Linguistic Excursion
This is an arcane paper I ran across doing a piece for my content-mill employer on Gestalt psychology’s property of invariance in perception. It intrigued me somehow, because I’ve always been fonder of the notion of tropes (a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words) than memes (an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture), even though I know there are real differences (though I harbor a perhaps irrational suspicion that these two ideas are part of differing conceptual cosmos); and I admit that the word “meme” has a negative (for me) association with Richard Dawkins, whose work I believe to range between wrong-headed and offensive. (I followed Dawkins debate with Stephen Jay Gould for a while, and found Gould to be far more convincing; but I’ll admit that I am not well-schooled in evolutionary biology or linguistics, and that I have a visceral dislike of reductionism.)
That said, we use the word meme here all the time, and even have a “meme-bar” at the top of the page. I realize – in my rational mind – that just because Dawkins gives me the creeps doesn’t mean his use of a word – coined and defined by others – is wrong.
That’s not the only thing that piqued my curiosity. This whole essay is packed with fascinating implications; and my recent preoccupation with Edward Bernays and his propaganda techniques – as well as curiosity about why these techniques don’t work on everyone – have me wondering about psychology, perception, linguistics, semiotics, et al. There are some pretty complex things that happen every moment that each of us is alive.
I haven’t read through this yet, but there are enough ideas in the first part to whet my appetite; and I just wondered if any other linguistic dilettantes wanted to join me in unpacking this paper, that roams around in that mysterious world between perception and language, experience and consciousness.
I’ll read it later today when I’m done working; but if anyone else wants to plow through it with a dictionary before I get there, by all means do and send along your thoughts.
Modeling language development has recently seen a shift towards studies of the interdependence of language and perceptual reality. Cognitive linguistics proposes that language is a cognitive phenomenon where conceptual structures stem from perception and embodiment (Hampe, 2005; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Taylor, 1989; Skoldberg, 2002). Language is imaginatively embodied where metaphor is central to the origins of meaning (Danesi, 2004). Modeling the development of language has focused on meaning rather than syntax. This leads to the important question: how are events in the physical world transformed into semantic notions? This question confronts the aporia or discrepancy between the analog world we live in and the discrete or digital nature of language in terms of categories and symbols. To overcome this difficulty Thom proposed that we need to preserve ‘a priori forms of space and time’ by generating dynamic structures or morphologies
Stan:
Here is Susie Vrobel’s paper on fractal time.
23 June 2011, 11:26 amRichard:
Stan, I just happened to be looking at this article before I read your post:
http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/1998/10/09/ritual-speech_coevolution/
Chris Knight is the author of the brilliant book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and Origins of Culture.
I hope you’ll pardon the indulgence, but I’ve written some at my blog about Knight and his book, as well as his views on Chomsky, Dawkins, and so on, here:
http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/search/label/Chris%20Knight
I find this stuff absolutely relevant to the kinds of discussions we have here. (Incidentally, though Knight’s work is not widely accepted, I think largely for reasons of ideological blindess, one of the earlier positive responses was from Robin Dunbar.)
23 June 2011, 11:59 amRichard:
In one of my blog posts, found in the link provided above, I linked to this article from 2008 by Chris Knight:
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/738/sciencereligion.html
For a taste, here are some excerpts:
On hunter-gatherers & communism:
On religion:
And on language & science:
23 June 2011, 12:16 pmMorocco Bama:
I believe this piece by Bob Simon is pertinent to the topic.
