I am swamped! I am going crazy! My students have let me down! I am not happy! I am far too busy to write...
But here I am. For some reason, I decided that right now I needed to return to blogging, that nothing mattered more to me than writing. I don't know why. I don't even have anything to say. Perhaps I just needed a little pontification to clear my mind...
At the English department meeting today, one of my colleagues related a story of a workshop on adapting lessons to fit the needs of English language learners at which the presenter told the group that language isn't necessary for thought. On hearing this, Mark left the meeting. (This act of defiance could have put him into some hot water, but he felt he had to leave in the face of such idiocy.) Her statement has made me wonder.
Language is so ingrained into us that I cannot conceive of the world with out. Literally. Of course, it is possible to see mental pictures, but I defy most people to shift complete away from the mental electricity of language. It is what we run on; our synapses firing would be little more than a jump start without the words to run the vehicle. Or would our lives be that dim without language?
As an English teacher, I have been conditioned to think that words our necessary to life. Perhaps they are. Perhaps not. They are for me. I am a word-lover. Learning new words thrills me. I like word games. I am especially crazy about etymology, which must drive my students crazy because I kind of force it down their throats. I often catch myself thinking deeply, perhaps a little too deeply, about a certain phrase or word, dwelling on them. Beyond all of my fancy for words is the necessity of words. They are our thoughts. As often as I can, I belabor a point Margaret Atwood made: writing is telepathy. In other words, the only way to get the contents of my mind to that of my audience is through these crazy sounds (or, in the case of writing, this arbitrary squiggles that stand for sounds), and, indeed, that is really how I access my information when it is inside of my head.
But I have begun to wonder about all of this. Is it true?
A few years ago (before I went to Japan?), I watched a program about a woman who works with cattle. She is a scientist who designs more humane ways to herd and slaughter animals. While I may take issue with the slaughter, I applaud her efforts to make them more humane. Anyway, her particular talent for this pursuit comes from the fact that as an autistic person, she claims to see in pictures. Lately, I stumbled upon her work again in the Ukiahi library. Her name is Dr. Temple Grandin. She says that her memories, her mind are not made up of words, but rather pictures that constantly run (and can be rerun) like a movie. This allows her to "replay" her thoughts and reexamine them from the cow's point of view. I am sure I am grossly understating this seemingly fantastic ability, but it is very intriguing to me.
I have no way of knowing if it is true. How could we? No one can go into another's mind, and precisely because of this, I can't even conceive of what Dr. Grandin means. My world is so bound and tied with words that thinking only (or mostly) in pictures is unfathomable to me. Surely we all have visual memory, but to have it dominate would represent a bold difference in my life. I am going to have to check out Dr. Grandin's book Thinking in Pictures.
This all brings me to wonder what my job is really about. Indeed, most humans are language-based thinkers, so my charge is to teach the young people of my community how best to use this vital tool. However, I wonder how much is necessary? How much is too much? Not that I want to change it, but could we change this language-heavy paradigm which very literally dominates our thinking, or is Dr. Grandin a reminder of some former epoch in human life when words were a smaller part of the thinking process? Clearly, if language is more socially created, as this question implies, it won out, probably, I would wager, due to its efficiency, but if language is/was social, could we go back (or, perhaps, more appropriately, switch our focus)? And if we could, would there be benefits from our changed perspective? Language, though, has components hardwired into the human psyche (as Chomsky & others), but, continuing the metaphor, when did that "upgrade" occur?
To get to the main question: why teach language if there are other thought processes out there that may (or may not) have important benefits. Do word lovers like me just push our language-centered world on others?
http://www.templegrandin.com/
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Welcome back to the online world, Chris! Unrelated to your post, I have gotten copies of the Burton Raffel Beowulf translation, along with Grendel; I'll let you know when I read them, and what I think.
More along the lines of your topic... within linguistics, there's a fairly famous hypothesis known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that basically said that language determines thought. Sapir and Whorf looked at a variety of cultures and thought that they found that a lack of a word for a particular idea (say, a color type) led to an inability to differentiate between that color and other colors that would be subsumed within that name.
It's an intriguing idea, and much research went into proving or disproving it, but ultimately, the hypothesis has been discredited. However, not much credence is given to the opposite idea, either, in which language is disassociated from thought. There is a large body of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research that seems to point up that language is intimately connected with thought processes; for example, seeing a picture associated with a word, then seeing a word related to that word, is faster than if you see a picture unrelated to that word. Seeing a picture of a tree makes it easier for you to access the word "leaf" than seeing a picture of a cat would, for example.
Language is a system that has a true neuronal network wired in in different parts of the brain; regardless of what you think of Chomsky and generative theory, it's hard to argue that we do come equipped in some way for language. Our experience with it shapes how we deal with it, though. I read some interesting papers last year showing that older Chinese speakers who had no experience with alphabetic writing systems couldn't even conceive of the notion of a separate consonant. They couldn't even understand the question of what "p" might be. So there would seem to also be a social component (although arguably, these people would make categorical distinctions in listening similar to literate speakers of alphabetic systems).
Let me try to address your last two questions, as well. I've been taking a seminar on the link between genetics and language recently, and the real answer to what led to the upgrade is still quite unclear. There are a variety of areas that may have been adapted for greater language use; I can send you some articles if you're interested. One interesting idea is that it's the element of recursion that has allowed language to be tied together, and that that itself may have been exapted from social hierarchy or navigation; I don't know if I believe it, but at least we're at a stage where such hypotheses can be credibly advanced.
I think that the importance of language can't be understated (but then, look at what I'm doing with my life; is that view surprising?). The fact is that the vast majority of people will acquire language in a naturalistic way, and the number of people who will not benefit from this is pretty small. Even those like Grandin who view the world differently are well-served by the ability to communicate with others; otherwise, her reforms and her views could not have been put into play. Language is the most powerful means we have to communicate; there are other ways to look at things, certainly, but since they are less readily communicable, teaching them in a broad sense is probably going to be more variable in success and more difficult to boot. Every healthy person will acquire language; not every healthy person will get other ways of looking at the world. Doesn't it make sense to start there?
Steven Pinker, a renowned cognitive scientist, just came out with a book on precisely this topic, called the Stuff of Thought. I haven't read it yet (although I intend to buy it later this week), but having read a lot of his other stuff, I recommend giving it a shot. It might help put this more in focus, as well.
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