learn about the lives of Abraham and Sarah who have been dust for perhaps three thousand years. Roughly a hundred and twenty generations separate us from Abraham and Sarah but their story is now read in every part of the world. Where in the bone and tissue of the larynx is there any hint of such a capability? One of the fundamental tenets of science is that from an initial set of parameters the entire history and content of the universe should theoretically, if not practically, be predicted. And did the larynx cause language to evolve- or did language cause the larynx to evolve? The former is the neo- Darwinian theory, the latter closer to the Lamarckian view.
My view is that there is a dialectic at work, a back and forth, as in the grammar of language versus the words, or the concrete versus the theoretical, or the ideal versus the concrete. But there must be more to it. Is there some unacknowledged force of nature, something akin to the electro-magnetic, that draws us on? We have a ready made vocabulary for this sort of thing, but words like soul and spirit turn scientists blue in the face, and in any event they have been appropriated by druids, wiccans and suchlike. So I will call it a latency force. Since I just thought of it I'll have to give it some thought.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Language I

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
This is how the Gospel of St. John begins, almost a rephrasing of the first verse of Genesis, which goes, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." God spoke and all we know was created. First came the Thought and then came His Word. The Word, Logos in the original Greek, is a mightier and weightier word than it is in English.
In Genesis much is made of words. We are not told how Adam and Eve came by their names, but we are told that the names of all living things were conferred by Adam while they passed by in a ritual procession. For both Greek and Hebrew it seems there was something momentous, even frightening about words. Perhaps they thought more deeply about such things than we do.
The Greeks went so far as to analyze their language and devise a grammar to describe it, as did the Latins as they acquired the trappings of sophisticated culture. Grammarians in England devised a theory of grammar for their language that mimicked the Greek and Latin theory. Those of us who struggled through the resulting grammar classes (do they still teach grammar in the early grades...or ever?) found out that words not only have meanings in themselves, they have functions which also have names. Verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs tell us how words function in a sentence, but the more important distinction is between words and grammar. Names are a big deal, as the Genesis story emphasizes, but without grammar nouns, verbs, adjectives, aren't enough to convey much meaning. You can say 'moose,' 'shot,' 'cabin,' 'pajamas,' and various other words but if they are not in the right order we will be puzzled at the meaning intended. Even a native speaker can get the grammar wrong, as in the joke that originated with Groucho Marx: "While I was staying in a cabin out in Wyoming I got up in the morning and shot a moose in my pajamas." Comeback: "If he was wearing my pajamas I would have shot him, too."
All languages have grammar whether or not a science of grammar has been devised for that language, and as the joke shows inattention to grammar can result in unintended hilarity.
The point is that language has two elements, the words themselves, and grammar, or syntax if you prefer. English uses word order to convey ideas not intrinsic to the words themselves, while Latin, Greek, and many other Indo-European languages use inflection. A noun, verb or modifier changes its ending or some other part to indicate who does what to whom. Thus a Latin or Greek verb may take a hundred forms. The system is nightmarish to learn, but has the advantage of precision. The Groucho joke wouldn't work in Latin.
So language is a lot like some other things I have discussed here. There is the thing itself and there is the logic behind it. There is a dog and there is a classification called canis. A dog can be weighed, measured, seen, kicked, it can bite, shed its fur all over your couch, but species is a word that designates a pattern and none of those things can be done to or by a pattern.
It seems that language corresponds to the material world in this way. Words themselves are abstractions, symbols, whether as a sound or further abstracted by symbols on a page or 1's and 0's in a hard drive. Would a rose by another name smell as sweet? I hate to take out the poetry, but a rose would smell the same if we called it an outhouse. (Nevertheless, one of the techniques of spin doctoring is to change the plain word for something into something that will divert attention from a real problem. It works quite well.)
Scientists spend a lot of time trying to figure out when and how humans evolved speech, or whether apes, whales, or other creatures also have speech. This requires them to try to define speech, and symbolism seems to be at the root of what distinguishes a warning scream from an arbitrary sound that says, "Leopard in the bushes," as opposed to "Stay away from my banana!" I don't want to get into this controversy. I want to concentrate more on some characteristics of language that I have seldom heard mentioned, and for that human language works best if only because we all have a profound personal knowledge of language whether we have studied grammar or not, or even if we can read.
Staying with the subject of grammar, that Groucho joke points to something interesting. The grammar can be correct while the meaning is false. "The moon is made of green cheese," is a grammatically valid statement that just happens to be wrong. This corresponds to any statement that depends on logic. Often the logic seems impeccable, but the experiment doesn't work.
This leads to the second point. To make any kind of communication it is necessary to have both grammar and words. You can't say anything about "leopard in the bush" by saying "noun, verb understood, preposition, article, noun."
