Steven Pinker: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

the relationship between language and the way we think next a conversation on the use of profanity hosted by the Smithsonian associates this program is just over an hour it contains language that some may find offensive thank you very much and it is a real honor to give a talk associated with these two magnificent institutions this old woodcut of the story of the blind man and the elephant reminds us that any complex subject can be studied in multiple ways and that is certainly true of a subject as complex as human nature anthropology can illuminate human nature by showing the way that all human cultures display similar patterns of behavior and belief and also how cultures vary from one another biology can show how evolution selected the genes that go into the development of the brain psychology can get people to disclose their foibles in laboratory studies and even fiction can provide insight into human nature by documenting the universal themes that fascinate people in myths and stories tonight I'm going to give you the view from language what insight we can gain into thought emotion and social relationships from words and how we use them I'll talk about grammar as a window into thought swearing as a window into emotion and innuendo as a window into social relationships in each case I'll start with a puzzle in language itself show how it reveals a much deeper feature of the human mind using specific examples from English the language with which we are all familiar but examples that have counterparts in many other languages and that follow a logic that can be seen in all languages let me begin with language as a window into thought and the puzzles that will inspire this discussion come from a wonderful book by Richard letterer called crazy English in which he asks you have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language where 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 our 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 and the answer I'm going to suggest is that there is a theory of physics embedded in our language a concept of space in our prepositions a concept of matter in our nouns a concept of time in our tenses and a concept of causality in our verbs and that understanding the intuitive physics in language helps explain the quirks of language that make it so seemingly crazy but also the mental models that humans use to make sense of their lives so let me begin with space and language how do we locate an object relative to a place in our everyday speech one could imagine a hypothetical system of prepositions that would locate an object precisely by having say six syllables in each preposition one each for distance of the object from the place in the up-down left-right and near-far directions and then three more syllables for the angle of pitch roll and yaw needless to say no language uses such a system instead location is digitized in language we have binary distinctions like near versus far on versus off in versus out on versus under which is the basis for the wisecrack by Groucho Marx if I held you any closer I'd be on the other side of you also in language scale is relative you can use the same spatial term across to refer to an ant walking across someone's hand and a bus driving across the country and similarly the meaning of their as inputted there will be very different depending on whether it is uttered by a crane operator or a brain surgeon third shape is schematic in reality all objects are three-dimensional arrangements of matter but language idealizes them as essentially one-dimensional two-dimensional or three-dimensional so we have the word line which of course refers to a one-dimensional entity we also have a word like road which refers to a an entity that we think of is one-dimensional although also fattened by a finite width we have the word beam for also for a one-dimensional entity but this time plumped out by a two-dimensional cross-section we have words like surface or a object that we conceive as being stretched out in two dimensions and slab slab for an object that we conceived of is also spread out in two directions but thickened by a finite thickness now this idealized geometry governs our prepositions for example the word long requires a one-dimensional object you can say the ant walked along the line or along the road or along the beam but not along the plate or along the ball it governs our use of nouns to identify shapes we don't refer to a wire as a long skinny cylinder I'm nor a CD as a short fat cylinder even though a geometers which say that's exactly what they are because we choose to ignore certain dimensions when we conceptualize objects and conceive of them with other dimensions it also goes into our general sense of shape and my favorite example is a speech error by or a really an utterance by a child who told her father I don't want the little crayon box I want the box that looks like an audience that is not the eight crayon box of canola of Crayola Crayons that's flat but the sixty-four crayon box where the crayons are arranged in pitched rows like the tears of an auditorium the boundaries of objects are treated like they're objects themselves we have words like edge that refer to the 1d boundary of a two-dimensional surface and so that we can say the what the ant walked along the edge of the plate even though we can't say the ant walked along the plate we have words like end for the boundary of a 1d ribbon or a 2d beam you could even cut the end off a ribbon which geometrically is impossible because the end doesn't have a dimension that allows it to be cut off but we conceived of the end as if it was an object in its own right and that solves the puzzle of why we say underwater and underground when the thing is surrounded by water or ground the reason is that we can use the words water and ground to refer to the 2d boundary of a 3d volume not just the volume itself and so someone can be under that boundary now why is the language of space so crazy well the reason is that prepositions divide space up into regions with different causal consequences and a clear illustration of that comes from a story that I clipped out of the Boston Globe a few years ago women rescued from frozen pond dyes a woman who fell through thin ice Sunday and was underwater for 90 minutes died yesterday the Lincoln Fire Department said a miscommunication between the caller who reported the accident and the dispatcher significantly delayed her rescue the