15.6 Erroneous beliefs underlying the four theories
15.6 Erroneous beliefs underlying the four theories
What led the theorists whose theories we have discounted to advocate the theories they did? Discarding the anti-Mentalist position of some of the Behaviourist theorists who would treat thought as some sort of speech or behaviour, there are certain erroneous beliefs which might have been held by the other non-Behaviourist theorists that led them to invalid conclusions. We will consider three such mistaken beliefs: (1) Their analysis of language is adequate; (2) The meaning of words is linguistic in origin; and (3) There are primitive languages and primitive human intelligence.
15.6.1 Erroneous belief 1: Their analysis of language is adequate
The most serious deficiency in the theorizing of Whorf, Sapir, Korzybski, Skinner, von Humboldt, and others concerns the assumption that the directly observable words or the structure of a sentence represent all of the semantic or thought elements of that sentence. These theorists drew conclusions largely based on what linguists today would consider a superficial surface structure analysis. Whorf (Carroll, 1956), for example, states that ‘Our Indian languages show that with a suitable grammar we may have intelligent sentences that cannot be broken into subjects and predicates’ (p. 242), and that ‘the Hopi language contains no reference to “time” either explicit or implicit’ (p. 58). Such statements (disavowed by subsequent linguists) are made essentially because it is assumed that surface structure directly signifies all of the mean- ing of a sentence. These linguists thus had a tendency to focus on the differences between languages. The idea that grammatical differences made thought differences was not long in coming. It seems that most of the linguists simply played with the idea, because they offered little or no evidence for their assertions. They had other concerns. Except for Whorf, they did not bother to seek out hard evidence to support their contentions.
It was only when Chomsky came along and postulated underlying struc- tures that it was realized that languages had a lot of similarities. It is not surprising, therefore, that only after Chomsky did the search for language universals begin in earnest, although the linguist Joseph Greenberg was an earlier initiator.
15.6.1 Erroneous belief 2: The meaning of words is linguistic in origin
Except for the minor case of onomatopoeia (speech sounds imitating envir- onmental sounds), the relationship between a word and its meaning is conventional. That is, there is no necessary relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning. There is no inherent reason for a dog to be called ‘dog’ and not ‘pen’. Thus, when one hears a word for the first time,
e.g. the obscure English word ‘tantivy’, its meaning is not understood, unless it is composed of known morphemes. The meaning that is to be associated with a particular sound sequence must be learned. It is not possible to know from the sound sequence alone (especially if not in a phrase or sentence) that the meaning of ‘tantivy’ is related to horses and indicates ‘a gallop or rapid movement’.
Meaning for words is acquired in four main ways: (1) a sound form is associated with an object, situation, or event in the world, e.g. the sound ‘dog’ with the object ‘dog’; (2) a sound form is associated with an idea or experience in the mind, e.g. ‘pain’ with the feeling of ‘pain’; (3) an inference may be made in a linguistic context, an idea may be suggested, e.g. in reading a paragraph one word may not be known but because everything else is understood, its meaning may be guessed at by inference; and (4) an analysis of known component morphemes may suggest a meaning for the sound form, e.g. the meaning of ‘unprimitive’ can be gained through know- ledge of the morphemes ‘un’ and ‘primitive’.
In considering these four ways of acquiring word meaning, we may note that the first two involve non-linguistic sources. In (1) the experiencing of objects, situations, and events in the world provides a basis for meaning, and in (2) experiences in the mind itself provide the basis. These are the experiences that attach to empty sound forms and thus form a meaningful word. While (3) and (4) do provide meaning through the medium of lan- guage, it must be recognized that such mediums themselves are composed of language that was derived from non-linguistic origins, i.e. through the experience of items in the world (1) or through experience of items in the mind (2). Thus, the ultimate source of all meaning is based on non-linguistic experiences of the world or mind.
The mistake of Whorf and others is to assume that the mere hearing of the sound form of a word (an unknown one) itself provides some sort of meaning. They do not allow for a prior mental experience because that would
imply that thought precedes language. A language sound form itself, how- ever, does not provide meaning.
15.6.1 Erroneous belief 3: There are primitive languages and primitive human intelligence
One often hears observers of other cultures say that such and such a people are not logical or rational or that they are somehow deficient in intellect. Such supposed deficiencies are frequently attributed to their having a primi- tive language. Yet modern linguistic research has never found a single lan- guage that could be called ‘primitive’. Thus it is that Chomsky (1967a) can with some assurance assert that all languages are of similar complexity, with each having similar basic forms and operations. And, while other linguists may disagree with Chomsky on what the basic form and opera- tions might be, they do not disagree that all languages are constructed and operate with essentially the same principles.
It appears to us that Sapir, Whorf, and the others assumed that there was such a thing as a primitive people and that those people had a primitive grammar. Since they supposed that the primitive grammar of these people reflected their thought, they concluded that their thought was primitive too. How else could Whorf have concluded that the Hopi people had no concept of time, even with the faulty linguistic data that he gathered from those people? Such notions about primitive peoples and primitive languages were virtually taken for granted in the first half of the twentieth century when Sapir and Whorf were doing their theorizing, when the world still had undiscovered peoples and lands. Those days seemed long gone.
Then, too, there is a case of non-standard speakers of such dialects as Black English, whom many naive people regard as irrational. Labov (1970), however, clearly demonstrated that logic does underlie the utterances of those speakers. Once one learns the premises that a people hold, their behaviour and statements that were previously thought to be strange or illogical immediately become rational.