The Ghost in the Machine (7 page)

 

 

But the series can also lead to an infinite regress. There are many
examples of this in the more technical papers of both Freud and Jung
setting out the details of individual case-histories, where the ultimate
meaning of the patient's messages -- often conveyed in the language of
dreams -- recedes more and more into the elusive domain of archetypal
symbols or the eternal struggle between Eros and Thanatos. The hierarchy
is 'open-ended': its apex recedes with each step towards it, until it
dissolves in the clouds of mythology.

 

 

Depth-psychology provides one example of an infinite receding series,
starting with the ambiguity of the patient's verbal communications and
receding towards the ultimate ambiguity of the existential riddle. But
each step upward in the hierarchy has a clarifying and cathartic effect,
providing limited answers to limited problems, or re-formulating in a
more meaningful way those questions which cannot be answered.

 

 

Other examples of open hierarchies are provided by various 'universes
of discourse' -- such as certain branches of mathematics, the theory of
knowledge, and all branches of natural science which have to manipulate
infinite magnitudes in space or time. When the physicist talks of an
'asymptotic approach' to truth, he implicitly admits that science moves
along an infinitely regressing series.

 

 

And so does the philosopher concerned with meaning, and the meaning of
meaning; with knowledge and belief, and the analysis of the structure
of knowledge and belief. It is, as we have seen, already a remarkable
achievement that we can produce -- and understand -- grammatically correct
sentences, although we cannot define the rules which enable us to do
it. But just as a grammatically correct sentence conveys no information
as to whether it should be taken at face value or in some twisted way,
so it also conveys no information regarding its veridity. Thus, when
the message has been received, the question arises whether it is true or
false. Here again, so long as we talk of trivial matters, the question
may be settled with relative ease; but in more complex universes of
discourse the next question must inevitably be what we mean by true and
false; and there we go again, up the spiral staircase into the ratified
atmosphere of the epistemologist's domain -- only to find that there is
no end to the climb. To quote Sir Karl Popper (his italics):

 

The old scientific ideal of epistêmê -- of absolutely
certain, demonstrable knowledge -- has proved to be an idol. The
demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every
scientific statement must remain tentative for ever. It may indeed be
corroborated, but every corroboration is relative to other statements
which, again, are tentative. . . .' [11]

 

 

Rules, Strategies and Feedbacks

 

 

This chapter was not intended as an introduction to linguistics,
but as an introduction to the concept of hierarchic organisation as
exemplified in the structure of language. I have accordingly left out of
account several factors which are important to linguistic theory, but not
directly relevant to our purpose. The most important of these omissions
is the class of
transformation rules
(Chomsky) which must be added to
the 'structure-generating rules' to account for the speaker's ability
to manipulate the branches of the tree in such a way as to produce a
variety of related meanings (for instance, 'the postman kicked the dog',
'the dog was kicked by the postman', 'did the postman kick the dog?',
'was the dog not kicked by the postman?'). It all seems so simple,
but consider for a moment how children ever acquire all the rules and
corollaries needed to achieve even these simple transformations in a
grammatically correct way.

 

 

I have mentioned Chomsky's 'transformation rules' merely for the sake
of completeness. However, there are other aspects of 'verbal behaviour'
direcdy pertinent to our subject which I have so far not mentioned;
it will be simplest to point them out by way of a concrete example.

 

 

Let us return for a moment to the two opposite recipes for giving a
lecture, quoted by Lashley. Perhaps the politician on a whistle-stop
tour can indeed 'turn his mouth loose and go to sleep'. A bar pianist,
too, can turn his fingers loose and do the same. But these are routines
which have become automatised by practice and are hardly relevant to
the question of how to compose a lecture which tries to say something
new. Nor can we rely on the opposite recipe, and listen to the inner
voice to guide us -- like a medium engaged in automatic writing. How,
then, does our lecturer manage in fact to produce a paper?

 

 

Let us assume that he is a history don who has been invited to give a
guest lecture at an American university. Further assuming that he is free
to choose the subject he likes, he will choose the subject he likes -- let
us leave it at that, to avoid another infinite regress into motivation,
personality, and the influences which moulded his personality. He chooses
as his subject 'Unsolved Problems of the Dead Sea Scrolls', because
he is convinced that he alone has the key to the solution. But how is
he going to convince his audience? First of all he must decide whether
he should present his pet theory in a straight-forward, non-polemical
manner, or else show why and where all other theories went wrong. This
is a matter of
strategy
, of choosing one among several alternative
courses of putting the same message across; and at each further step he
will be faced with other strategic choices.

 

 

He decides on the straight-forward, non-polemical method, because he
knows the kind of audience he will have to face, and does not wish to
antagonise them. In other words, his strategy is guided by
feedback
--
by the echo of his words from the audience, even if for the time being
it is merely an anticipated echo from an imaginary audience.

 

 

Let us note that all this wavering and decision-making need not at this
stage involve any verbal formulations; it may have taken the form of vague
visual images. (For instance, the polemical method may be represented in
his imagination by a white shape highlighted on a black surface -- the
Gestalt theorists' figure-background paradigm, and the straight-forward
method represented by a uniform grey. Questionnaires to scientists have
revealed that in the decisive stages of creative thinking, visual and
even muscular imagery predominates over verbal thinking.*)

 

* See below, Chapter XIII.

