Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature

[Music] thank you very much that kind introduction and thank you for inviting me to this splendid institution and this splendid building the old story of the blind men in the elephant reminds us that any complex subject can be approached in multiple ways and that is certainly true for a subject as complex as human nature anthropology can enlighten us on human nature by documenting human universals ways in which people in all cultures have similar emotions and thoughts and patterns of behavior as well as ways in which cultures can vary biology can document how they process of evolution selected the genes that help wire up the brain my own field psychology can get people to disclose their foibles in laboratory settings and even fiction can play a role in illuminating human nature by documenting the universal themes and plots and obsessions in the world's myths and stories this evening I'm going to give you the view from language what kind of insight we can get into thought emotion and social relationships from words and how we use them I'll use grammar as a window into thought swearing as a window into emotion and innuendo you know as a window into social relationships in each case I'll start with a puzzle in language show how it reveals a much deeper feature of the human mind using specific examples from the language we know best English but cases in which there are parallel examples in many other languages and which conform to an overall logic that can be found in all human languages so let me begin with language as a window into thought there's a delightful book by Richard letterer called crazy English which notes among other things that you have to marvel at the unique lunacy of language where a house can burn up as it burns down and in which you fill in a form by filling it out why is it called after dark when it is really after light things that we claim are underwater and underground are surrounded by not under the water and ground so the first puzzle is why do languages talk about the physical world in such crazy ways the answer that I'll suggest is that there's a theory of physics embedded in our language a conception of space in our prepositions the conception of matter in our nouns a conception of time in our tenses and a conception of causality in our verbs and of these I'll only have time to talk about the way that language conceptualizes time but more generally understanding the intuitive physics in language explains the quirks of language itself but also the mental models that humans use to make sense of their lives so let me say a few words about the language of time in many ways time and language is conceived of as a dimension of space and happenings are considered like matter as a kind of time stuff that could be located or extruded along a time line we see this in the many spatial metaphors for time in our language such as the deadline is coming or were approaching the deadline we see it in some of the errors that children make such as can I have any reading behind the dinner meaning after the dinner and we see it in the semantics of verb tense in the tense systems of all the world's languages time is digitized no language has tenses for precise intervals such as an hour or a day or a week also time is relative no language has tenses for absolute times and dates such as November or 2007 or after 3 p.m. instead location in time is specified in terms of three regions defined relative to the moment of speaking so when one of those regions is what William James called the specious present an interval of about three seconds that corresponds to our general sense of now this specious present is the duration of a deliberate action like a handshake of a quick decision such as how long you alight on a channel while channel surfing before deciding whether to click on to the next one it corresponds to the decay of unrehearsed short-term memory it's the duration of a line of poetry in all the world's genres of poetry and it's the duration of a musical motif such as the opening notes of Beethoven's fifth symphony which you don't hear as a note followed by another note followed by another note but rather the first notes cohere as a gestalt and in some sense you hear the motif all at the same time the second interval that is singled out by language is the past stretching backwards indefinitely anything that happened from about three seconds ago stretching backwards to the Big Bang is treated equivalently in language which is why Groucho Marx could say I've had a wonderful evening but this wasn't it and then there's the future until eternity everything from about three seconds from now until the heat death of the universe is given the same timestamp when it comes to tense now not only are there these three locations in time but there are also shapes in time what linguists call aspects and just as shape in space is treated schematically so is shape in time so there are unbounded activities like to shake which doesn't have any clearly demarcated beginning or end there are punctate or moment aeneas events like to swat fly which is conceived of as if it were instantaneous and then there are accomplishments like to cross the street which don't have any clearly defined beginning but do have a clearly defined end point namely when some human goal has been reached in this case getting to the other side now formless activities can be packaged into bounded events by some of the mechanisms of language so that in the same way as in the realm of matter we can take a word for a generic substance like beer and convert it to an expression for a bounded unit by saying I'll have another beer or I'll have two beers you can do the same thing with time stuff you can take an amorphous unbounded activity like to shake it and turn it into an event with a boundary using the particle up to shake something up means to shake it to completion to shake it until all the ingredients are mixed like why is the particle out does the same thing the difference between wringing a shirt and wringing your shirt out is to wring it out means to wring it until all the water has been squeezed from it and this answers the puzzle in crazy English of why a house can burn up as it burns down and while you fill in a form by filling it out now another quirk of the way that time is treated in language is that the boundary of an event can be treated like an event itself for example in the domain of space I can say I'm going to cut off the end of this ribbon which when you think about it is geometrically impossible but we conceive of the end of the ribbon as an object in itself and granted a little smidgen of adjacent matter well we do the same thing in time I can say I'm going to start the end of my talk which also should be impossible if End literally means the instant at which I shut up but we conceive of the end as an event and we give it a bit of the adjacent time stuff