Verbs, Pinker, Foder, and Thought

Thanks to the Harry Potter series, we know what thoughts look like: Silvery strands of goo that can be pulled out of your ears for storage and later retrieval and play-back. But what are thoughts, really?

Undaunted, Steven Pinker tackles that subject in his book 'The Stuff of Thought'. Pinker is a linguist, and he approaches the subject through his research into how we use language, and what it looks like on a universal scale. (Early in the book he states that there is enough universality to languages that we don't actually think differently based on the language we use. I'm not proficient in enough languages to either verify or refute that claim, so we'll have to accept it for now.)

Pinker bases his observations on the constructs that appear in language, and how we (or more appropriately, children) learn and use their language. As an example, he points at that some verbs are very flexible: They can fit into either construct:

Load hay into the wagon.
Load the wagon with hay.

But other seemingly similar verbs (action) refuse:

Pour water into the glass.
*Pour the glass with water.

You have probably never been tempted to use the second form (unless, perhaps, if you are a poet.) What is astonishing to linguists the world over is how quickly we learn which verbs fit into which constructs (and Steven Pinker gives several more classes as examples) – and often, after some initial flubs as very young children, we are not tempted to mess them up, even when we encounter a new verb that we haven't known before!

Enter Jerry Foder. Another linguist / philosopher, he is convinced that there is an enormous amount of language structure built in – our dividing verbs (and nouns) into classes that pre-determine how they get used is innate: We don't have to be taught, our brains are pre-wired for those constructs and those verb classes – and maybe even those verbs! Foder belongs to the class of linguists described as Extreme Nativists.

Pinker disagrees with Foder, and the exposition of the book is putting forth his argument that we do indeed learn all this stuff, and the quantity of innate structure in our minds is much, much less. However, in a gentlemanly moment, Pinker gives a compliment to Foder by quoting Daniel Dennett: “If we've learned much and pushed new ground, it's by jumping on Jerry” - a take on the old adage that 'if I've seen farther, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants.' Pinker indicates that without Foder as a foil (and a very, very intelligent one, at that), his and others' research would not have gone as far or perhaps produced the same quality of hypothesis. Disagreement, yes, but respect.

As I was contemplating the information contained in the book, it became very clear to me why both hypotheses would exist: It is extremely difficult to tease apart cause and effect at this level. Do the children of musicians become musicians because there is a music gene that they've inherited (plausible), or because their milieu from the time they were born was musical (equally plausible)? The same for athletes, actors, public servants, etc. We can see the genetic results in our external forms – do we have long arms, a slender or stocky build, what is the ratio of our tibia to our femur – all things that certainly may suit or unsuit us for particular activities.

But we can't see the genetic differences in the internal aspects of our brains. Is there a gene that controls the degree of folding? The connections between the hemispheres? The size ratios of the various constituent parts? We universally learn to speak by the time we are three – instinct? Or learned? (And that's an impossible test: We can't ethically remove children from speakers and isolate them to see if they ever learn to speak...) Does our brain innately understand cause and effect, movement to/from or past, or do we learn these constructs that are reflected in our language? How do we tell? If we observe the same constructs, and the same avoidance's, do we learn not to pour the glass with water, or does it innately not make sense?

Recent research into other areas of environment vs innate ability keep astonishing us, mostly with how what we thought was innate is instead learned – and so Pinker may currently have the upper hand in this argument, but certainly not the last word. The rest of us are lucky, that, again in Dennett's words: Pinker and Foder are like trampolines that push back when challenged, and in the process of springing off each other, they push our understanding of, well, understanding.