http://cnettv.cnet.com/sea-gypsies/9742-1_53-50034460.html
23 June 2011, 12:35 pmMorocco Bama:
And this little segment, cutely animated, by Zimbardo about how we conceive Time and its affect on Culture is also interesting, in at least an ancillary way. Of interesting note, at the latter half of the segment, he discusses how the digital age is affecting the younger generation’s concept of time, and therefore their Culture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
23 June 2011, 12:42 pm(Boer) Tom:
@stan
23 June 2011, 8:16 pmYou do realise that fractals are defined mathematically in an utterly reductionistic fashion, right? The simple operation causes great diversity. What is remarkable about Gould is that he actually takes the evolutionary arguments seriously, and see what consequences follow – on different time scales – Dawkins is a virtuoso who passionately doesn’t want to see where his own arguments lead him. His ‘selfish gene’ concept is an excellent example – it is precisely the kind of simple overshoot (momentum versus acceleration type of system – compare rotation of planets, always falling past their primary attractor) that leads to fractal situations, ‘unintended consequences’ (‘greedy’ algorithms, or short-sighted algorithms generally suffer these ‘in the real world’, or where multiple such operations, attractors, etc. are present and working together/against each other), to which Gould pointed to make arise phenomena that no gene optimising its reproduction could cause by itself. Dawkins’s arguments in general are autistic/Aspergers like, although there is also a fashion aspect – compare him to non-white (but non-black in your example) immigrants to the west, who as you said want to be more white than the whites, thus behaving as caricatures of whites (negro-phobia in your example) – he’s a white Zimbabwean (bloody uncouth/stupid rhodie) making a success of it (acceptance) in England by saying what people in high places want to hear, yet being original and making a scientific contribution – I can relate emotionally to his situation…
P:
Though hardly a “linguistic dilettante,” maybe because of that very fact, I was left with a very different impression than most (or so I assume) after reading this paper. I remember reading “Totem and Taboo” as an undergraduate, and marveling at Freud’s ability to cherry-pick his way through fundamental humanistic happenstance, constantly fishing for meaning behind the stacking of one shape above the other, because that had to mean SOMETHING. Of course, this was all assessed under Freud’s assumption that up is good and down is bad. It had to be true, he said, because it is perceived. Maybe that’s true–I don’t know. But take a word that doesn’t fit well within the doctor’s paradigm: ain’t. Ain’t, which makes no sense in the world of conjunctions or otherwise, is one of the most self-expressing words in the English language. Ain’t, rebuked by high-brows from sea to sea, reflects the most human expression to ever be parlayed into words: to be (or, more accurately, to NOT be). To not be ANYTHING. Any negation of human expression can be distilled to ain’t. It is a strange hybrid, ain’t, but we all know what it means. We all know what it means despite the fact that it doesn’t conform to most of our standard rules of linguistics. How did “am not” become ain’t? It conjures no metaphors, yet even without proper foundation, it can be inferred. I think that is something that Dr. Rail failed to acknowledge in his paper–that freak accidents of language can themselves become so ingrained before ever even being a trope. This is a freak accident that people, through their subconscious, are quickly able to embrace. A spark of nothingness into something, eventually snowballing into a workable ism. I guess what I’m saying is: Dawkins may very well have something insightful to say on “the trope,” and on “ain’t.”
24 June 2011, 12:25 amMorocco Bama:
My favorite trope of all:
Work
It’s at the heart of Western Culture(s). I’ve seen it bandied about at this blog rather frequently, albeit somewhat unconsciously. Personally, I cringe when I hear or see the word, because of the onerous weight it carries. I bet the Moken don’t have a word for “work” either, just as they don’t for “want” and “when.” And, if you think about it, that would make perfect sense, considering those three words are integrally related.
24 June 2011, 8:17 amStan:
Wow, I left this place for a day, and I have two miles of reading to catch up on. Prolific peoples!
@Tom
Reduction as activity ain’t my problem (wink 2 P). Making ultimate truth claims for reductionist knowledge is. In the JSTOR link on master tropes, the four master tropes are translated as:
metaphor=perspective
metonymy=reduction
synecdoche=representation
irony=dialectic
Reduction interacts with the others to “create a whole that is greater than the some of the parts.”
@P, check the link in the glossary for cognitive linguistics, and I think you’ll see how cognitive linguistics can account for “ain’t.”
Denying the modularity of language seems to be axiomatic in his field.
