The Ghost in the Machine

  The next level of ambiguity is less common, but has great theoretical importance for linguists, because it shows up nicely the fallacies of the chain concept. 'Young boys and girls are fond of sweets' sounds simple and unambiguous enough. But what happens if this is immediately followed by 'Young boys and girls have no hair on their chests'? If we follow the S-R schema, we shall very likely come to the conclusion that older girls do have hair on their chests. The reason is that in the first sentence we have parcelled out our 'verbal stimuli' thus: ((Young) (boys and girls)). So we tend to do the same thing in the second sentence. Only later do we realise that in the second sentence we must package the stimuli differently: ((Young boys) (and) (girls)). But if the stimuli can only be discriminated after completion of the chain allegedly based on discriminated stimuli, then we are moving in a vicious circle and the S-R model breaks down.*

  * In the terms of symbolic logic we would have to say that the response R to the whole sentence implies the responses r to its elements, which in turn imply the response R to the whole sentence: R
  Translated into neurophysiological terms, the hierarchic approach indicates that speaking and listening are both multi-levelled processes, which involve constant interactions and feedbacks between higher and lower levels of the nervous system (such as receptor and effector organs, the projection areas in the brain, other areas involving memory and association, etc.). Even Behaviourists must realise that man has a more complex brain than the rat, although they do not like to be reminded of it. Only by this multi-levelled activity of the nervous system is the mind enabled to tramform linear sequences along the single dimension of time into complex patterns of meaning -- and back again.

  The ambiguities so far discussed relate to the phonological and syntactic domains. They are resolved in a relatively simple way by reference to context on the next higher level of the hierarchy. But this analysis merely ensures intelligibility in the literal sense; it is no more than the first step upward into the vast, multi-layered hierarchies of the semantic domain. A sentence taken in isolation conveys no information as to whether it should be interpreted at face value, or metaphorically, or ironically, i.e., meaning the opposite of what it seems to mean; or perhaps containing a veiled message -- as the 'Don't mention it' in our dialogue. Such ambiguities of an isolated sentence can once more only be resolved by reference to its context -- i.e., to the next higher level in the hierarchy. This is exemplified when we ask at the end of a perfectly intelligible sentence: 'What do you mean by that?' Thus sentences stand in the same relation to their context as words to the sentence and phonemes to words. With each step upward in the hierarchy the peak seems to recede. In discourse concerned with relatively trivial matters, the hierarchy comprises only a few levels, and the climber comes to rest. But we have seen that even that trivial dialogue between He and She tapers into a whole pyramid of overt messages, implicit meaning, the motivation behind it, and the motivation behind the motivation. Some psychoanalysts use the term 'metalanguage' for these higher levels of communication, where the real meaning of the message can only be got at through a whole series of de-coding operations.

  But the series can also lead to an infinite regress. There are many examples of this in the more technical papers of both Freud and Jung setting out the details of individual case-histories, where the ultimate meaning of the patient's messages -- often conveyed in the language of dreams -- recedes more and more into the elusive domain of archetypal symbols or the eternal struggle between Eros and Thanatos. The hierarchy is 'open-ended': its apex recedes with each step towards it, until it dissolves in the clouds of mythology.

  Depth-psychology provides one example of an infinite receding series, starting with the ambiguity of the patient's verbal communications and receding towards the ultimate ambiguity of the existential riddle. But each step upward in the hierarchy has a clarifying and cathartic effect, providing limited answers to limited problems, or re-formulating in a more meaningful way those questions which cannot be answered.

  Other examples of open hierarchies are provided by various 'universes of discourse' -- such as certain branches of mathematics, the theory of knowledge, and all branches of natural science which have to manipulate infinite magnitudes in space or time. When the physicist talks of an 'asymptotic approach' to truth, he implicitly admits that science moves along an infinitely regressing series.

  And so does the philosopher concerned with meaning, and the meaning of meaning; with knowledge and belief, and the analysis of the structure of knowledge and belief. It is, as we have seen, already a remarkable achievement that we can produce -- and understand -- grammatically correct sentences, although we cannot define the rules which enable us to do it. But just as a grammatically correct sentence conveys no information as to whether it should be taken at face value or in some twisted way, so it also conveys no information regarding its veridity. Thus, when the message has been received, the question arises whether it is true or false. Here again, so long as we talk of trivial matters, the question may be settled with relative ease; but in more complex universes of discourse the next question must inevitably be what we mean by true and false; and there we go again, up the spiral staircase into the ratified atmosphere of the epistemologist's domain -- only to find that there is no end to the climb. To quote Sir Karl Popper (his italics):

  The old scientific ideal of epistêmê -- of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge -- has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever. It may indeed be corroborated, but every corroboration is relative to other statements which, again, are tentative. . . .' [11]

  Rules, Strategies and Feedbacks

  This chapter was not intended as an introduction to linguistics, but as an introduction to the concept of hierarchic organisation as exemplified in the structure of language. I have accordingly left out of account several factors which are important to linguistic theory, but not directly relevant to our purpose. The most important of these omissions is the class of transformation rules (Chomsky) which must be added to the 'structure-generating rules' to account for the speaker's ability to manipulate the branches of the tree in such a way as to produce a variety of related meanings (for instance, 'the postman kicked the dog', 'the dog was kicked by the postman', 'did the postman kick the dog?', 'was the dog not kicked by the postman?'). It all seems so simple, but consider for a moment how children ever acquire all the rules and corollaries needed to achieve even these simple transformations in a grammatically correct way.