rescue workers believed that a woman had fallen on the ice not through it and that left the rescuers combing the woods to find the scene of the accident so on vs. through divides up space and trajectories into two regions with in this case tragically different causal consequences let me turn to substance in language language primarily distinguishes the stuff that things are made of from the things themselves and you can divide up all the matter in the universe according to the four different ways that this taxes nouns work there are countable things such as an apple masses like much applesauce plurals like many apples and collections like a dozen apples and these aren't so much for kinds of matter as for ways of looking at matter because we can look at the same matter and construe it in alternative ways for example a bunch of stone fragments can be seen as many pebbles that is a set of individual objects or as much gravel a named amorphous substance without boundaries and we all know the cliche about the person who can't see the forest for the trees hence in crazy English letter could ask why does a man with hair on his head have more hair than a man with hairs on his head why is the language of substance so crazy well words for matter allow people to agree on how to package and quantify the material world and an obvious example of that is when you have to transact chunks of the material world such as in a supermarket or other place in which commodities are sold where the same amount of matter can be priced per item by weight or by the Dozen and interestingly the same mindset that we use to package and quantify matter we also apply to abstract concepts as well when we distinguish many opinions things that we can count from much advice amorphous stuff without boundaries likewise we can apply this mindset to packaging happenings in time for example how many events took place on 9/11 2001 in New York one way of looking at it would say that a stet alien a single event took place namely a single plan was executed another way of looking at it is that two events took place because two buildings were destroyed at slightly different times now this might strike you as the ultimate in semantics in picking nits or debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but as someone who wrote a book on semantics I use this example to show that semantics can be consequential the reason is that the leaseholder for the World Trade Center held an insurance policy that entitled him to three and a half billion dollars quote 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 so the semantics of an event turns out to be worth three point five billion dollars and the case was tied up in numerous legal trials for many many years now this brings us to the language of time and as the example of packaging events into units like objects shows in language time is often conceived like space and openings are conceived like a matter a kind of time stuff that can be extruded and stretched out along a line we see this in spatial metaphors for time like the deadline is coming or we're approaching the deadline we see it in children's speech as when a child says can I have any reading behind the dinner that is after dinner a form that obviously they didn't memorize from their parents so must have revealed the similarity between space and time that occurred to that child and we see it in the semantics of verb tense in tense as in the treatment of space-time is digitized and time is relative that is just as no language has a set of coordinates to express space no language uses dates and hours and minutes to express time in it state tense system like November 7 342 p.m. instead location in time is quantized in English into three regions relative to the reference point at the moment of speaking so one has the present tense which corresponds to what William James called the specious present an interval of about three seconds that moves through time that captures the duration in that we seem to experience all at once as a totality so the specious presence present of about three seconds is the duration of a deliberate action like a handshake it's the duration of a quick decision such as when channel-surfing how long you alight on a channel before going on to the next one of the decay of short-term memory when it is unrehearsed of a line of poetry that's a one of the great human universals is that in all cultures a line of poetry takes about three seconds and of a memorable musical motif like the opening notes of Beethoven's fifth symphony then the second region that we use to reckon time in language is the past stretching backwards indefinitely all events from the Big Bang to four seconds ago are treated identically in language which is why Groucho could say I've had a wonderful evening but this was a dance and the third region in which time is divided is the future until eternity now there are not only locations in time but there are also shapes in time what linguists call aspects and shape in time like shape and space is treated schematically as a few generic kinds of blobs and points we have an action like shake with no clear beginning or ending a kind of amorphous mass stretched out along a timeline we've got events that are moment aeneas or conceived of as punctate like to swat a fly and we have events that have no clear beginning but are terminated with a crisp ending when some state or goal has been attained such as to cross the street which is over as soon as you get to the other side now stretches of time can be mentally packaged just as in matter we can take a noun for a mass like beer an amorphous substance without any boundaries and convert it to a an object as in one beer with recognizable boundaries we can take an amorphous stretch of time like shake it and with the use of particles like o up convert it to a an event with a crisp end state likewise we can take Ringgit which is a process without a clear end point and by adding the particle out turn it to wring it out which again means to completion until it's no water is left and it's because of this ability of words like up and out to chop continuous stretches of activity into events with an end state that crazy English could note that a house can burn up as it burns down that is to completion and you can fill in a form by filling it out the boundary of an event in time can be like the boundary of a mass in space can be treated like an event itself just as you can cut off the end of a ribbon which is geometrically impossible you can start