in doing so hence in crazy English when letterer asks why is it called after dark when it is really after light the reason is that the word dark refers to the instant bounding an extent of time that is to the endpoint and not to the stretch of Darkness itself and it is exactly parallel to the puzzle of why in space we say something is underwater when the thing is surrounded by water we use the word water in this context to refer to the boundary of the water not the water itself and something can be underneath that boundary well why is the language of time so crazy why does it carve up a time line in these idiosyncratic ways well location and time is demarcated the way it is because stretches of time defined relative to the moment of speaking have different consequences for knowledge and action a fancy way of putting it is that tense is not just a chronological concept but also has some metaphysics and epistemology packed into it the present is just another word for our consciousness for what we are aware of at any given moment of wakefulness the past is not just any old stretch of time but as that stretch of time which is potentially knowable which is factual and which is unchangeable you can't change the past an illustration of how this matters in human affairs comes from the Scott Peterson murder case in the United States where investigators noted that Peterson used the past tense when referring to his wife and unborn son before their bodies were found abruptly correcting himself this was not just any old use of tense but rather the past tense incriminated him by identifying his state of knowledge at the moment at which he spoke the future Inca is also not just any old stretch of time but it's that time which is unknowable which is hypothetical and which is potentially willable and we see this conflation when Winston Churchill famously said we shall fight on the beaches we shall fight on the landing grounds we shall fight in the fields and in the streets we shall fight in the Hills we shall never surrender which is ambiguous between a prediction as to what's going to happen and an avowal of determination those two concepts are blended together in the tenth systems of many languages now that's location in time the reason that language packages events into shapes is that it allows people to agree on how to package and measure their experience in the seamless flow of time how can two people know whether they are referring to these same for example how many events took place on September 11th 2001 in New York you could argue that the answer is one because a single plan was executed or you could argue that the answer is two because two separate buildings were hit by two separate airplanes and were destroyed at two different instants now this might strike you as the height of pointless semantic hair-splitting but in fact it turns out to be a highly consequential issue because the leaseholder for the World Trade Center held an insurance policy that entitled him to three and a half billion dollars per destructive event if 9/11 comprised one event he stood to gain three and a half billion dollars if it comprised two events he stood to gain seven billion dollars one of the reasons that there's still a hole in the ground in lower Manhattan instead of the Freedom Tower is that it's taken this long for lawyers on each side to come to an agreement on how many events took place that morning so when anyone asked me what is the possible value of haggling over a semantic distinction I say it's three and a half billion dollars so to sum up language is a window into cognition there's a theory of physics embedded in our language a theory of space in terms of places and objects and digital relationships which I did not have time to mention conception of matter in terms of stuff and things extended along one or more dimensions a conception of time in terms of activities and events located and extended along a single dimension and a conception of causation in terms of the direct impingement of an actor upon an entity this way of construing reality differs from real physics but it corresponds to human goals and purposes to the causal texture of our environment to what is knowable factual and willable to ways of packaging and measuring our experience and to ways of assigning responsibility for events let me switch now from thought to emotion and again I'll begin with a puzzle of language this one came to light five years ago when the Golden Globe Awards were broadcast on live American television and the accepting a award on behalf of the group u2 bono said in his acceptance speech and I quote this is really really brilliant and the network did not bleep it out now the switchboards lit up like a Christmas tree with protests and the case was sent to the FCC the Federal Communications Commission which is legally empowered to regulate what is broadcast on the airwaves to everyone's surprise they chose not to find the network for failing to bleep out the offending word because their guidelines which allow them to regulate indecency describe it as quote material that describes or depict sexual or excretory organs or activities and they rule that the and brilliant is quote an adjective or an expletive to emphasize an explanation well a number of conservative congressmen were enraged and they filed a number of pieces of legislation designed to close this loophole in which my favorite is House Resolution three six eight seven the Queen airwaves Act which I down lay downloaded from the US Congress website and which I will now read to you in its entirety be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled that section one four six four title 18 united states code is amended one by inserting a before whoever and two the term profane used with respect to language includes the words piss and the phrases are a scoffer compound use including hyphenated compounds of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases including verb adjective gerund participle and infinitive forms unfortunately the and brilliant is an adverb and that's the one part of speech so grammar matters and the puzzle is why do people get so upset about certain words it's not as if anyone hasn't heard the words and indeed the in both the US and Britain the use of obscenity in printed on the airwaves has been one of the main legal battlegrounds of free speech in much of the 20th century and the 21st because in fact the clean airwaves Act is now up for review by the US Supreme Court well to understand this one needs to probe a bit into the language of swearing including the cognitive neuroscience of swearing what happens in the brain when a person perceives or produces a taboo word the first generalization is that taboo words activate brain areas associated with negative emotion they the activation is concentrated in the right hemisphere which we independently know to be associated with negative emotion in production they seem to engage the