2012.11.24 — Jung by Anthony Stevens: Read

Anthony Stevens.
Jung.
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0192876864. [Note: the link is to 2001 edition, not shown here.]

Begun: 2012.10.29.
Finished: 2012.11.21.

★★★★★

Jung is a tightly written, comprehensive yet short overview of Jung's ideas and biography. Stevens managed to connect how Jung's biography influenced the

development of his ideas and how influential those ideas have been. Stevens' survey of Jung's relationship with Freud is interesting and balanced, as is his refutation of the anti-semitism charges that have floated around Jung since before the second world war.

Now after all that praise, I would suggest that Jung is a book without a really strong audience. The book is detailed enough and I suspect generally as accurate as a 3rd party biography can be. But that is its biggest problem. I suspect that many people completely unfamiliar with Jung's writings are likely to come away from this book with an exaggerated understanding of the power and range of Jung's ideas and influence and decide to not read anything else. They will not understand that the reason people read Jung is to begin the journey of self-understanding, what Jung called individuation.

On the other hand, those who are significantly familiar with Jung will not find too much new here. It remains simply a summary and review, albeit a very good one. It does have some nice quotable bits for those interested in quips or sound bites.

But what moved this book from just a solid four to five stars was something Stevens observed I had until reading it here thought that I had uniquely noticed. Thank god I am not the only one to have spotted the remarkable similarity between Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories and Jung's conceptualization of the collective unconscious and archetypes (p37). Now, it is possible that other Jungian commentators I have previously read made this connection too, but at a time in my life before I was familiar with Chomsky's linguistic ideas. But I do not remember even one such reference, and definitely haven't seen one since then. Nor have I seen anyone from the Chomsky side making the connection. (For those curious about this, a good overview of Chomsky's linguistics is Justin Leiber's Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Overview. I have blogged my review of it here.) And in it was my first publication of my perception of the strong equivalent between Jung's collective unconscious and Chomsky's Deep Structure and Universal Grammar. (No, the writers of the Wikipedia do not make a similar claim.)

Furthermore, Chomsky completely eviscerates behaviouralist models as having been completely ineffectual at explaining anything. Jung found the idea that behaviouralism could explain the human experience as untenable as well. Here's Stevens' summary:

… An archetype, [Jung] said, is not 'an inherited idea' but rather 'an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a "pattern of behaviour". This aspect of the archetype,' concludes Jung, 'the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology' (CW XVIII, par. 1228). In a sense, ethology and Jungian psychology can be viewed as two sides of the same coin: it is as if ethologists have been engaged in an extraverted exploration of the archetype and Jungians in an introverted examination of the [biologically postulated] IRM [Innate Releasing Mechanism].

The currency of archetypal theory

Many other disciplines have produced concepts similar to the archetypal hypothesis, but usually without reference to Jung. For example, the primary concern of Claude Levi-Strauss and the French school of

structural anthropology is with the unconscious infrastructures which they hold responsible for all human customs and institutions; specialists in linguistics maintain that although grammars differ from one another, their basic forms—which Noam Chomsky calls their deep structures—are universal (i.e. at the deepest neuropsychic level, there exists a universal [or 'archetypal'] grammar on which all individual grammars are based), an entirely new discipline, sociobiology, has grown up on the theory that the patterns of behaviour typical of all social species, the human species included, are dependent on genetically transmitted response strategies designed to maximize the fitness of the organism to survive in the environment in which it evolved; sociobiology also holds that the psycho-social development in individual members of a species is dependent on what are termed epigenetic rules [epi = upon, genesis = development; i.e. rules upon which development proceeds); more recently still, ethologically oriented psychiatrists have begun to study what they call psychobiological response patterns and deeply homologous neural structures which they hold responsible for the achievement of healthy or unhealthy patterns of adjustment in individual patients in response to variations in their social environment. All these concepts are compatible with the archetypal hypothesis which lung had proposed decades earlier to virtually universal indifference.

