It isn't the sort of argument Pointsman relishes either. But he glances sharply at this young anarchist in his red scarf. "Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages.

"It's not my forte, of course," Mexico honestly wishing not to offend the man, but really, "but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."

"No--not 'strike off.' Regress. You're 30 years old, man. There are no 'other angles.' There is only forward--into it--or backward."

(Pynchon winkingly giving cognitive science a what-for. cc: "levels of analysis")

The talented writer and polyglot Robert Lane Greene has a short guest blog in yesterday's NY Times today suggesting that (as Emily Anthes recapped on Twitter): "Perhaps we're seeing more grammatical mistakes because literacy is on the rise."

In the post, Greene scrutinizes the prescriptivist rallying cry that language is in a perpetual decline and must be enshrined (quick!) before it's too late.  He trots out the usual counter-arguments: linguistic change is constant and inevitable; linguistic change is not necessarily bad ("when a good thing changes it can become another good thing"); and so on.

The most interesting claim Greene makes comes at the end of the post, when he notes that illiteracy rates have plummeted over the last century, to virtually zero.  However, as he is quick to point out:

Literacy is a continuum of skills. Basic education now reaches virtually all Americans.  But many among the poorest have the weakest skills in formal English.

This, he thinks, is to blame for the rise of misplaced apostrophes and teen-text speak.  It's a truly interesting observation, but one I think he squanders in his conclusion.

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"I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other."

--Errol Morris in the opinion pages of yesterday's NY Times, aptly capturing that spirit of wonder academics bring to the world... Or something.

Yesterday, a famous linguist in construction grammar sent me the following Radiolab video:

Words are Beautiful

...Which was a powerful and joyful experience.

This prompted me to send her an excerpt of a paper I wrote with Prof Plum on how words mean (and also on metaphor):

The kinds of expectations that people build up about words in listening and reading may have an important part to play in their conceptualisation of those words. Words are often thought of as being abstractions of objects and events in the world, but defining a simple relation between the thing being represented and the label that represents it is problematic (Murphy, 2002). Indeed, it has been argued that the meanings of words are better understood in relation to their patterns of use, rather than to the things in the world they appear to represent (Wittgenstein, 1953). When we talk about names, for example, we say things like ‘did you catch her name’, ‘his name is mud’, ‘they were called by name’, ‘she made a name for herself’, and so on. From this perspective, a ‘name’ is not only a word ‘by which something is called or known’, as the dictionary designates, but also a thing to be had, caught, muddied, cleared, called, and made. People ‘go by names’, they ‘throw names around’, they hope to see their ‘name in lights’, and on this view, the meaning of ‘name’ is inextricable from its patterns of use: from the words it co-occurs with and the words that modify it, and the effect that these have on the way that people think about ‘name’.

These kinds of co-occurrence patterns offer a rich and readily available source of information for anyone learning to understand the world and the way that language relates to it, and there is considerable evidence to support the idea that people are sensitive to this information. Our suggestion is that people’s understanding of the patterns of use associated with motion words actually plays an important part in shaping their understanding of them. For instance, saying that time can ‘run out’ or ‘fly by’ influences what we understand time to be in the first place, because thinking about time in this way involves processes shared with other things that ‘run out’, ‘fly by’, or ‘stand still’ (Slobin, 1996). In a sense, the mind works metaphorically, associating words with other words that are used in similar ways.

If understanding results (at least in part) from predictive processes and the expectations produced by patterns of co-occurrence, then when we use words in similar ways they ought to become more closely aligned in meaning. This would suggest that saying literally ‘the man runs by’, fictively ‘the road runs along the river’, and figuratively ‘time runs out’, should, as a result of this common pattern of usage, more closely align our notions of how space and time operate. Accordingly, we suggest that the similar ways in which people talk about motion through space and motion through time is an important part of their common underlying conceptualisation." (Ramscar, Matlock & Dye, 2010)

...The writing of which was inspired by Wittgenstein, and also by the great Ira Allen, who has some wonderful leads to literary science writing.  Thanks also to Seth, who looks just like a young Foucault (and is almost certainly just as clever).

Hope you are having a nice winter, folks.