basal ganglia - evolutionarily ancient sets of nuclei buried deep within the brain here and here which are involved in the packaging of behavior and the inhibition of behavior and which seem to be malfunctioning in the case of Tourette's syndrome which is often marked by involuntary outbursts of taboo words in perception they seem to light up the amygdalas - almond shaped organs also buried deep within the brain that were off that respond to threatening stimuli such as an angry face or a dangerous animal also taboo words are processed involuntarily that is you like words in general you can't hear a taboo word as just a stretch of sound or see them on the page as just a bunch of ink squiggles they automatically register in their brain with their meaning including the negative emotion so this gives us a characterization of swearing as using language as a weapon to force a listener to think an unpleasant or at least an emotionally charged thought and it breaks down the question of swearing into two smaller questions what kinds of concepts trigger negative emotions and hence can be a meaning of taboo words and why would speakers want to trigger negative emotions in the brains of their listeners and I'll treat those separately now anyone who speaks more than one language knows that the particular taboo words vary from one language community to another if you translate the swear words in one language into another often you don't get the same effect nonetheless scholars who studied taboo language find that the taboo words across languages tend to fall into five main categories each them associated with a negative emotion there are often taboo words for the supernatural such as our own damn hell and Jesus Christ these are tend to be more potent in religious societies where I grew up in Quebec which until recently was a traditional Catholic Society the worst thing you could say when you stubbed your toe or wanted to curse someone out was a cursive Tabernacle or a cursive chalice as I say said it doesn't quite work the same way and loses something in translation and these words evoke the emotions of awe and fear of the power of supernatural beings there are many taboo words in many languages for bodily effluvia and the organs that that secrete them you all know what they are and it's not surprising that we should have strong emotions when it comes to bodily effluvia because epidemiologists tell us that effluvia our major vectors of disease there are many parasites and pathogens that find it convenient to hitch a ride from one body to another via bodily secretions we seem to have evolved a defense against been infected by this root the emotion of disgust and that is what is evoked by this class of words there are many taboo words for disease death and infirmity across the world's languages such as the old curses Epoque Sanh u and a plague on both your houses I was recently told that in the Netherlands the worst thing that you can say to someone is get cancer and another example for those of you speak Polish or Yiddish is hilarya cholera and there's even a bit of taboo surrounding the word for our most dreaded malady cancer I even though we don't use it conventionally in curses the way the Dutch do one often sees in newspaper obituaries that so-and-so passed away of a long illness both the word died and the word cancer are considered too emotionally unsettling and they have to be replaced by euphemisms and this of course evokes the emotion of dread of death and disease there are many taboo words of course for sexuality for the act of sex and the associated organs again you all know what they are and at this point many people say well how could this fit into the theory that taboo words tend to be associated with negative emotion haven't we been told that sexuality is a source of wholesome usual mutual pleasure between consenting adults well it can be that but in a much greater range of circumstances it can be more emotionally fraught such as exploitation illusion see incest jealousy spousal abuse cuckold read desertion child abuse feuding and rape it's not surprising that people in all cultures have strong emotions when it comes to sexuality which we can call revulsion at depravity finally there are often taboo words for disfavored people in groups for infidels for cripples for enemies and subordinated peoples including the most taboo word in the United States today which is not the s word nor the F word but rather the N word one of a set of taboo racial term taboo terms for various racial and religious minorities and these words evoke the emotions of hatred and contempt so that's a the palette of negative emotions that taboo words can refer to the next question is why do people use language in this way why try to evoke negative emotions in the minds of your listeners and it turns out there's not a single answer to that question because people have lots of motives for annoying other people via the use of language there are at least five distinct ways of swearing the first is what can be called dysphemism the difference between synonyms refer to the exact same thing but differ in their emotional colouring such as versus feces or vs. copulate now you all know what the word euphemism means the idea behind a euphemism is we have to talk about this for a specific purpose but let's avoid thinking about how awful it is the term dysphemism is the exact opposite it's the word that you reach for when you want your listener to ponder how awful something is and this can be seen in the thirty-four euphemisms for feces and continue English now people don't like to think about feces any more than they like to touch it or smell it nonetheless we are incarnate beings and feces is a part of life and you can't get through life without at least occasionally having to confer about what to do with it and in order to solve this problem the English language provides us with a number of ways of bringing up the subject while making it perfectly clear to the listener that we're not doing it in order to gross them out and so we have generic euphemisms like waste fecal matter filth and muck formal terms from Latin like feces and excrement are terms that you use with children during toilet training like poop and doodoo terms that you use about children like soil dirt and Load terms used in a medical context like stool and bowel movement many terms used in connection with animals depending on whether you're referring to large units like Pat's and chips small units like droppings the context is at scientific as in scat or agricultural ISM in your org Juan oh and in this day of recycling the need has arisen for a word to refer to human feces recycled for use as furniture and so we've seen nightsoil humanure and my favorite human bio solids now each one of these euphemisms is specific for a context in which you apologize for bringing up the subject for but for a good reason and if you were to use the wrong euphemism in a particular