the end of a talk which if you if the end of a talk was simply an instantaneous moment of which you is over is impossible what we conceived of the boundary as if it was a unit itself hence why is it called after dark when it is really after light well the reason is that the word dark can refer to an instant bounding an event in time and it's exactly analogous to the question in space of why do we say underwater when the thing is surrounded by water the boundary of an object or an event can be treated as an object or an event itself why is the language of time so crazy well locations in time hour stretches of time relative to the moment of speaking and time is reckoned that way because they have different consequences for knowledge and action so another way if a fancy-schmancy way of putting it is that tense smuggles in some metaphysics and epistemology and it is not strictly a concept of chronology the present corresponds to our consciousness being alive and awake and aware that's what the present tense is all about the past is what we conceive of as knowable factual and unchangeable an example is the Scott Peterson murder case in which the paper noted that investigators noted that Peterson used the past tense when referring to his wife and unborn son before their bodies were found abruptly correcting himself so the past tense betrays a state of knowledge and it's not just any old interval in time conversely the future is that stretch of time which we conceived of as unknowable hypothetical and willable and in fact those concepts are often conflated with the future tense in many languages including English as when Winston Churchill 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 he meant it not just as a prediction of what would happen at some future date but as a declaration of will and indeed when you think about it it isn't so easy to pull those two concepts apart finally let me turn to causality a language and the model of causality in language can more or less he summarized by this diagram that is one billiard ball clacking into another and sending it on its way the concept of causality and language is one of an actor directly in pinching on an entity making it move or change the psychologist Philip Wolfe has demonstrated this in a simple experiment involving some computer animations in this frame a woman grasps a doorknob and causes the door to opened by manhandling it directly in this frame she opens a window and the wind comes in and it blows the door open if you ask people did Sarah cause the door to open in the first direct action case they say yes and in the indirect case they say yes but if you look for causality expressed directly in the verb if you say did Sarah open the door then in the first case they say yes but in the second case they say no so there's a difference between causing something to open and opening it and it's the difference between indirect mediated circuitous causation versus direct physical manipulation well why is the language of causality so crazy it's because directly cause of caused events are the ones that are most likely to be foreseeable and intended hence those for which we could hold people responsible when the directness of causation is fuzzy so is our sense of moral and legal responsibility and a nice example of that comes from an event in 1881 when President James Garfield was shot by an assassin Charles Guiteau but the bullet did not strike an artery or a major organ the wound was not fatal and and didn't even have been fatal in Garfield's time except he was subjected to the hairbrained medical practices of the day the doctors for example probed his wound with unwashed hands and they had the idea of feeding him through his rectum instead of his mouth and as a result Garfield lingered on his deathbed for three months until he finally succumbed infection and and starvation at the assassins trial Tito said the doctors killed him I just shot him the jury disagreed and Quito was hanged more evidence of the consequential nature of lexical semantics okay to sum up language is a window into cognition there's a theory of physics embedded in our language a theory of space comprising places and objects in qualitative relationships a conception of matter as stuff and things stretched out along one two or three dimensions a conception of time in terms of processes and events that are located and stretched along a single dimension and a conception of causal 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 the causal texture of the human environment what is knowable factual and willable ways of packaging and measuring our experience and ways of assigning responsibility for events well let me turn now from cognition to emotion and use language as a window into emotion the event I'll begin with occurred four years ago and it was a be golden global Awards broadcast live on NBC television accepting an award on behalf of the rock group u2 bono said and I quote this is really really brilliant now those of you watching on c-span will note that I was not bleeped for saying that word because on cable television as any fan of The Sopranos knows you can say anything you want but on but broadcast television is regulated by the FCC and the FCC has jurisdiction to find networks or into quote indecency now the FCC was given this case after these switchboards lit up like a Christmas tree and they chose not to find NBC because their guidelines to find indecency as quote material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs and activities and they ruled that the and brilliant is quote an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation well a number of congressmen were outraged and filed legislation designed to close this loophole and I'll read you House Resolution 3 687 the clean airwaves Act which I will 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 to the term profane used with respect to language includes the words 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 form forms unfortunately if anything the and brilliant is an adverb and that's the one part of speech they forgot grammar matters so the question is why do people get so upset about certain words indeed obscene language has to find the main legal battleground of court battles a free speech for most of the 20th century well this brings us to the language of swearing in particular the cognitive neuroscience of swearing and a generalization in this area is the taboo words activate brain areas associated with negative emotion that hearing a taboo word