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What is a Neural Theory of Language?
What can we "understand" when we are confronted with new words like "Unified Cognitive Science", "Embodied Mind"?
What is "understanding"? How do we "understand"? How do we understand each other? How do we "relate"?
Traditional linguistics studied language as an "object". We need new word-tools to describe this THING as a process, a process of interaction, of coordination - both on the level of neurons and on the level of social communication.
A new vocabulary to describe language and communication:
neural theory of language - metaphor - abstract symbol system - cognitive science - embodied mind - multimodal nature of language - constructions - concepts - conceptual systems - categorisation - semantic spaces - neural maps - conceptual schemas - cultural frames - core semantics - embodied concepts - linguistic determinism - Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - metaphor - simulation - -
From Molecule to Metaphor
VII Preface: This book proposes to begin integrating current insights from many disciplines into a coherent neural theory of language. It might seem that no such effort is needed. Isn't language obviously a function of our brains - what else could it be? Certainly other human abilities such as motor control, hearing, and especially vision have been studied as a neural systems for many decades. But language is still often treated as an abstract symbol system not particularly tied to human brains or experience.
A great deal of permanent value has been learned from formal studies of language, but it is surprising that the notion of disembodied language persists. This is partly historical artefact, but it also arises from the fact that other animals share visual and motor abilities but not our language skills. Much of the progress in neural theories of vision and motor control have come from invasive animal experiments that are thankfully prohibited on people. Until recently, very little has been known about how our brains process language. The book can be seen as a part of a general effort to construct a Unified Cognitive Science that can guide the effort to understand our brains and minds.(FeldmanPreface)
The Embodied mind : One simple insight has driven much of the scientific study of how the structure and function of the brain results in thought and language: Human language and thought are crucially shaped by the properties of our bodies and the structure of our physical and social environment. Language and thought are not best studied as formal mathematics and logic, but as adaptions that enable creatures like us to thrive in a wide range of situations. (Feldman7)
The integrated, multimodal nature of language: Because language is complex, linguists have traditionally broken its study artificially into levels or modules given names such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, the lexicon, semantics, discourse, and pragmatics. Most linguists specialise in the study of just one level or at the border between two adjacent and subfields. Such focused studies have told us a great deal about language and are still the norm.
... real language is embodied, integrated, and multimodal. When your doctor asks you to lift your leg, your understanding involves a rich interaction among many neural systems.
There is systematic structure to how all these components fit together to constitute language. The rules of patterns of language are called constructions. Constructions integrate different facets of language - for example, phonology, pragmatics, semantics, and syntax. The request construction might specify a grammatical form, and intonation pattern, pragmatic constraints, and the intended meaning. This integrated, multifaceted nature of language is hard to express and traditional theories, which focus on the separate levels and sometimes view each level as autonomous. But constructions can provide a natural description of the links between form and meaning that characterise the neural circuitry underlying real human language. They offer a high-level computational description of a neural theory of language (NTL). (Feldman7)
19 Communication and co-ordinated evolution: Communication between cells is a major revolutionary advance and a prerequisite for the appearance of multicelled creatures like ourselves. Individual cells survive by carefully controlling their internal chemistry and it goes against their nature to allow outside agitators. Of the 4 billion years since life began, about two thirds was required to evolve the simplest multicellular organism and their coordination mechanisms.
The basic mechanism of the communication is molecular matching...the emission and subsequent recognition of a signal molecule is the simplest form of communication among living things. (Feldman15)
33 Functionalism: No one believes that the computer simulation of a weather pattern is itself anything like the weather itself: the ever-changing clouds, the heat, the rain in your face, the oppressive humidity, and so on. The model is clearly distinct from the reality being modelled.
But when we use a computer program to simulate some function of the brain, we get into some delicate philosophical questions about exactly what is being done. One possibility is that, like the weather simulation, the computer is simply being used to carry out a formal, computational description of some process of the mind. The process is understood as being carried out by the physical brain, which is quite different from the program used to model it.
A second possibility, however, has become a major intellectual position within Anglo-American philosophy, generative linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. This position is called functionalism. In its strong form, it claims that the way the mind is physically embodied in the brain is irrelevant to the study of mind. Functionalism as principal is the opposite of an embodied theory, which suggests that everything important about language depends on the brain and body…
As we saw in previous chapters, scientists are all this study nature using various perspectives, and a functional analysis is usually involved. Almost everyone agrees that a functional level of description is needed for language and thought. Philosophical functionalism holds that everything important about language and thought can be understood completely using information processing models, without looking at the brain at all. An even stronger position claims that any information processing system of sufficient complexity will automatically have all the mental powers of the mind, including consciousness. This stance is also called strong artificial intelligence. (Feldman33)
96 Embodied Concepts: Human conceptual systems are inextriably linked to language: The basis for concepts is categorisation. Categorisation occurs whenever a lot of data boiled down to a few all values. This happens in the retina and everywhere else in the brain, whenever a number of neurons signal to another neuron. Categorisation is not just a function of language. All living systems categorise.