context the results would be rather odd for example if a nurse were to say at the end of a medical appointment the medical lab will lead a doo doo sample you probably raise your eyebrows or if you look in a gardening magazine which said four nice plump Tomatoes fertilize your plants of cattle bowel movement something would have gone wrong with the use of language there on the other hand there's also a need for dysphemism x' for those those moments in life where you really do want to remind your listener of how truly awful something that they are doing really is for example if some inconsiderate boor was allowing his dog to foul your lawn you might open your window and yell will you pick up your dog for a moment when we point for politeness has passed you might complain to your friend the plumber was working under the sink and I had to look at the crack in his arse the whole time or you can imagine a wife snooping on her husband's email and confronting him by saying so I've been taking care of the kids you've been your set your secretary an offensive word for a circumstance in which the offense is offended and I something that the English language gives us the tools to to do well that's dismissed expiring for when you're using a particular term to refer literally to what the refer be to the words referent but there are also a variety of more metaphorical ways to swear in abuse of swearing you call on the negative emotion automatically evoked by a taboo word to intimidate or humiliate someone and there are is a whole branch of language study called maledicte ah the study of implications across the world's languages and these scholars who have tabulated maledicte have often commented on the sheer ingenuity that goes into the crafting of obscene implications indeed all of the class of poetic devices metaphor imagery connotation alliteration meter and rhyme are on full display in obscene maledicte ax for example you can use metaphor to liken people to bodily effluvia and their associated organs or accessories you can give people advice you can advise them to engage in undignified activities such as Egypt shove it up your ass or yourself you can accuse them of being the kind of person that habitually engages in undignified sexual activities and for every undignified sexual activity there is an obscene implication including incest sodomy fellatio masturbation and my favorite comes from the domain of best eality it's a curse that has not been in common use for at least 400 years but I would like to see it revived and so the next time someone steals the parking space for which you've been patiently waiting I suggest you advise them to kiss the of a cow last last recorded in 1585 and which not only brings some fresh imagery to this rather cliched domain I think has a rather pleasing alliteration and a meter well even further removed in towards the abstract from abusive swearing is idiomatic swearing strange expressions like out of luck get your together piss-poor pissed off - a pain in the ass sweet all what the where it's completely unclear what those words are doing in those idioms and the answer is that they're being used purely for their ability to arouse the listeners autonomic nervous system to gain their attention to assert a macho or cool pose or to express informality to signal this is the kind of environment in which you don't have to watch what you say related to idiomatic swearing is emphatic swearing as in Bono's this is really really brilliant also rather puzzle if you try to work out the meaning he thinks he's a Scoutmaster Rip Van Winkle and so on now the overuse of emphatic squaring leads to a style of speech that I'm sure you're all familiar with but sometimes called patois as in the story of the soldier who said I come home to my house after three years in the war and what do I well find my wife in bed engaging in illicit sex [Applause] then there's cathartic swearing another strange phenomenon where when some misfortune befalls us we knock a glass of beer into our lap or we cut our thumb together with the bagel the topic of our conversation abruptly switches to religion sexuality or excretion well what's going on there if you ask people have a common response is it relieves tension it lets off steam the hydraulic theory of swearing the problem with the hydraulic theory is that neuroscientists tell us that there isn't literally a boiler and a network of pipes and valves in the brain they're just brain cells that fire in patterns and so this is no more than a metaphor a more biologically respectable theories the rage circuit theory according to which mammals you have evolved a reflex in which when an animal is suddenly injured or confined it'll erupt in a furious struggle accompanied by a sudden angry noise presumably to startle or intimidate an attacker in humans we've inherited that reflex and anyone who is a sat down on it on their pet cat or caught their dog's tail in a door is well familiar with this reflex we humans have inherited however our language system has taken over control over our of our vocal tract so instead of just howling or yelping we articulate our howl with a word for a strong with strong negative connotation that we ordinarily inhibit ourselves from making well I think the rage circuit theory explains a lot about cathartic swearing although it also leaves open the phenomenon that cathartic swearing is conventional it's not purely a reflex in which we blurt out any old word with saturated in negative emotion but cathartic swearing is specific to a language you have to learn what to say when you hit your thumb with a hammer in a particular language in some languages you can shout-out contour in English that would sound odd even though those are taboo words and it's appropriate to the kind of misfortune if the cause of your misfortune is another human being you can shout out whereas if it's you who hit your thumb with a hammer you probably shout out something else so it isn't purely a reflex and this leads to the response cry theory from the great sociologist Erving Goffman who proposed the cathartic swearing has communicative function namely it conveys to bystanders that one is currently in the throes of a strong emotional state over which one barely has control and as such it's like other response cries in the language like aha ouch whoops while yes and yak which also conveyed to bystanders the particular emotion that the speaker is undergoing so to sum up language to sum up this part of the talk humans are prone to strong negative emotions to all the supernatural disgusted bodily effluvia dread of disease hatred of disfavored people in groups revulsion at depraved sexual acts nonetheless people sometimes want to impose these thoughts on others whether to gain their attention to intimidate and humiliate them to remind them of the awfulness of the objects and activities or to advertise ones strong reactions to misfortunes the final part of the talk is