Language Learning Gilbert Harman Noûs, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Feb., 1970), pp. 33-43. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624%28197002%294%3A1%3C33%3ALL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1 Noûs is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.
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http://www.jstor.org Sat May 12 00:32:42 2007
THIRD SYMPOSIUM
Language Learning* GILBERTHARMAN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Commentators: S ~ V A I BROMBERGER N ~~~S-m~usErns INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
BRIAN SKYRMS
UNIVERSITY O F ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO CIRCLE
Let us suppose that there is an "inner language" of thought that may or may not be distinct from the "outer language" one speaks. I wish to contrast two views of what it is to learn a natural language. A code breaking conception might be provisionally formulated thus: (CB) One's inner language, which one thinks in, is distinct from one's outer language, which one speaks. Communication involves coding or translation between inner and outer languages. Learning language is a matter of learning an outer language and involves acquiring the ability to do such coding or translation. An incorporation view might be stated as follows: (IV) Knowledge of a language is the ability to use that lan-
* This work was
supported in part by the National Science Foundation.
33
p a g e ; and the primary use of language is in thought. Knowing a language is being able to think in it. Learning an outer language involves the incorporation of that language into one's inner language. If space permitted, I would try to associate CB with such people as Jerrold Katz, the Port-Royal Grammarians, and Aristotle. I would try to connect IV with Wilfrid Sellars, Quine, Wittgenstein, Whorf, and Humboldt. On this occasion I must restrict myself to the attempt to say what the issue between CB and IV amounts to in the last analysis. I shall begin with the notion of a psychological model. Such a model conceives a person as a nondeterministic automaton, whose input is the result of interaction with the environment and whose output consists in actions and reactions, including speech. Any plausible model makes use of a system of representation for framing beliefs, desires, etc. In a simple model, there might be two places in which representations are stored. Representations of things believed would be stored in one place; representations of things desired in the other. Interaction with the environment would produce new representations that would be stored as beliefs. Needs for food, love, etc. would produce representations to be stored as desires. Inferences could produce changes in both the set of beliefs and the set of desires. Let us use the term "thoughts" to stand for states and occurrences such as thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc. Then we might interpret CP and IV as the following proposals about psychological models : (CBPM) A psychological model of a speaker of a language should use a system of representation for thoughts that is distinct from the language spoken by the person modeled. In a model of communication, the model of the speaker converts an element of this inner system of representation into a sentence of the language; and the model of the hearer converts this sentence back into the proper element of the inner system of representation. A model of a language learner must come to acquire the ability to thus convert elements of the inner system to sentences of the outer language; and vice versa.
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(IVPM) A psychological model of a speaker of a language should use a system of representation for thoughts that includes the language spoken by the person modeled. A model of communication need not involve the sort of conversion mentioned in CBPM. A model of a language learner does not acquire the ability to do such conversion; instead it comes to incorporate the outer language into its inner system of representation. There is no question that relevant models must thus make use of a system of representation. We know that people have beliefs and desires, that beliefs and desires influence action, that interaction with the environment can give rise to new beliefs, and that needs and drives can give rise to desires. Adequate psychological theories must reflect this knowledge and add to it. So adequate psychological models must have states that correspond to beliefs, desires, and thoughts such that these states function in the model as psychological states function in the person modeled, and such that they are representational in the way that psychological states are representational. Where there is such representation, there is a system of representation; and that system may be identified with the inner language in which a person thinks. This reduces the claim that there is an inner language, which one thinks in, to the trivial assertion that psychological states have a representational character. But it leaves obscure CBPM and IVPM, which respectively deny and assert that one's inner language contains one's outer language. What could it mean to assert or deny that psychological states involve, or even are, instances (i.e, tokens) of sentences of one's language? How can it be serious whether or not to include sentences of a person's language among the representations used in the way suggested above as part of a psychological model of that person? In reply, one can agree that it is not clear what it is for a person's psychological states to be or include tokens of his language. But that is at least partially because it is unclear what it is for anything to be a token of a sentence. Compare uttered and written tokens, tokens in different dialects,, different handwriting, and different styles of type, tokens uttered aloud and said to oneself. What do all the various instances of a sentence have in com-