This raises an important question. If lung's theory of archetypes is so fundamental that it keeps being rediscovered by the practitioners of many other disciplines, why did it not receive the enthusiastic welcome it deserved when Jung proposed it? The explanation is, I think, twofold: namely, the time at which Jung stated the theory, and the way in which he published it.

In the first place, throughout Jung's mature lifetime, researchers working in university departments of psychology were in the grip of behaviourism, which discounted innate or genetic factors, preferring to view the individual as a tabula rasa whose development was almost entirely dependent on environmental factors. lung's contrary view that the infant comes into the world with an intact blueprint for life which it then proceeds to implement through interaction with the environment, was so at variance with the prevailing Zeitgeist as to guarantee it a hostile reception.

Secondly, Jung did not state his theory in a clear, testable form, nor did he back it up with sufficiently persuasive evidence. His book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido in which he first put forward his idea of a collective unconscious giving rise to 'primordial images' (as he originally called archetypes) was so densely written and so packed with mythological exegesis as to make it virtually impenetrable to any but the most determined reader. Moreover, in arguing that 'primordial images' were derived from the past history of mankind,

Jung exposed himself to the accusation that he, like Freud, subscribed to the discredited theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, originally proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), i.e. that ideas or images occurring in members of one generation could be passed on genetically to the next and subsequent generations.

In fact, the collective unconscious is a respectable scientific hypothesis and one does not have to adopt a Lamarckian view of biology to entertain it. Indeed, as we have seen, it is entirely compatible with the theoretical formulations of contemporary ethologists, sociobiologists, and psychiatrists. Precisely in order to acquit himself of the charge of Lamarckism Jung eventually made a clear distinction between what he termed the archetype-as-such (similar to Kant's das Ding-an-sich} and the archetypal images, ideas, and behaviours that the archetype-as-such gives rise to. It is the predisposition to have certain experiences that is archetypal and inherited, not the experience itself. The French molecular biologist and Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod reached an identical conclusion: 'Everything comes from experience, yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.'

Thus, the Jungian archetype is no more scientifically disreputable than the ethological IRM. Just as the behavioural repertoire of each species is encoded in its central nervous system as innate releasing mechanisms which are activated in the course of development by appropriate sign stimuli, so Jung conceived the programme for human life to be encoded in the collective unconscious as a series of archetypal determinants which are actualized in response to inner and outer events in the course of the life cycle. There is nothing Lamarckian or unbiological in this conception (37-9).

On the day I began this book, it managed to link itself to a small fushigi involving my friend BH. For the curious you can read the fushigi at 2012.09.29 —….

2012.06.17 — Chomsky for Beginners by John Maher & Judy Groves: finished 2012.06.14 & Fushigis*

John Maher and Judy Groves (Illustrator).
Chomsky for Beginners (but published as Introducing Chomsky in the USA).
Cambridge (UK): Icon Books, 1996. [Out of Print.]
ISBN 1874166420. [NOTE: The USA cover for this ISBN is different.]
★★★★★
Began 2012.05.27.
Finished 2012.06.14



This book review also contains a pair of fushigi:, which I've linked.
1. Blood pressure Fushigi
2. Crow Fushigi.

First, the review
I purchased Chomsky for Beginners without much expectation, but as a Chomsky book to put into my library. I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the exposition and thought that went into putting this excellent synopsis of Chomsky's ideas in linguists and their role in utterly transforming our understanding of human language. Even more than that, Maher and Chomsky include a range of contrary opinions and subsequent arguments that, although very concise, clearly illuminate the issues, thinking and controversies.

The basic evisceration of the behaviourist model of language acquisition was well articulated throughout. But I like how he approached Skinner.

The Refutation of Behaviourism
In 1959, Chomsky composed a basic refutation of behaviourist psychology in this review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour. According to Chomsky, children are not born tabula rasa. On the contrary, each child is genetically predisposed to structure how knowledge is acquired.

"The phrase 'X is reinforced by Y' is being used as a cover term for X wants Y, X likes Y, X wishes Y were the case, etc. Invoking the term 'reinforcement' has no explanatory force, and any idea that this paraphrase introduces any new clarity or objectivity into the description of wishing, liking, etc., is a serious delusion."