 

Next comes the vexed problem of the 'organisation of material'; vexed,
because the different aspects of the problem, the welter of evidence and
the welter of interpretations, are all interconnected like threads in a
Persian carpet. Our lecturer is keenly aware of the pattern they form;
but how can he convey that pattern if he has to unpick the threads in
order to explain them one at a time? Here the problem of temporal order
begins to intrude, although his mind may still be functioning in the
partly or wholly non-verbal regions of images and intimations.

 

 

At last he arrives at a tentative arrangement of his material, under a
series of headings and sub-headings, which he shuffles about as if they
were compact building blocks. They are probably each represented by a
mere jotted key-word. This again sounds simple enough, but the longer
you think about it the more puzzling the nature of these building blocks
appears to be. William James expressed this puzzlement in a memorable
passage (his italics):

 

. . . And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental
fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said
it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other
intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore;
and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either
of words or of things? Hardly anything! . . . Yet what can we say
about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts
that replace it? The intention to say so and so is the only
name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic
life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes
of thought not yet articulate. [12]

 

But now the time has come for these intentional seeds to start growing
into saplings which will branch out into sections, subsections, and so
on: the selection of evidence to be quoted, of illustrations, comment and
anecdotes, each of them necessitating further strategic choices. At each
node -- branching point -- of the growing tree, more details are filled
in, until at last the syntactic level is reached, the phrase-generating
machine takes over, the individual words are lined up-some effortlessly,
some after a painful search, and are finally transformed into patterns
of contractions of finger muscles guiding a pen: the logos has become
incarnate.

 

 

But of course the process is never quite as neat and orderly as that;
trees do not grow in this rigidly symmetrical way. In our schematised
account, the selection of the actual words occurs only at an advanced
stage of the process, after the general plan and the ordering of the
material have been decided on, and the buds of the tree are ready to burst
open in their proper left-to-right order. In reality, however, one branch
somewhere in the middle might blossom into words, while others have as yet
hardly started to grow. And while it is true that the idea or 'intention
of saying a thing' precedes the actual process of verbalisation, it is
also true that ideas are often airy nothings until they crystallise into
verbal concepts and acquire tangible shape. Therein, of course, lies the
incomparable superiority of language over more primitive forms of mental
activity; but that does not justify the fallacy of identifying language
with thought and of denying the importance of non-verbal images and
symbols, particularly in the creative thinking of artists and scientists
(
Chapter XIII
). Thus our lecturer sometimes
knows what he means, but cannot formulate it; whereas at other times
he can only find out what exactly he means by explicit, precise verbal
formulations. When Alice in Wonderland was admonished to think carefully
before speaking, she explained: 'How can I know what I think till I
see what I say?' Often some promising intuition is nipped in the bud by
prematurely exposing it to the acid bath of verbal definitions; others
may never develop without such verbal exposure.

 

 

Thus we have to amend our over-simplified schema: instead of the
symmetrically growing tree, with branches steadily progressing
downward, wehave irregular growth and constant oscillations between
levels. Transforming thought into language is not a one-way process; the
sap flows in both directions, up and down the branches of the tree. The
operation is further complicated, and sometimes brought to the verge of
a breakdown, by our lecturer's deplorable tendency to correct, erase,
chop off entire flowering branches from the tree and start growing
them afresh. The Behaviourist calls this Trial-and-Error behaviour and
compares it to the behaviour of rats running at random into the blind
alleys of a maze; but the search for the
mot juste
is, of course,
anything but random.

 

 

Matters would be even more complicated if our subject were a poet,
instead of being a historian. If he were a poet, he would have to
serve two masters -- operate in two interlocking hierarchies at the
same time: one governed by meaning and the second governed by rhythm,
metre, euphony. But even though the lecturer writes in prose, his choice
of words and phrasing is influenced by the demands of style. Complex
activities are often dependent on more than one hierarchic order --
trees with intertwining branches -- each controlled by its own rules
and value-criteria: meaning and euphony, form and function, melody and
orchestration, and so on.

 

 

 

I have said enough to indicate some of the problems which human speech
presents. Now Behaviourists, too, are in the habit of preparing papers,
and even of writing books, so they must no doubt also be aware of the
difficulties and complexities of the process. But when they discuss
'verbal behaviour', they manage to forget or repress them. They confine
the discussion to such embarrassing trivialities as: 'The verbal stimulus
"Come to dinner" is usually reinforced by food.' They demonstrate how
the experimenter can 'control a subject's verbal behaviour' by placing
'a large and unusual pencil in an unusual place clearly in sight --
under such circumstances it is highly probable that our subject will say
"pencil"' [13] (both examples are from Skinner's
Verbal Behaviour
,
a treasure-house of similar profundities). By these methods they can,
as we have seen, go on talking about S-R atoms forming chains extending
in a vacuum -- without having to bother to define what the S's and the
R's consist of.

 

 

 

Summary

 

 

Where indeed shall we look for the atoms of language -- in the phoneme
/e/? In the digram /en/? In the morpheme /men/? In the word /mention/?
Or in the phrase /don't mention it/? Each of these entities has two
aspects. It is a
whole
relative to its own constituent parts, and
at the same time a
part
of the larger whole on the next level of
the hierarchy. It is both a part and a whole -- a sub-whole. It is one of
the characteristic features of
all
hierarchic systems, as we shall
see, that they are not aggregations of elementary bits, but are composed
of sub-wholes branching into sub-sub-wholes, and so on. This is the first
point of general validity to retain from the preceding discussion. I
must now mention a few more characteristics of language which have the
same universal validity for hierarchic systems of all types.