mon? It is not easy to say; but the following conditions seem necessary. First, any two tokens of the same sentence must have similar (potential) representational properties. Second, the tokens must each be analyzable as an ordered sequence of the same words in the same order. A generalization of the second condition allows us to distinguish tokens of the same old sentences appearing in a new form (e.g. the new written tokens as opposed to the old spoken tokens) from tokens of sentences in another language which are only translations of sentences in the original language. In a language that can be both spoken and written, for every possible spoken word, there is a corresponding written word. Every spoken sentence is a temporal sequence of spoken words; and the corresponding written sentence is a spatial sequence of corresponding written words in the same order, where corresponding written and spoken sentences have the same potential representational properties. This sort of general correspondence does not hold between distinct languages. One cannot, for example, correlate English and Russian words so that whenever a sequence of English words forms a sentence, the corresponding sequence of Russian words forms a sentence that translates the English sentence. This suggests that we formulate the two conceptions of language learning as follows (recall that we are using "thoughts" to include beliefs, desires, etc.) : (IVT) The relationship between one's thoughts and the sentences of one's language is relevantly more like the relationship between spoken and written English than it is like the relationship between English and Russian. Thoughts may be analyzed as sequences of elements; and some of the elements may be correlated with words in one's language so that corresponding sequences of elements and sequences of words have similar representational characteristics. To learn a language is to acquire thoughts that are (at least in part) tokens of sentences of that language. (CBT) The relationship between one's thoughts and the sentences of one's language is relevantly more like the relationship between English and Russian than it is like the relationship between spoken and written English. The sort of analysis envisioned in IVT is not
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possible. To learn a language is not to acquire thoughts that are tokens of sentences of the language but is in part to acquire the ability to encode one's thoughts in such tokens. Notice, by the way, that so formulated IVT does not commit one to the view that thoughts that are "in words" have such words occurring in temporal sequence. One can think in words without those words passing through one's head in the proper temporal order. An uttered sentence is a temporal sequence; but a written sentence is a spatial sequence; and a thought sentence need not be a spatiotemporal sequence at all. However, a moment's reflection suffices to show that, when formulated in this way, IVT is false and CBT is true, because of ambiguity in natural language. Thoughts are not ambiguous in the way that sentences in English are. So there can be no analysis like that suggested in IVT which correlates sentences and thoughts that have similar representational characteristics. IVT is trivially false; and CBT, the relevant denial of IVT, is trivially true. The ambiguity of a sentence may derive either from the ambiguity of certain words in the sentence, from the ambiguity of the grammatical structure of the sentence, or from some combination of factors. Let us make the controversial assumption that the relevant grammatical structure is what transformational linguists refer to as "deep structure," which reveals relations such as underlying first argument of a predicate, etc. (and also, I would maintain, scope of quantifiers and negation, etc.). Let us also assume that the deep structure of a sentence represents in some form or other the words (or morphemes) relevant to the meaning of the sentence. Finally, let us assume that different senses of words are distinguished by subscripts on those words in deep structure but that deep structure contains no other purely semantic information. Then, by a sentence under analysis, I shall mean a sentence viewed (or "heard") as having a particular deep structure in the sense just described. We may now state the incorporation view and the code breaking conception of language learning in such a way that there is a real nontrivial issue between them. (IVA) To acquire a language is to acquire thoughts that are, at least in part, instances of sentences of that language under analysis. Spontaneous speech is thinking out loud: one utters a sentence under analysis. Two such
sentences sound the same if they contain the same words in the same order, even if their deep structures are different. For someone to understand what is said is for him to hear it as a sentence under analysis. (CBA) To learn a language is not to acquire thoughts that are instances of sentences of the language under analysis, but is in part to acquire the ability to encode one's thoughts in such instances. Although I have defended IVA elsewhere, I now find that it is false. A recent article reports that Our data show that children make discriminations that are not reflected in their speech. Children whose speech is telegraphic readily obey well-formed commands, and less readily obey telegraphic commands. Thus a description of the child's spontaneous utterances does not do justice to his linguistic organization. In some fairly clear sense, comprehension seems to precede the production of wellWhat is truly surprising is that those utterformed sentences. ances which a description of natural speech would specify as TYPICAL for the child are just those utterances which are LESS EFFECTIVE to him as commands. (Shipley, Smith, and Gleitrnan, "A Study in the Acquisition of Language," Language, XLV (1969): 322-342, quoting from pp. 336-7.)
...