Skinner's account rejects all postulations of inner states and sees human behaviour as entirely a function of antecedent events. For Chomsky, this reduction of human behaviour to 'conditioned responses' contradicts the actual [and demonstrated] complexity and freedom of consciousness (43).

I find the few quotations supplied to be on point and interesting. As a reader of fiction, even of so-called 'literature' I was bemused to read:

Perhaps literature will forever give far deeper insight into 'the full human person' than any model of scientific inquiry can hope to do (9).

The bulk (2/3) of the book covers linguistics. The balance of the book is Chomsky's political and media criticism. This was of less interest to me, that being where the bulk of my Chomsky reading has been. However with that exposure comes my ability to assess how well that section is put together. But more than that, the precise and clearly articulated criticisms of the media and socio-political thought in general was hugely informative and entertaining to read. For example, the contrast that Chomsky draws between 'enlightenment values' and how far our science and social perspicuity have fallen from them is delightful. For example:

The American Paradox
The United States proudly calls itself 'the leader of the Free World'. We know the US as a free and open society, more so in many ways than societies of Western Europe. And yet, Chomsky has criticized the US as blind to what it really is…
1. One of the most depoliticized nations in the industrial world
2. One of the most deeply indoctrinated societies in the industrial world
3. One of the most conformist intelligentsias in the industrial world.

Q: IS THIS NOT A PARADOX?
A: It only looks that way.

The freer the society the more well-honed and sophisticated its system of thought control and the indoctrination. The ruling élite, clever, class-conscious, ever sure of domination, make sure of that (138-9).

It is clear from the very first page that, unlike the one or two 'Dummy' books I've tried, the writers of Chomsky for Beginners, John Maher and Noam Chomsky, demonstrate deep respect for the readers' intelligence and ability to understand complex ideas. This at no time feels dumbed down. This book has been described as a good introduction to Chomsky's ideas, and it is. But far, far more importantly, this is a book that introduces one to the challenge of really thinking, even those who are, like me, familiar with Chomsky. And I loved that.

Now, everything up to this point would have earned from me four stars. So why five? Because for the first time I read someone else make the connection between C.G. Jung and Chomsky's ideas of language and language acquisition. I was so excited to see this! (For my connection, see my review of Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Review by Justin Leiber.) From Beginners Maher does not elaborate on the connection beyond a citation on the Collective Unconscious which he implies has a correspondence to Chomsky's concepts of Deep Structure and Universal Grammar.

"One part of our biological make up is specifically dedicated to language. That is called our language faculty. UG is the initial state of that language faculty" (77).
…
Universal Grammar is that part of cognitive psychology (ultimately human biology) which seeks to determine the invariant principles of the language faculty and to determine as well the range of variation that those principles allow — that is, the possible human languages(78).

Now compare with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and archetypes:

The human psyche is composed of innate forms always present, giving direction and form to their actualization in images and action. The collective unconscious is universal: it is shared by everyone. "The autonomic contents of the unconscious or 'dominants' … are not inherited ideas but inherited possibilities, necessities even, of bringing to birth the ideas by which these dominants have been expressed, every region has its forms of speech, which can vary infinitely" (80-1).

Okay, enough book review.

1. Blood pressure fushigi

I took my wife to an appointment with a dietician to talk diet as it relates to her recent onset of diabetes. This was her first time there, and there was an instantaneous clash of personalities. I won't go into the minutiae. However, the nature of the visit may perhaps be epitomized by when she had her blood pressure. For the first time in her life, despite having had her pressure measured many times because of fifteen years of serious health issues, it was taken with an automatic machine. Well, she has a relatively contentious relationship with mechanical devices, and when the pressure on her arm became far more intense than she was familiar with from the manual systems, she freaked. Pure panic. When I picked her up 45 minutes later she was still clammy and sweating from the panic. She commented that her arm still hurt and, to her great annoyance read over 160. In fifteen years of repeated tests under various circumstances, it has never been over 130, and normally sits between 120 to 125 to the surprise of every doctor who always expect it to be high.