language as a window into social relations and again I'll begin with a puzzle in language this one is taken from the movie Fargo from a scene early in the movie in which a kidnapper has a hostage and tied up in the backseat of a car and inconveniently is pulled over by a by the police because he's missing his plates the police officer asks him to show his driver's license he proffers his wallet with the license showing and a fifty dollar bill extending ever-so-slightly and he says to the officer I was thinking that maybe the best thing would be to take care of it here in Brainerd which the audience and presumably the officer recognized as a veiled bribe now this is an example of what linguists call an indirect speech Act a case in which we don't blurt out what we mean in so many words but we veil our intentions in in you endo hoping for our listener to read between the lines and infer our real intent and this is something that we do all the time often without realizing it for example if you could pass the guacamole that would be awesome now when you think about it that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but we effortlessly recognize it as a polite request we're counting on you to show leadership in our campaign for the future anyone who is sat through a fundraising dinner is familiar with euphemistic snoring like that which can be translated as give us money would you like to come up and see my etchings that has been recognized as a sexual come-on for so long that in the 1930s James Thurber drew a New Yorker cartoon which a man says to his date you wait here and I'll bring the etchings down then there's a nice story you got there would be a real shame if something happened to it which any viewer of The Sopranos could recognize as a veiled threat so the puzzle is why our Brides request seduction solicitations and threats so often veiled when both parties presumably know exactly what they mean and it's not just a scientific puzzle but it has considerable practical importance in the crafting and interpretation of the language of diplomacy and in the prosecution of extortion bribery and sexual harassment which are often conveyed in veiled language rather than learn it out overtly this turns out to be a surprisingly complex phenomenon and I think the solution requires three ideas the logic of plausible deniability the logic of relationship negotiation and the logic of mutual knowledge which all I now spell out in turn at the starting point is what game theorists call the identification problem namely how do you figure out the rational course of action when the outcome depends on another intelligent agent but you don't know the agents values and bribing a police officer is a paradigm case imagine now that you only had two alternatives you could offer a naked bribe in so many words or you could remain silent and just arrived at all what is the which of these actions would give you the best outcome well the answer is it depends it depends on what kind of officer you're facing if you're facing a dishonest officer who would accept the bribe then you've got the very high payoff of going free if on the other hand you're unlucky enough to be facing an honest officer he may not only rebuff the bribe but could arrest you for the crime of attempting to bribe a police officer and if you compare the very high payoff of bribing a dishonest officer with a very high cost of bribing an honest officer then it's not clear whether the expected sum is better or worse off than the moderate cost a traffic ticket which you'd get for not bribe at all now imagine you had a third option though a veiled bribe such as I was wondering if there's some way to handle the ticket here without doing a lot of paperwork well now a dishonest officer could sniff out the bribe behind the innuendo and you get the high payoff of going free an honest officer couldn't be a bribery charge stick in court by the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt the worst thing you get is a traffic ticket you get the high payoff of bribing a dishonest officer with a relatively small cost of not bribing an honest officer combined in a single option and that makes the veiled bribe the rational choice okay so this is I think what we mean when we use the expression plausible deniability but what about non legal contexts what about why do people still resort to indirect language when there are no legal penalties facing them in everyday life you might say well when would a respectable law-abiding citizen ever be tempted to offer a bribe in everyday life well how's this you want to go to the hottest restaurant in town you have no reservation why not see if you can slip the maitre d a $20 bill in exchange for getting seated immediately this was the assignment that was given to the writer Bruce Feiler by an editor at gourmet magazine who dared him to try it and to write up his experience for the pages of the magazine and the article I found intriguing for one thing the task was marked by extreme anxiety even though to my knowledge no one has ever been arrested for the crime of attempting to bribe a Maitre D' filer begins his article as follows I am nervous truly nervous as the taxi bounces through the trendier neighborhoods of Manhattan I keep imagining the possible retorts of some incensed maitre d what kind of establishment do you think this is how dare you insult me do you think you could get in with that secondly when he did screw up the courage to offer the bribe he instinctively did it in indirect speech holding a $20 bill discreetly under his hand without looking at it he would look the maitre d in the eye and say something like I hope you can fit us in or can you speed up my weight or I was wondering if you might have a cancellation and the third interesting finding was the or this is a really important night for me the third one was the outcome which is that it worked 100% of the time as he put it we were seated in between two and four minutes to the astonishment of my date well here's a theory language has to do two things it's got to convey some content such as a bribe a command or a proposition the same time it's got to negotiate a relationship type and that the solution is to use language at two levels the speaker uses the literal form to signal the safest relationship to the listener while counting on the listener to read between the lines to entertain a proposition that might be incompatible with that relationship and politeness is a simple example what's going on with if you could pass the guacamole that would be awesome I think everyone would agree that it's a bit of an overstatement and also it's not clear why you should be pondering counterfactual worlds right there and then at the dinner table now the listener thinks assuming that the speaker has not lost his mind the speaker says an outcome is good therefore he must be requesting it the overall effect is that the intended content gets through namely the