Poor Pluto

The demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet (or planetoid) provides another example of the themes of my previous posts. Like the definition of "species", the definition of "planet" is vague, man-made, and changes over time. Scientific authorities also alter the membership of the category based on new information. These changes make many people (especially children) upset. I suspect changes to the planets also cause cognitive dissonance due to their ancient connections to astrology, mythology, and religion. The unchanging nature of heavenly objects was a bedrock belief: "as sure as the sun will rise." Yes, Pluto was not one of the original planets visible to the naked eye, but like the others on discovery it was given the name of a Roman (formerly Greek) god. Today people don't consciously remember how much of our daily language is based on past mythology. My favorite example (besides the planets) is the English names of the days of the week:

Sunday : Sun
Monday : Moon
Tuesday : Tyr (Norse god)
Wednesday : Woden / Odin (Norse god)
Thursday : Thor (Norse god)
Friday : Freya (Norse goddess)
Saturday : Saturn (Roman god)

The Appeal of Fantasy Fiction

I've been thinking about the continued appeal of fantasy fiction, especially in relation to topics I have discussed before such as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Moral Realism, and Essentialism. Science fiction author David Brin has written several essays critical of fantasy fiction, including J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress. His basic theme is:

It's only been 200 years or so -- an eye blink -- that "scientific enlightenment" began waging its rebellion against the nearly universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture. Wherever human beings acquired both plows and swords, gangs of large men picked up the latter and took other men's women and wheat... They then proceeded to announce rules and "traditions" ensuring that their sons would inherit everything.

Brin explains how these actions are ennobled in the literature passed down to us, such as the Iliad and Odyssey, the Bible, Arthurian legends, etc. I've been thinking about how these values were embedded at a more basic level, in the language we still use. Look at the term I used earlier: ennobled. The first online dictionary definition gives:

1. to make noble, honourable, or excellent; dignify; exalt
2. to raise to a noble rank; confer a title of nobility upon

[Middle English *ennoblen, from Old French ennoblir : en-, causative pref.; see en-1 + noble, noble; see noble.]

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ennobled

Here, prior to the emergence of modern English, the concept of honorable behavior was bound up with the concept of the superiority of certain blood-lines of inherited privilege. If you accept some form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, that language influences thought, then the use of the English language itself provides a subconscious favorable disposition to the idea of inherited privilege. Critiques of the past or present nobility will inherently generate a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. Also note that the idea of noble blood is "essentialist", and fits with humans natural predisposition towards essentialist thinking.

My hypothesis is that feudal and essentialist thinking are embedded throughout all languages, including English. We aren't living in a feudal society, and science is constantly critiquing essentialist thinking. This creates a constant tension in the minds of readers and speakers of English. Fantasy fiction provides a release for this tension. It is a place where the language fits with the action. Often a magical land where essentialist expectations are reality.

Fantasy fiction is in turn divided into two broad categories: High Fantasy, and Swords and Sorcery. High fantasy, of which Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is the prime example, is centered on an epic struggle between Good and Evil. Swords and Sorcery (think earlier pulp fiction, such as Howard's Conan the Barbarian) is more morally ambiguous. However essentialist expectations, such as the reality of magic and the supernatural, are still met.

Most written Science Fiction today is closer to Swords and Sorcery in terms of moral ambiguity. "Hard" science fiction follows modern science in rejecting essentialism. While the "what ifs" of this type of fiction satisfy some readers, many others yearn for the moral black-and-whites provided by High Fantasy. This demand is satisfied in popular science fiction films, such as Star Wars. Here the heroes turn out to be nobles (like Strider/Aragorn the returning king in LoTR!), matching the essentialist expectations bound up in our language.

Pinker Again

In my previous post Sapir-Whorf Revisited I cited Lakoff's theories on metaphor. A much simpler critique of Pinker can be made, based only on Pinker. He says

"...the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers". (The Language Insinct, p. 57)

Now simply substitute "culture" for "language":

"...the Revised S-W hypothesis of cultural determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their culture, and its weaker version, cultural relativity, stating that differences among cultures cause differences in the thoughts of their members."

Sound more reasonable? Most of Pinker's critique in his chapter on "Mentalese" would not apply.