causes activation in the right hemisphere which has independently been associated with negative emotion producing a swear word involves activity in a complex set of ancient and deeply buried structures in the brain called the basal ganglia these two complex networks of nuclei in purple and hearing a swear word a reading one causes activation in the amygdala to almond shaped organs also evolutionarily ancient buried deep in the brain that have been associated with threat and fear also the other relevant fact about the processes that go on in the brain when you hear a taboo word is that they're processed involuntarily you can't not hear or read a taboo word without that negative emotion getting activated there's a simple way to demonstrate that it involves the Stroop test familiar to every psychology undergraduate and the subject of more than 4,000 scientific papers the Stroop test is straightforward the task is simply to name the color in which words are printed so I'm gonna give you a list of words and I'm gonna have you do the the stupid just the Stroop test ignore what the words say just concentrate on the color of the ink so to speak okay so with each word name the color in which it is printed okay red black easy okay here's a variant of the stew test same instruction name the color in which the word is printed okay black green it's a lot of art that is called the Stroop interference effect and it simply tells us that in highly literate people reading is automatic you can't process a linguistic stimulus except in terms of its meaning and associations you can't turn that process off or will it not to happen now I mentioned that that there have been 4,000 scientific papers on the Stroop effect of those four thousand my favorite was done by the psycho linguist Donald makai at UCLA the instructions are the same once again just named aloud the color in which the word is printed okay black now people are are slowed down at that task almost as much as when the word is printed in a distracting color and that's because you can't read a swear word without experiencing that emotional ping in your amygdala which means that swearing can be used as a weapon a kind of mind control where you could use language to force a listener to think of unpleasant or at least an emotionally charged thought and that gives us in turn to questions scientific questions about swearing what kinds of concepts trigger negative emotions and why would one speaker want to trigger a negative emotion in the mind of a listener well anyone who in terms of the contents of swearing anyone who speaks more than one language knows that the sqaure words in one language cannot be directly translated into another swearing varies from language to language nonetheless there are universals categories of taboo that can be found in all languages and they basically fall into five categories there's the supernatural as in our own damn Hell in Jesus Christ which are of course are far milder swear words than they used to be as recently as nineteen thirty nine people were scandalized at the end of the movie Gone with the Wind when Rhett Butler said frankly my dear I don't give a damn now that would be considered rather genteel language the emotional punch of religious swearing is still felt in religious societies and where I grew up in Quebec I knew that in Quebec why French the worst thing that you can say when you stub your toe or someone steals your parking space is goddamn tabernacle or goddamn chalice this is true and this of course evokes the emotion of awe and fear at the power of deities bodily effluvia and organs are obvious source sources of taboo words in English as in piss and so on it's not surprising that these are emotionally evocative words because epidemiologists tell us that bodily effluvia our major vectors of disease many protozoa and parasitic and infectious diseases are transmitted from body to body via bodily secretions we may have evolved in a motion to defend us against this route of disease transmission it's the emotion of disgust and that is what is elicited by such words there's disease death and infirmity we don't have very many taboo words for that in English but they are quite common in other languages and in earlier stages of English you could curse someone by saying a pox on you or a plague on both your houses from Romeo and Juliet and in Yiddish there is the curse hilarya cholera even today there is some taboo associated with the word cancer our most dreaded malady and often one reads an obituary in an obituary that someone has passed away from quote a long illness and of course this is the emotion of dread of disease death and infirmity sexuality is the most obvious source of taboo words in English and in many other languages as in screw and so on and when people hear this they often say well wife had thoughts about sex be associated with negative emotions isn't sex between consenting adults supposed to be a source of a wholesome clean fun well maybe sometimes but in the full sweep of human sexuality it's also associated with exploitation legitimacy incest jealousy spousal abuse cuckoldry desertion child abuse feuding and rape sex is no small matter in any culture including our own and it's not surprising that it should pack an emotional charge which we can call the emotion revulsion at sexual depravity finally there are taboo words associated with disfavored people in groups in many many languages for words for infidels cripples enemies and subordinated peoples and that is especially true of our own language we're by far the most offensive word has nothing to do with excretion or sexuality but rather with race the word so incendiary that you can't refer to it but have to use a word for the word the n-word or and there are corresponding words for other racial minorities we're here the emotion is hatred or contempt so given that all of these negative emotions that we can be held hostage to why would one person commit the aggressive act of forcing a negative thought into the brains of another well this is I turns out to be a complicated question and there are lots of reasons why people mentally assault each other through language at least five of them there's the first is dysphemism the difference between say and feces or copulate words that are when you think about them exact synonyms but obviously differ greatly in their acceptability now you all know what a euphemism is the logic behind a euphemism is we have to talk about this for a specific purpose but let's avoid thinking about how awful