Who Is the Master Who Makes Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously?

[Originally posted March 9, 2008. This re-post has been lightly copy-edited]

“Language of thought” theory (LOT), originally developed by Jerry Fodor in the 1970s, and now championed most famously by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought, presumes a pre-literate conceptual language, sometimes called mentalese, upon which our conscious, tangible symbolic language is based. This language of thought is imagined to be innate, and thus a universal substrate for all human language from Algonquin to Finno-Ugric to Brooklynese.

The LOT hypothesis is an outgrowth of Noam Chomsky’s nativist theory of a “universal grammar,” which in its turn was a response to the reigning behaviorist paradigm of the day. Behaviorism never fully rebounded from Chomsky’s critique (though it’s found new expression in the speculative protoscience of memetics) , and we’re all better off for this. But beyond this, nativism has not proved to be very fruitful in our understanding of cognition, serving mostly (through no fault of Chomsky’s) to fortify the sociobiological argument that our cultural norms reflect hard-wired biological determinants, which emerged to help us manage the challenges of our paleolithic beginnings.

There are a number of logical problems with the LOT hypothesis, with perhaps the most obvious being that words, unlike numbers, are not static and precise through time, as they would need to be if they were subject to unconscious translation into and out of mentalese. The number represented by the numeral 2, for example, can be counted on to always be the same. But what is indicated by the modern English words love, doctor, faith, fish, holiday, circus, atom, fairy, wealth and savage, just to name a few, has wildly varied just in the few hundred years we’ve been using this form of the language. If there was some kind of inborn uber-language which determined the meanings expressed in our own spoken languages, it’s difficult to see how it could permit this kind of semantic drift.

The LOT model is built on the metaphor of computer processing, so it is instructive to ask how well a computer would function if different things were intended by the same terms during successive installs of a piece of software. It seems plausible to many of us living now to imagine that human language rests on a logical foundation just like a computer program: after all, we can perform logical calculations, just as a computer can, and most of our expressions appear to be logically grounded. But the question to ask is not what we can do now, but what humans or humanoids could and did do at the dawn of language, at least 50,000 years ago, perhaps much earlier. The rudiments of formal logic didn’t appear on the scene until less than 3,000 years ago, with the Greeks, and weren’t developed into a complex system until the 20th century. This would be a strange course of events if formal logic were built into the structure of our cognition from the start, which is what LOT proposes.

As best we can tell, for the first several thousand years of our existence human cognition took the form of what we now derisively call “magical thinking,” or myth. This is the environment into which language was originally born and given to develop. There is little in the linguistic and ethnographic data to presuppose a rational thought process underlying pre-modern language, and a great deal to suggest something very different.

Ernst Cassirer notes that the primacy of mythological thinking presents a significant problem for the “realist” view. The common line is that myths were erroneous explanations of objects and phenomena, given the lack of adequate tools and resources to understand these objects and phenomena for what they really were. But this description is based on a misunderstanding of mythical thinking; it presumes that from the very first, humans were concerned with explanations. The problem is that to formulate the questions that these explanations are supposed to answer, one must already have a language, and a fairly well-developed one. As Cassirer writes, in Language and Myth (1946):

It seems only natural to us that the world presents itself to our and inspection and observation as a pattern of definite forms, each with its own perfectly determinate spatial limits that give it its specific individuality.

But it becomes difficult to see how these forms might have been experienced before there was a language to conceive them in. It would seem that ideation and language require each other. But then we are faced with the problem of winnowing. Cassirer continues:

What is it that leads or constrains language to collect [classes of objects] into a single whole and denote them by a word? … As soon as we cast the problem in this mold, traditional logic offers no support … for its explanation of the origin of generic concepts presupposes the very thing we are seeking to understand and derive, the formulation of linguistic notions.

Cassirer was writing 40 years before Pinker’s first books on language, but provides an apt preemptive critique of the LOT thesis. How would this putatively inborn, genetically determined linguistic structure have supported a conceptual schema so radically different from our own, and so different from what its own nature would predict, for so many thousands of years?

Cassirer provides numerous examples of the slow progression of mythological ideation from the earliest and simplest myths to the appearance of logical reasoning, and we could turn to any prominent cultural anthropologist for additional demonstrations. But there is interesting evidence of a more recent provenance as well, in the autobiography of Helen Keller, who very explicitly asserts that she had close to no inner life at all before she was taught sign language:

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect.I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind impetus… [N]ever in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation.

We shouldn’t read too much into one self-reported anecdote, of course. Keller was a special case, born with sight and hearing only to lose it at nineteen months, so she was exposed to spoken language for a not insignificant period of time. But it is intriguing to note how non-conceptual her cognition was before she learned to use language.