So, later that day, when I return to reading Chomsky for Beginners, I read:

Universal Grammar is not a grammar. Neither is it a theory of knowledge. It is a theory about the internal structure of the human mind.

Principles, therefore, are universal to all languages. The specific values for parameters are a fixed property of language which vary within very specific limits from one language to another.

For example, age, gender, and renal function are parameter values (para = in addition to) that determine blood pressure in the human body.

If renal function is damaged by an illness like diabetes, then the blood pressure goes up. Therefore the study of dietary salt intake by itself will not provide an accurate and complete picture of operating renal function.

In a tightly integrated theory with a fairly rich internal structure, change in a single parameter may have complex effects, with proliferating consequences in various parts of the grammar (Chomsky102).

And the graphic to accompany it seems right on point, too.

2. Crow Fushigi

Well a second fushigi happened on the 14th, too. And indirectly it is related to my wife's visit with the dietician, so I'll include it here, even though it is not directly related to Chomsky for Beginners except though the dimension (or element) of time.

It began in the morning while waiting for it to be time to leave for the appointment. We have been observing a pair of crows who have nested nearby. Oddly enough, for the first time in my life I was actually dive bombed by the one the crows the previous weekend. Anyway, my wife asked when crows fledged. I said I didn't know, but that it must be soon.

When I dropped my wife off at the dietician's office, I went and did some banking. After that I had a nice open block of time and then went for a good walk to Queen's Park along 5th Avenue before going to pick her up. On the way back from the park I heard unusual sounding crow squawks. When I looked over to where the noise came from, I saw three crows standing at the edge of the roof of a house. One was in the eave, the other two on the roof. The one that was making the unusual noise was being fed by the other ones: it's beak was wide open and squawked it's demand for food, and the others were feeding it.

'Ah,' I thought, 'it would seem that the crows have fledged.' L.'s question has ben answered.

2011.03.18 —Language and Responsibility - Finished 2011.02.24

There is so much I want to write about this book since I finished it last month, including an amusing fushigi with Margaret Atwood's book Payback, that I've not written anything. [Click here to see the fushigi which I've blogged separately.]

So, how to begin? Well, I guess I can start by giving it its ☆☆☆☆☆. (Begun 2011.01.06, with comment 2011.01.23.)

The book begins with Chomsky, with typical clarity and documentation, examining the many egregious failures of responsibility the American intellectual elite have displayed in remaining ignorant of America's true history, and/or of disseminating the myth of American democratic benevolence in the world. But very quickly the book moves beyond that and it was with great pleasure that I had my first extended foray into Chomsky's real passion, that of linguistics. It turns out that this is a fascinating subject, especially as told with the intelligence and creative honesty of Chomsky.

And I loved that Chomsky seriously questioned the intellectual integrity of his linguistics community, as well as that of the behaviorist's school of psychology, for failing to be empirical even as they aver their scientific integrity. I felt a particular affinity for this because I am doing something similar with the economic schooling and schools I have experienced and read. My first reaction was surprise at just how similar in kind are our arguments. But when I thought about it a bit more, my surprise is misplaced because they both go to conceptual and thinking fallacies that naturally arise whenever and wherever ideology trumps practical experience. 

The interviewer Mitsou Ronat brings obvious intelligence and a thorough knowledge of linguists to the interview, and was perhaps integral to the high quality of the discussion.

Anyway, for these reasons, and many more, it is well deserving of five stars.