Some philosophical traditions ask us to rise above our human categorisations and see the world as it really is, assuming some basic structure of nature that is independent of people. However, this is impossible for neural beings who evolved to do best-fit matching of input to the current context and goals. We have good reason to believe that there is a real physical world, but not that there is a privileged way of categorising it. People evolved to develop categories that match their situation and needs. These must be consistent with the facts about the physical and social environment or they wouldn't be of any use.
101 The interaction of people with their physical and social environment defines various semantic spaces, such as the space of colours, emotions, or dance steps. Languages differ in how they talk about each of these semantic spaces, but all languages must have ways of expressing the conceptual primitives that all people share.
105 Even to begin to explain the intricate processes of language learning and use requires a way of describing language and thought processes. A long and distinguished tradition has tried to define some formal „laws of thought“ characterising meaning and reasoning. Attempts to define exact grammatical rules for language go back to a Sanskrit scholars of many centuries ago. The current work of many linguists is concerned with trying to describe the form and meaning of language in strict mathematical formalisms, deliberately avoiding any connection to human bodies or experience. Another group, the cognitive linguists, studies how language interacts with other mental functions but they have lacked formal notations for expressing their insights.
112 Neural representation is also characterised by dozens of systematic maps - collections of linked neurons with related functionality… Neural maps also play an important role in theories and models of brain function. (Feldman 95)
125 Learning words: ...There is an even more basic problem in learning how words refer to things in the external world, which is usually ignored, but is important for our neural understanding of language. If, as our theory suggests, the child's experience is the product of her neural and hormonal activity, why should she believe an entity is in the external world? A simple and traditional, but inadequate, answer is that the world is inherently made up of fixed entities and our brains evolved to recognize and deal with these entities. But humans categorise experience in various ways according to their situation and needs.
One part of an adequate explanation for our belief in an external world involves this general human tendency to categorise inputs. (Feldman 125)
Conceptual Schemas and Cultural Frames: The child's first words are labels for his or her experience, but not all experiences can be described with a single word. Actions such as „grasp“ or special relations such as „support“ inherently have multiple participants, or roles. Grasping requires roles for at least the grasper and the thing being grasped. Coordinated motor activities such as grasping are called motor schemas. The same term, schemas, is used to describe relational information as in the concept of „support“. Many of these cognitive structures are universal across all languages and cultures, and I refer to all of these as conceptual schemas or sometimes just schemas. Other coherent collections of experience are particular to some culture, and following convention I refer to these as frames. Typically, a cultural frame such as the baseball frame will involve several basic conceptual schemas such as run, grasp, contact, and goal. Notice that a single word, like „shortstop“, can evoke the baseball frame with its many roles, actions, and relations...Image schemas and cultural frames figure prominently in the core semantics of human language. They form a crucial part of the computational level description of neural circuitry for language and thought. (Feldman 135)
...a theory of how abstract, cultural, and technical words and concepts arise from the substrate of direct experience. Neural embodiment remains central to the story - people, as neural systems, understand abstract ideas because these concepts are mapped to and activate brain circuits involved in embodied experience....This interplay between direct experience and language-driven learning is the primary basis for the transmission of culture to children. As a child learns to deal with the world, family and community point out and label features of the physical and social environment they consider important. This inevitably controls the way the child perceives the world and organises knowledge and behaviour - it determines the child's conceptual system. One of the most heated controversies involving the brain and language is whether the language a person speaks limits what he or she can think about - often called linguistic determinism. (Feldman 185)
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher, Edward Sapir, in the first half oft he twentieth century formulated the traditional basis of linguistic determinism in what is know as the „Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis“.
Whorf proposed that „We cut nature up, organise it into concepts and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are party to an agreement to organise it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
In the words of Sapir: „Human beings… are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society…The fact of the matter is that the „real world“ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.
It is quite difficult to assess how grammar affects thought, because it is hard to test a person‘s thinking without using language. Difficult, but not impossible. A number of results from various labs now show language-related differences on some tasks. All of these results are tendencies - no absolute differences are known to arise from variations in the grammatical form of one's language. However, we now know that the language people speak does have a measurable effect on how they think. (Feldman 188)
How do people learn the concepts and language covering rich array of cultural frames? In particular, what does the embodied neural theory of language have to say about learning and using the language of cultural discourse?
