Language, Mind and Brain: Mirror Images?

Tatiana Chernigovskaya

St. Petersburg State University

My points are ...

Why should there be a mirror for the Universe to look at?

Are things crying to be named? How brains

make up their minds?

My points are ...

Do we share recursion and even the faculty of language itself with other species?

FOXP2 : any chance to find a grammar gene?

Merab Mamardashvili

Merab Mamardashvili

Mind is a paradox you can not get accustomed to

Inevitability of thinking - Man is doomed to think: it is the ontological feature of humans

We are suspended in language

Merab Mamardashvili Антропный принцип давно сформулирован

в философии. Самая четкая формулировка его принадлежит Декарту, который подчеркивал наличие в сознании особых непосредственно данных знаний о целом, к которым мы могли бы прийти, лишь проделав бесконечно большое количество познавательных шагов.

Merab Mamardashvili The Anthropic Principle has long ago

been formulated by philosophers. The best wording of it belongs to Descartes, who stressed the point that mind has some inherent specific knowledge about the whole, which we could acquire only after infinitely great number of cognitive acts.

Stephen W. Hawking

Stephen W. Hawking: Does God play dice?

Anthropic Principle seems essential in quantum cosmology. Otherwise, why should we live in a four dimensional world, and not eleven, or some other number of dimensions.

Stephen W. Hawking: Does God play dice?

The anthropic answer is that two spatial dimensions are not enough for complicated structures, like intelligent beings.

Stephen W. Hawking: Does God play dice?

...four or more spatial dimensions would mean that gravitational and electric forces would fall off faster than the inverse square law, planets would not have stable orbits around their star, nor electrons have stable orbits around the nucleus of an atom.

Stephen W. Hawking: Does God play dice?

Thus intelligent life, at least as we know it, could exist only in four dimensions.

Umberto Eco. Kant and Platypus. Essays

on Language and Cognition (2000) An immense power of language is that

it shows us being so that the self-revelation of being is actuated within language

Not only can we name the objects...

Nomination is conventional

Umberto Eco. Kant and Platypus. Essays

on Language and Cognition (2000)

.....but also, as a result of cognitive illusion, we get the impression that we can conceive them (impossible objects and pictures ‘breaking’ the laws of nature)

Yuri Lotman

Yuri Lotman

Humans are the only having the ability of reflection and self-reflection and thus creating the semiosphere of a specific character

Language is the only vehicle for humans to categorize and therefore organize the fuzzy and vague continuum of perceived sensations. Large parts of this sensory space even do not totally belong to specific sensory modality, therefore causing synaesthetic ( and aesthetic - to rhyme) sensations. Some are evolutionary so old and subconscious that even do not have specific nominations.

Visual (especially color) semiosphere is probably the most delicately elaborated by the majority of human languages, while olfactory is the less verbalized of all sensory modalities, probably due to its subconscious nature and cultural prohibitions. In fact, it has almost no vocabulary of its own and has to borrow labels from other domains.

Types of activity are associated with certain cerebral regions

We need primarily right brain to communicate with flora...

... and fauna

... to find the way in space

... to understand jokes

... to understand tastes, odours and smells

.... and all kinds of nonverbal semiosis

The right hemisphere is responsible for

Global/Gestalt recognition.Revealing the relevant components of

a situation (or a scene). Relatively high speed of decision

makingClassification of colours and odoursOrientation in space and timeEvaluation of gestures, face

expressions and verbal prosody

While Aristotelian logic is stillthe main tool for traditionalscientific thinking, right-hemispheric mentality not onlygoverns artistic and religiousspheres and a wide range ofsocial behavior but is the basisfor creative break-through inscience itself

The left hemisphere introduces an object intogeneralized classes of phenomena and providesfor logical operations and categorical perception

Left brain subserves specific features of human language

‘Digital’ and hierarchical structure (phonemes - morphemes - words -phrases - discourse)

Productivity governed by the linguistic rules

Differences in the superficial order of constituents

Left brain subserves specific features of human language

The use of null elements (e.g. ‘it’, ‘there’)

The use of sub-categorical argument structure for verbs

Mechanisms for expansion of utterances

Embedding

Important debates in Linguistics

NativistsN.Chomsky’s

nativism New synthesis

(S.Pinker) Modularity of

Mind (J. Fodor)

Connectionists J.Bybee Network

models Neuronal nets

modelling (Rummelhart and McCleland, etc.)

Emergenists (Ellman etc.)

They argue... Nativists:

The reality of linguistic levels

The reality of symbolic rules which is human specific

Symbolic rules are not effected by linguistic probabilities

Modularity and informational encapsulation causes lack or the absence of interconnections between the levels.

Connectionists :

Linguistic levels are conventional; lexicon and grammar are the aspects of one process, and morphological level does not exist

There are no symbolic rules

Probabilities are the basis of linguistic procedures

The levels ARE interconnected

However, Symbolic rules ARE used in complex

operations, linguistic included On the other hand only associative

processes can be successfully simulated There seems to be no memory in the net;

then where is the information stored? Associative nets do not need symbolic

rules; how do symbolic rules function? Cerebral mechanisms tend to prove

network hypothesis; there seems to be no data on brain functions subserving symbolic rules and specific linguistic memory

Merab Mamardashvili Я считаю, что пересечение гуманитарных и

естественнонаучных исследований сознания носит серьезный, не внешний характер, напоминающий перекличку двух соседей. Но связь здесь пролегает в другом, более существенном измерении, а именно в измерении места сознания в космических процессах, во Вселенной..... мы не можем судить о том, какой Вселенная была в “чистом виде”, до сознания.

Merab Mamardashvili

I believe that the intersection of humanities and sciences is of fundamental not superficial nature; it’s not just an exchange of messages between neighbours. They are connected on a more important level,namely in the role played by mind in the Universe, in everything that happens in the cosmos... We can’t know anything about the Universe ‘as such’, before the mind came into existence.

M. D. Hauser, N. Chomsky, W.T. Fitch. The Faculty of Language: What Is it, Who has it, and How Did It Evolve?

Science, vol. 298, 22 November 2002

The Faculty of Language.....

A distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and in the narrow sense (FLN)

FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the internal computational mechanisms, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements.

Most of FLB is shared with other species

The Faculty of Language.....

FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language... It is the abstract linguistic computational system alone and is a component of FLB(Colorless green ideas furiously sleep)

Such computational abilities are seen outside of the domain of communication (i.e. in navigation, social behavior,etc.)

The Faculty of Language.....

Human system of recursion operates with broader range of elements (..numbers, words) than in other animals where it is impenetrable within different functions while in humans it is, and it gives us the power to apply recursion to all cognitive tasks.

Genetic basis for this is evident, but The Grammar Gene is not