  I have mentioned Chomsky's 'transformation rules' merely for the sake of completeness. However, there are other aspects of 'verbal behaviour' direcdy pertinent to our subject which I have so far not mentioned; it will be simplest to point them out by way of a concrete example.

  Let us return for a moment to the two opposite recipes for giving a lecture, quoted by Lashley. Perhaps the politician on a whistle-stop tour can indeed 'turn his mouth loose and go to sleep'. A bar pianist, too, can turn his fingers loose and do the same. But these are routines which have become automatised by practice and are hardly relevant to the question of how to compose a lecture which tries to say something new. Nor can we rely on the opposite recipe, and listen to the inner voice to guide us -- like a medium engaged in automatic writing. How, then, does our lecturer manage in fact to produce a paper?

  Let us assume that he is a history don who has been invited to give a guest lecture at an American university. Further assuming that he is free to choose the subject he likes, he will choose the subject he likes -- let us leave it at that, to avoid another infinite regress into motivation, personality, and the influences which moulded his personality. He chooses as his subject 'Unsolved Problems of the Dead Sea Scrolls', because he is convinced that he alone has the key to the solution. But how is he going to convince his audience? First of all he must decide whether he should pr
esent his pet theory in a straight-forward, non-polemical manner, or else show why and where all other theories went wrong. This is a matter of strategy, of choosing one among several alternative courses of putting the same message across; and at each further step he will be faced with other strategic choices.

  He decides on the straight-forward, non-polemical method, because he knows the kind of audience he will have to face, and does not wish to antagonise them. In other words, his strategy is guided by feedback -- by the echo of his words from the audience, even if for the time being it is merely an anticipated echo from an imaginary audience.

  Let us note that all this wavering and decision-making need not at this stage involve any verbal formulations; it may have taken the form of vague visual images. (For instance, the polemical method may be represented in his imagination by a white shape highlighted on a black surface -- the Gestalt theorists' figure-background paradigm, and the straight-forward method represented by a uniform grey. Questionnaires to scientists have revealed that in the decisive stages of creative thinking, visual and even muscular imagery predominates over verbal thinking.*)

  * See below, Chapter XIII.

  Next comes the vexed problem of the 'organisation of material'; vexed, because the different aspects of the problem, the welter of evidence and the welter of interpretations, are all interconnected like threads in a Persian carpet. Our lecturer is keenly aware of the pattern they form; but how can he convey that pattern if he has to unpick the threads in order to explain them one at a time? Here the problem of temporal order begins to intrude, although his mind may still be functioning in the partly or wholly non-verbal regions of images and intimations.

  At last he arrives at a tentative arrangement of his material, under a series of headings and sub-headings, which he shuffles about as if they were compact building blocks. They are probably each represented by a mere jotted key-word. This again sounds simple enough, but the longer you think about it the more puzzling the nature of these building blocks appears to be. William James expressed this puzzlement in a memorable passage (his italics):

  . . . And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! . . . Yet what can we say about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts that replace it? The intention to say so and so is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. [12]

  But now the time has come for these intentional seeds to start growing into saplings which will branch out into sections, subsections, and so on: the selection of evidence to be quoted, of illustrations, comment and anecdotes, each of them necessitating further strategic choices. At each node -- branching point -- of the growing tree, more details are filled in, until at last the syntactic level is reached, the phrase-generating machine takes over, the individual words are lined up-some effortlessly, some after a painful search, and are finally transformed into patterns of contractions of finger muscles guiding a pen: the logos has become incarnate.

  But of course the process is never quite as neat and orderly as that; trees do not grow in this rigidly symmetrical way. In our schematised account, the selection of the actual words occurs only at an advanced stage of the process, after the general plan and the ordering of the material have been decided on, and the buds of the tree are ready to burst open in their proper left-to-right order. In reality, however, one branch somewhere in the middle might blossom into words, while others have as yet hardly started to grow. And while it is true that the idea or 'intention of saying a thing' precedes the actual process of verbalisation, it is also true that ideas are often airy nothings until they crystallise into verbal concepts and acquire tangible shape. Therein, of course, lies the incomparable superiority of language over more primitive forms of mental activity; but that does not justify the fallacy of identifying language with thought and of denying the importance of non-verbal images and symbols, particularly in the creative thinking of artists and scientists (Chapter XIII). Thus our lecturer sometimes knows what he means, but cannot formulate it; whereas at other times he can only find out what exactly he means by explicit, precise verbal formulations. When Alice in Wonderland was admonished to think carefully before speaking, she explained: 'How can I know what I think till I see what I say?' Often some promising intuition is nipped in the bud by prematurely exposing it to the acid bath of verbal definitions; others may never develop without such verbal exposure.