In the March 10 issue of The New Yorker, John Lancaster writes of a similar, though more everyday, predicament when it comes to the most precisely descriptive regions of experience, as in the appreciation of wine, or perfume. He begins with a story about his “discovery,” after long resistance, of what oenophiles call “graininess” in red wine. Before the experience, he had rejected the term as rhetorical overkill–something that many people with less refined palates (myself included) are quick to presume when encountering such seemingly fantastical language. But when he finally noticed graininess (after many failed attempts), he conceded it was the perfect word, and not nearly as figurative as he had imagined. Here’s the interesting part, which I was not expecting to find in a New Yorker article on olfactory perception:

What’s more, in tasting it I realized I’d encountered versions of it–milder, more restrained–before. Now I knew what grainy tannins were. Most taste experiences work like that. A taste or smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don’t have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the same time, and both your palate and your vocabulary have expanded.

This is exactly the opposite of the common sense view, that objects and phenomena precede their names (though to be fair, someone had to be the first person to call a wine “grainy.”) Is it possible that our understanding of the world expands and develops not before we describe it, and not because we describe it, but as we describe it? This seems much more plausible than the Darwinian explanation, in which we are in constant stenographic response to a world of given stimuli; and because the latter has us spinning our wheels, culturally, over alleged biological imperatives from a world long past, the possibility that we participate in our description of the world also seems much more likely to allow some actual evolution of thought, philosophical, scientific, and moral.

Th Banality of Evil Genes

[originally posted February 24, 2008. This repost has undergone moderate copyediting for style, and to address a correction pointed out by the author]

Evil Genes: How Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, by Barbara Oakley. Prometheus Books. 459 pages.

One might be forgiven for assuming that the nature versus nurture argument had been quietly settled long ago, with credit and spoils agreeably distributed among all parties. But apparently that’s not what most of us want to hear, as the continuing supply of sociobiology books championing the near-irrelevance of culture seems to show. In psychology, the big names are Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate) and Judith Rich Harris (The Nurture Assumption), both of whom have now favorably blurbed a book by a new footsoldier, Barbara Oakley, professor of electrical engineering at Oakland University. To the cause Oakley’s book contributes, at the very least, a way of encapsulating human nature that everyone can understand. It’s called Evil Genes.

Evil Genes is half personal anecdote, half survey of recent science on the biochemical underpinnings of mood and emotion (Oakley would go further, to say underpinnings of human behavior, but this is exactly the connection the studies do not show). Indeed there is some interesting science in Evil Genes, mostly in the areas of genomics, brain chemistry, and neural imaging. But when you extract what is actually pertinent to Oakley’s thesis, you are left with very little. Certain genes, as we might expect, influence the production of certain neurotransmitters, and the growth of certain areas of the brain. There are studies that suggest that some genetic profiles can sufficiently impact mood, emotion and cognition to dispose a person to psychopathy. Evil Genes cites several such studies.

But here we need to be careful. Genomes are not blueprints. Complex organisms have a profound level of variation available in their genes. Some traits are, admittedly, highly determined by our genes–Mendel’s famous wrinkled and smooth peas, for example, or our own eye and hair color. A handful of diseases, like Huntington’s, are almost inevitable in those carrying the right genes, and in some cases the onset of these diseases can be predicted with considerable accuracy.

But these are misleading examples, and because of them the deterministic aspect of genetic influence is given far more importance, in the popular mind, than is due. For a century, scientists have spoken of genes “for” various traits, though for at least half of that time we’ve known that gene activity is regulated by non-heritable factors, either in the “outside” environment, or within the cell. Though we still talk of programs, blueprints and “hard-wiring,” genetic influences are much more similar to a library of possible texts. In short, genetic determinism, though so eminently compelling to our imaginations, is a scientific model that has outlived its usefulness.

Most genetic determinists give abundant lip service to the complexity of gene regulation in the cell, and to the important role of environments in expressing genetic tendencies. But when the time comes to put it all in everyday terms, these caveats are swept aside. Thus we have Richard Dawkins’ oft-quoted comments about genes as “master programmers” exerting “ultimate power” over behavior. He knows, or should know, the falsity of this, but it helps sell books.

Oakley, too, is careful to emphasize that traits arise from interactions between genes and environments*. To this extent her book is a helpful contribution to our understanding of the genetics of human behavior. But this subtlety falls away where it matters most. We look to the title to distill for us the most important part of a book’s argument. Evil Genes does little, unfortunately, to dispel the common misunderstanding of the genome as a deterministic program, and it’s hard to see how this could be anything but deliberate.

(This is the same gambit used by Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism. Deep in the guts of his text he makes weird disclaimers to the effect of “just because I’m calling liberals ‘fascists’ doesn’t mean they’re always diabolical; in fact liberal fascism is often quite benign.” That’s a supreme act of bad faith, and a pretty big insult to all the people who suffered at the hands of real, non-benign fascism last century.)

Titles matter, because we need to connect even the most complicated explanations of things to basic understandable ideas. In the case of Evil Genes the idea is an old one; it’s the myth of the “bad seed,” the notion that evil is born, not made. The mark of Cain. There’s another, less explicit myth in there too, the myth of the Svengali, wherein evil always manages to get the better of good, through trickery and exploitation. Evil, in this tale, is endowed with a powerful inner magnetism which Goodness does not have the resources to resist.