Mentalese also appears to have numerous flaws. On a small scale, what is mentalese for our modern word 'telephone'? On a larger scale, for 'cell doctrine'? For 'plate techtonics'? For 'Standard Social Science Model'? For 'physical symbol system hypothesis / computational theory of mind'? All of these concepts are uniquely made available to us by our culture. They were not hard-wired by evolution. They provide categories which determine (or at least cause differences in) our thoughts.

I also doubt human cognition is based on Predicate Logic. We aren't very good at it, and systems actually based on it normally fall apart on the first inconsistency encountered in the real-world (see Carl Hewitt's heroic attempts to fix this in Common sense for concurrency and strong paraconsistency using unstratified inference and reflection).

Sapir-Whorf Revisited

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis asserts that categories in particular human languages influence or even control our possible thoughts. You have most likely heard this presented in its most (in)famous example, about Eskimos having N different words for "snow". I thought this version was well taken-apart by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct. Recently an Edge essay HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? by Lera Boroditsky has made me reconsider.

Using the terminology of Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh, Pinker's critique is classic first-generation Cognitive Science. Pinker says the brain is the equivalent of a computer or Turing Machine, processing abstract symbols. He asserts that thinking is done in "mentalese", not in a particular human language. Translation to human language is the last step before speaking, so it cannot influence the core of thought.

Lakoff and Johnson's second-generation Cognitive Science can be difficult to grasp, so I'll go slow. It is a big idea, and since you can't see where I'm going, it is easy for me to get too far ahead for you to follow. Simply stated: thinking is largely based on metaphor, and abstract thinking is based on metaphorical analogy to bodily operations in the physical world. Re-read the examples in the first two sentences: "difficult to grasp", "go slow", "big ideas", "see where I'm going", "get too far ahead", "follow". All of these are related to operations or relations in the physical world. Their use in the realm of ideas is much more vague and abstract. It is easy to agree on a measurement for the "bigness" of a tree, but how do you measure bigness for an idea? Works such as Feldman's From Molecule to Metaphor show how evolution started with simple minds able to interact with the physical world, and placed increasing layers of abstraction on top. But abstract thinking still bottoms out at the use of modules originally evolved for physical world manipulation.

So how does this relate to language and Sapir-Whorf? The studies cited by Boroditsky indicate different cultures use different physical-world metaphors for their abstract thinking:

"English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month")."

This is plausible. There is no inherent reason why time should be metaphorically mapped horizontally versus vertically. It can easily be culturally determined rather than hard-wired into the brain. And this puts an interesting new spin on Sapir-Whorf. Thought is not determined by language, but instead both thought and language are determined by culturally transmitted, culturally specific abstract metaphorical mappings. And how is culture transmitted? Primarily through language. So linguistic determinism or linguistic relativity is in a sense correct, but not for the reasons usually proposed.

Brain Scans, Machine Learning, and Trillion-word Web Text Corpus

"The question of how the human brain represents conceptual knowledge has been debated in many scientific fields. Brain imaging studies have shown that different spatial patterns of neural activation are associated with thinking about different semantic categories of pictures and words (for example, tools, buildings, and animals). We present a computational model that predicts the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) neural activation associated with words for which fMRI data are not yet available. This model is trained via a combination of data from a trillion-word text corpus, and observed fMRI data associated with viewing several dozen concrete nouns. Once trained, the model predicts fMRI activation for thousands of other concrete nouns in the text corpus, with highly significant accuracies over the 60 nouns for which we currently have fMRI data."

Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns, Tom M. Mitchell, Svetlana V. Shinkareva, Andrew Carlson, Kai-Min Chang, Vicente L. Malave, Robert A. Mason, Marcel Adam Just, Science, 320, pp. 1191-1195, May 30, 2008.

This research is the most interesting I have seen on the mapping of internal brain structure based on analysis of large bodies of text available from the web. When generating machine-learned models from fMRI data, they found that for their tested set of concrete nouns the most accurate intermediate semantic features were sensory-motor verbs. This matches with others theories of ideas being represented as the convergence of many related sensory patterns. For instance, apple as the convergence of the word "apple", redness, shiny, apple taste, apple texture, picking-by-hand, etc.