it is now a dysphemism is a bit of jargon for the exact opposite a word where the logic is I want you to think about how awful this is so just to explain the distinction there are at least 34 euphemisms for feces in contemporary Standard English the reason is we are incarnate beings and feces is a part of life you can't go through life without ever talking about it but in order not to offend your listener in order to make it completely clear that you are raising the topic not to gross them out but rather because it's unavoidable we have a rich vocabulary of all of appropriate to all the contexts in which someone might have to discuss feces there are generic terms like waste and fecal matter kind of fancy Latin terms and LICA and feces excrement excreta there are terms that you have to use with children I poop and doodoo there are terms that you use of children in reference to diapers like soil and dirt terms in a medical context like stool and bowel movement numerous terms that you use in connection with animals depending on whether you're talking about large units like small units like droppings a scientific context like scat and coprolites and agricultural context like manure and guano and in this golden age of recycling we need a term to refer to a human waste that is recycled as fertilizer and so one hears of nightsoil humanure and my favorite human bio solids and it really makes you wonder why people make so much of a fuss about the fact that the Eskimos have all those words for snow well if the the need for euphemisms then is to be able to bring up necessarily disagreeable objects in an emotionally neutral context and you can see that if you imagine using one of these words as a synonym for the other such as I think you would kind of boggle if your next medical appointment the nurse said the medical lab will need to do do sample open up a gardening book and it said four nice plump Tomatoes fertilized your plants with cattle bowel movement well there are times when we also need dysphemism when the time for politeness is passed and you want to remind your listener of how truly awful the reference of a word is and at that point the English language provides one the means for that kind of communication as well as when you might open your window and yell at a person will you pick up your dog at that point there is not only not a need for a euphemism but you want to inform the person of how offensive that particular action is and that's why we have dysphemism x' or the plumber was working under the sink and i have to look at the crack in his ass the whole time or so while i've been taking care of the kids you've been your secretary so if there is a need for dysphemism a second kind of swearing is abuse of swearing when the negative emotion is employed to intimidate or humiliate someone a situation that people every once in a while find themselves in now scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of maledicte ax of curses and imprecations across the world's languages have often been impressed at the sheer ingenuity of abuse of swearing of how much brain power goes into the crafting of verbal maledicte ax and indeed all of the poetic devices that you might remember from your college English class metaphor imagery connotation alliteration meter and rhyme are all put to use in abuse of swearing you can liken people to effluvia and their associated organs and accessories as when you call someone a piece of or an or a you can advise them to engage in undignified activities such as shove it up your ass or yourself you can accuse them of having already engaged in undignified sexual activities and for every undignified sexual activity there is an abusive curse such as incest mother sodomy bugger fellatio sucker masturbation jerk or wanker and my favorite leads to best eality and this is a curse that I I believe should be revived I think that when next time you're cut off in traffic instead of reaching for one of those hackneyed cliches that's been drained of its imagery long ago I suggest you advise the offending driver to kiss the of a cow yeah a curse that originates from 1585 and which not only has some at least has some fresh imagery but has a rather pleasing alliteration well then there's idiomatic swearing terms where it's completely unclear what the referent of the word has to do with the current context should have locked your together piss-poor pissed off my ass a pain in the ass sweet all what the where there the words are being used purely for the emotional impact with no connection whatsoever to their original meaning they're they're obviously to arouse the listeners attention to assert a macho or cool pose or sometimes even to among peers to express informality just to say this is the kind of setting in which you don't have to watch your words or worry about what you say closely related to idiomatic swearing is emphatic swearing as in Bono's this is really really brilliant or terms that all of us have heard like he thinks he's a Scoutmaster or Rip Van Winkle and the overuse of profanity for emphasis or in idioms leads to the form of speech 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 sexual relations finally there's cathartic swearing the strange phenomenon in which when some misfortune befalls you you slice your thumb along with the bagel or you knock a glass of red wine onto your lap the topic of your conversation abruptly turns to sexuality or excretion so what's going on there well the theory that most people will offer is that it lets off steam it relieves tension the so called hydraulic theory mine but in fact neurobiologist tell us that the skull literally does not contain a boiler with steam or a network of pipes and valves but only brain cells that fire in patterns and so this leads to a somewhat more satisfying explanation called the rage circuit theory namely that throughout the mammals fair one finds a reflex where an animal that suddenly injured or confined will emit a sudden angry noise to startle or intimidate an attacker and any of you who have stepped on the tail of a cat will be familiar with this reflex the idea is that we humans have inherited this reflex except in our case this vocal urge also triggers the language system because our language system has commandeered partial control over the vocal tract in the course of human evolution and so as well as just emitting a yell we articulate our scream with an aggressive word with negative effect indeed one that we're ordinarily inhibited from making now the only problem with