But that only begins to describe the depth of the excitement I felt reading this book because in Lang. & Resp. I read tangible evidence of a connection I have long felt between Chomsky and the psychologist C.G. Jung. I began reading Chomsky several years after I had begun to explore Jung, and nowhere in all the Chomsky I've read, which isn't everything but is quite a bit, do I remember him mentioning Jung. But I have found that my exposure to Jung, even in a limited way, has helped me to understand Chomsky. I have felt for a long time that both these thinkers have a similar, very empirical, approach in their method's of inquiry and in coming to tentative conclusions about the nature of life. And I am bemused that both have been castigated by their ideological peers for being ideologues. 
In Lang. & Resp. Chomsky, in several places, sharply criticizes both behavior psychologists and linguists for a secular ideology that blinds them to the pragmatic real world evidence that their theories fail to account for in more than very limited examples of diurnal reality. For an example of his criticism as it pertains to linguistic ideology, see my earlier blog 2011.01.08. This argument reminds me of the frustration Jung felt whenever he was accused of being un-scientific by peers stuck on theories to the oblivion of real world experience. Jung felt that theories were easy traps that could and did lead the un-wise into trying to force the facts of life to fit the theory at the expense of understanding what the real world facts were saying about life. Chomsky's argument against behaviorist theories is just about identical.

Both Jung and Chomsky condemn as irrational empiricism when it dismisses or overlooks the unknown just because it is unknown. Chomsky is less troubled by a scientist ascribing to God a characteristic or behaviour than for that scientist to irrationally ascribe that behaviour to incomplete and unproven psychological 'truths' only because they are 'modern' theories that have removed God from the equation. Chomsky, on several occasions in Lang & Resp. comments that it was indeed scientific for thinkers of the past to assign a behaviour to 'God' because doing so was saying, quite bluntly, 'we don't know why this or that, and until we do it remains simply what it is, a mystery.' To Chomsky, that is being honest and empirical. Jung makes the exact same kinds of arguments throughout his writing about the unconscious.

But what really got me buzzing with excitement was when I realized that Chomsky's descriptions of a 'universal grammar' is nothing more or less than Jung's archetypal imagery from the collective unconscious but put into words and their rules rather than images and their meanings. Jung speculated — I am here loosely paraphrasing him — that there was some innate quality to being human, like a genetic code (what Ronat referred to as a "mental organ"), that is independent of race or creed that creates common archetypal imagery expressed through myth, mythologems, religions and dreams. Chomsky's universal grammar argues the exact same thing, but for the development of language.

Where Jung puzzled at the common mythological themes he saw in the world religions, and then in the dreams of people ignorant of these archetypal motifs, Chomsky puzzles that regardless of race, language is learned from the exposure to a human environment, even when they are ostensibly inadequate. So, for example, even if a child is born a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon, s/he will become a New Yorker if raised there from a young enough age — but decreasingly so as the child ages before immersion and vice versa. Language acquisition is a human trait independent of race, and as such exists outside of the rules of a particular language's grammar. But this strikes me as exactly the same idea as the collective unconscious!

When Jung made a similar observation about the dreams of people from different ethnic back grounds, he was accused of being a racist. And that is very similar to what Chomsky has been charged with by the so-called 'socio-linguists' who argue that social environ trumps anything like a universal grammar and, therefore, claim that Chomsky is supporting a language class system that ghettoizes blacks, for example, because they do not speak 'proper' English.

In proposing a 'universal grammar' Chomsky broaches the problem of understanding skills that exist independently from the experiences of the individual. Chomsky argues that this universal grammar becomes a specific grammar through, perhaps, socio-biological systems that derive from the time and place that the infant and child experiences. But this is exactly the same rationale Jung used to postulate the collective unconscious. Jung argues that the collective unconscious, while universal, is expressed uniquely through the individual and his/her experiences, in the wordless language of meaningful imagery.

Chomsky also lightly introduces the problem of context when language is both used to create communication and understanding. To me, this is a huge hurdle for those in linguistics fixated on the rules of the acquisition of a language from within the language itself, because I do not understand how puns, for example, could be made intelligible from rules derived from within the language itself. Puns exist outside any rules of language, and yet are perfectly understandable — but only to those who have the right language skills and, perhaps, social awareness to make the pun 'work.' And it is here, too, that there is a curious link with Jung's ideas of symbols of transformation: the understanding of a transformative experience is done only when the previous rules are superseded by new ones outside of or beyond what had been up until then, the rule. Puns exist because of an understanding skill beyond the 'proper' rules of grammar/language, and Jungian transformation happens when understanding moves beyond an individual's personal rules of understanding. [And I've bumped into another weird fushigi: the only thread I'm following in the Goodreads social networking site, has just been discussing personal transformation that has changed completely one's understanding of life and their place in it.

