The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization by Corballis Michael C

The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization by Corballis Michael C

Author:Corballis, Michael C. [Corballis, Michael C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-04-18T00:00:00+00:00


9

Language and Mind

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)

In his novel Nineteen Eighty-four, Orwell painted a grim picture of a future in which the ultimate technology for thought control was the language Newspeak, which could render impossible all modes of thought other than those required by Ingsoc (English Socialism). We have struggled past 1984, but political life, at least, is still replete with euphemisms designed to make us think differently. Thus collateral damage is a way of referring to the killing of innocent people during war, underprivileged means poor, special means handicapped, liquidate means murder. An extreme movement known as General Semantics was established in 1933 by Count Alfred Kozybski, an engineer, and popularized in bestsellers such as Stuart Chase’s Tyranny of Words, and Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action. Hayakawa was later president of San Francisco State College, and gained notoriety for stamping out student protest. According to General Semantics, human folly is created by semantic damage brought about by the structure of language.

The relation between language and thought is one of the most contentious issues in the history of philosophy. As we saw in chapter 2, Chomsky’s concept of I-language—the common language underlying E-languages—is essentially the language of thought. This is encapsulated also in the so-called language of thought hypothesis proposed by the philosopher Jerry Fodor, who argued that virtually all of the concepts underlying words are innate.1 Steven Pinker refers to this as the theory that “we are born with some 50,000 concepts,” based on the number of words in the typical English speaker’s vocabulary.2 Of course the actual words we use will depend on the linguistic environment a person is exposed to, but it is as though we have been already supplied with all the meanings we shall ever want, and all we need do is discover the verbal labels. It is of course difficult to believe that a person alive during the Renaissance could have been supplied with the meaning of the word helicopter, although one might perhaps make an exception of Leonardo da Vinci, who indeed developed the idea of such a contraption.

The idea of a strong connection between language and thought implies that nonhuman animals are incapable of thinking as we humans do, an idea defended by the psychologist Clive Wynn in his 2004 book Do Animals Think? If nothing else, the idea of dumb animals—dumb in both senses of the word—is a source of comfort, because it helps justify our appalling treatment of our fellow creatures, as I noted in the preface to this book. Not only do we treat them badly, but we also use them for insults, as when we characterize people as brutish, beastly, swinish, mousey, mulish, catty, hawkish, foxy, bullish, and lazy cows.

Most such expressions are unfair to the animal in question.



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