The moment of creation, Thoughts

I just finished reading Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. His premise is that we can learn something from the structure of language about how humans think. He argues that while assuming communicative intent, relevant and veridical content, and so on most speech acts involve an element of politeness with the aim of preserving 'face'. Human interactions are governed, at an emotional level, by three forces - communality, authority (or deference) and reciprocity - and these forces set the context for communication and the scales on which 'face' is to be preserved. According to Pinker, we understand complex, abstract concepts by their metaphorical relation to simple, intuitive ones, that come from our discrete, topological understanding of space and time. Communality is the force for togetherness, authority is the quest to power, and reciprocity is the desire for fair exchanges. Pinker claims that it is only through metaphorically extending the definition of the emotional commons to include knowledge that we are able to advance our scientific theories and have rational discourse, including fair legal and mercantile process. The goal of education, according to Pinker, should be to shed the garb of our emotional baggage, now it has been pointed out, and to go beyond 'face'.

I like Pinker's revision of the Benthamian stance so pervasive in this post-Freudian culture that there is always some 'secondary gain' an imaginary 'bottom line' to all our interactions with others. It seems that linguists have come up with this concept of 'face' through their analysis of dialogue that simply fails to squeeze onto a single dimension.

Much of Pinker's book is anglo-centric, and some distinctions (like the one between 'for' and 'to') simply don't translate. I grew up speaking Hebrew, a langauge that lacks that distinction. Nevertheless, while focusing on the inferences drawn from one language he has come to conclusions that could potentially be supplemented by examining other languages in as much detail. I can remember the experience, during a time in my life when I was switching from speaking mostly in English to speaking mostly in Hebrew, of having a thought in my mind and holding it there before choosing which language to think it in. So my intuition is that thought precedes and shapes language, although not all thoughts are translatable into all languages and the language of a person's thoughts places bounds on the ones they are likely to have.

I believe that the goal of education should be critical thinking. Pinker gives no examples of what moving away from the emotional aspects of language would be like because, I think, that is not actually possible. All metaphor is, in my view, empty without tying it in to some narrative. It's like a dictionary that allows you to translate from one language to another, but where is the story? Critical thinking is not an escape from preserving 'face'. Instead, it is the faculty of following a story or a line of reasoning and holding in memory all the different parts, checking them out not only against a simple, intuitive snapshot frame of the dominant metaphor but also against all the other available stories that have become a part of the culture. We can change the way people talk, in fact politeness like language varies from one culture to another as well as over historical time. We may not be able to sever the links between language, thoughts and feelings, but we can and do rearrange them all the time.

I created this blog to share my thoughts and observations. They probably won't all be as linear and coherent as the above book review. It's interesting to think that there was something I wanted so much to express about that book, it made a big impression on me and I persevered with reading it through some mental resistance to the content and tedium over the more technical parts concerning verbs. There is so little time for reading, and so much time for expressing oneself these days! And I could have just added it to a book review site, but that's not really what I want. I don't want to offer my judgment on the book to others. I want to express how I related to it. There may be no audience, but I don't mind dancing alone on a dark stage to my own music.

Next on my reading list: Feast of Souls, by CS Friedman. Recommended by my son.

Next in life: sleep... Why is this so hard that I am always trying to pay back a debt in catnaps?