M, every religion claims special rites are required for such experiences. I have to admit I had been listening to a series of books on my iPod as I worked, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Siddhartha, and I was somewhere in the middle of The Universe in a Single Atom when that switch in conscious processing occured. But I doubt it was Richard Gere's voice in my ears, reading the Dalai Lama's words, that caused the event! I think there is a physical basis in the brain for what happened, a switching from one stable topology to another, the collapse of observer into observed, or the formation of a metaobserver, I'm not really sure which.

I experienced the "sea of joy and love" much the same as Rose describes it, but a few days after the initial experience, in trying to understand it, logically. It happened as I internalized what the Buddhist idea of "attachment" means. As I consciously let go of attachments and felt the release, found I had the power to release them if I chose, the joy that was there was very powerful. I realized I could let go of the attachment to life, and did. The only thing I was not ready to let go of was my responsibilities to my boys, and whatever I might be able to do to help others with my life (Jeff).]

Back to Chomsky and Jung.

Here's Noam Chomsky's (N.C.) discussion with Mitsou Ronat (M.R.):

CHAPTER 9

Universal Grammar and Unresolved Questions

M.R.: These last years you have concentrated your linguistic work on the discovery of the conditions imposed on rules, that is, hypotheses concerning universal grammar. This is the third epoch of generative grammar which I defined at the beginning.

N.C.: We may think of universal grammar as the system of principles which characterizes the class of possible grammars by specifying how particular grammars are organized (what are the components and their relations), how the different rules of these components are constructed, how they interact, and so on.

M.R.: It is a sort of metatheory.

N.C.: And a set of empirical hypotheses bearing on the biologically determined language faculty. The task of the child learning a language is to choose from among the grammars provided by the principles of universal grammar that grammar which is compatible with the limited and imperfect data presented to him. That is to say, once again, that language acquisition is not a step-by-step process of generalization, association, and abstraction, going from linguistic data to the grammar, and that the subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience.

M.R.: The expression "mental organ" has appeared on occasion in these hypotheses...

N.C.: I think that is a correct and useful analogy, for reasons we have already discussed. The problems concerning this "mental organ" are very technical, perhaps too much so to enter into detail here [but which which link to an interesting fushigie with something else I was reading at about the same time — see 'Atwood' below this citation.] A particular grammar includes rewriting rules, transformational rules, lexical rules, rules of semantic and phonological interpretation. It seems that there are several components in a grammar, several classes of rules, each having specific properties, linked in a manner determined by the principles of universal grammar. The theory of universal grammar has as its goal to determine precisely the nature of each of these components of the grammar and their interaction. For reasons we have already discussed—having to do with the uniformity of acquisition of a highly complex and articulated structure on the basis of limited data—we can be sure that universal grammar, once we have understood it correctly, imposes severe restrictions on the variety of possible rule systems. But this means that the permissible rules cannot express in detail how they function, and it also means that the rules tend to overgenerate —one cannot include within the rules themselves the restrictions placed on their application. What many linguists have tried to do is to abstract from the rules some quite general principles that govern their application. The study of these abstract conditions is a particularly interesting part of universal grammar. I have been working on this topic since the beginning of the 1960s, and more specifically in the past few years. From about 1970, I have been working on and writing about some fairly radical hypotheses on this subject. These hypotheses restrict very severely the expressive power of transformational rules, thereby limiting the class of possible transformational grammars. To compensate for the fact that the rules, thus restricted, tend to generate far too many structures, several quite general principles have been proposed concerning the manner in which transformational rules must be applied to given structures. These general principles are of a very natural type, in my opinion, associated with quite reasonable constraints on information processing, in ways that are probably related quite closely to the language faculty. What I hope to be able to show is that these principles provide the basic framework for "mental computation," and that in interaction with rules of limited variety and expressive power, they suffice to explain the curious arrangement of phenomena that we discover when we study in detail how sentences are formed, used, and understood. I doubt that they will work entirely, but I believe that they are on the right track. This type of approach has proven very productive, much more so than I expected. In my opinion this is a reasonable way to develop the Extended Standard Theory. Some work has been published, and more is on the way. I feel that the work of the past few years is much more encouraging than has been the case for quite some time. I'm very happy about it ... (180-2)

