The Science of Language (14 page)

NC:
If you look at language, you can find a thousand things that look different. If you look at a system you don't understand, everything looks special. As you begin to understand it, things begin to fall into place, and you see that some things that look special, really aren't.
Take Move – the displacement phenomenon. It's just a fact about language that displacement is ubiquitous. All over the place, you're pronouncing something in one position, and interpreting it in some other position. That's the crude phenomenon of displacement – it's just inescapable. It's always seemed to me some kind of imperfection in language – a strange phenomenon of language that has to be explained somehow. And now, I think, we can see that it's an inevitable part of language: you'd have to explain why it
isn't
around. Because if you do have the fundamental recursive operation which forms hierarchic structures of discrete infinity, one of the possibilities – which you'd have to stipulate to eliminate – is what amounts to movement – taking something from within one of the units you've formed and putting it at the edge; that's movement. So what looked like a fundamental property of language and also looked like a strange imperfection of language turns out to be an inevitable property of language – and then the question is, how is it used, how does it work, and so on and so forth. That's a serious rethinking of perspective. And that's what happens when you learn something about what looks like a chaotic system.

 

It's been the same throughout the history of the
sciences. Everything you look at appears to be completely chaotic and inexplicable. You begin to tease a few principles out of it, and some of it – maybe a lot – falls into place; and the rest looks chaotic. How far can you go in this? You don't know. But the question of
what is unique to humans as distinct from other primates arises right there – how much of what we see in language and human theory of mind and the curious nature of human concepts, which are not referential in the animal sense – how much of this is unique to humans, how much isn't? For example, the special properties of
phonological rules – are they unique to humans, or will they be shown some day to be just an optimal way of meeting conditions that phonology has to meet? Phonology
has
to meet the condition that it relates the sensory-motor system to objects created by the computational operations of hierarchic recursion. Well, maybe phonology is an optimal way of meeting those conditions, and its various apparent complexities arise as a solution to that problem. Nobody knows enough to know whether that's true; but it wouldn't be very surprising. In fact, I strongly suspect that something like that must be true – otherwise, how would anybody ever pick it up?

NC:
There is now for the first time some serious research into it. A lot of it grew
out of John Mikhail's dissertation; now
Marc Hauser is doing work, Elizabeth Spelke, and others. And they're finding some quite interesting things. There are these kinds of paradoxical situations that have been worked on by ethical philosophers for
some time – trolley problems, for example – conditions under which you have a choice to make. A typical case is a doctor in a hospital who has five patients who each have different diseased organs, and they're all going to die. And a healthy person comes in and you could kill him and take the appropriate organs and transplant them and save five patients. So, should you kill one person and save five patients? Almost everybody says no, although on any utilitarian grounds, or any other principle you can think of, the answer ought to be “yes.” And that turns out to be cross-culturally valid. It's true of young children. It's an extremely strong principle. And there are many different variants of it. On the other hand, you make slight modifications of it, and it turns out that people say “yes.” If you're driving a trolley and you go this way you kill five people, and go the other and you'll kill one person, you've got to kill the one person. Well, why is it different? These are very sturdy principles. They hold up cross-culturally, children, and so on. And in investigating them, you're investigating our fundamental moral nature, which has deep properties that have paradoxical outcomes.

You can think of this – in fact, Mikhail in his thesis did think of it – as a way of pursuing remarks of Hume's on the
nature of moral systems. The remarks do point out the basic problem, although he didn't carry it anywhere. The basic problem that he pointed out is that we have an infinite number of duties, responsibilities, moral commitments, and we can determine how they work in new situations; we're constantly facing new circumstances and applying these
moral principles. They can't be stored in our minds. So they must arise from some much smaller set of fixed moral principles that are a part of our fundamental nature and thought of by some
generative procedure – now this is not Hume's term, but that's what it amounts to.

NC:
or the generation of judgments also . . .

JM:
the generation of judgments, yes
.

NC:
We can somehow generate judgments and you can't expect that . . .

NC:
No, not at that time. But he did recognize that there must be certain principles from which the others derive. He maybe had in mind something like Euclidean geometry, although it's hard to know. I don't think that there's any development of this anywhere among moral philosophers. But the point is clearly there. And it's correct. That's the core principle of generative grammar, and of any unbounded cognitive system.

NC:
The missing shade of blue is the same problem, and it's got to somehow follow from whatever principles we have that organize colors for us. And it shows – and I suspect that Hume was aware of this; he left it as a paradox – that the idea that we're picking them up by sensation and association can't possibly be right. The missing shade of blue shows that.

NC:
Well, the notion of a conceptual scheme is loose enough that it can include anything we want to think of as ‘thought.' So, yes, it's all a part of our thought. What the components are, how they are related, whether they have similar origins, and so on . . . who knows?

