Consciousness and Language

Consciousness and Language

Consciousness science has not yet penetrated the field of linguistics, but clearly consciousness and language have a lot to do with each other. How are the two related? They are salient features of the human animal and we would expect to see significant interactions between them. Yet linguistics and philosophy of language largely proceed as if they had little to do with each other; rarely is one mentioned in the same breath as the other. Are they quite distinct theoretical domains capable of separate development? On the face of it no, because we speak consciously and language suffuses our consciousness. What it is like to be human must include centrally our linguistic capacities, and our linguistic capacities must recruit our conscious capacities (as well as our unconscious capacities). So extensive is the entanglement that we might wonder whether one can be analyzed in terms of the other: is consciousness in humans reducible to human language capacity, and might language capacity consist in the ability to perform conscious mental acts? I don’t think either of these reductive aspirations is likely to succeed, but I don’t think the connection is contingent either. We will not get far in the project of explaining perception, pain, emotions, and desires in linguistic terms; and we will limit the field of language studies unduly if we insist solely on studying conscious manifestations of language. Someconsciousness is non-linguistic and some language use is non-conscious: but much of each intersects with the other. The most obvious area of intersection is thought: thought is typically conscious and thought arguably relies on a language of thought.[1] Thought is thus characteristically a conscious linguistic act—the conscious “tokening” of words and sentences inwardly. Therefore, the study of conscious thought will take in the study of language, and linguistic studies will require attention to the role of language in conscious thought. What it is like to think will include reference to language, and studying language will involve us in its role in enabling thought. These are not insulated areas of investigation.

Is human consciousness different from other forms of consciousness in virtue of its linguistic involvements? Do we have a distinctive type of subjectivity because of our linguistic nature? Is language to us what echolocation is to bats? I think this is very plausible, but it is not easy to spell out the character of this linguistic subjectivity. It depends on your prior conception of language. First, we need to divide language into the phonological, syntactic, and semantic (also pragmatic): each component will have its own manifestation in consciousness—what it’s like to hear and produce meaningful sounds, what it’s like to engage in syntactic manipulations, and what it’s like to mean something by one’s words. We will need a three-pronged phenomenology. Then too, we must settle on a theory of meaning: pictorial, intention-dependent, use-based, etc. Is linguistic consciousness a type of picturing, or intending, or using? Could it be all three (and more—e.g., truth conditions)? The important point for now is that all such theories have consequences for the character of our linguistic phenomenology—our description of what it “feels like” to exercise linguistic mastery. These questions unavoidably involve us in the consideration of similarities and analogies with other types of human activity. Is speaking like painting a picture? Is it like intending to mow the lawn? Is it like using a tool? Answering such questions will determine how we conceive linguistic phenomenology: do we have a pictorial phenomenology, or a volitional phenomenology, or a practical phenomenology? You will not find a discussion of such questions in Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (this is not meant as a criticism). I won’t attempt to adjudicate such questions here, merely to indicate what our new discipline of linguistic phenomenology will look like.

I will now lay out what I think the phenomenology of language involves, according to my own theoretical predilections. This can only be exploratory and suggestive in the current state of inquiry. We can begin by mentioning music and game playing: is conscious language use like hearing or producing music, and is it like playing chess or cards? Both ideas are suggestive: for both involve the rule-governed combination of discrete elements, with infinite potential. Spoken language is like music in being itself proto-musical, with rhythm and melody built into utterance. It is also like game playing in being goal-directed, rule-governed, and skill-involving. Not for nothing does song develop from language, and language use has been compared to playing games: speaking is a bit like playing a musical game. But this characterization is too restrictive; we need a more abstract account of the underlying phenomenology. I trust I will be saying nothing novel or shocking if I suggest that language use is a combinatorial pairing of sound and meaning (or gesture and meaning in the case of sign language). Thus, the phenomenology of language consists of consciously following rules that generate novel sentences of arbitrary complexity and infinite scope. That is what it is like, consciously, to speak (not just what it is). This covers what it is normally thought of as the syntactic aspect of language not the semantic aspect—how the grammatical structure of sentences is represented in the mind (conscious and unconscious). But what about the semantic aspect? Here we must descend to the level of nouns and verbs and the nature of predication. At a first pass we might reach for the concept of pointing—to use a noun involves the feeling of pointing. Ostension is the primitive form of the referential relation as it is represented in consciousness. To use a verb is consciously to entertain something on the order of applying one thing to another, as it might be putting one thing on top of another. Predication is an applicative act. These are both activities of the human hand and arm; so, we may as well make it explicit that nouns and verbs are associated in the conscious mind with activities of the hand and arm.[2] I believe this reflects their evolutionary origin: our language capacities evolved (partly) from pre-adaptations incorporating the motor abilities of hand and arm. Accordingly, the biological origins of referring and predicating go back to actions of gripping and grasping and also manual application and operation. You grip with one hand (noun), then you do something to the gripped object with that hand or the other hand (verb)—throwing or hitting the object, say. If this is a correct theory of origins (suitably supplemented), then we can expect that remnants of these origins will be preserved in the brain and hence seep into the corresponding phenomenology. In short, the use of nouns will feel like gripping (grasping, holding, pointing) and the use of verbs will feel like moving (swinging, hitting, propelling). This is a biological-cum-psychological hypothesis not an analysis of the concepts of noun and verb: it situates our linguistic phenomenology in our evolutionary past, where it surely belongs. Our conscious minds (brains) evolved over many millennia and our current subjectivity reflects this evolution. The linguistic science of natural language phenomenology will thus bring together the study of language as a formal object, the biological evolution of the language capacity, and the way it feels consciously to speak and understand language. Putting this together with the syntactic aspect of language mastery, we can say that conscious language use involves creative rule-governed construction and primitive bodily actions going back many thousands of years. The hand and arm figure in the phenomenology, perhaps schematized and streamlined, alongside the more computational syntactic processes of sentence construction. If we follow Chomsky, we can say that linguistic consciousness is a combination of Merge and manual action.[3]