imperative but without the presumption of dominance that would ordinarily accompany an imperative namely an expectation that you can be commanding some other person to do what you want now dominance then is one kind of relationship that people craft their language to avoid attempting to assert what are the other types of relationships that were mindful about mindful of well according to the anthropologist Alan Fisk there are only three major human relationship types across the world's cultures each prescribes a distinct way of distributing resources each has a distinct evolutionary basis and each applies most naturally to certain people but can be extended through negotiation to others and that's where language comes in so there's dominance as I've mentioned whose logic is don't mess with me and which presumably we inherited from the dominance hierarchies that are ubiquitous among among primates very different from that is communality the ethos share and share alike which evolved by a different route namely kin selection and mutualism and therefore is extended by default to kin to spouses and among close friends finally there's reciprocity you scratch my back I'll scratch yours which pertains to the business like tit-for-tat exchanges of goods and services that characterizes reciprocal altruism now behavior that's acceptable in one relationship type can be anomalous in another for example at a drinks party you might go over to your husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend and help yourself to a prawn off their plate but you wouldn't go up to your boss and help yourself to a prawn off his plate because what you can get away with in a commune ality relationship you can't get away with in a dominance relationship likewise at the end of a dinner party if you pulled out your wallet and offered to pay the host for the dinner that would not be perceived as fair that would be perceived as crass because of the clash between reciprocity which would is what would be appropriate say at a restaurant and commonality which is what we deem appropriate among friends now those are cases where everyone knows what's appropriate but in cases where the two sides aren't sure that they're in the same wavelength a divergent understanding can lead to an unpleasant emotion the one that we call awkwardness for example there can be awkward moments in a workplace when a employee doesn't know or a student doesn't know whether to address a supervisor by their first name or to invite them out after work for a beer because of the ambiguity as to whether their relationship is governed by dominance or friendship it's well well-known bit of wisdom that good friends should not engage in a major business transaction like one of them selling his car to the other the very act of negotiating of a price can put a strain on the friendship because what's appropriate in a reciprocity relationship is not appropriate in a commonality relationship and the contrast between two kinds of communal relations sorry the contrast between and sex as when a supervisor solicit sex from an employee defines the battleground of sexual harassment and even the two kinds of communal relationship of friendship and sex give rise to the anxieties of dating well this gives rise to a social identification problem where the social costs of awkwardness from a mismatched relationship type can duplicate the payoff matrix of a legal identification problem as in bribing a police officer and bribing a Maitre D' can illustrate this where the clashes between the authority relationship that a Maitre D' ordinarily wields over his restaurant fiefdom where he seats someone where and when he pleases and the reciprocity relationship that you're raising by offering the bribe according to which he'd be obligated to see you immediately in return for accepting that the bribe so once again if your only options were to utter a naked bribe or no bribe at all then with a corrupt maitre d you'd have the advantage of a quick table you'd consummate the reciprocity relationship the cost though would be in those circumstances in which you face a scrupulous maitre d who says something like what kind of establishment do you think this is how dare you insult me do you think you can get in with that where he insists on the dominance relationship in defiance of your offer of reciprocity giving rise to the high cost this case an emotional cost of awkwardness and once again the combination of a potential high payoff and a potential high cost makes this a fraught choice compared to the moderately moderate cost of a long wait in either case if you accept the maitre d's dominance by not bribing at all with the ambiguous bribe such as I was hoping you might have a cancellation the corrupt maitre d could consummate the reciprocity relationship leading you to the quick table the scrupulous maitre d could choose to ignore it and continue to wield his dominance relationship the worst thing you have is the long wait you combine the high payoff of bribing a corrupt maitre d with the small cost of failing to bribe a scrupulous maitre d combined in a single option well one remaining problem and then I'll wrap up which is why we resort to indirectness even when there is no real uncertainty for example you now know that all maitre d's are bribable nonetheless I suspect that if you ever tried this stunt you would still use indirect speech rather than blurting out the quid pro quo in so many words or when the listener knows the speaker's intent people aren't naive and it's hard to believe that any grown woman could be fooled by the line about the etchings nonetheless there is something that is more comfortable about asking to see edgings than asking for sex so what is going on there the deniability is not really plausible why should an obvious innuendo still feel more comfortable than a direct overture that is in some sense on the record and oh Allah straight the problem with a scene from the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally we're in an early scene in the movie Harry makes a remark that Sally interprets as sexual and she accuses him of you're coming on to me so he says well what do you want me to do about it I take it back okay I take it back she says you can't take it back why not because it's already because it's already out there this is oh geez what are we supposed to do call the cops it's already out there well what is the psychological status of an overture that we feel to be out there or on the record that makes it feel so much more awkward than a veiled overture that's conveyed indirectly and I think a key to this paradox is a concept that economists and logicians call mutual knowledge which they distinguish from individual knowledge in individual knowledge a knows X and B knows X in mutual knowledge a knows X B knows X a knows that B knows X B knows that a knows X a knows the B knows that a knows X ad infinitum and this is a difference that has profound