24 June 2011, 11:20 amStan:
Glossary Links:
Cognitive Linguistics
Gestalt Approach to Psychology
Speech Segmentation
Transformational Grammar
Double Scope Blending
Master Tropes
more will follow, after I figure these out
24 June 2011, 11:37 amRichard:
“ain’t” doesn’t really strike me as difficult to figure out; I don’t see how it “doesn’t conform to most of our standard rules of linguistics”; it’s grammatically fine, linguistically speaking, but not according to what we think of as everyday accepted grammar
try to say “isn’t” or “amn’t” (for “am not”) quickly, slurring your words, perhaps, or softening, with an accent other than received English… I can see “n’t” morphing into “ain’t”
24 June 2011, 12:06 pm(Boer) Tom:
Illustrative examples of double scope blending…
@stan
24 June 2011, 12:22 pmCould you give an example of a reductionist truth claim to illustrate your objection?
Stan:
the selfish gene
(and I should have said “ultimate truth claim”)
24 June 2011, 1:36 pmMorocco Bama:
Or, ain’t could be a hybrid of aren’t and isn’t. It is peasant slang, and peasants are noted for mixing the singular with the plural. For example, in the deep South, rural white folk put an s at the end of everything, or so it seems. As an example, WalMart is not WalMart….it’s WalMarts. A road called Shillinger is referred to as Shillingers. It’s not a hard and fast rule, though, and it’s extremely difficult to determine any logic behind what may get the s, and what doesn’t. What is also difficult to ascertain is whether, or not, the s is being used to denote possessive, or more that one, or if it’s sometimes possessive and other times used to denote more than one…..and they can’t tell you either.
What I find interesting is the linguistics used to articulate the analysis of linguistics. Imagine discussing any of this with the common man using the terminology those who are studying linguistics use. I can imagine the reaction……and it’s good material for comedy. Considering that, who’s the audience, or the benefactor of this highly technical research, since it obviously is not the “common man?” Perhaps the source of the funding which ultimately reverts back to the Elite Class, although I would think many of them would have a hard time staying with this complexity for any length of time without drifting to more comfortable thoughts. So, it looks like it’s intended for a small clique of “scientists” who enjoy the mental masturbation, and in order to perpetuate their cozy little deal, they’ve created enough complexity surrounding it give it the veneer of legitimacy and keep the funding coming.
24 June 2011, 3:02 pm(Boer) Tom:
Could you illustrate the problem of (ultimate) truth claim with the claim/description/analogy of the ‘selfish gene’ (i.e. the gene being ‘selfish,’ i.e. optimising its own survival potentially at the expense of the organism’s well-being)?
24 June 2011, 3:03 pmStan:
Dawkins relies solely on the explanatory power of his reduction (which is metaphorical, but I’ll leave that alone for now). He privileges the reductive explanation over the synthetic and complex. He is not claiming to explain the activity of DNA with the “selfish gene”; he is claiming to explain the process of evolution.
*
Back again: Just found this excursus on the Dawkins-Gould debate. Might save some time (or ignite more conversations). This debate is kinda my point of reference on this, since I am not (1) a philosopher, (2) a scientist, or (3) an evolutionary biologist. Like the name of the blog, I’m just this guy who is trying to understand some things without the benefits or hindrances of a formal education.
On mathematics, I fear, I will be lost. Like Hungarian, it’s a language I never learned.
24 June 2011, 4:31 pmStan:
Working my way through “double scope blending.”
Okay…
This is not blending two different ideas. It is much more rudimentary than that. It is the basis of grammar. Take this quote from Fauconnier& Turner:
Once = iteration
the = signifier of specificity
brain = symbol, also abstracted as part of a taxonomy
through = indicates passage
evolutionary = concept rendered as modifier
time = abstraction unavailable except by memory and projection
What were the blended “conceptual relations, such as cause-effect, modality, participant structure, role-value, and so on” that allowed us to understand these disparate classes of phenomena (as symbols carried by a culture) in a way that was intelligible?
Try to explain “once” to your dog. Or “time.”
24 June 2011, 6:03 pmStan:
Just getting to Richard’s links. Strongly recommended. Really thought-provoking stuff. Still trying to catch up. Back acted up again, so I’m on Flexeril which makes me a little slow.