the rage circuit theory although I think it explains part of the phenomenon is that cathartic swearing is conventional again those of you who are multilingual will know that you have to learn to swear in a particular language you have to know what to scream in what circumstances and even in English the different swear words have different connections to the kind of insult or or misfortune if you knock over a glass into your lap you don't shout-out although in many other languages in many other languages you do and nor do you say but that's what you might say if the cause of the misfortune was another human being so there is a conventional aspect to squaring these are words that you have to learn the way you learn other words in the language this leads to the suggestion of the brilliant sociologist Erving Goffman of called the response cry theory namely the cathartic swearing is communicative it informs by standards bystanders of the emotional state that you're currently experiencing and a bit about what causes it and therefore it's like other response cries in the language like aha ouch whoops Wow yes and yak which have no syntax but nonetheless are connections between form and meaning so to sum up language is a window into emotion humans have prone to strong negative emotions of the supernatural discussed at 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 to gain their attention to intimidate or humiliate them to remind them of the awfulness of the objects and activities or to advertise that one has the normal reactions to life's misfortunes part three is language as a window into social relationships and let me again begin with a puzzle this one is taken from the film Fargo in a scene early in the movie in which a kidnapper has a hostage in the backseat of the car is pulled over by a police officer because he's missing his license plates is asked to show his driver's license and proffers his wallet with the driver's license showing and a $50 bill extending from it 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 we assume the officer interprets as the audience interprets as a veiled bribe this is an example of an indirect speech act a case in which we don't blurt out our intentions but veil them with innuendo or double speak even though both parties know exactly what message is here are some other examples if you could pass the guacamole that would be awesome a statement that doesn't make a whole lot of sense on the face of it but which we all understood stand as a polite request anyone who is sat through a fundraising dinner is familiar with euphemistic snoring like we're counting on you to show leadership in our campaign for the future I give money would you like to come up and see my etchings that has been a sexual come-on for so long that in the 1930s James Thurber could draw a cartoon with a somewhat confused young man saying to his date you wait here and I'll bring the etchings down and then there's nice story you got there would be a real shame if something happened to it the prototypical veiled threat well why are bribes request seductions solicitations and threats so often veiled when both parties know exactly what they mean this isn't just a academic question but it has practical importance in the interpretation and crafting of the language of diplomacy and in the prosecution of extortion bribery and sexual harassment the solution turns out to be surprisingly elusive and comes in three parts the logic of plausible deniability the logic of relationship negotiation and the logic of mutual knowledge and I'll explain what each one of these means let me begin with possible deniability Thomas Schelling the Nobel prize-winning economist laid out what he called the identification problem in game theory namely how do you deal with another intelligent agent when you don't know his or her values and bribing a police officer is a prime example you've got two options you could let imagine that you just have two options namely to offer an overt bribe or not to say anything at all you might be faced with two different kinds of officers a dishonest officer who would accept the bribe and let you go free or an honest officer who would not only rebuff the bribe but might arrest you for attempting to bribe an officer and so of course the payoffs are wildly asymmetrical in the case of not offering a bribe at all nothing ventured nothing gained there's a traffic ticket in each case in the case of tendering the bribe you've got what very skewed costs and benefits with a dishonest officer you of the high payoff of going free with an honest officer you have the high cost of an arrest for bribery or in the case of fargo and arrest for kidnapping now if you can offer a veiled bribe though then you get the best of both worlds a dense dishonest officer can sniff out the bribe in the innuendo and you get the high payoff of going free an honest officer with a higher threshold of having to make a charge of attempted bribery sticking in court beyond-a-reasonable-doubt could not nail you on the with that a vague proposition and so the worst you have is a traffic ticket you get the very high payoff of offering a bribe but the relatively low cost of not driving at all combined into one option so this is the logic of plausibility possible deniability not much of a surprise but it raises the question why we use indirect speech in non legal contexts cases in which there isn't an officer who is empowered to arrest you and but nonetheless people still use weasel words so why do you have to veil say a bribe in everyday life now you might think I'm bribe in everyday life when would a upstanding law-abiding citizen 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 try bribing the maitre d to seat you immediately well this was an assignment given to the food writer Bruce Feiler by Gourmet magazine and a report of his experience is I found highly instructive first of all there was extreme anxiety this is the way his article opens 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 an establishment do you think this is how dare you insult me do you think you can get in with that second interesting outcome when he did screw up the courage to offer a bribe he did it in an indirect speech act which he concocted on the spot a different one with each restaurant such as I hope you can fit us in he said as he discreetly held the fifty dollar bill in the maitre d's peripheral vision can you speed up my weight I was wondering if you might have a cancellation and the the best one is this is