Certain aspects of our moral judgments probably can be accounted for in terms of notions like kin selection, and the like. It's no surprise that you pay more attention to your children than to someone you've never seen before.
And maybe you can account for that on evolutionary grounds – kin selection, gene survival, and so on. On the other hand, it's very unclear how far that can go. For example, people spend a lot more emotion and time and energy in saving a stranded dolphin than in saving a million children dying in Africa; and the evolutionary distance between humans and dolphins is hundreds of millions of years.

NC:
Well, there may be some elements that enter into our moral theories, but it's a good question how far it can go. There are so many obvious counterexamples – like, say, an adopted child. You don't care for the adopted child less than the natural child. And you care for it a lot more than for a cousin, say – or an animal, or a dolphin. Our moral judgments are far more intricate than anything that can be reduced to those realms – which isn't, though, to say that they aren't a part of it. It's possible that there's something to the earliest
theories of evolutionary psychology – Kropotkin's. He held that mutual aid is a factor in evolution. But whatever the answer turns out to be, it's still going to be necessary to carry out the task of characterizing the moral faculty. And you can by now begin to understand some aspects of it experimentally.

NC:
Well, it depends on what's in his mind, of course; it might have been a judgment of interest or a moral judgment. But I'd guess it is the former . . .

NC:
Well, it might be – by picking out the moral ones from the prudential ones. The prudential ones aren't moral; they're immoral, in fact. We recognize them to be immoral.

NC:
So they tell us something about our moral faculty; namely, that these are acts that we regard as immoral.

NC:
I'm sure that there is some. Take the kind of work that has come out of Davidson's ideas on
event structure; that's been very productive. It's internal computation, but it's the internal computation that's due to thought systems.

NC:
Yes, and if there's going to be any systematicity to conceptual systems, it's also going to be syntactic. It'll have something to do with the internal computations that go on – systems of judgment and perception.

NC:
Well, if by ‘
syntax’ we just mean internal computation of symbols – like, say, Peirce would have meant – then, yes, it's all syntax. It's in the head; it's syntax. There are some parts of it that will relate to motion of molecules; we call that “phonology.” There's another part that will relate to truth-indications. We call that “
semantics.”[C]

NC:
Does anyone actually, literally, deny that?

 

JM:
. . . Not, I suppose, without shifting out of the moral domain
.

NC:
What people would say, I think, is that yes, we keep to universal principles, but the special circumstances are such that . . .

NC:
. . . No, they are – like
Henry Kissinger or somebody. There are people who say that it can’t be universalized. But if you asked Kissinger, who does have the honesty to say it rather than just accept it when it is convenient, he would say that of course, really, at some other level, it is universalized. But it's a deeper principle that is universalized, one that exempts us from the restriction against, say, aggressive war. So the deeper universal principle is, say, that you have to act to make the world the best possible world, but a special case of that is that we have to be exempt from every moral principle. So it's still universalized: immoral, of course, but universalized.[C]

Actually, there's an interesting paper that I don’t understand, but it's interesting. You might want to read it. It's by Akeel Bilgrami. Ask him to send it to you; it's a draft. In it he
distinguishes universality from universalizability in a way that is interesting, but I can’t reproduce it, because I don’t quite understand it. It's a paper on Gandhi. He's arguing that Gandhi was in some deep sense an intuitive moral philosopher who had something important to say, and the standard interpretations are wrong. Part of it is a distinction between universality and universalizability. Universalizability means that it's a principle that we have a way to make universal – or something like that. And that's different from a principle that's universal. He does make a distinction, and he has cases that make sense, but I don’t understand it well enough to repeat it. But that might be something relevant; it's an interesting approach. It's a thoughtful paper; I’m sure of that.

NC:
. . . He compares
Gandhi to Mill and others. He also has all sorts of things to say about truth that are interesting – and the search for
truth as an objective, which it wasn’t for Gandhi. He argues also that Gandhi wasn’t really interested in persuasion, because he regarded that as violence, and that the meaning of his true non-
violence is just to present a model, which others will then decide to follow, or not. Which sounds to me vaguely confusing, from what I’ve read.

JM:
To help me get a grip on this, let me get back to that Canadian premier of Alberta who argued that Canada ought to go in with Bush into Iraq. He argued the following way: we have a moral obligation to do so because the US is our friend, and he meant by friend, effectively, that we scratch their back if they scratch our back
.

NC:
That's a universal principle, presumably. I wouldn’t call it a very moral principle. Here we’re running into questions of
conflicting moral systems, and you have the usual problem of trying to work your way through them by seeing if there's some deeper ground from which you can derive something you can agree on. So did he agree that Germany should have declared war on the United States because it was allied with Japan, and Japan had declared war on the US?

JM:
Unsurprisingly, no
.

NC:
Well, why not? That's a case of scratch your back if you scratch mine . . . That's the way to decide whether he really means it.