Intuition Network

A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter

Presents the Following Transcript from the
Series

THINKING
ALLOWED
Conversations On The Leading
Edge
Of Knowledge and Discovery
With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove
COPYRIGHT (C) 1998 THINKING ALLOWED
PRODUCTIONS

LANGUAGE AND
CONSCIOUSNESS
Part I: ARE OUR THOUGHTS
CONSTRAINED BY
LANGUAGE?
with STEVEN PINKER, Ph.D.
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey
Mishlove. This is the first in a four-part series on "Language
and Consciousness." Today we'll be exploring the question of
whether or not our very thoughts are shaped by the language
that we use. With me is Professor Steven Pinker, a member of
the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and
director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center at MIT. Dr.
Pinker is the author of numerous books, including Visual
Cognition and most recently, The Language Instinct. Welcome,
Steve.

STEVEN PINKER, Ph.D.: Thank you.

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. You know, I have to

confess, I have always assumed that our thoughts are
constrained by the limitations of the language that we use. For
example, I'm very interested in consciousness, and it's always
struck me that people who use languages like Sanskrit have a
much richer texture in which to look at the various nuances of
consciousness. I know that you take a different point of view, I
think, about language.

PINKER: Yes, I don't think that we think in language, or think

in words. I think we think in visual images, we think in auditory
images, we think in abstract propositions about what is true
about what. And I think that language is a way of
communicating thoughts, of getting them out of one head and
into another by making noise. I think that even if you look at
language itself, you see that there's got to be something
underlying the words themselves, because words can be
ambiguous. So if you take one of those unintentionally
ambiguous newspaper headlines, like "Stud Tires Out," which
was in a New Hampshire newspaper when they banned stud
tires, but most people give it a different interpretation, the fact
that there can be two ideas underlying the word stud, for
example, or underlying the word tires, shows that words and
thoughts can't be the same thing.

MISHLOVE: Well, isn't it considered pretty much of a truism

for people that different cultures have more words for some
things that are important to them? I mean, we talk about the
Eskimos, for example, having many words for snow.

PINKER: Right, and even that is really a bit exaggerated. There

is a famous essay called "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,"
where someone actually went to a dictionary of the Eskimo
language and counted the number of words for snow, and the
first dictionary they picked up had the following number of
words for snow -- not four hundred, not two hundred, not one
hundred -- two. Now, that was a pretty stingy dictionary, and if
you go to slightly bigger ones you can come up with maybe a
dozen, maybe twenty. But if you think about it, English has a lot
of words for snow too. We've got avalanche and blizzard and
hard pack and powder and sleet and slush, and we're not really
that far behind the Eskimos. This isn't to deny the point that if
you're an expert in something you're going to have more jargon
words for it. But I don't think it's that you have all these jargon
words and you think more thoughts or more finely
discriminating thoughts. I think if you know a lot about
something, you invent the words to express them. And I think
the fact that we invent slang, we invent jargon, we invent new
figures of speech when we need to, shows that we have the idea
first, and we think to ourselves, "How am I going to clothe this
in words so I can make it clear to some other person?"

MISHLOVE: Well, language, of course is more than just words.

A language has a cadence. It has certain sounds and pitches and
timbres. Don't you think these things may affect the
environment in which we think?

PINKER: Well, those are certainly what make for great

literature and poetry and prose, and artists and writers take
advantage of those things to get across a certain emotional
effect. And I think that's why great poetry and great literature is
often very hard to translate, because even if you translate the
meaning you're not getting the resonances of the sounds. You
might have like a harsh staccato set of sounds in one language,
and their exact translation might be something very mellow and
smooth, and so you might lose that extra layer of meaning that
resonates with the literal meaning. But the fact that you can
translate at all, when you think about it, shows that there's got to
be something other than words, because what would it mean for
two sentences in different languages to be translations of each
other, if not for the fact that both of them have the same
meaning, where the meaning isn't exactly the same as either
string of words? When we translate, it's obviously not like one
of those phrase books, where it's, "How do I get to the train
station?" and then you find the equivalent in Hungarian,
because if you know two languages, you can translate an
unlimited number of sentences. There has got to be something, I
think, underneath it, something like a set of propositions that
don't really have sounds, that don't have any left-to-right linear
order the way language does, but that has a web of connections
between concepts, and that are also connected with other
aspects of experience -- with visual images, with body
sensations.