I would like to return to the idea of the biological part of language acquisition, the so-called 'mental organ' or 'genetic links.' Until I read Lang. and Resp. I had not made an interesting link between an experiment I saw on TV with song birds and the 'problem' of the feral child, which is mentioned in Lang. and Resp.

The 'problem' of the feral child is that beyond a certain age if a human child is not exposed to language, then that person fails to acquire language skills. S/he may learn the words that can do things, like get food, or the like, but the real language of understanding seems lost. This is exactly comparable to the song bird experiment I saw, in which a baby song bird was incubated and hatched sonically isolated from the song birds of its genus — a so-called 'feral' bird, if you will. That bird did have a song, but it was without the depth and vibrancy of the normally raised song bird. And this biological connection between the acquisition of a behaviours is even more strongly supported by those people who as adults got for the first time the use of their eyes or ears, but found that they were unable to use them — whatever mechanism required in the body between the brain and the senses that is needed to turn light or sound into meaningful images or communication had never been created, and seemed to now be something that could not be created.

And, in another near fushigi, the problem of context in understanding language was hammered home, for me, when I read the following:

To what does this refer? When I first read it, it seemed obvious to me it was about the ecological problems facing the planet these days, with over exploitation and global warming. But is it? Here's the bigger picture:

Even with the entire context of the cited text, I first read 'The Nature Issue' as relating to the problems of the ecology, because that is the context I have come to expect with that kind of phrase. It took a couple of second thoughts to realize that the word 'issue' was referring to the magazine itself, and 'nature' to the travel. And even here, my thoughts turn to Jung and the differences between symbols and signs, and the problem of having adequate knowledge to know when a sign is a symbol and vice versa.

2011.03.20 — Language & Responsibility, Payback and a fushigi

This fushigi blog began in the blog "2011.03.18 —Language and Responsibility - Finished 2011.02.24." But even though it began with Noam Chomsky's Lang. & Resp., I'll begin here with Margaret Atwood.

In Payback she mentions the idea of a 'mental organ' associated with the concept of debt. She doesn't use the phrase 'mental organ' — that is a phrase from Lang. & Resp. — but this idea forms the pith of this fushigi. She refers to 'gene-linked configurations' as building blocks to what makes us fundamentally Human Sapiens Sapiens. Here is what she wrote:

... perhaps debt exists because we imagine it. It is the forms this imagining has taken — and their impact on lived reality — that I would like to explore.

Our present attitudes toward debt are deeply embedded in our entire culture — culture being, as primatologist Frans de Waal has said, "an extremely powerful modifier — affecting everything we do and are, penetrating to the core of human existence." But perhaps there are some even more basic patterns being modified.

Let's assume that all of the things human beings do — the good, the bad, and the ugly — can be located on a smorgasbord of behaviours with a sign on it reading Homo sapiens sapiens. These things aren't on the smorgasbord labelled Spiders, which is why we don't spend a lot of time eating bluebottle flies, nor are they on the smorgasbord labelled Dogs, which is why we don't go around marking fire hydrants with our glandular scents or shoving our noses into bags of old garbage. Part of our human smorgasbord has actual food on it, for, like all species, we are driven by appetite and hunger. The rest of the dishes on the table contain less concrete fears and desires — things such as "I'd like to fly," "I'd like to have sexual intercourse with you," "War is unifying to the tribe," "I'm afraid of snakes," and "What happens to me when I die?"