consequences for example why is freedom of assembly enshrined as a fundamental right in a democracy and why are political revolutions often triggered when a crowd gathers in a public square to challenge the the president in his palace well it's because when people were at at home everyone knew that they loathed the dictator but no one knew that other people knew that they knew once you assemble in a place where everyone can see everyone else everyone knows that everyone else knows that everyone else knows that the dictator is loathed and that gives them the collective power to challenge the authority of the dictator who otherwise could pick off two centers one at a time another example is that the Emperor's New Clothes is a story about mutual knowledge when the little boy said the Emperor is uh is naked he wasn't telling anyone anything that they didn't already know anything that they couldn't see with their own eyeballs he was nonetheless changing the state of their knowledge because at that moment everyone now knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew once again that gave them the collective power to challenge the dominance of the Emperor through their their laughter the moral of the story is that explicit language is an excellent way of creating mutual knowledge and so here's the hypothesis innuendos even obvious ones merely provide individual knowledge whereas direct speech provides mutual knowledge and relationships are maintained or nullified by a mutual knowledge of the relationship type so if Harry I were to say would you like to come up and see my etchings and Sally says no then Sally knows that she's turned down an overture and Harry knows that she's turned down a sexual overture but to Sally know that Harry knows she could be thinking maybe Harry thinks I'm naive and just Harry know that Sally knows that he knows he could be wondering maybe Sally thinks I'm dense there's no mutual knowledge and they can maintain the fiction of friendship whereas if Harry were to say would you like to come up and have and Sally turns him down now Harry knows that Sally knows that Harry knows that Sally knows they cannot maintain the fiction of a friendship and I think this is the basis for our intuition that with overt language you can't take it back it's out there so to sum up people often have to convey messages while unsure of their relationship indirect speech can minimize the risks in legal contexts with tangible costs as in bribes and threats the same thing can happen in everyday life because relationship mismatches have an emotional cost and finally indirect speech prevents individual knowledge from becoming mutual knowledge and mutual knowledge is the basis for a relationship well now I'm going to begin the end of my talk often psychologists characterized their job as in terms of a hypothetical Martian biologist who is not subject to all of the familiarity and biases and Pirozhki allottee of individual people reflecting on their own condition but rather sees a human species from a fresh without preconceptions and so the common question in psychology is how would a Martian biologists describe our species in a way tonight square was how would a Martian linguist describe our species if he had to characterize our our ways just based on words and how we use them well Isis argue that he could say a lot when it comes to human cognition you would note that humans have an intuitive theory of the physical world they identify places in space and locate objects relative to them in digital terms they construe matter as formless stuff or discrete things we just stretched along one or more dimensions they order and package events in time relative to their own moment of consciousness and they explain events by identifying their causes namely an actor that impinges upon an entity human intuitive physics differs from real physics but it helps them to reason and agree about aspects of reality relevant to their purpose to the causal texture of their environment to what they can no change and will how they package and quantify their experience and to how they assign moral and legal responsibility the humans not only have ideas but they steep them with emotion they stand in awe of deities they are terrified by disease death and infirmity they are revolted by bodily secretions they loathe enemies traitors and subordinate people's and they are appalled by depraved sexual acts despite having negative reactions to so many thoughts humans willingly inflict these thoughts on one another to remind them of the unpleasant nature of certain things to intimidate or denigrate them to get their attention or to advertise their reactions to life's misfortunes finally when it comes to to a social life humans are very very touchy about their relationships with some of their fellows typically kin lovers and Friends humans freely share and do favours with others they jockey for dominance and with still others they trade goods and services people distinguish these relationships sharply and when one person breaches the logic of a relationship with another they both suffer an emotional cost nonetheless humans often risk these breaches sometimes to get on with the business of life sometimes to renegotiate their relationship and finally humans think a lot about what other humans think about them and their relationships are ratified by this mutual knowledge they know that others know that they know what kind of relationship they share as a result to preserve their relationships while transacting the business of their lives humans often engage in hypocrisy and taboo and those are just some of the ways in which language can serve as a window into human nature thank you very much thank you it was fantastic this painting has been here for 230 years and yes I saw a suspect that certain aspects of your speech which has never looked down on before although those says so yeah totally clad Nick they asked and so bad no that's absolutely true um if I could just start off with a couple of questions and then we'll well it will it will open it out and I was reminded in your talk of that terrible joke about the guy who walks into the bar and says I'd like a double entendre please and the barmaid says shall I give you one um what about a change in in language one of the kind of cliches of modernity is that things are moving faster and faster and faster technology globalization all these kind of things is a language itself changing faster and if it is changing faster is it changing faster million superficial ways that there are more words or more things as we invent more things and as people as it were move around the world are the more fundamental changes taking place it's not clear that that the English language is changing more rapidly now than it did in the past on the one hand obviously it's absorbing new words for technological innovations all the words associated with computers and digital cameras and so on on the other hand