Years of Poems and Spirits

All of sudden, I have heard so much about an ongoing academic debate: a linguistic professor is challenging whether Chomsky’s tree is really that universal in all languages.

I first heard of Dan Everett on a Sunday morning when I forgot to turn off the alarm clock set for the day before. NPR’s weekend edition has a nice piece of how an Amazonian tribe “converted” a missionary into an atheist professor and inspired him to challenge Chomsky.

I was a dirt poor immigrant student struggling with libido, money, grades and finding a job when I first learned the Chomsky’s theory in my Compiler class. I almost failed the class. It was not until all those temporal issues were settled did I realize what I had missed: one day I hit an epiphany and became a convert. I even bought his political arguments (the return on that was much lower though).

Hearing someone challenging Chomsky was enough to keep me awake on a gray Seattle weekend morning. I did some research on the topic but couldn’t understand all the original documents flying back and forth among Everett and his challengers.

A day later came the Apr 17th issue of the New Yorker that has a featured article (c) about this very topic. It made things much easier for me to understand but I guess I am still missing the part I don’t understand.

As described by the NYKR article, the central question is whether recursion is part of the “universal grammer” that is innate to human beings. Chomsky thinks that vocal communication is not unique to human, but recursion is. It seems so far, all the languages in history has bore him out until Dan Everett met the Piraha tribe in the Amazon jungle.

What Everett, a gifted linguistic expert and a former Evangelical missionary, found is that:
1. The Piraha tribe is a capable people: they have a history, a body of knowledge that enable them to survive in nature and, most importantly, they seem to have fostered a tradition or a culture–not in the forms of dances or rituals but in how they think. For example, they don’t trust outsiders and are resistant to outside influences.
2. Yet their language seems to be extremely primitive: it does not have words for directions or numbers.

The whole affair is enormously fascinating. I have so many questions that I don’t even know where to start. For example, Everett seems to suggest that the Pirahas do not use, nor do they understand, abstraction: they have to deal with something concrete and immediate. For example, a boy can build a model airplane but only when there is a real one in front of him. Instead of using directional words, they use physical landmarks (e.g. turn to the river). What I don’t understand is, if this is true, how can they pass knowledge around? How does a father tell his son how to evade a jaguar? Does he have to do so in front of a live one?

Other questions include: is Everett’s discovery really enough to unset Chomsky’s universe? Or maybe the Piraha case is an exception of the close coupling of culture and language?

More importantly, is there a parallel between language structure and knowledge structure? Theoretically speaking, if a body of knowledge can be described by a langugae, the knowledge should conform to the Chomsky normal form as well. For example, let’s say how to work with a spreadsheet is a body of knowledge, then there a tree-like form that encompasses all the necessary information (e.g. feature list) and sub-knowledge (e.g. what is a spreadsheet). Interestingly enough, a business guru, Barbara Minto, advices businessmen to use a “pyramid structure” to carry out effective communications (i.e. to convey/exchange a body of knowledge).

This kind of link back to what I have always thought as the “meta-concept” in a language. To put it simply, a meta-concept is an abstraction of a collection of lower level concepts until one hits physical senses. For example, the colors red, green, blue are concepts derived from physical senses and the concept/word “color” is an abstraction of all visible colors. Color, texture and rigidity may be further abstracted as the concept of “attribute” (of an object)… and so on.

My argument is, the more high level meta-concepts a language espouses, the more powerful the language is (e.g. more capable of delivering complex concepts). This is perhaps too self-explanatory to make a difference. However, that is exactly why the Piraha case is so strange. Something is not quite right here: either humans can survive with limited language ability or the whole language-knowledge relationship is wrong: e.g. the Pirahas can use limited vocabulary and recursion-less structure to express complex meanings. Either way, it doesn’t make a whole lot sense.

Read a pretty interesting article: Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes

Couple of days ago, I wrote about how politics, as a social behavior, could be driven by physical desire and is not confined in human only. This article seems to have just de-constructed the mystical emotion called love. The article seems pretty banal but that is because from scientists’ view, love itself is pretty banal.

Not much to add, just to say it confirms many things I kind of suspected/assumed/accepted: too much of man is writte0n in his genes. The irony is, if one wants to overcome any genetic deficiency and succeeds, it is probably because one has a “perseverance gene”. So much for the much philosophized “free will“.

I have seen/heard several reports on new discoveries of sophisticated social behaviors among animals. So sophisticated, one may say the beasts are playing “politics” (rhetorically, this is nothing new). For example, biologists found that some birds would willingly help a stronger individual of the same sex to attract a mate in order to get “promoted” to a higher position in the hierarchy. Or competing chimps would solicit support from others to upstage a rival.

Some scientists suggest there is a “selfishness” gene in every animal. If this is true, the implication is that we are born “social”–for if there is no “others”, there is no need to be “selfish”. This is quite a claim for it means that we are biophysically wired to be aware of others of the same species!

Regardless, I was really alarmed at the realization that playing politics is not an unique human behavior. This raises some fundamental question about ethics, morality and epistemology. In other words, if humans don’t have monopoly over politicking , is politicking still governed by ethics or morality? If someone (I mean humans here) still insists he lives by his principle, where does this principle come from? In other words, what is the justification of this principle? Of course, this discussion only makes sense in a rational and secular setting. One can always invoke religion and the divine, but he probably doesn’t even consider himself an animal anyway.

Another thought from this realization is how to differentiate from various “politics”. First of all, what is “politics”? In this context, my definition would be “one manipulates a social environment through non-violent means in order to gain advantage for oneself.” (In a boarder sense, violence can be part of politics, but that is another story altogether)

What distinquishes politics in this sense from basic collaborative behaviors as seen in ants and bees is that politics has complext cognitive abstraction (i.e. knowledge or belief–they are the same thing) and rich symbols. They constantly reinforce each other and commands great power in an advanced society.

For example, research found that “chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days. ” Here we see a clear examples of “cognitive abstraction” and its power. Somehow the chimps have transcended random kindness toward each other and realized that his individual welfare is best secured by consciously initiating and reciprocating kindness.

Yet chimps don’t have symbols to remember fallen heros by. Although they are known to make tools now, it looks like manufacturing symbol is still an exclusive human expertise. It now looks like there is a progression chart for social behavior: from simplest labor division and collaboration to elaborated rituals. Isn’t this stuff fun??

Although materialistically speaking, the symbols are just reminders of certain knowledge, more than often, they take on a life of their own. Just read an New Yorker article on Benedictus PP. XVI (”The Pope and Islam” by Jane Kramer, Apr 2007). It seems that, more than any other recent Popes, Mr. Ratzinger is determined to pursue the morality issue as if it is the end, the purpose of his popeship.

Before, I was never much into the sanctity of ethics and morality. I always thought they were products of social-historical necessity. Knowing that animals can play politics too, I guess I have a even better explanation now: E&M are symbols to dress up our animal instinct!

I am implicitly agreeing with Karl Marx and his materialism: politics is built on a material infrastructure. Except that he deemed this infrastructure is only the modus of production at a given historical moment. What he missed, I posit, is Freud’s discovery of physiology of human consciousness. In other words, Marx, without the benefit of knowledge of psychology, didn’t realize that the so-called subjective matters–history, society, culture, tradition, morality–are just as material as machines and capital.