24 June 2011, 6:21 pm(Boer) Tom:
About the ‘selfish gene’ – putting the ideological anthropomorphism aside, the insight that governs the notion is that a gene is similar to a retrovirus, except that it cannot detach from the DNA – it can evolve ‘separately’ (in some part) from the ‘host’ organism, especially as the gene is reproduced trillions of times for every one reproduction of a suitably large organism (certain codon sequences reproduce problematically, and other sequences can turn a gene’s effects off), and several millions can potentially go off to the next generation of the larger organism as gametes.
I’m not sure that Dawkins the scientist rejects Gould the scientist’s explanations as being descriptive of aspects of evolution as it seems to have happened; rather, Dawkins the scientist estimates the significance of Gould’s mechanisms to be less than Gould does; polemics is another matter.
As to religion, Dawkins’s atheism is very typical of Asperger’s/Autism – he reads the texts literally, on the expectation that the religious generally bother with the claims of material truth claims (in practice, it is probably mainly Asperger’s/autistics who generally take the claims at face value – most people tend to take even their grandparents’ claims as metaphorical when they cannot verify the claims, and those that do take specific claims as literal truth are generally part of movements that promote that, e.g. J-dubs, creationists, KJV proponents), the movements usually doing so to form a common identity.
On your question. ‘What were the blended “conceptual…’ – aren’t you listing the answer? Or do you seek specific instantiations? As an example, when I accuse the RCMP of being a cocaine trader terrorist enterprise for collaborating with Guy Philippe, and give a quick one sentence backgrounder on the gentleman, no Canadian misunderstands me about the RCMP’s role, but rather tries to lessen the charge (or occasionally bring the spotlight on me for charging them) or tries to change the subject – participant structure and role value is well understood by both me and my audience, and I have an instinctive understanding of the utilization of the shared intuition of role value etc. to communicate my meaning.
26 June 2011, 7:33 pmpg:
“am not” is first person singular– “I”….
“aint” is third person singular– “he, she, it”….
(Shakespeare used “aint.”)
Fractals are iterative; is iterative = reductionist?
Perhaps you’ve seen the fifteen minute part of Dawkins’ presentation at the Beyond Belief 2006 Conference where he explains by way of examples how evolution might and might not work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acJ1rUZF_Vg
[Beyond Belief {50/80}]
27 June 2011, 8:19 pm(Boer) Tom:
I take it the comment about mathematics was with regards to fractals and overshoot/momentum and acceleration. I’ll try to illustrate without using math… Try to push a heavy object toward some point. If the object starts at rest, you can usually push the object straight toward where you want it. If you push too hard, you won’t be able to stop it in time, and you’ll either knock something beyond the desired final position, or simply move it past (friction won’t stop you in time). It gets even harder if the object was moving in a different direction to start with – just pushing in the desired direction will certainly not get the object in the right position – usually we first make the object stop, then start moving it – few of us are adapt at getting the object to move to a desired end locations, when we aren’t on the objects/don’t have a first-person view.
A ‘greedy’ (or short-sighted) algorithm simply pushes e.g. the object in a desired direction (fitness to reproduce in the starting environment, as another example – the method of pushing/producing force in the desired direction is the algorithm of my example, where the desired end is to get the object in a specific final location). As the object gets closer, it doesn’t stop moving (or the changed fitness with respect to the original environment makes the environment with the new fitness a different environment, even before we consider all the other organisms and species, and so much more when we consider their adaptations – had that organism been in its current form in its original – ancestral – environment, it would be much more fit in that environment than the new one it finds itself in), so suddenly the new situation isn’t exactly optimal (overshoot, newly misplaced adaptation – the ground shifted under its feet in terms of our human expectations about the outcomes of our actions – our estimation is generally short-sighted), and unintended consequences abound – the ‘momentum’/'tendency to keep on moving’ aspect is the conservative tendency, i.e. the spread of the adaptation, which must now be newly replaced. Note that this is only obvious over sufficient time scales (thousands of generations).