MISHLOVE: Well, if we were to follow that line of thinking, it

would seem to me that one might say that a person who has no
language at all could still think, could still have thoughts.

PINKER: And I think that's true. In fact, recently there have

been a number of techniques that scientists have used to try to
tap the minds of creatures that don't have language. We now
know that babies, for example, before they begin to talk have a
fairly sophisticated understanding of the world around them.
They pay attention to objects; they make predictions about how
objects will behave -- what will fall, what won't fall, what can
pass through, how people behave. Babies clearly are making
sense of the world, and that's before they're saying a word.
Animals too -- I think there's a lot of good evidence that many
non-human animals engage in some form of thought, even
though obviously they don't have the words. And even people
with words -- if you look at the autobiographies of great
scientists and authors and poets and sculptors, one thing that
runs through all of them is that they say that their moments of
inspiration often come from a vivid visual image, and that they
then have to struggle to find the words to express that image --
not only in the sciences, like Einstein, who claimed to have
come upon his insight about relativity theory by, say, imagining
what it would be like to be in a plummeting elevator and then to
take a coin out of your pocket and try to drop it. Often novelists
will say that the first idea for a novel will be a scene, with
people in the scene, and then they struggle for the words to
express it. So I think that aspect of experience jibes with what
the science of mind has recently found out, namely, that
language is a very rich part of the mind, but only one part.

MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose it's incontrovertible, if you look at

the biographies and autobiographies of creative people, that
they describe their breakthroughs, their intuitions, coming to
them in many different forms other than normal language. But
when we look at babies, or when we look at other animals,
many critics of this research would say we have to be careful
not to project, to anthropomorphize, or to read more into the
data than is actually there.

PINKER: Yes, that's certainly true, and you can't just look at a
baby, guess what it's thinking, and leave it at that. The
techniques are very clever, and they involve indirect ways of
looking at, say, the baby's eye movements, what the baby is
staring at, and controlled displays, to try to figure out what's
going on in the baby's mind. Babies might even be able to keep
track of number; they might even do a simple form of
arithmetic. They seem to know that one and one is two. These
are things that you don't just get by hunches, but by seeing how
long they look at various kinds of displays, and what surprises
them and what bores them.

MISHLOVE: You seem to be suggesting, then, that the mind

has a language of its own, independent of the language that the
mouth uses.

PINKER: Yes, right. You can think of it as mentalese.

MISHLOVE: Mentalese.

PINKER: The language of thought. And I think speaking is

almost like translating mentalese into English or Japanese, and
understanding is almost like translating English or Japanese into
mentalese, depending, of course, on which language you
actually speak. But I think that's why we can understand each
other, why we can translate, why we can coin new words when
we need them. If words and thoughts were the same thing it
would be impossible to coin a new word. Where would the
impetus to coin a word come from, if you didn't have some idea
that you needed to express? And also, when you're speaking or
writing, people often have the sense that they didn't express
themselves properly. They'll say, "Oh no, that isn't what I meant
to say. Don't misunderstand me. It came out wrong. What I
really meant to say was such and such." Or when you're writing
you get frustrated, and you tear up the paper, and you say,
"Darn, that sentence wasn't what I meant. I know what I want to
say, but I just can't put it into words." And I think there's
something real behind that intuition.

MISHLOVE: Well, that's a subtle feeling, when you know that

you have an intention that's not quite expressed by the language
that you use. Has that been subjected to rigorous research?

PINKER: Well, what has been researched is the subtle shades of

meaning that different orders of words convey. It's probably true
that no two sentences have exactly the same meaning, even
ones that are very, very close, like, to give you an example, "I
sprayed paint on the wall"; "I sprayed the wall with paint." They
sound like synonyms, like two different ways of expressing the
same thought. The thoughts they express overlap by a lot, but
there's a subtle difference. Most people will say that if you
sprayed the wall with paint, the wall's completely covered with
paint, whereas if you sprayed paint on the wall, there could just
be a little dab in one corner. And it's when linguists start to pay
very close attention to the nuances of meaning of different
orders of words that you discover that there's a reason why
people often feel that their thoughts aren't being expressed
properly by words -- that even tiny differences in the words can
convey very subtle differences in meaning.