a really important night for me the third interesting outcome of this natural experiment is the the outcome itself which was as he put it I was invariably seated in between two and four minutes to the astonishment of my girlfriend yes a very useful thing to know in life is that maitre d's are bribable but then why veiled the bribe as far as I know no one has ever been sent to jail for trying to bribe a maitre d the I think a hypothesis to explain this is that language has to do two things at once it has to convey the content the bribe the command the proposition simultaneously it has to negotiate a relationship that you have with the person and the solution is that language is used at two levels at once the speaker uses the literal form of his or her words to signal the safest relationship to the listener and he counts on the listener to read between the lines to entertain a proposition that may be incompatible with that relationship and a polite request is the most transparent example what's going on with if you could pass the guacamole that would be awesome well the literal content makes no sense I think you'd agree that it's a bit of an overstatement awesome and also why is a diner speculating about possible worlds then and there well the listener assuming that the speaker is minimally same thinks the speaker says an outcome is good therefore he must be requesting it the overall intent is that the intended content of an imperative gets through but without the presumption of dominance that is in Russian uttering imperative you're presupposing that you can expect the listeners compliance as if they were some sort of underling or flunky and to avoid communicating that that's what you think of the listener then by veiling the request in this polite imperative as linguists call it you can eat your cake and have it so what kind of relationships do people worry about negotiating well there is dominance as I've mentioned in the politeness case but the anthropologist Alan Fisk reviewing the ethnographic literature suggests that all natural human relationships occur in one of three types each prescribes a distinct way of distributing resources hence the high emotion surrounding them each has a distinct evolutionary basis and each applies most naturally to certain people but can be extended to others through negotiation so there's dominance as I've mentioned whose logic is don't mess with me and which presumably originated in the dominance hierarchies that are ubiquitous among primates there's a very different ethos of commonality whose logic is share and share alike which presumably evolved via kin selection and mutualism and is applied most naturally a monk in between spouses and among close friends then there's a third ethos called reciprocity whose logic is you scratch my back I'll scratch yours namely the exchange of goods and services in a businesslike relationship whose evolutionary basis is reciprocal altruism now critically behavior that's acceptable in one relationship is perceived as highly anomalous in another for example you at a cocktail party you might go over to your boyfriend and help yourself to a shrimp off his plate or your husband or wife but you wouldn't go up to your boss and help yourself to a shrimp off that's because the helping yourself to a shrimp belongs to the mindset of commonality and the relationship of boss exerts over you is one of dominance another example if a friend had you over at a dinner party and at the end of the meal you pulled out your wallet offer to pay him for the cost of the food that would be perceived as rude not polite and that's because the mindset of friend friendship is one of commonality not tit-for-tat reciprocity now when these are obvious cases of things that no one would do but when people have a divergent understanding of which relationship type is in effect in that pair the divergence can be costly and is experienced as an unpleasant emotion that we call awkwardness for example there can be awkward moments in a workplace when a an employee is not sure whether he can address his boss by his first name or vitam up for a beer after work everyone knows that it is very unwise for to prevent friends to engage in a business transaction like one of them selling a car to the other it puts a strain on the friendship and that's because the clash between the commonality among friends and the reciprocity necessary to consummate a business transaction the tension between dominance and sex as in a sexual proposition from a supervisor to an employee defines the battleground of sexual harassment and even the conflict between friendship and sex defines all of the free saw of dating so this gives rise to a social identification where the social costs of awkwardness from a mismatched relationship type can duplicate the payoff matrix of a legal identification problem as in the bribery case and an example would be bribing a Maitre D' which involves the possible clash between authority and reciprocity once again a diner can find to direct speech has the choice between not bribing the maitre d and offering and naked bribe depending on whether he's faced with a corrupt maitre d who will accept the bribe or a scrupulous maitre d who will say what kind of do you think this is then the payoffs are quite asymmetrical in the case of not offering a bribe the two understandings of the relationship are compatible that is the maitre d exerts dominance over his restaurant fiefdom so there's no tension there but the diner gets the long wait in either costume you need a case a mild cost in the case of offering a bribe there's the possibility of a very high payoff of a quick table if the relationship is consummated and the maitre d agrees to a reciprocity relationship on the other hand if the maitre d insists on maintaining dominance while you've offered reciprocity the result can be that high cost of awkwardness but by saying this is a really important night for me or I was wondering if you had a cancellation then you get the possibility of a quick table if you're lucky enough to have a corrupt maitre d and a but the small cost of a long wait if you have a scrupulous maitre d ok that's 2/3 of the solution and there's one remaining problem I believe which is that people aren't naive usually both parties know when an overture has been made by an innuendo I mean who could honestly claim to be fooled by the idle comment I was wondering if you might have a cancellation or would you like to come up and see my etchings life isn't a court of law you don't