This time I look at a short work that contains a large number of surprising ideas.
A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning by Ray Jackendoff (Oxford, New York, 2012, 274pp ISBN 978-0-19-969320-7, www.oup.com, $29.95)
According to Steven Pinker's blurb on the dust jacket,
"Ray Jackendoff is a monumental scholar in linguistics who, more than any other scholar alive today, has shown how language can serve as a window into human nature. Combining theoretical depth with a love of revealing detail, Jackendoff illuminates human reason and consciousness in startling and insightful ways."
Jackendoff is the author of many books on linguistics
and cognition, but in this one he presents an overview of some key concepts to
a broad audience. He says that as a traditional scholarly treatise it would be
a thousand pages long -- if he ever finished it. The usual downside of
presenting lots of ideas in a short space is that a book can become, like
McLuhan's Understanding Media, too dense for ordinary humans to grasp. But
down-to-earth examples, simple diagrams, and a few cartoons -- which provide
the revealing detail Pinker refers to -- make this book a pleasure to read.
Cognitive Perspective
The heart of Jackendoff's argument is that thought and
meaning are almost completely unconscious; we are aware of pronunciations,
sentences, visual surfaces, and a small set of inklings that arise from
unconscious processes. The inklings, called character tags, give us the
feeling, for example, that a certain sound or visual surface is meaningful,
significant, good, taboo, based on sensory input, and so forth. If you say
"thit," I'm aware that you said something meaningless, but the mental
processes that produce that awareness are as unavailable as those that tell me
when to breathe. It's hard to explain what happens in your head when I say,
"Osculating means doing this."
Jackendoff presents dozens of small examples that refute
many widely held ideas and lead him to conclude that meaning is unconscious.
Reading them is enlightening and delightful. They often contrast the ordinary
perspective -- the one we're all born with -- which is natural, but can lead to
paradoxes (there's no such thing as sunsets), with the cognitive perspective,
which always asks, "How does the brain do that?" For example,
"John slept until the bell rang" entails a single sleep, while
"John jumped until the bell rang" entails potentially many jumps.
Nothing in the actual sentences conveys that difference. We can use
words after the fact to explain the difference, but it is
immediately apparent without that step. Whether the jumping is a one-time event
or a repeated activity is an aspect of the unconscious meanings that the
sentences don't express.
This book is about software in the sense that Jackendoff
is concerned with how the brain provides the experiences of language, thought,
and meaning that we are all familiar with. From the ordinary perspective we
have no trouble understanding that "the bear chased the lion" and
"the lion was chased by the bear" mean the same thing. From the
cognitive perspective, we know that this understanding arises from brain
activity. But just as we don't look at
digital signals to figure out how a computer executes an algorithm written in
Java, Jackendoff doesn't try to explain this phenomenon by looking at neural
and chemical activity. He focuses on data structures, information flow, and the
states of character tags.
Many people have tried to explain consciousness (for
example, see Micro Review, Mar/Apr 1992, where I review Daniel Dennett's
Consciousness Explained). Jackendoff reviews some of the more popular theories
and challenges them to explain the observed phenomena. He believes that
whatever consciousness is, it enables us to perform certain language-based
kinds of reasoning, but it gives us limited access to the most important and
powerful brain activities that support the way we attach meaning to events in
the world. Sentences like "the bear chased the lion" and "the
lion was chased by the bear" are different handles for closely linked
entries in unconscious data structures. Those structures contain information
about lions, bears, chasing, and English grammar. They provide the means by
which we can recognize "the wargon chased the olifump" as likely to
be an instance of the same sort of activity, even though we don't recognize the
words "wargon" or "olifump." The structures also define the
conceptual relationships that show types and characteristics: bears are
animals, mammals, predators, intelligent creatures, four-legged, and so forth.
They exhibit mother/child relationships similar to but different from those of
lions or humans. If we see a bear, we know it's a bear even if we have never
seen that particular bear before.
Jackendoff, unlike his mentor Noam Chomsky, thinks
communication is why language developed, with rational thinking as a side
benefit. Rational thinking is important, but it isn't what most of us think it
is. As Lewis Carroll pointed out in What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, every
syllogism relies on a hidden syllogism in an infinite regress. When we say,
"All humans are mortal; Socrates is human; therefore, Socrates is
mortal," we have a hidden syllogism that lets us reason that this is of
the form "All A are B; C is an A; therefore C is B," and that if we
can line up humans, mortal, and Socrates with A, B, and C, then the statement
about Socrates is true. Ultimately, we
rely on an unconsciously generated character tag to tell us whether the
reasoning is correct.
In Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2011), Daniel Kahneman popularizes System 1, the fast, intuitive mode of
thought and System 2, the slow, rational mode of thought. Jackendoff says these
correspond to his ideas of unconscious and conscious thought and that they are
not separate. System 2 rides on top of System 1 and uses its capabilities. If I
encounter a bear with its cubs in the woods, System 1 tells me to head immediately
in another direction, while System 2 helps me reason about what the bear might
do. System 2 is thought that is linked to a cognitive correlate of
consciousness, namely, a data structure that corresponds to our subjective
experience of hearing language in our heads and provides a handle for the
unconscious thought.
Images, smell, taste, touch, and even the sense of where
we are in the world (proprioception)
provide additional handles to unconscious meanings and structures. Blind
children, led along two walls of a room to an opposite corner, have no trouble
returning along the diagonal to their starting point. This shows that we have
unconscious spatial maps that are distinct from visual images.
Jackendoff speculates on the structures that support
unconscious thinking. In addition to meanings linked into conceptual structures
and spatial maps, every entity that we deal with in the long or short term has
a reference file, which holds everything we know about it. The reference file
for the mama bear lets us keep her in mind while we ponder other facts that
may be helpful. Rational (conscious) thinking enables us to create reference
files for thoughts, so we can manipulate and explore them without losing track
of them.
Character tags -- of which Jackendoff postulates fewer
than a dozen -- play an important role in his model. They explain how we
perceive the world as "out there" and how we distinguish actual
perception from mental images or dreams. He postulates a character tag that
gives us a sense of whether the visual surface in our head arises from our
minds or from sensory input. This character tag is often ineffective during
dreaming, and it sometimes gives schizophrenics the wrong message. Another
character tag provides a sense of whether we are in control of ongoing events.
This forms the basis of our sense of free will.
Implications
Jackendoff's model of unconscious structures and
character tags does more than simply explain the relationships between
language, thought, and meaning. It provides a coherent explanation of how we
understand and experience the world. For example, from the ordinary
perspective, we ask, "What is truth?" Jackendoff answers by showing
that question to be hard to answer. He shows pictures of men of varying degrees
of baldness, looks at the one in the middle and asks, "Is Ed bald?"
He prefers the cognitive perspective, which asks, "What does the brain do
when it judges a statement to be true?"
This leads to the conclusion that judging truth largely happens unconsciously,
and that the well known phenomena of confirmation bias and denial play a part.
The fact that meaning is unconscious and that System 1
thinking is fast and pretty accurate does not mean that rational thinking is
useless. In fact, rational thinking is a large part of what distinguishes
humans from other animals. Language, which characterizes System 2 thinking,
enables us to give thoughts reference files of their own, describe and
manipulate the information provided by character tags, and engage in hypothetical
reasoning. We can transform the results of intuitive reasoning into explicit
steps and challenge each one. The famous
example is the bat and ball that cost a total of $1.10, with the bat costing a
dollar more than the ball. Intuitive reasoning immediately says that the ball
costs ten cents, but rational thinking, plodding along methodically, arrives at
the correct answer.
All of this has implications for teaching, learning, or
becoming a virtuoso of art or science. Jackendoff, an accomplished concert
clarinetist, illustrates this by telling how his chamber group spent 15 minutes
deciding how to play the first six seconds of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. From
this he extrapolates to how to integrate rational and intuitive thinking in
music, theater, sports, art, writing, and every other skilled activity -- even
reasoning itself. The goal is always "flow" -- that state in which it
all goes so well we surprise ourselves.
Jackendoff tries to show that the arts matter as much as
science. I believe that he is correct but it's a hard argument to make.
Rational thinking, because it is based on language, conceals aspects of thought
that language cannot express. Science resonates with the rational while the
arts resonate with the intuitive. Science looks for ever broader
generalizations that minimize the surface of appearances. Artistic appreciation
seeks intricate and subtle details and patterns. It reveals the character of
the surface -- not what is said, but how. Because System 2 rides on System 1, you
can't have rationality without the underlying intuition, and the better you
train the intuition, the better the rationality will be. As I said, it's a hard
argument to make.
The book is a deceptively easy read. I got through it
once and realized that I had missed many key points. I had to start over and
take careful notes. The book is densely packed with insights and ideas, which
are well worth the effort of grasping them.