MISHLOVE: I think you've also suggested that the possible

sentences that can be constructed are virtually infinite, even
though the number of words and letters are much more finite.

PINKER: I think they're literally infinite, in the mathematicians'

sense that there is an infinite number of numbers. Of course,
there isn't any room in the universe to store an infinite number
of numbers, or an infinite number of sentences, but we can infer
that in principle the number is infinite, by the old trick that you
probably learned in elementary school. Your teacher may have
given you the following demonstration. Let's say that you think
that you've found the largest number. Well, I'll prove to you it
isn't the largest number; I'll add a 1 to it, and that's a number
that's even larger. It's the same thing with language. The
Guinness Book of World Records actually claimed to have
found the world's longest sentence. It was a sentence by
Faulkner in his novel Absalom, Absalom, and it was 1300
words long, and it began something like, "They both bore it as
though in desultory flagellation," or some sequence of words
that I can't even remember. But I'll prove to you that that is not
the world's longest sentence, because I can say, "Pinker said that
Faulkner wrote that they both bore it as though in desultory
flagellation." And you can say, "Who cares that Pinker said that
Faulkner wrote. . . ?" And someone else could say, "Jeffrey
said, 'Who cares that. . . ,'" etcetera. So in that sense, in
principle there's no limit to the number of sentences that a
human mind can create and understand -- except for the fact, of
course, that eventually we die, so we can't process literally an
infinitely long sentence.

MISHLOVE: Well, let me go back, though, to the distinction

between thought and language. Let us assume for the moment
that there is mentalese, that we have a way of thinking that is
quite independent of language. You even have argued, I think
convincingly, that certain people who were born deaf and never
learned language were still able to express thoughts once they
were taught sign language.

PINKER: Yes. Now, deaf people who have sign language are
people with a language, because sign language is a fully
expressive, grammatical, complex language. So the crucial case
are those unfortunate deaf people who grew up without sign
language, and occasionally they're discovered, and there are
some very interesting case studies looking at their conception of
the world. And even though they are obviously cut off from a
lot of our culture, because we convey our culture through
words, it's clear that they have minds, and that the minds are
capable of some abstract understanding. Just to give some
simple examples: one person can repair a broken bicycle lock.
When you think about it, that's not so easy; I don't know if I
could repair a broken bicycle lock. It obviously involves a kind
of mechanical intelligence -- knowing what the lock is for,
knowing how the different parts interact, and so on. They can
handle money. Money involves a very subtle concept of debt
and what you owe and social exchange. They can pantomime
their life history. Pantomime isn't the same as sign language;
pantomime is more like charades. They can do that, so they
have memory of their own autobiographies, which they can
communicate. And when people first encounter a languageless
deaf person, they often get a sense of the intelligence, simply by
the eye contact and by the nonverbal. So you really get a sense
that there's a mind there, and it's just that there are lots that they
don't know.
MISHLOVE: Well, so I think that you might conclude from that
that there is a mentalese; there is a way that we think without
language or words. But then we might begin to ask ourselves
the question, is our mentalese shaped by language nonetheless?
Obviously it would be in the case when you're listening to
someone else's speech.

PINKER: Yes, absolutely. Certainly the contents of mentalese

are supplied a lot by language, by learning about objects in
faraway places and abstract concepts from conversations with
other people and by reading. So it's like the entry port into the
mind. The actual sentences of mentalese often derive from
language, although not directly, because we never remember the
exact wording of what we hear; we remember the gist, and the
gist is probably something like mentalese. And I think probably
in the evolution of the human species, evolution of language
and the evolution of language in thought probably went
together; each one helped the other. If you can think more
complex thoughts, that puts pressure on you to be able to share
them, and if you've got other people supplying you with
complex language, that puts pressure on you to be able to have
those thoughts. And you can imagine a kind of feedback loop,
where each one helped the other.

MISHLOVE: Well, surely in this conversation, my thoughts are

being shaped by your words, and I think your thoughts must be
shaped to some degree by my words.

PINKER: Clearly. Yes, absolutely.

MISHLOVE: And so now I suppose the question is, to what

extent are we conditioned, is our mentalese conditioned, by the
kinds of reinforcement that we get from other people in the
culture around us?