If some of the child's thoughts are to be analyzed as sentences of his language under analysis, these sentences are either (1) the telegraphic ones of the sort he spontaneously produces or (2) the well formed ones of the sort he understands. On alternative (I), the child does not understand what is said by hearing it under analysis. And it would seem absurd to suggest that the child hears a well formed sentence as a telegraphic sentence under analysis, since the child has greater di£Eculty understanding telegraphic sentences than well formed ones. On the other hand, on alternative (2) the sentences the child spontaenously produces are not, even under analysis, sentences the child thinks in; and speech is not simply a matter of thinking out loud. Neither alternative (1) nor alternative (2) seems consistent with IVA. The experimental results cited definitely favor CBA. Understanding is a matter of decoding what is said; spontaneous speech is a matter of encoding one's thoughts. Neither of these processes is trivial; and in learning a language, the former process is easier than the latter. However, even if all this is granted to the code breaking con-
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ception, a defender of the incorporation view will want to claim that the relevant thoughts are language dependent. If thoughts are not sentences under analysis, i.e. sentences with deep structures, perhaps they are simply the deep structures without the sentences (but with the relevant words). Some defenders of the code breaking conception will want to argue that thoughts are not thus dependent on one's language. Therefore, I am led to a second way of stating the incorporation view and the code breaking conception such that there is a real and nontrivial issue between them. (IVDS) To understand what is said is to hear what is said as a sentence under analysis. That is because certain of one's thoughts are instances of deep structures of such sentences. Thoughts may be analyzed as structures of elements; and the elements can be correlated with subscripted words, the structures with deep structures, so that corresponding structures of elements and sentences under analysis have the same representational characteristics. To acquire a language is to acquire thoughts that are, at least in part, instances of deep structures of sentences of that language. (CBDS) In order to understand what is said, one must do more than hear the sentence uttered as having the proper deep structure; one must also interpret that deep structure by decoding it or translating it into the language of thought. The sort of analysis envisioned in IVDS is not possible. To learn a language is not to acquire thoughts that are instances of deep structures of sentences of that language. Now, consider the following objection, which a defender of CBDS might make to IVDS: "If IVDS were true, thoughts expressed in one language could not be expressed in another, since thoughts are taken to be deep structures of sentences. But an English sentence under analysis can be translated into French sentence under analysis; and a criterion of good translation is that the translation should express the same thought as the sentence translated. The possibility of good translation shows 'that the same thoughts can be expressed in different languages. Therefore, IVDS must be false."
One might think it enough to respond to this objection by citing Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation. Quine points out that adequate translation is a matter of pairing sentences from one language with sentences from another in such a way that the general correlation satisfies certain conditions. He claims that, when one considers all reasonable constraints on translation, one discovers that various nonequivalent general schemes of translation will satisfy these conditions. Thus he claims that the translation of one language into another resembles the "translation" of number theory into set theory, in that there are many different equally good nonequivalent ways in which such translation may be carried out. If Quine were right, it would make no sense to say that two sentences of different languages express the same thought, except relative to one or another general scheme of translation between the two languages. For, although one scheme might count sentence A the translation of sentence B, an alternative, but equally good, scheme would count sentence C as B's translation, where A and C need not express the "same thought." Given indeterminacy of radical translation, the possibility of good translation does not establish that the same thoughts can be said to be expressed by different sentences in different languages apart from specification of a general scheme of translation. And to say that relative to a specified scheme of translation the same thoughts are expressed by sentence A and sentence B would not be to say something incompatible with IVDS. If Quine were right, IVDS would seem definitely preferable to CBDS. In Word and Object Quine argues that the meaning of a sentence in a single speaker's idiolect is a matter of what sentences he would be disposed to accept or reject as the result of being placed in various perceptual situations. Let me abbreviate this by saying that for the Quine meaning is a matter of a speaker's dispositions to accept sentences, where this is meant also to include rejection of sentences. If meaning were only a matter of a speaker's dispositions to accept sentences, then there would almost certainly be indeterminacy of radical translation. For it would seem obvious that there will be many different, equally simple ways to correlate sentences of two different languages which preserve a speaker's dispositions to accept sentences equally well. , The assumption that meaning is essentially a matter of a speaker's dispositions to accept sentences does seem to capture the essence of the approach to the theory of meaning exemplified in the