There’s a certain value to these stories, but it’s not the one that Oakley seizes upon. The lesson of these cautionary archetypes is not about the Evil Other, it is about ourselves. It is about the tension between, in Blake’s proposition, Innocence and Experience. The primary confusion running through Evil Genes is Oakley’s implicit association of “good” with “innocent.” She is trying to combat the naive misconception that people are born “good.” But is this really all that widely held? It seems to me the much more prevalent conception is that humans are born innocent, which is not at all the same. Ironically, the conflation of innocence and goodness falls prey to the same naiveté Oakley sets out to remediate: to identify innocence with goodness is itself innocent. To the extent we can talk about good and evil in any meaningful way, they must be informed by our experience.

A newborn baby can do neither good nor evil. He or she is utterly self absorbed, by nature, in a way that is entirely beyond reproach. We allocate proportionally more responsibility to children as they develop, until we release them as free agents into the world, at around 18. But this is not a process of reactively doling out greater and greater hunks of adulthood until the child’s development it complete. It is an interactive and creative venture. These 18 years are set aside, in our culture, not just to wait for development to be completed, but to build a psyche, an identity (as opposed to a personality, which we can be more comfortable calling “inborn”) that can function in a healthy way. And we spend an enormous amount of energy and money on this process, through rearing, schooling, media, and various other organized activities. A visitor from another planet would have to conclude that we consider that enculturation of children a pretty important activity.

Oakley’s book completely ignores the function of culture and socialization in the development process. The extent of her interest in the social aspect of psychology is expressed in a single sentence:

Psychology, with explanations founded on “defense mechanisms,” “countertransference” and “acting out” can only go so far.

We are not told how far is “so far,” nor are we treated to any explication of the merits (or demerits) of the psychological paradigm. She unnecessarily dismisses the behaviorist “blank slate” model of human nature, which has been out of favor in clinical psychology for half a century. Again, it is an irony Oakley fails to recognize that without the important work the behaviorists did eliminating conceptual structures as a legitimate course of psychological study, the mechanistic view of humanity she favors, in common with luminaries like Steven Pinker and Judith Rich Harris, would not be possible.

I mentioned earlier that the book is half personal narrative, focusing mostly on Oakley’s effort to understand her sister, Carolyn, who she calls a “Machiavellian” personality type, after the classification developed by Christie and Geis in the 1950s. On the one hand the fact that Oakley has written her personal motivation for pursuing this interest right into the through-line of her book is an admirable transparency. But making the venture explicitly personal demonstrates a conflict of interest that deeply mars Oakley’s argument. Though she briefly touches upon some of the recent challenges in the literature, such as identical twin studies, to prevailing nurture-based theories of psychology, when it comes to her own family the topic is (understandably) off limits. By failing to seriously investigate (or even consider) the possibility that Carolyn (who died in 2004) might have suffered some kind of transgressional event in her childhood, Oakley obviates her sister’s history of any illuminatory potential regarding interpersonal causes of psychopathology. Excerpts from Carolyn’s diary throughout the book give the appearance of contributing, somehow, to Oakley’s evil genes thesis. But since Oakley only considers as possibilities that Carolyn had “Machiavellian”** genes, or (in a half-hearted investigation) that her personality was altered by childhood polio, the diary entries serve only a circular, tautological role.

Whatever happened or didn’t happen to Oakley’s sister, most morally and emotionally damaged people have a history of somekind of childhood abuse or neglect. The pattern is demonstrable. It’s possible that some people are born with a more robust genome, and able to thrive after an upbringing that would have twisted the psyche of many another into Gordian knots. It’s not clear to me why we should call the latter a genetic defect instead of calling the former a genetic cushion. In either case, most children raised in healthy homes don’t end up “sinister.” As a culture, we are able to profoundly influence the nurture side of the equation. Why not focus on what is possible, instead encouraging the kind of fatalism that extends from considering human nature as set in stone, out of our hands? Why devote large portions of our discourse to the things we can’t have any influence on? At the very least, scary bedtime stories about monsters go down a lot easier (and result in much better dreams) when the hero or heroine is given something interesting or useful to do.

 

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* Indeed, in her comment to me she writes: “There is little doubt that some very rare individuals are born without the capacity to feel empathy, and take great pleasure in the sufferings of others. Often this results in what many people would agree is deeply antisocial, harmful, and even “evil” behavior. But for most other people who grow up with a pattern of harming others, environment plays as profound a role as genetics.” I don’t know how to read this as anything but a refutation of her main thesis. It all hinges on how rare is “rare,” of course, but the implication is that the number of people born “evil” is statistically insignificant. And if we’re going to preclude any study of what environmental factors might have affected the pathology, such as it was, of Mao, Stalin, or Paris Hilton, I don’t see what possible value the “evil gene” theory can provide us.

 

**We use the word “Machiavellian” today to indicate personal opportunism, but this is not the philosophy Machiavelli espsoused; his counsel of deception and cruelty was meant not for everyman, but for Kings, and not because he wanted Kings to have special privileges for their own sake, but for the greater stability of the state. When we talk about ends justifying means, we rarely remember that to make any sense at all, the ends would have to be something other than whatever might be gratifying at the time–i.e. short-term personal gain.