PINKER: Yes, certainly a large extent. When we talk about

persuading and convincing and winning friends and influencing
people, one thing that's really true about human beings, clearly,
is that a lot of our social interactions are by words. So we
certainly try to get people to see things our way by aiming these
noises at them, what we call language. I think it's the machinery
of the mind, it's the ability to have thoughts, that's independent
of language; but language is obviously very important to
supplying the actual content of the thoughts, I think.

MISHLOVE: Now, some cultures, particularly in Asia, have

developed, let's say, a mystical tradition that we haven't had
with nearly as much depth in the West. And I think that's
reflected in their language. Is it fair to say that the people who
are raised in that linguistic environment might be more prone to
have mystical experiences?

PINKER: I'd be willing to bet that the experiences come first,

and the reason they have the words for them is that they need
the words to talk about them. I'll give you an example that's a
little closer to home -- closer to my experience, anyway,
because I don't know much about these Eastern cultures. But
Yiddish, the language that my grandparents spoke, has many
words for which there are no exact equivalents in English. The
word naches any Yiddish speaker will instantly recognize,
describes the emotional state of pride and satisfaction, typically
from a family member, most prototypically from one's child.
When your son wins the Nobel Prize, you experience naches.
And there's no exact English equivalent; pride doesn't quite
capture it. I think, though, having even explained it to you, even
if you didn't know a word of Yiddish, you'd probably know
exactly what emotion I was talking about. It's maybe talked
about more often in Yiddish culture, but I don't think I've
expressed something that you can't grasp, even if you never
heard the word before. You probably know what I'm talking
about; maybe you'll even start to use the word. And I suspect
that for some of the words in these Eastern cultures, it may be
like that. I probably haven't had much occasion to talk about
those states, but if I was in that kind of circumstance where I
would experience them, and someone said, "Oh, by the way,
that's called blah-blah-blah," I think I would be able to use blah-
blah-blah.

MISHLOVE: Well, maybe it's a question of habits -- that

certain language groups habitually cultivate certain states that
then they like to talk about.

PINKER: I think so, and I think that's the kernel of truth behind
the Eskimo snow myth. They probably have a few more words
for snow than we do. It's probably for the same reason that
bicycle mechanics have more words for parts of bicycles, and
painters have more words for shades of mauve, and so on. As
you say, when you're in the habit of dealing with different
aspects of the world, and dealing with other people who are also
dealing with those aspects, you're going to invent the words to
be able to communicate them. But the fact that we can invent
words is what makes me think that the experiences come first.

MISHLOVE: What about the cadence of the languages? Like

some languages, the Polynesian language, or Japanese, or
German, it seems like it's very crisp and precise, a lot of sharp
consonant sounds. Other languages, the Romantic languages -- I
think other languages emphasize the vowels more. Doesn't that
create a whole different personality?

PINKER: I tend to doubt it, to be honest. I think the sounds of

language change without necessarily a change in the culture.
English sounded very different several hundred years ago than
it does today. I don't know if the mind of English speakers has
changed. Also think about the way that different cultures adopt
new languages. I mean, the English language now is spoken
over huge parts of the world, but I don't know if the sounds of
English have actually caused all the cultures that have adopted
it to start thinking differently. But I think where it probably
might have influence is in art and literature and poetry. The
sounds of the language might make it more appropriate to
express it in kinds of emotion that might resonate more with
certain kinds of experience. There's a wonderful line in one of
Woody Allen's movies, where he's trying to seduce a woman
and she says, "Say something to me in Spanish. Spanish is such
a romantic language." And he says, "I don't know any Spanish. I
can say something to you in Hebrew." The humor in that is
there is something about the rhythm and the cadence of Spanish
that puts us in the mood, perhaps, of more romantic thoughts.
But I think that's probably the extent of it.

MISHLOVE: Well, it seems to me that your message, then, is

that our thoughts are really totally free, at least as regards any
constraints that might be imposed by language -- that whatever
modifying influences language has, it doesn't anywhere impose
a constraint on what we can think.
PINKER: I don't think it imposes a sharp constraint. I think it
helps to think in certain ways, for the following reason. You've
got, as you're thinking a complex thought, as you're formulating
an argument to yourself, or as you're trying to solve a puzzle,
you often have to keep a bunch of things in mind, sort of
juggling a lot of balls in the air. And if you can keep some of
those in mind by imagining yourself saying the words, you've
got almost like a little echo in the back of your head, that's one
more mental scratch pad that you can use to keep the ideas from
fading.

