The Ghost in the Machine (6 page)

* For a more detailed treatment see The Act of Creation,
Chapter, 'Motor Skills', pp. 544.

 

The Postman and the Dog

 

 

So far I have touched on only a few of the difficulties of explaining
how we convert pressure variations on the eardrum into ideas. Even
more formidable is the problem how we convert ideas into air-pressure
waves. Take a simple example: the farmer's little boy of about three,
leaning out of the window, sees the dog snapping at the postman, and the
postman retaliating with a vicious kick. All this happens in a flash, so
fast that his vocal chords have not even had the time to get innervated;
yet he knows quite clearly what happened and feels the urgent need
to communicate this as yet unverbalised event, image, idea, thought,
or what-have-you, to his mum. So he bursts into the kitchen and shouts
breathlessly: 'The postman kicked the dog.' Now the first remarkable
fact about this is that he does
not
say, 'The dog kicked the
postman', though he
might
say, 'Doggy
was
kicked
by
the postman'; and again, he will
not
say, 'Was the dog kicked by
the postman?', and least of all, 'Dog the by was the kicked postman'.

 

 

This was an example of a very simple sentence consisting of four words
only ('the' being used twice). Yet a change of the order of two words
gave a totally different meaning; a more radical reshuffling, with two
new words added, left the meaning unaltered; and most of the ninety-five
possible permutations of the original words give no meaning at all. The
problem is how a child ever learns the several thousand abstract rules and
corollaries necessary to generate and comprehend meaningful sentences --
rules which his parents would be unable to name and define; which you and
I are equally unable to define; and which nevertheless unfalteringly
guide our speech. The few rules of grammar which the child learns
at school long
after
it has learned to speak correctly -- and
which it promptly forgets, are descriptive statements about language,
not recipes to generate language. These recipes, or formulae, the
child somehow discovers by intuitive processes -- probably not unlike
the unconscious inferences which go into scientific discovery -- by
the time it has reached the age of four. By that time 'he will have
mastered very nearly the entire complex and abstract structure of the
English language. In slightly more than two years, therefore [starting at
about the age of two] children acquire full knowledge of the grammatical
system of their native tongue. This stunning intellectual achievement
is routinely performed by every pre-school child (McNeill [6])'. As
another renegade Behaviourist, Professor James Jenkins, remarked at
our Stanford seminar: 'The fact that we can freely produce sentences
we had never heard before is amazing. The fact that we can understand
them when produced is nothing short of miraculous. . . . A child never
has a look at the machinery that produces English sentences. He
could
never have a look at that machinery. Nor is he being told
about it since most speakers are completely unaware of it.'

 

 

The facts must indeed appear miraculous so long as we persist in confusing
the string of words which is speech, with the silent machinery which
generates speech. The difficulty is that the machinery is invisible,
its working mostly unconscious, beyond the reach of inspection
and
introspection. But at least psycholinguistics has shown that the only
conceivable model to represent the generation of a sentence does not work
'from left to right', but hierarchically, branching from the top downward.

 

 

The diagram below is a slightly modified version of Noam
Chomsky's so-called 'phrase-structure generating grammar'.*
This is about the simplest schema for generating a sentence.

 

* Chomsky did not claim that it shows how a sentence is actually
produced, but observational analysis of how small children learn
to speak (by Roger Brown [7], McNeill [8] and others) has confirmed
that the model represents the basic principles involved.

 

 

 

At the apex of the inverted tree is /I/ -- it might be an Idea, a visual
Image, the Intention of saying something -- which is
not yet verbally
articulated
. Let us call this the /I/ stage.* Then the two main branches
of the tree shoot out: the doer and his doing, which at the /I/ stage
were still experienced as an indivisible unit, are split up into different
speech categories: noun-phrase and verb-phrase.** This separation must be
a tremendous feat of abstraction for the child -- how can you separate the
cat from the grin, or the kick from the postman? -- yet it is a universal
property of all known languages; and it is precisely with this feat of
'abstract thinking' that the child starts its adventures in language at
a very early age -- in languages as different as Japanese and English. [9]

 

* Chomsky calls the apex S, standing for the whole sentence,
which makes the model appear as a sentence-analysing, rather than
a sentence-generating, model.
** The NP-VP division is more expressive and easier to handle than
the related categories of subject and predicate.

 

The verb-phrase in its turn splits immediately into the doing and its
object. Lastly, the noun, and the article which previously was somehow
implied in the noun, are spelt out separately. Deciding at which point
of the rapid, predominantly unconscious working of the machinery the
actual words pop up and fall into their places on the moving conveyor
belt of speech -- along the bottom line of the diagram -- is a delicate
problem for the introspectionist. We all are familiar with the frustrating
experience -- shared by semi-illiterates and professional writers alike
-- of knowing what we want to say, but not knowing how to express it,
searching for the right words that will exactly fit the empty spaces on
the conveyor belt. The opposite phenomenon occurs when the message to be
conveyed is very simple and can be put into a ready-made turn of phrase
like 'How do you do?' or 'Don't mention it'. The living tree of language
is weighed down heavily by these clichés, which hang from its branches
like clusters of bananas that can be picked a whole bunch at a time. They
are the Behaviourist's delight. In a famous speech, from which I have
just quoted, Lashley said: 'A Behaviourist colleague once remarked to
me that he had reached a stage where he could rise before an audience,
turn his mouth loose, and go to sleep. He believed in the chain theory
of language.' This, Lashley concluded ironically, 'clearly demonstrates
the superiority of Behaviourist over introspective psychology'.