The answer is metaphor. Metaphor in general refers to understanding one domain in terms of another. The NTL approach suggests that all of our cultural frames derive their meanings from metaphorical mappings to the embodied experience represented in primary conceptual schemas. The next few chapters elaborate on the related ideas of meaning as metaphor and simulation. (Feldman 194)
196 Metaphors for language and thought:
Thinking is perceiving
Thinking is moving
Thinking is eating - in which ideas are food, communicating is feeding, accepting is swallowing, understanding is digesting, and so on.
...These examples are all clearly metaphorical. They are systematic. They involve applying the reasoning of the embodied (source) domains to the abstract (target) domain.They define a large proportion of our modes of comprehension of what ideas, thought, understanding, and communication are. Try having a conversation about thinking, communicating, and understanding for 10 minutes without using any of these metaphor's or any of the reasoning that arises from their use. You probably won't notice unless you pay close attention, but you will be using some of these metaphors.
Thought is language. Thought is mathematical calculation.
The mind is a machine.
(Feldman 194)
VII. Understanding Stories page 225
VIII. Combining Form and Meaning page 257
271 The Language Wars : Chomsky - Lakoff
283 Combining Meanings - Embodied Construction Grammar
295 Embodied Language
325 Remaining Mysteries:
Feldman 325
The mystery of language origins: How did we come to develop a communication system is so much richer than that of other animals? This hotly debated topic is related to the „language gene“ controversy and is also popular in the media. Every few months, we get another story about how some new finding has solved the mystery of language origins.
328...the mystery of the origins of human language is not likely to be solved any time soon. But it is not a profound mystery. Everyone agrees that expressive language conveys very significant evolutionary advantages on groups that can use it. Biological evolution moves too slowly to explain the rise of language (and modern civilisation) in just some thousands of years, but cultural evolution is easily fast enough. In a general way, it must be true that the genesis of language was neither a biological events nor individual learning, but the social phenomenon. The biological precursors, whether specific to language or more general, were almost certainly evolving well before the rapid rise of language. The mathematics of this kind of rapid change from a slowly evolving base is well understood as part of dynamical systems theory.
329 We discuss this ability in terms of mental spaces.
I believe there is a plausible story about how a discreet revolutionary change could have given early hominids simulation capability that helped start the process leading to our current linguistic abilities. Mammals in general exhibit at least two kinds of involuntary simulation behaviour - dreams and play. While a cat is dreaming, a centre in the brain stem blocks the motor nerves so that the cat’s dream thoughts are not translated into action. If this brainstem centre is destroyed, the sleeping cat may walk around the room, lick itself, catch in imaginary mice, and otherwise appear to be acting out its dreams. There is a general belief that dreaming is important for memory consolidation in people, and this was also be valuable for other mammals. Similarly, it is obvious that play behaviours in cats and other animals have significant adaptive value.
Given that mammals do exhibit involuntary displacement in dreams, it seems that only one revolutionary adaption is needed to achieve our ability to imagine situations of our choosing. Suppose that the mammalian involuntary simulation mechanisms were augmented by brain circuits that could explicitly control what was being imagined, as we routinely do. This kind of overlaying a less flexible brain system with one that is more amenable to control is the hallmark of brain evolution, and no one it would be surprised to find another instance of this mechanism. Now, hominids who could do detached simulations could relive the past, plan for the future, and be well on their way to simulating other minds. Understanding other minds would then provide a substrate for a richer communication and all the benefits that accrue from the use of mental spaces.
One crucial component of mental space reasoning is the ability to map ideas from one mental space to another. This is how we draw lessons from the past or change our plans after thinking about the consequences. People can predict what someone is likely to do based on what she says. So, our general simulation faculty must include the ability to maintain and exploit relational mappings. The learning of grammar could be very nicely modelled as learning relational mappings between regularities of linguistic form and the underlying meaning they convey, and some such mapping abilities seems to be required under any theory of grammar. Even more speculatively, the combined ability to imagine separate scenarios and to map them together is perhaps one of the foundations of many human capabilities, including grammar. This is close to the proposal of cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in a recent book „The Way We Think“ (2002). Whatever combination of biological and cultural evolution gave rise to early human language, it is no mystery that it developed rapidly, and, in all cultures, has a vast array of uses in human communication and thought.
We would love to know more about how language evolved, but it is unlikely that any theory of language origins would change our basic ideas of who we are and how the world works.
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A new vocabulary to describe language and communication:
neural theory of language - metaphor - abstract symbol system - cognitive science - embodied mind - multimodal nature of language - constructions - concepts - conceptual systems - categorisation - semantic spaces - neural maps - conceptual schemas - cultural frames - core semantics - embodied concepts - linguistic determinism - Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - metaphor - simulation -
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