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Interview (Steven Pinker): The language detective
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926631.700&print=true
8.7.2
Jo Marchant

Everyone's favourite linguist, Steven Pinker, is known for his
theory that the mental machinery behind language is innate. In his
latest book, The Stuff of Thought, he asks what language tells us
about how we think. He says the words and grammar we use reflect
inherited rules that govern our emotions and social relationships.
Jo Marchant asked Pinker why he thinks that concepts of space, time
and causality are hard-wired in our brain, and why he's turning his
thoughts to violence

Why do you think grammar reveals our intuitive theories about the
physical world?

We can learn about our conceptions of space, time and causality from
the way we use prepositions, tense markers and verbs. Take causality
and verbs. If someone turns down a dimmer switch and the lights dim,
people say "he dimmed the lights". But if someone turns on the
toaster and the light dims, people don't say "he dimmed the lights".
When we talk about cause and effect in the most direct way possible
- namely using a subject and a verb like "to dim" - the causation
must be direct and intended.

I suspect this concept of causation is part of the inherited
machinery of our brains. We see the same concept in other domains,
such as in assigning moral responsibility. Dick Cheney was not
charged with attempted murder when he accidentally shot his friend
while hunting - the intention makes all the difference.

Doesn't language reveal information about our social relationships
too?

Consider the phenomenon of indirect speech. Why do you say "if you
could pass the salt that would be awesome", instead of "give me the
salt"? It's because if you give people a direct command, you're
presuming that you can expect compliance, which is tantamount to
treating the person with the salt as some kind of underling. By
uttering a non-sequitur and counting on the hearer to guess our true
intention, we can convey that we want the salt without bossing them
around. This, together with examples of innuendo, politeness,
euphemism and veiled threats, tells us that people are always
mindful of what type of relationship they have with their listener,
and they craft their sentences accordingly.

How can you test your ideas?

That depends on which idea you are asking about. To test hypotheses
about how people use words, you can devise computer animations of
causal scenarios (such as a boat travelling in one direction but
buffeted by fans that push it in another) and see what combinations
of forces lead people to use verbs like "cause", "let", "prevent"
and so on.

Surveys of hundreds of languages can be used to test for universal
patterns in language, such as causative verbs requiring direct
causation. And to test hypotheses about whether thoughts about time
(such as "at 3 pm") co-opt parts of the brain used for thoughts
about space (such as "at the corner") you can study people with
neurological disorders who can no longer use words in their temporal
sense but retain an ability to use them in a spatial sense, and vice
versa.

Are there any "thoughts that we can't think" - ideas that don't fit
into the conceptual framework of our brains?

It's possible that some of the big, philosophical questions may be
beyond us, such as the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness:
why does being conscious actually feel like something? Why does a
red thing look red to me, as opposed to merely triggering a
different response in my brain than a green thing? The philosopher
Colin McGinn has suggested that this and other classic problems of
philosophy strike us as eternally puzzling, possibly because they
seem holistic; by contrast, science advances when problems are
combinatorial - for example, chemicals are composed of elements and
equations are composed of symbols. I have suggested that human
intelligence is largely combinatorial, which explains why holistic
problems can baffle us. Note that this is a falsifiable hypothesis:
some genius may in the future come up with a theory of consciousness
(or of meaning, or of free will) that makes us all slap our
foreheads and say, of course!

Your theories upset a lot of people. For example, if human nature is
innate, this suggests we can't improve ourselves. How do you discuss
these ideas without getting embroiled in the politics?

My previous book, The Blank Slate, examines why theories of human
nature are so politically sensitive. One reason is that people
confuse an empirical theory of how humans are with a political
theory of how we ought to treat people. This is dangerous. If you
base a policy that all groups should be treated fairly - that women
and ethnic minorities must not be discriminated against, for example
- on the claim that there are no biological differences between
groups of individuals, then are you prepared to back down from fair
treatment if, down the line, we find that there are in fact
biological differences?

Anxieties about human nature can be found at both ends of the
political spectrum. Traditionally, the left has been committed to
the doctrine of the blank slate, which implies that the right kind
of society can create perfect human beings. Those on the right have
hated the idea that our moral instincts might be products of
evolution rather than gifts of God. I show that there has been some
rethinking in recent years, with the more astute political theorists
paying more attention to the sciences of human nature, crafting more
subtle political philosophies as a result.

Is there anything you don't know about language?

Lots of things! For example we don't know how children acquire
language - exactly what learning mechanisms we are born with, and
how they allow the child to learn. We have only the first inklings
of the genetic basis of language. And we have no idea of the
sequence in which language evolved in the first place.

The Stuff of Thought rounds off two book trilogies: on human nature
and on language. Where next?

My next book will be on the decline of violence and its
implications. Rates of murder, warfare, genocide, torture and deadly
riots are lower now than at any moment in human history. Assuming
that we haven't changed biologically, then what has changed in our
psychology and society to make that possible?

How do you go about working out what makes societies less violent?

By looking at historical records. One hypothesis is that the
development of a judicial system can mitigate people's thirst for
vengeance: they can present their grievances to a disinterested
party and see the offender punished, rather than going the route of
vendettas and blood feuds. That can be tested by looking at violence
rates after a judicial system is introduced, or by comparing similar
societies with and without a judicial system. Another hypothesis is
that trade diminishes violence. If you want what someone else has,
you buy it from him rather than kill him.

Do you hope to find answers that can be applied to society in the
future?

I hope so. People like to moralise about violence - to say that
there are bad people who like war, and good people who like peace,
and that we need to make people more peace-loving. Perhaps, but that
should be treated as a testable hypothesis, not a self-evident
truth. Does pacifism lead to a less violent society, or does it lead
to appeasement, and hence to more violence? I hope that violence can
be treated as an empirical, not just a moral, question.

The Human Brain - With one hundred billion nerve cells, the
complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special
report.

Profile

Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1954, Steven Pinker got a BSc from
McGill University, Montreal, in experimental psychology, then a PhD
from Harvard University, where he is now professor of psychology.
His books include The Language Instinct and How The Mind Works. His
latest, The Stuff of Thought, is out in paperback in the UK now
(August in the US).

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Steven Pinker forecasts the future
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Don't blame Pinker
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Weblinks

Steven Pinker's Harvard University web page
http://www.pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/
Steven Pinker's Wikipedia page
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
The logic of indirect speech, Proceedings of the National     Academy of 
Sciences
http://www.pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/PNAS%20Logic%20of%20Indirect%20Speech.pdf
The Blank Slate (article in The General Psychologist)
http://www.pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/The_Blank_Slate_General_Psychologist.pdf