MISHLOVE: Subvocalization.

PINKER: Like subvocalization, right. And if a thought

corresponds exactly to a word, you can play it to yourself in
your auditory imagery, and if you have a language that has
words for certain things, you can probably keep more of them in
mind. I know people who know sign language and spoken
language, who often when they're thinking, when they're
following a complex argument -- when they're, say, sitting in a
lecture, or you told them something very mind boggling and
they're trying to reason it through -- they'll be gesturing with
their hands, even though there's no other signer in the room,
simply because the muscle memories of the motion you just
made with your hands, if they have linguistic meaning, are yet
another form of short-term memory that you can use. So I think
that's a way in which language does interact with thought. But
it's not that you are incapable of thinking certain thoughts if you
don't have the words for them.

MISHLOVE: But what about most of the time? Don't most

people report, if you were to ask them, "How do you think?"
they would say, "I think in words"?

PINKER: A lot of people do, although, remember, a lot of

people don't. A lot of people say that they think in images, that
they think in body sensations. I think that what you're aware of
is probably a tip of the iceberg as to what's actually happening
in the mind, and words are the things that we can talk to each
other about. How am I going to tell you what I'm thinking
unless I use words? And so the thing that's going to be
uppermost in my mind, if I'm trying to convey to you how I
think, are going to be things like the vocalizations, the auditory
imagery of words. That's what we notice, although I don't think
that's where the real heart of the matter is in thought processes. I
think it's just a part that's most accessible to us.

MISHLOVE: In other words, it's a consequence of the accident

that we were born with mouths instead of multimedia projector
systems.

PINKER: Exactly. We use our mental imagery of words, I think,

as one extra, almost like a piece of paper that we jot down a
phone number to remember it, but of course all inside our
heads. But clearly, when you look at all these ambiguities in
language -- "Hershey Bars Protest" -- that's another headline;
the town of Hershey outlaws protest. Whoever wrote that
headline, it probably didn't even occur to that person that it had
another meaning. He might have reported that he was literally
thinking in words, but if he was thinking in words, then both of
these meanings should have been apparent, but there's got to be
an idea underlying it that he had in mind, that he probably
wasn't even aware of.

MISHLOVE: So you're arguing that the ambiguities that exist

in language would suggest that they can't possibly constrain our
thoughts.

PINKER: Exactly. In fact most of us don't even realize how

ambiguous language is, and that's why it's been so hard to
program computers to have a conversation. We think each
sentence has a meaning. We actually try to program a computer
to do it, and the computer will find nineteen meanings, and
won't know which one you had in mind. But those are really
below our level of awareness.

MISHLOVE: Well, in a way I suppose it's close to a miracle

that we can sit here and have this conversation and understand
each other, and thousands of people at some other point in time
are going to be listening to some sort of electronic
representation of this conversation, and they'll know what we're
thinking.

PINKER: That is astonishing -- that noises are coming out of

our mouths, and we could be narrating the play-by-play of a
basketball game, or we could be talking about a soap opera plot,
and they would just be slightly different noises, but human
brains are capable of unpacking the meaning behind the noises,
to figure out in our case that we're talking about language itself,
but we could have been talking about anything.

MISHLOVE: Well, obviously we've raised more questions in

all of this than we have answered. I mean, the mechanism of
mentalese, the way in which the subvocalizations and the words
and the pictures all fit together and interact with our brain is a
subject of great interest that we will explore together in future
portions of this series. Steven, this has been an eye-opener for
me, because I have to confess honestly it's caused me to change
my opinion about language. I was certain that there were certain
inherent limitations in the English environment, and you really
have convinced me otherwise, and I find that very liberating. So
for that I thank you.

PINKER: It's been a pleasure.

MISHLOVE: We've got just a few seconds yet before we need

to close this program. I might mention for people who are
viewing that we're going to look more into the mechanisms of
how we produce language, and how we understand language,
and we'll look at the evolution of language, and finally, as we
approach the fourth part of this series, we're going to explore
the nature of consciousness itself. You have some very
interesting ideas about the modules in the nervous system that
produce consciousness. Steven, thanks so much for being with
me.

PINKER: My pleasure. Thank you.