the fact that we have standardized spelling the fact that we have universal education the fact that we have broadcast media and the Internet means that innovation that it's hard to change the entire language it's just a very big ship to change course whereas in when the english-speaking community consisted of lots of villages and regions that seldom communicated with one another at least at a much slower rate each one of which became a breeding ground for innovation and you got many many varieties if you look at the OED for almost any word you'll find that there 16 or 17 different past tense forms for example now we've settled on on one so I don't know I think where it's been hard in the past to quantify the rate of linguistic change because there hasn't been any database that you can take seriously in terms of its represent quantitative representation of different words but I'm about to embark on a project with some colleagues at Harvard Martin Novak and Eira's Lieberman using Google books as a database namely the digitization of the entire Harvard University Library and other libraries which would allow for the searching of particular linguistic forms from the reasonable numbers from the 16 and 1700s to the present day so some of these questions I think will be better suited to answer in the next few years than we have been great will report to that um can I explore something which links this book to other of your work as a evolutionary psychologist which is around the way in which consciousness appears to us in language so you will be critical obviously you're critical in your work of the notion of there being a sort of a me inside me which is not connected to the material stuff of me to the whole notion of the ghost of the machine but yet that is quite a ubiquitous aspect of human language and I wondered whether you could shed insights on to the ways in which we conceptually portray consciousness through language yes and I think language reflects our own intuitive psychology which conceives of the person as some immaterial entity who happens to inhabit a body even there an expression like John's body or John's brain and you think about it who exactly is the John that takes possession of this brain and it's very easy language makes it very easy to say things like after someone has died well he's in he's in a better place now or John is wouldn't want us to treat his body that way but when you think about it the body that's separate from the owning entity is a deeply mysterious concept but one that effortlessly talk about likewise there's another construction that I discuss in the book of where you can either say Shawn hit bill on the arm or John hit bills arm and what's the difference between those two to hit bill on the arm you can even take away the on the arm just John hit bill it's kind of like Bill is kind of suffused throughout his body so you can you can kick him in the leg you can kick him in the toe any one of his body parts is something that in some sense he is he's efuses whereas to hit John's arm it's just the body part without any notion of personhood and it only works with animate sentient entities so you can't say the ball hit the library on the roof that sounds a little bit odd it sounds as if the library can actually feel something impinging on its roof so it's another way in which a folk conception of sentience actually affects the grammar of the language and I talked about other cases in the book of how the notion of free will is also built into our use of verbs we generally when we use the subject of a transitive verb John broke the window it usually means that he voluntarily did it he intentionally did it and he intentionally had that as the goal of his action so teleology free will billiard ball causation are all packed into our causative verbs and across languages that is that combination a prototypical kind of free willed causation is the the concept that generally gets associated with the most concise causative construction of the language it's not just a peculiarity of English great and then finally before I open it out we where a number of speakers here two or three weekend and it comes to me that very frequently some of the most interesting insights are emerging and the what one might generally call the area of how we how we think or how our brain works and that's your work on the work in ingress takes its work in behavioral economics its work in social psychology do geosynchronous of human behavior and the roots of those in our mental processes and of course in neuroscience and I wonder whether you could reflect on on whether there is something quite significant in the fact that there are so many insights coming together in this kind of whole area of how we think we are used as human beings to this to thinking that what we think is what's important rather than how we think so maybe that's changing yes well I think the the kind of questions that were at least trying to answer today aren't aren't that that new and that many of them were raised in the Enlightenment many of them were raised by by Hobbes by can't by Hume by Locke by Descartes by Spinoza we now have I think a better ability to answer them than they did all I think they would those enlightenment fingers would be thrilled beyond belief to be time transported to the present and to see the kind of progress that's being made I don't think they would be flabbergasted by the questions I think what we have now is obviously the technologies of neuroscience so actually instead of using analogies like boilers filled with steam and clockwork we can say something more specific about how neural tissue actually works I think we have a better concept of information and computation it's a concept that clearly the enlightenment philosophers psychologists appeal to but they didn't really have the vocabulary for it they didn't know what a bit was they didn't know what an algorithm was and I think we have the concept of of evolution and hence a respectable conception of design teleology and purpose not the mystical one of Aristotle but one that can be cashed out mechanistically and once again in that era there was a sense of design and purpose in the organization of the mind but there wasn't any clear sense as to what that actually meant now with evolution we have a firmer grasp on that I think those three technological developments are allowing us the sudden increase in progress on ancient questions great

Channel: RSA

Views: 124,185

Rating: 4.9309464 out of 5

Keywords: Pinker, Steven Pinker, language, linguistics, communication, communicate, RSA, Royal Society of Arts, talk, meaning, mind, understanding, metaphor, language and cognitive science, cognition, Harvard, experimental, psychologist, human nature

Id: 5S1d3cNge24

Length: 63min 19sec (3799 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/turdninja]

I just read a Pinker essay on this in my Evolutionary Psychology class. Very interesting stuff