Now we can add some further elements to this picture. Chomsky emphasizes transformations, ambiguity, word order, nonsense, degrees of grammaticalness, hierarchical structure, and more: all these can be incorporated into phenomenology with sufficient subtlety and sensitivity. Each linguistic phenomenon will have a counterpart in the stream of consciousness—there will be something it is like to experience ambiguity and nonsense, say. I leave this for further research (hint: ambiguity will feel like uncertainty and nonsense will feel like delinquency—or some such). What matters is that the linguistic phenomena will perforce have a conscious correlate of some sort or other, granted that they reach the level of consciousness at all. Moreover, linguistic consciousness will be coupled with consciousness of the unconscious—we are conscious that our conscious mind is not all there is to it. We know (perhaps only tacitly) that we have a linguistic unconscious that interacts with our linguistic consciousness; we are aware that a lot happens behind the scenes. We can also extend these observations to the more pragmatic aspects of language, as in speech acts: there is something it is like to assert, to question, to command, to promise, etc. Speech acts are conscious acts, so they possess a distinctive phenomenology. Writing is clearly a highly conscious activity, requiring the writer’s full attention, so it will have a distinctive presence in the conscious mind (no doubt with some unconscious underpinnings): there is definitely something specific that it is like to write. Consciousness of the infinite will attend language use in any reasonably intelligent speaker, since it is so obviously the case in language. We experience language as infinite in scope. Taken together, these features define the distinctively human subjectivity that goes with linguistic competence. Echolocation feels a certain (complex) way to bats and speech feels a certain (complex) way to humans. Apparently only humans experience this form of subjectivity, at least in its full complexity (whales and dolphins may experience hints of it). If a bat were writing an essay about the mind-body problem, she might cite humans as alien forms of consciousness due to their ability to speak. Lastly, language is obviously connected to human culture—the arts, the sciences, entertainment—so its presence in consciousness is bound up with the existence of human culture. There is no culture to speak of without language and consciousness, indeed language in consciousness. It is time we recognized that language and consciousness belong together, requiring integrated treatment. We can now look forward to a phenomenological linguistics to be set beside regular psycho-linguistics. Language is primarily (dare I say it?) an activity of consciousness.[4]              

[1] The following have advocated a linguistic theory of thought: P.T. Geach, G. Harman, and J. Fodor.

[2] I discuss this in some depth in my book Prehension (2015), particularly chapter 6. I should emphasize that the general project of linguistic phenomenology is not committed to this particular theory of predication, but the theory at least provides us with something concrete in the way of phenomenological proposals. Other ideas may be considered, perhaps involving objects of desire and actions of satisfying desire—the field is wide open. We might even invoke some mathematical phenomenology, e.g., concerning functions and arguments (Frege-style linguistic phenomenology).

[3] For Chomsky’s Merge operation see his What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016), especially chapter 1. Of course, we are dealing here with only the simplest kinds of sentences.

[4] Hence not primarily an activity of the body (verbal behavior). Chomsky has long urged the psychological reality of linguistic theories; I am urging the phenomenological reality of linguistic theories. Linguistic categories and operations have not only a reality in the mind and brain but also in the subjective consciousness of the language user. Thus, linguistics (including philosophy of language) merges with consciousness studies.