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writings of Carnap, Ayer, Lewis, Firth, Hempel, Sellars, et al. This approach seems definitely committed to the indeterminacy of radical translation. But is it obvious that the basic assumption of this approach is correct? The only argument for the assumption that I have been able to find appears in my contribution to the Synthese issue on Quine (in Vol. 19). I say, Meaning is not very much a matter of what words a person actually uses. What words he could have used are more relevant. Different people have different ways of speaking, different favorite phrases, etc. This obvious fact does not mean that the sentences of such different people are to be translated differently. To require similarity in actual usage (rather than possible usage) as a criterion of translatability would almost certainly rule out all translation, since any two people use their words differently. I do not mean something different by sentences of set theory from what you mean just because you and I use these sentences differently, e.g. just because I count with the von Neumann numbers while you count with Zermelo's, since I could always do it your way (18-19). But this argument is obviously invalid. Preservation of similarity in actual usage can be a criterion of translation without ruling out all translation on the grounds that people use words differently. Preservation of similarity in belief is a criterion of translation even though no two people believe the same things. I t tells us that, other things equal, we should prefer one general scheme of translation over a second if the first has us ascribe to speakers of another language beliefs that are more similar to our own beliefs than are the beliefs we would have to ascribe to them on the second scheme. A criterion of translation that appeals to similarity in actual usage can be given an analogous formulation: other things equal, we should prefer one general scheme of translation over a second if translations of things actually said by speakers of another language are more like things we would say on the first scheme than on the second. The latter principle would rule out schemes of translation not ruled out by the appeal to a speaker's dispositions to accept sentences. For example, it might rule out a general scheme of translation according to which speakers of another language regularly refer to rabbit-stages rather than rabbits, people-stages rather than people, etc., in favor of a scheme according to which they regularly refer to rabbits, people, etc., although both these schemes might be equally good in terms of preservation of dispositions to accept sentences. Furthermore, I can think of no reason why preservation of
similarity of actual usage, so understood, shouldn't be permitted to be just as much a criterion of good translation as preservation of similarity in belief. And, if it is allowed as a criterion, Quine's thesis of indeterminacy of radical translation no longer seems obviously true. Therefore, one cannot defend IVDS by appealing to this sort of indeterminacy. Nevertheless, Quine's overall approach to meaning and translation is a good one; and it tends to support IVDS rather than CBDS even without the indeterminacy thesis. One general scheme of translation is better than another to the extent that it is simpler, preserves dispositions to accept sentences, and preserves similarity of actual usage. Each of these things is a matter of degree; and they can compete with each other. One could achieve perfect correspondence between another person's dispositions to accept sentences and one's own if one were willing to give up on simplicity. And sometimes one gives up the simplest scheme, e.g. the homophonic scheme with respect to a compatriot, in order to preserve more dispositions to accept sentences or to gain more similarity of actual usage. The fit is never perfect; but, let us assume, there is sometimes a best fit-a best general scheme of translation from one language to another. Since the fit is only a matter of degree, the translation relation is not an "equivalence relation" in the mathematical sense. For it is not transitive. If x is the translation of y and y the translation of z, x need not be the translation of z. For there may be three languages L, M, and N, such that the best scheme of translation from L to N is not equivalent to the scheme one gets by first translating by the best scheme from L to M and then by the best scheme from M to N. This poses a problem for CBDS, which takes the possibility of good translation to show that the same thoughts can be expressed in different languages. If the thought expressed by x is the same identical thing as that expressed by y, which is the same as that expressed by z, the thought expressed by x is the same as that expressed by z, by the transitivity of identity. On CBDS, the translation relation ought to be an equivalence relation. So, even if Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation is not accepted, his theory of translation gives us reason to be skeptical of CBDS, since CBDS implies that thoughts are linguistically neutral states that may be expressed in various languages in a way that is not relative to translation. IVDS says that certain of one's psychological states may be
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treated as deep structures of sentences of one's language. This is done by constructing a psychological model in which certain beliefs are represented by the storage in a given place of instances of the appropriate deep structures. Similarly for desires, etc. The acquisition of language is treated in the &st instance as the acquisition of a system of representation for the storage of beliefs, desires, etc. I think that IVDS gives the beginnings of the correct account of language learning. It might have been supposed that the possibility of good translation tells against IVDS in favor of a view like CBDS. However, I have argued that this is not so and that, as of now, a view like IVDS looks more promising than one like CBDS. We cannot say simply whether the code breaking conception is or is not better than the incorporation view. On the one hand, language learning appears to involve the acquisition of coding and decoding abilities, as is revealed by the child's being better at decoding than he is at coding. CBA is true and IVA is false. On the other hand, the thoughts that a language encodes may themselves be highly dependent on that language, even to the point of being or involving deep structures of sentences of that language. Language learning may involve the incorporation of a system of language specific debp structure into one's language of thought. In that case IVDS will be true, and CBDS will be false.
