I have (unapologetically) digressed.
It started as usual, with cracking open World Philosophies and nosing about Immanuel Kant’s theories. He wrote the middle path between rationalist and empiricist, arguing for the existence of a priori systems of thought alongside a posterori solidity. Neither philosophy suited him; he could not agree wholly with innateness or solely with existence out of substance. Intangible concepts like duty and loyalty could not be settled to him by anything physical, they were synthetic (hence a priori), born out of human consciousness. How could one trace back to a solid relic of these types of free-floating concepts?
Upon my first reading, I found myself nodding along, fitting the pieces together easily. Kant made sense, it seemed impossible to trace synthetic concepts back to some point of physical origin. A priori subjectivity latched and left me without further thought. A few hours later, I recalled the grounded physicality of all things, even those that are artificial. They derive out of something; it seemed too ungrounded to think a child develops honor and duty out of some innate system formed during his time in the womb.
So, as any younger sister does, I prodded my older sister for a further explanation of the concept and toed the idea that it seemed far too simple. She linked me to an essay (of sorts) by Willard Quine and sent me on my way to discovery. And so my digression began.
Quine writes on linguistics, breaking down sentences to their logical and mathematical forms. The essay explores the concept of analytic statements, but quickly severs the reader form any point of argument. Quine traps the reader in an infinite loop of definition and interchangeability (salva veritate). For, the definition of a more “complex” phrase tends to be a synonym and simpler concept. Hence, any complexity perceived in a language is simply dependent on the “richness” of the language itself. Salva veritate only applies to languages that have many simple, interchangeable phrases. All concrete statements stem out of sensory experience, but seem to lose their empirical solidity as they drift further from the original concept.
According to Quine, humans brush the very fringes of experience. Our representations and understandings constantly have room for change and do change. Language, constantly in flux as it meets with new experience, therefore does not fall under constraints other than those built upon experience. This information provides us with Quine’s conclusion that there exists no boundary between synthetic and analytic, as both are constructs based on faulty human representation of sensory information.
This explanation gave some solid ground to pack the shaky path of my a priori doubt. But my interest was piqued, linguistics proved to be one of the most interesting things I’ve read about, so I inquired further and was told of a big wig in the field, the creator of one of the leading theories—Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky, a notable linguist, brought forth the theory of universal grammar. In this theory, a human child holds the key to language and an underlying grammar structure innately. Language comes to play given the correct environment circumstances—obviously one in which language-speaking adults surround the child. All languages have a common underlying grammatical structure, from Mandarin to Swedish. In this instance, language would be genetically encoded and need a trigger to begin to function.
Another part of Chomsky’s theory on language includes discontinuity from animal species. In short, he does not believe that language evolved out of animal communication. He finds the concept of man one day acquiring a near perfect grasp of language to be a more reasonable explanation than that of the evolutionary theory. He argues that animals communicate based on biological needs; they do not do so with implicit purpose, they cannot mean something else in context of their call.
The dismissal of evolutionary theory in Chomsky’s concept of language acts as a large impetus for the rest of his theory. If one did consider evolutionary theory as a method by which humans acquired language, it would be a different story. The concepts of learning and higher order memory storage would begin to play a larger role in the studying of languages, while innateness and its cul-de-sac would be off to the side. In this theory, language developed and stored itself within the human culture through constant exposure by surrounding people who spoke certain languages. These languages pass down the generations, eventually producing branches from the original (see: Latin and all the romantic languages).
Each language produces a thought process dissimilar from all others. As an interesting aspect of higher order memory storage and learning, these thought processes produce separate views of the world that then pass down again to another generation. This theory, named Whorfian theory, shows how across languages humans see the world in different ways. Simple things like memorization of directions may completely alter a person’s memory. One of the cultures that I happened to read about used the cardinal directions for their way of telling direction instead of the Western, egocentric left, right, up, down, etc. Although one cannot say what it has done to the moral compass of the culture (made them worldlier, more empathetic or detached?), it has proved to have an effect on the way that their memories are stored. Instead of visualizing a scene through the narrator’s standpoint, always facing forward, this culture imagines the room entirely how it is cardinally. It’s hard for me to imagine, really. To have such a firm grip on north, south, east, and west. I barely am able to navigate off the person-tied directions Western culture has given us.
Whorfian theory may be an indicator of Chomsky’s incorrect vision. The diversification across the globe reveals grammatical structures so vastly different and representative of the individual cultures that it seems impossible for it to have come from some strand of DNA. As I look to continue my dive into the field of linguistics (if only for a twisted kind of hobby), I plan to read Chomsky only as a refutation of other theories in the stubborn finality of his work. I see no further exploration down the Chomsky road, with things seeming to have settled and in the midst of collecting dust.
Linguistics turned out a worthy, though temporary exploration.
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