 

 

But classical introspectionism did not fare much better. Lashley went
on to quote Titchener (the grand old man of introspective psychology
at the turn of the century) who, describing the role of imagery (which
might be visual or verbal), had written: 'When there is any difficulty
in exposition, a point to be argued pro and con, I hear my own words
just ahead of me.' [10] This may be a boon to the timid lecturer, but
from the theoretical point of view it is not much help -- because the
question how words arise in consciousness is merely pushed one step back,
and thus becomes the question how world-images arise in consciousness.

 

 

Both answers -- the Behaviourist's and the introspectionist's -- avoid
the bask issue of how thought is parcelled out into language, how the
shapeless rocks of ideas are cunningly split into crystalline fragments
of distinctive form, and put on the moving belt to be carried from
left to right along the single dimension of time. The reverse operation
is performed by the listener, who takes the string as his baseline to
reconstruct the tree, converting sounds into patterns, words into phrases,
and so on. When one listens to a speaker, the string of syllables itself
hardly ever reaches consciousness; the words of the previous sentence,
too, are rapidly effaced and only their meaning remains; the actual
sentences suffer the same fate, and by the next day the twigs and branches
of the tree have wilted away so that only the trunk survives -- a shadowy
generalised schema. We can represent both processes diagrammatically,
indicating how 'imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown',
and how the pen 'turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings a
local habitation and a name'; and we can also go through the operation in
reverse gear to show how the traces left by the pen lose their shape and
revert to airy nothings. But while these diagrams yield reliable formulae
and rules, they provide only a superficial kind of understanding of how a
child attains mastery of language, and how adults convert thoughts into
airwaves, and back.
A complete understanding of these phenomena will probably always elude our
grasp because the operations which generate language include processes
which cannot be expressed by language: the attempt to analyse speech
leaves us speechless. To quote Wittgenstein: 'the thing which expresses
itself in language, we cannot represent by language'.* This paradox is one
of the many aspects of the mind-body problem, to which we shall return;
for the moment let me merely point out that, in contrast to the rigid
concept of the chain which drags the organism along its predetermined
path, the dynamic concept of the growing tree implies an open-ended
hierarchy. The meaning of 'openness' in this context will become evident
as we go along.

 

* Was sich in der Sprache ausdrückt, können wir
nicht durch sie ausdrücken.

 

 

'What do you mean by that?'

 

 

Let me return for a moment to the ambiguity of language, which will
provide a first example of 'open-endedness'.

 

 

There are different kinds of ambiguities on different levels of the
hierarchy. On the lowest level, as we saw, is the purely acoustic
ambiguity of phonemes, revealed by their sound-spectrograms (sounds
transformed into visible patterns as on the sound-track of a film). They
show that the transitions between /bay/, /day/ and /gay/ are continuous,
like the colours of a rainbow, and that whether we hear /day/ or /gay/
depends mainly on the context.

 

 

On the next level we find, in addition to sound ambiguity, the subtler
indeterminacies of the meaning of words, of which several types are
shown in Lashley's mill-wright example. They can be put to deliberate
use in the pun, in the play of words, in assonance and rhyme.

 

 

The next level of ambiguity is less common, but has great theoretical
importance for linguists, because it shows up nicely the fallacies of the
chain concept. 'Young boys and girls are fond of sweets' sounds simple
and unambiguous enough. But what happens if this is immediately followed
by 'Young boys and girls have no hair on their chests'? If we follow the
S-R schema, we shall very likely come to the conclusion that older girls
do have hair on their chests. The reason is that in the first sentence
we have parcelled out our 'verbal stimuli' thus: ((Young) (boys and
girls)). So we tend to do the same thing in the second sentence. Only
later do we realise that in the second sentence we must package the
stimuli differently: ((Young boys) (and) (girls)). But if the stimuli
can only be discriminated after completion of the chain allegedly based
on discriminated stimuli, then we are moving in a vicious circle and
the S-R model breaks down.*

 

* In the terms of symbolic logic we would have to say that the
response R to the whole sentence implies the responses r to its
elements, which in turn imply the response R to the whole sentence:
R-- a variant of the paradox of the Cretan liar.

 

Translated into neurophysiological terms, the hierarchic approach
indicates that speaking and listening are both multi-levelled processes,
which involve constant interactions and feedbacks between higher and
lower levels of the nervous system (such as receptor and effector organs,
the projection areas in the brain, other areas involving memory and
association, etc.). Even Behaviourists must realise that man has a more
complex brain than the rat, although they do not like to be reminded of
it. Only by this multi-levelled activity of the nervous system is the
mind enabled to tramform linear sequences along the single dimension of
time into complex patterns of meaning -- and back again.

 

 

The ambiguities so far discussed relate to the phonological and syntactic
domains. They are resolved in a relatively simple way by reference to
context on the next higher level of the hierarchy. But this analysis
merely ensures intelligibility in the literal sense; it is no more than
the first step upward into the vast, multi-layered hierarchies of the
semantic domain. A sentence taken in isolation conveys no information as
to whether it should be interpreted at face value, or metaphorically,
or ironically, i.e., meaning the opposite of what it seems to mean;
or perhaps containing a veiled message -- as the 'Don't mention it'
in our dialogue. Such ambiguities of an isolated sentence can once more
only be resolved by reference to its context -- i.e., to the next higher
level in the hierarchy. This is exemplified when we ask at the end of
a perfectly intelligible sentence: 'What do you mean by that?' Thus
sentences stand in the same relation to their context as words to the
sentence and phonemes to words. With each step upward in the hierarchy
the peak seems to recede. In discourse concerned with relatively trivial
matters, the hierarchy comprises only a few levels, and the climber comes
to rest. But we have seen that even that trivial dialogue between He
and She tapers into a whole pyramid of overt messages, implicit meaning,
the motivation behind it, and the motivation behind the motivation. Some
psychoanalysts use the term 'metalanguage' for these higher levels of
communication, where the real meaning of the message can only be got at
through a whole series of de-coding operations.