  Thus we have to amend our over-simplified schema: instead of the symmetrically growing tree, with branches steadily progressing downward, wehave irregular growth and constant oscillations between levels. Transforming thought into language is not a one-way process; the sap flows in both directions, up and down the branches of the tree. The operation is further complicated, and sometimes brought to the verge of a breakdown, by our lecturer's deplorable tendency to correct, erase, chop off entire flowering branches from the tree and start growing them afresh. The Behaviourist calls this Trial-and-Error behaviour and compares it to the behaviour of rats running at random into the blind alleys of a maze; but the search for the mot juste is, of course, anything but random.

  Matters would be even more complicated if our subject were a poet, instead of being a historian. If he were a poet, he would have to serve two masters -- operate in two interlocking hierarchies at the same time: one governed by meaning and the second governed by rhythm, metre, euphony. But even though the lecturer writes in prose, his choice of words and phrasing is influenced by the demands of style. Complex activities are often dependent on more than one hierarchic order -- trees with intertwining branches -- each controlled by its own rules and value-criteria: meaning and euphony, form and function, melody and orchestration, and so on.

  I have said enough to indicate some of the problems which human speech presents. Now Behaviourists, too, are in the habit of preparing papers, and even of writing books, so they must no doubt also be aware of the difficulties and complexities of the process. But when they discuss 'verbal behaviour', they manage to forget or repress them. They confine the discussion to such embarrassing trivialities as: 'The verbal stimulus "Come to dinner" is usually reinforced by food.' They demonstrate how the experimenter can 'control a subject's verbal behaviour' by placing 'a large and unusual pencil in an unusual place clearly in sight -- under such circumstances it is highly probable that our subject will say "pencil"' [13] (both examples are from Skinner's Verbal Behaviour, a treasure-house of similar profundities). By these methods they can, as we have seen, go on talking about S-R atoms forming chains extending in a vacuum -- without having to bother to define what the S's and the R's consist of.

  Summary

  Where indeed shall we look for the atoms of language -- in the phoneme /e/? In the digram /en/? In the morpheme /men/? In the word /mention/? Or in the phrase /don't mention it/? Each of these entities has two aspects. It is a whole relative to its own constituent parts, and at the same time a part of the larger whole on the next level of the hierarchy. It is both a part and a whole -- a sub-whole. It is one of the characteristic features of all hierarchic systems, as we shall see, that they are not aggregations of elementary bits, but are composed of sub-wholes branching into sub-sub-wholes, and so on. This is the first point of general validity to retain from the preceding discussion. I must now mention a few more characteristics of language which have the same universal validity for hierarchic systems of all types.

  'Active speech' (in contrast to 'passive speech', i.e., listening) consists in the stepwise elaboration, articulation, concretisation, of originally inarticulate generalised intents. The branching of the tree symbolises this step-by-step, hierarchic process of
spelling out the implicit idea in explicit terms, of converting the potentialities of an idea into the actual motion-patterns of the vocal chords. The process has been compared to the development of the embryo: the fertilised egg contains all the potentialities of the future individual; these are then 'spelled out' in successive stages of differentiation. It could also be compared to the way a military command is executed: the generalised order 'Eighth Army will advance in direction of Tobruk', issued from the apex of the hierarchy, is concretised in more detail at each of the lower echelons. Furthermore we shall see that the exercise of any skilled action, whether instinctive, like the nest-building of birds, or acquired, as most human skills are, follows the same pattern of spelling out a 'roughed-in' command by a hierarchic sequence of steps.

  The next point to note is that each step in our imaginary lecturer's progress was governed by fixed rules, which, however, leave room for flexible strategies, guided by feedbacks. On the highest levels operate the rather esoteric rules of academic discourse; on the next lower level the rules of generating grammatically correct sentences; lastly, the rules which govern the activities of the vocal chords. But on each level there is a variety of strategic choices: from the selection and ordering of the material, through the choice of metaphors and adjectives, down to the variety of possible intonations of individual vowels.*

  * Once more it is interesting to note the intense reluctance of academic psychologists -- even those who have outgrown the cruder forms of S-R theory -- to come to grips with reality. Thus Professor G. Miller writes in an article on psycholinguistics: 'As psychologists have learnt to appreciate the complexities of language, the prospect of reducing it to the laws of behaviour so carefully studied in lower animals has grown increasingly remote. We have been forced more and more into a position that non-psychologists probably take for granted, namely, that language is rule-governed behaviour characterised by enormous flexibility and freedom of choice. Obvious as this conclusion may seem, it has important implications for any scientific theory of language. If rules involve the concepts of right and wrong, they introduce a normative aspect that has always been avoided in the natural sciences. . . . To admit that language follows rules seems to put it outside the range of phenomena accessible to scientific investigation'. [14] What a very odd notion of the purpose and methods of 'scientific investigation'!