Pinker on the Thinker - David Cole

06:39 PM, June 27, 2007

In the early part of his discussion, Pinker suggests five non-technical reasons for thinking that not all thought is in natural language:  

"We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a what we meant to say that is different from what we said." (57)
We remember the gist of something heard , not the exact words.
If thoughts depended on words, new words could not be coined .
Language could not be learned .
Translation from one language to another would be impossible .

Children think and they don't use language. 

Animals think. 

Pinker cites languageless persons rebuilding broken locks - this is evidence of perhaps visual imagery, but not mentalese (at least not without quite a bit more detail and argument than we are given).

It could even turn out that some mathematical ability may have a basis in a facility that is closer to image processing 

It is also hard to see how mentalese is going to help us coin new words, or that the lack of mentalese could prevent us from coining new words. Take "Kleenex" and "slimeball". I don?t know the, no doubt interesting, history of these neologisms in detail, but I hope it is plausible to speculate that Kleenex, a product of Kimberly-Clark, was coined because it had a K, and also because it was hoped it would be associated by sound with "clean". ("Kodak" is well-known example of a minted word which, Eastman tells us, was selected specifically for its K endowment). Now for these attractive features, mentalese is totally hopeless as an aid to word coining. Mentalese doesn?t have Roman letters, and lacks rhyme, which is only a feature of phonology. So here mentalese would be an impediment rather than an aid to coining new words as compelling as "Kleenex".  

With "slimeball", I suspect the vividness of the visual image (not a proposition in mentalese), plus perhaps the sound of "slime" and the associations with that English word, endeared it to its creator and subsequent echoers. The original creator may have been looking for a way to convert "slime" to a count noun, and accomplished the transformation of the English "ball of slime" into "slimeball". "Byte" was coined to be phonologically similar to "bit", yet mean something bigger, which is accomplished by homonymy with "bite". In doing so, it relies on the similar phonological properties that "i" and "y" can have. "Minivan" rather than "miniature van" or "small van" is clearly chosen because it is easy to say, and assimilates to a host of other "mini-" things -- surface features, "Caravan", a brand name for a minivan, is truly a stroke of genius. "Boomer" is a convenient shortening of "Baby boomer" which is a transformation of "product of baby boom", which presumably endeared itself by alliteration. "TV", "pc", "scsi", "wasp", have jointed a host of acronyms. Again and again we see the central role played in neologism by various surface properties: phonological, including phonological economy, orthography, homonymy, alliteration, and acronyms. Mentalese is not much help here.  

The most expensive coining that I know of is the saga of how Standard Oil of Ohio became Esso and then finally Exxon. The latter transformation is alleged to have involved computers and millions of dollars. It allowed them to get away from gas-leak sound of Esso. And surely part of the appeal of the new name lies in the associations with the letter "x", and the exciting visual opportunity to have two x?s in a row, sharing a single crossbar. Who could resist? And how would mentalese have helped with discovery of these phonological and orthographic virtues? Word coining seems to point away from mentalese and instead to natural language as a medium of a least some thought.  

Ambiguity: natural language is (often) ambiguous. Our understanding is not. So the medium of our understanding is distinct from natural language.  
Synonymy: distinct arrangements of words in natural language mean the same thing, so there must be "something else that is not one of these arrangements of words" (80)

CONTEXT is crucial for disambiguation

Similarly in natural language. If I think "Jim went to the bank", it might - from what you can tell from the English sentence here displayed outside my head -- be the thought that he is going to a river bank or the thought that he is going to a financial institution. But it is a holdover from days gone by to think that this difference is solved by an ideal language of thought that uses different symbols for river bank and money bank. For again we can ask the crucial question: what makes the different symbols refer to different things? Nothing intrinsic to the symbols, and nothing intrinsic to the fact that they are different -- nothing internal to language keeps different symbols from co-referring. A system might use a certain symbol to mean one thing on Tuesdays and another on Wednesdays, or one thing in context A and another in context B.  

Again, inference role is crucial to determining how the system understands its symbols. If I think "Jim went to the bank, and since the river is running high, he might slip and get wet, or worse", it is much clearer how I am interpreting "bank". (But not absolutely conclusive, as you can see by reading the sentence with both interpretations of "bank".) What is relevant is that I am letting my beliefs about river banks determine my inferences from the sentence. Suppose further, what is not manifest in the sentence reported publicly, I am not letting my beliefs about financial institutions have any role. Then I am interpreting it one way and not the other. But doing that does not require that I translate the natural language sentence into some other, non-natural, language. What is required is what will be required for any medium of thought: a particular inference role for the sentences.  

Pinker says in this connection (p. 79):  

Intelligent you , the reader, knows that the Africa that Ralph lives in is the same Africa that all the other elephants live in, but that Ralph?s tusks are his own ." [Unlike a computational model of you.]

He concludes: "English sentences do not embody the information that a process needs to carry out common sense."  

Pinker on the Thinker - David Cole

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