While it may turn out that baboons do have the ability to make such communications with each other, or even to lie about it, only humans have the ability to teach each other through the use of vocalizations alone how to set a trap for a leopard. This is an enormous difference, so enormous that it amounts to a difference in kind not just quantity. Human language is more than just more of the same. And yet there are similarities that should not be ignored. In totality, the story of language has a lot to show us about every other aspect of existence.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The Elizabethan World Picture

Almost every well-read person is familiar with the work of the great authors even if only by reputation rather than through personal knowledge. But there must be hundreds of lesser lights who deserve to be better known. E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture is one of them. It opened my eyes to a thoughtscape I didn't know existed. And yet I had a lifelong familiarity with bits and pieces of it. These bits and pieces are like the ruins of old castles and monasteries, or sections of masonry incorporated into newer walls of our culture. This thoughtscape is basically neo-platonic, and at one time it was what everyone believed. It had the same place in the way people thought about things as science does today. It was only in late medieval times that it began to be seriously challenged by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others. Their new science swept over the previous thoughtscape like a tsunami.
Tillyard's book is a snapshot of the state of the public thoughtscape in Elizabethan England, the age of Shakespeare, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, John Dowland and so many others in which one of those inexplicable eruptions of human creativity convulsed Europe at that time and London thronged with explorers, poets, scientists, and sermonisers. The new science still coexisted side by side with the older neoplatonic science. The purpose of Tillyard's little book is to show that a knowledge of that elder science is indispensable for an understanding of those great Elizabethan figures.
Neoplatonism is the shorthand term I use but Tillyard doesn't. He contents himself with describing the salient features of the system as understood in that time and place and leaves it up to the reader to pursue the topic further should he wish.
He emphasizes that this was the way everybody thought and quotes extensively from various writers to prove how commonplace was this way of thinking. This was the science that had been grafted onto Christian dogma. Christianity is based on the gospels and epistles which tell of God become man to suffer on the cross for the redemption of mankind. But scripture says very little about the universal order beyond the fact that it was created by God. That was where the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system came in. It seemed to describe the universe in an entirely logical way. And the math worked. It was that system that the calculations of Copernicus et al shook to its foundations.
I have been more interested in its role in the history of thought than its literary aspect, but I am also attracted to it. There is something beautiful and in harmony with the human heart about that older system, and there something in our modern system I find cold and inhuman. In the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system the soul of man was integrated into metaphysics, astronomy, and all of creation. For Christians Man is the reason God created the universe. And I think this is an innate belief all human beings have, though often dismissed mainly through the influence of modern science which sees man as a mere accident, on an insignificant planet, not much different than an amoeba or a rosebush. A philosophy known as 'Deep Ecology' goes further and suggests that Man is a cancer on the earth. This philosophy permeates political movements as diverse as PETA, Planned Parenthood, the Green Party and it teaches us to hate ourselves.
By contrast, the neoplatonic/ptolemaic system saw Man as an essential link in the mystery of Creation, which itself was holy and sacred.
Our link is part of a cosmic Great Chain of Being that includes not only all visible things but a multiplicity of other invisible universes inhabited by supernatural beings known as Angels, both blessed and damned. The system was hierarchical starting at the bottom with 'inferior creatures' and proceeding upwards to the very throne of God.
Tillyard quotes, among others, Sir John Fortesque, a jurist writing on the law of nature:
So that from the highest angel down to the lowest of his kind there is absolutely not found an angel that has not a superior or an inferior; nor from man down to the merest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature or inferior to another. So that there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace.
The details of this chain are elaborated well in the book, for instance that the highest form of one class connected to the lowest form of the next class. The dolphin is the highest of the fishes, the king of its kind. This logic also justified the hierarchy of society with a king at the top followed by nobility and winding up with common labourers. Also there was a hierarchy of races which helped to justify black slavery, neither was there any room for democratic ideals.
Another element of the system was the theory of Corresponding Planes. Not only was there a hierarchy of substances, living beings, angels, there was a hierarchy of Planes of existence. Tillyard explains: The different planes were the divine and angelic, the universe or macrocosm, the commonwealth or body politic, man or the microcosm, and the lower creation...the mind is like an ocean because it is microcosmic, it contains all the bounty of the seas in little.
In other words every aspect of the material world has a corresponding aspect in the celestial sphere.
I can't explain why I felt it was appropriate to insert this little digression at this point, except that it illustrates how one world picture can be so thoroughly overthrown in just a few short centuries. Its example should be a cautionary tale for the arrogant Daniel Dennetts and Richard Dawkins of the world. It also fits in with my theme of how thought, an immaterial, intangible activity, is a precursor to the appearance of that material reality they worship. Even more importantly I think that cultural heritage amounted to a projection of the human soul onto the universe so that the universe became a mirror image for mankind in which everything outside him corresponded to what was essential within. Our own era's science, for all its many successes, is still in its youth. And perhaps as the adolescent matures and mellows out it will find there was much wisdom in its parent.