But there's nothing on the table that isn't based on or linked to our rudimentary human patterns — what we want, what we don't want, what we admire, what we despise, what we love, and what we hate and fear. Some geneticists even go so far as to speak of our "modules," as if we were electronic systems with chunks of functional circuitry that can be switched on and off. Whether such discrete modules actually exist as part of our genetically determined neural wiring is at present still a matter for experiment and debate. But in any case, I'm assuming that the older a recognizable pattern of behaviour is — the longer it's demonstrably been with us — the more integral it must be to our human-ness and the more cultural variations on it will be in evidence.

I'm not proposing a stamped-in-tin immutable "human nature" here — epigeneticists point out that genes can be expressed, or "switched on," and also suppressed in various ways, depending on the environment in which they find themselves. I'm merely saying that without gene-linked configurations — certain building blocks or foundation stones, if you like — the many variations of basic human behaviours that we see around us would never occur at all. An online video game such as Evercjuest, in which you have to work your way up from rabbit-skinner to castle-owning knight by selling and trading, co-operating with fellow players on group missions, and launching raids on other castles, would be unthinkable if we were not both a social species and one aware of hierarchies.

What corresponding ancient inner foundation stone underlies the elaborate fretwork of debt that surrounds us on every side? Why are we so open to offers of presenttime advantage in exchange for future though onerous repayment? Is it simply that we re programmed to snatch the low-hanging fruit and gobble down as much of it as we can, without thinking ahead to the fruitless days that may then lie ahead of us? Well, partly: seventy-two hours without fluids or two weeks without food and you're most likely dead, so if you don't eat some of that low-hanging fruit right now you aren't going to be around six months later to congratulate yourself on your capacity for selfrestraint and delayed gratification. In that respect, credit cards are almost guaranteed to make money for the lender, since "grab it now" may be a variant of a behaviour selected for in hunter-gatherer days, long before anyone ever thought about saving up for their retirement. A bird in the hand really was worth two in the bush then, and a bird crammed into your mouth was worth even more. But is it just a case of short-term gain followed by longterm pain? Is debt created from our own greed or even — more charitably — from our own need?

I postulate that there's another ancient inner foundation stone without which debt and credit structures could not exist: our sense of fairness. Viewed in the best light, this is an admirable human characteristic. Without our sense of fairness, the bright side of which is "one good turn deserves another," we wouldn't recognize the fairness of paying back what we've borrowed, and thus no would ever be stupid enough to lend anything to anyone else with an expectation of return (10-3).

I think this is interesting in itself, but now I here is one of the references to it in Lang. & Resp., brought up, here, by Mitsou Ronat, Chomsky's interviewer:

N.C.: We may think of universal grammar as the system of principles which characterizes the class of possible grammars by specifying how particular grammars are organized (what are the components and their relations), how the different rules of these components are constructed, how they interact, and so on.
M.R.: It is a sort of metatheory.

N.C.: And a set of empirical hypotheses bearing on the biologically determined language faculty. The task of the child learning a language is to choose from among the grammars provided by the principles of universal grammar that grammar which is compatible with the limited and imperfect data presented to him. That is to say, once again, that language acquisition is not a step-by-step process of generalization, association, and abstraction, going from linguistic data to the grammar, and that the subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience.

M.R.: The expression "mental organ" has appeared on occasion in these hypotheses...

N.C.: I think that is a correct and useful analogy, for reasons we have already discussed. The problems concerning this "mental organ" are very technical, perhaps too much so to enter into detail here. A particular grammar includes rewriting rules, transformational rules, lexical rules, rules of semantic and phonological interpretation. It seems that there are several components in a grammar, several classes of rules, each having specific properties, linked in a manner determined by the principles of universal grammar. The theory of universal grammar has as its goal to determine precisely the nature of each of these components of the grammar and their interaction. For reasons we have already discussed—having to do with the uniformity of acquisition of a highly complex and articulated structure on the basis of limited data—we can be sure that universal grammar, once we have understood it correctly, imposes severe restrictions on the variety of possible rule systems...(180-1).

I think that this is an interesting, albeit little, fushigi. But the idea of a 'mental organ' relating to language is particularly fascinating, and I explore it more fully on my blog Lang & Resp.