In a sense, much of nature is algorithmic, especially biology – specific chemical and neural systems formulate programmatic responses (whether neural or chemical) to their environments. What makes for the diversity is that responses (adaptations/algorithms) that are initially very successful change their environments by virtue of their success, and thereby (the new environment and adaptations to the new environment) make the initially highly successful adaptations/algorithms obsolete – the fractal time steps are defined by the rate at which the successful adaptations cause themselves to become obsolete. This works as well in biology as on the left – if we see anarchism (late 1800s-1930s), marxism (1910s-1990s, as a mass movement, and not identical to the persons of Marx and his immediate followers) and the new left (1960s-2000s) as variously successful challenges to the capitalist states, each relying on subverting the responses (adaptations) of the capitalist state to previous challenges, we can meaningfully define epochs of struggles. The hope lies in the fact that the state is subject to its own algorithmic responses, which we experience as institutional blindness (insofar as neural responses, e.g. sight, are much faster than chemical/institutional changes) – often palace coups are needed to adjust to a successful new tactic – a bit of back and forth between three or four tactical responses is usually enough to exhaust a regime – after the palace coup, there aren’t too many newcomers to take the intellectual lead – the fall of apartheid after the palace coup of the ‘reformers’ (Botha, de Klerk) is a good example, and ditto the semi-palace coup of the anti-maoist parties in Nepal more recently – stated another way, there’s usually not a coherent plan C. Ditto Boyd, but more than two actors, and not necessarily violent.
27 June 2011, 11:14 pmStan:
Interesting video and after that, for mathematicians, here is his field work.
4 July 2011, 5:43 pmSt. Jude as Claus:
I thought that the most interesting part of that video came in the last few seconds about strategies common in different cultures.
I also thought that it was interesting that success was defined as increasing the rate of off spring or something like that.
I find that kind of nonsensical. The definition of success is avoiding pain in a personal and collective sense. Real success would be ending the games. But maybe real success in that sense is not possible. The numbe of beings that need to be saved from suffering may be infinate.
We, (sentient beings) suffer pain, from hunger or sickness, or humiliation for example. That is the problem. We try to fix the problem. We try to fix all of our problems. If we succeed, we eat execcessively, make music, dance, tell stories, accumulate art, and learn about more about our environment becasue when we have no problems to solve bordem becomes the problem and knowing more might be useful to solving future problems. If the destinity of humans is to be in a situation where they are free from hunger, unneccesary sickness, and fear so that they can enjoy the pleasant things of life like music and stories then I guess we should not think so much about the goal because it might appear to be to shallow or insignificant to strive for. The significance will come from the journey itself. What solutions are used and how they were decided upon and all of the small details that created the results which will be masterpiece. When a football game is over and one looks only at the score of of 38 to 34 it is really not a very impressive work of art. When one looks at the film of each play and a flim of what all of the 22 players are doing on each play and listening to what the coaches are saying in on the sidelines. Then one sees the true complexity and drama of the game. How many football or baseball games can you watch until you do not ever want to watch another one?
Right now so many people are playing the wrong games. They are still playing Monopoly or Risk. They should be playing Lincoln Logs or Legos. The thing is the rules of the game for Lincoln Logs or Legos were never poperly explained to them.
I was thinking about honesty dishonesty and secrecy last night. When some uses violence to achieve a gain it is readily apparent. When someone uses dishonesty it is often not apparent for a long time if ever. Dishonesty is just as harmful to the group well being as violence. Yet it is much more tempting to use becasue it is more difficult to detect. So those who are dishonest will have an advantage over those who refuse to be dishonest. Therefore trying to keep secrets as well as being at least a little dishonest would seem to be critical defence strategies that need to be deployed even before someone else uses dishonesty because we can not be as sure that we are dealing with an honest partner. When one person is treating another person dishonestly a situation of parasite and host exists. A parasite does not benifit from killing its host. That would be one principle that would keep the level of dishonesty within certian bounds. Another factor that would keep it in check is if dishonesty was easily detectable and everyone knew that dishonesty would be detected and punished.
Roger, out.