have to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt so any deniability is not really plausible why would an obvious indirect overture feel less awkward than an overture that is quote on the record what record well my favorite illustration of that comes from a romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally an exploration of the social perils of dating and friendship in a scene early in the movie Harry has made what Sally interprets as a sexual remark and she says you're coming on to me Harry says what do you want me to do about it I take it back ok I take it back she says you can't take it back why not because it's already out there oh jeez what are we supposed to do call the cops it's already out there well this is a profound question what is the status of an overture that we feel to be out there or on the record or once said can't be unsaid that makes it worse than a veiled overture that's implicated indirectly there I think a number of possible solutions but the one that I find most compelling in hears in the concept that logicians and economists and linguists call mutual knowledge sometimes common knowledge which must be distinguished from shared knowledge now in shared knowledge a knows X 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 that B knows that a knows X ad infinitum and this is a distinction with a with a big difference for example why do democracies enshrine freedom of assembly as a fundamental right and why are so many political revolutions instigated when and disgruntled crowd assembles in a public square say in front of a palace or military installation well before the assembly everyone knew that they were individually disgruntled but when you assemble a mass in a public space you can now see that everyone else is disgruntled they can see that you're disgruntled and everyone can see that everyone else can see that collective power allows the crowd to challenge the authority that otherwise would be able to pick them off one by one likewise in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes when the little boy said the Emperor is naked he wasn't telling anyone anything that they didn't already know but he was conveying information nonetheless he was conveying the information that now everyone else knew what they knew and moreover they knew would everyone else knew and again that gave the crowd the collective power to change the relationship with the Emperor and challenge his authority but the morale for this particular discussion is that language as in the what a little boy shouted out is an excellent way of generating mutual knowledge so here's the hypothesis innuendos merely provide shared knowledge even when they're obvious whereas direct speech provides mutual knowledge and rate relationships are maintained or nullified by a neutral knowledge of the relationship title in other words if Harry were to have said would you like to come up and see my etchings then Sally may know that she's turned down an overture and Harry may know that he's that she has turned down an overture but to Sally know that Harry knows she could be thinking maybe Harry thinks I'm naive and does Harry know that Sally knows that he knows he could be thinking maybe Sally thinks I'm dense so there is no mutual knowledge and they can maintain the fiction of a friendship whereas if Harry had said would you like to come up and have sex then Harry knows that Sally knows that Harry knows that Sally knows that she's turned down and overture they cannot maintain the fiction of a friendship and I think that's what's behind our intuition that you can't take it back it's out there so to sum up language is a window into social relationships people have to convey messages while unsure of their relationship indirect speech can minimize the risks in legal contexts with tangible costs such as in bribes and threats the same thing can happen in everyday life because relationship mismatches can have an emotional cost also indirect speech prevents shared knowledge from becoming mutual knowledge and it's mutual knowledge that's the basis of a relationship it's let me give an overall summary often psychologists have to face the problem of making the familiar seems strange of overcoming the anesthetic of familiarity and getting people to ponder aspects of their own lives that they take for granted because they are so commonly experienced one way of making the familiar seem strange is to ask what would a martian psychologist or martian biologist say about our species if he arrived on our planet and had to characterize us without preconceptions the question for this evening is how it'll it Martian linguist describe our species characterizing us only through our words and how we use them well I think you might say something like the following humans have an intuitive theory of the physical world they locate things in space by identifying places and locating objects and discrete relationships to them because through matter as formless stuff or discrete things which are stretched along one two or three 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 and to ative physics differs from real physics but it helps them to reason and agree about aspects of reality relative to their purposes that understanding of cause and effect what they can know change and will how they identify and quantify their experience and how they assign moral and legal responsibility humans not only have thoughts but 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 peoples they take a prurient interest in sexuality in all its variations 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 frustrations and setbacks when it comes to 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 favors with others they jockey for dominance 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 with their relationship humans think a lot about what other 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 with that I'll end thank you very much steven pinker previously with MIT is a professor of psychology at Harvard he's the author of several books including the blank slate and how the mind works for more visit Pinker dot WJ h harvard.edu

Channel: TheEthanwashere

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Keywords: steven, pinker, the, stuff, of, thought, language, as, window, into, human, nature, pyschology, human nature, chomsky, linguistics, biology, socio-biology, evolutionary pyschology

Id: U654Kw6oVA4

Length: 64min 32sec (3872 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2013