5 July 2011, 6:49 amStan:
He’s not promoting games. He is using game theory to test an idea about evolution, and showing that evolution, as he says early on, happens to populations (as opposed to individuals). His thesis runs counter to many of the ideological presumptions of evolutionary biology, oddly enough by going beyond Gould’s argument that evolution is not teleological (as in progressing from lower to higher via competition, qua Dawkins), and saying that there is a teleology – but that it is toward complexity, which is fundamentally a function of cooperation (not competition!).
5 July 2011, 1:53 pmSt. Jude as Claus:
Yes you are right. No he is not promoting games. I am promoting games. Lego’s Lincoln Logs to be precise.
5 July 2011, 3:32 pmGame theory is about what stategies we should follow under a given set of circumstances to maximize our benifits. I am saying we maximiue our benifits be changing the game we are playing. We stop playing Monopply and Risk which is the game most of the people are playing.
In the mean time someone said, “But, I am good at Monopoly and Risk.”
Well someone, unless you think that you are the Best and the luckiest person in the world you would still be better off playing Lego’s Lincoln Logs.
In LLL there are no losers, and artistic things get built and stay built until you decide to take it apart and start all over again. One thrill in participating is getting your idea of what and how to build the with Leo’s Lincoln Logs adapted by those that you are building with. An even more thrilling outcome is hearing the ingineous idea of someone else in the group that just leaves you brethless when you comprhend its sublime beauty. Its symetry, harmoney, and originality.
Of course playing with Mennonite, Quaker, or UU action figures is optional. It does open up a whole new dimension to the game though. That is the story of how the action figures fight injustice while maintianing a conventional family life.
I hope that clears a field for builidng without uprooting the fruit trees.
Now here is an imagination game that I came up with after seeing the links.
What would a Tornado of cooperation look like?
martin:
Hi Stan,
I have read a number of your articles for ‘Counterpunch’ and enjoy the Feral Scholar very much.
You mentioned Bernays above: I imagine that you have see Adam Curtis’ film ‘The Century of the Self’, but if not, it contains much material on Bernays, advertising, psychoanalysis, propaganda, etc. I highly recommend it and any of his other provocative films. They are freely available online.
Also, your piece and the comments made me think of Koestler’s book on Kammerer (‘Case of the Midwife Toad’).
Best wishes to you and your family.
11 August 2011, 2:35 pm(Boer) Tom:
Regarding Dawkins, I was recently arguing with a creationist adherent, who tried to convince me that evolution was wrong as the ‘tree of life’ notion was not empirically well supported. I learned something, anyway – horizontal gene transfer – genes are often transferred between species, apparently, e.g. by hybridization and other methods. So I was wrong that genes cannot separate from the host genome. I’ll give the references that he gave (they are decidedly not creationist – the individual’s thinking was that if Darwin was wrong with the tree of life concept, then evolution could not have occurred, yet horizontal gene transfer is much faster than mutation) as they are very interesting, at least to me.
“Bushes in the tree of life” Rokas, A. and Carroll, S.B.
PLoS Biology, 2006, 4(11): e352, 1899-1904
“Comparing Gene Trees and Genome Trees: A Cobweb of Life?” PLoS Biol 3(10): e347
2009 January 24 New Scientist (I think the article was “Axing Darwin’s Tree”
August 2011 “Logic of Chance” Eugene V Koonin
Biol Direct. 2011; 6: 32.
3 October 2011, 8:39 amCurt:
@Claus
14 March 2012, 9:32 amI was in Kaiserslautern yesterday. I saw some graffitti written on a wall along the fussganger zone. This is something that anyone living in the area can verify. It was written near the end of the north side of the fussganger zone on the west (left) side. I foind this the most profound graffitti that I have ever seen in my life.
It was naturally written in German so I need to translate it. Anyone else who sees it is free to correct my translation. It says, As long as I can see I will not quit looking. As long as I can walk I will not quit moving. As long as I can think I will not quit imagining. As long as I can stand I will not quit acting. It sadly was not signed. I think that the guy who came up with that………..I had to wonder if this graffitti has been protected for more than 40 years.
Michael Anderson:
Great graffiti—-I hope the person who wrote it was an agent for good in this world!
14 March 2012, 1:13 pm