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1. Japan's Creative Imitations
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter One Japan's Creative Imitations It is very clear thatJapan is making money by taking and applying the fruits of science that the West creates at great expense. -Tonegawa Susumu, Nobel laureate Thinking About Language and Thought This is a book about language, especially written language. I shall argue that the mechanism used to write a language significantly affects one's ability to engage in creative thinking. In other words, there is a direct, causal link between the writing system people use and the contributions they make to science. Establishing this hypothesis will require me to spend some time, indeed several chapters, on what would seem to be an unrelated political issue, namely, the transfer of technology between nations. My purpose in doing so is to show that the phenomenon under study-the poor record East Asia has in creative science-is in fact a real issue that cuts across Asia's national boundaries and is serious enough to warrant an explanation beyond what economists and social scientists offer. I am convinced that the root cause of East Asians' endemic borrowing of Western ideas lies in their use of nonalphabetic writing and that their "creativity problem" is linguistic in nature. Given the central role linguistics will play in this study, I would like to say a few words about language before getting wrapped up in the political dimensions of the problem. The institutions Asia has to transfer Western technology respond to features of Asian psychology that are languagedependent . As we enter this world of political intrigue, I ask you to keep in mind our goal of relating this behavior to its linguistic antecedents. Japan's Creative Imitations 9 Language is so much a part of the human condition that we tend to take it for granted. While essential to our livelihood, it is not something we often contemplate. We use language every day of our lives, paying little attention to the structures that support it, assuming that our thoughts will be conveyed independently of the medium itself. The same naivete extends to writing. No one thinks about how a writing system expresses ideas, still less about its effects on an individual's thinking, and not at all about how such effects are manifested cumulatively in the behavior of whole societies. But what if it could be shown that language-the mechanism itselfmatters ? And that the systems we use to form and convey thoughts shape our behavior in subtle but significant ways? There is no a priori basis for assuming, as the more cosmopolitan among us do, that language is neutral about how ideas are conceptualized and strung together. Given the great diversity between languages, and the intimate connection between language and thought, the notion that differences in language and its means of expression equate somehow to differences in thinking would seem tenable. 'This argument applies not just to comparisons between so-called "primitive ," that is, technologically less advanced societies versus more technologically advanced societies, but also to countries like Japan and China, where differences in the two languages have been linked to what some scholars see as analogous differences in behavior.l The notion that language determines thought, formalized in the writings of Be~amin Whorf (1897-1941), has received a bad press in recent decades for being too simplistic, in its strong version at least, and for being out of step with the currently dominant intellectual paradigms. Chomsky's theory of universal grammar (1957,1965) holds that "surface" distinctions made by different languages disappear at the "deep structure level" where language interacts with thought. Deacon (1997:121), who rejects this nativist hypothesis in favor of an evolutionary model of language convergence , also does not put much stock in Whorf's theory for the same reason: universal deep structure, whether the result of biological or linguistic evolution, has no room for a theory that equates psychological and cultural variation with differences in morphology and syntax. Whorf's theory also failed certain tests relating to its claims about color terms and Native American verb forms (Foss and Hakes 1978:382-84), which discredited its strong or deterministic version for most linguists. Equally damaging to the theory was its assault on the belief that all humans [3.227.239.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:58 GMT) 10 Chapter 1 are alike, notwithstanding the apparent differences. Most of us, on some level, want to believe that humans share the same basic cognitive apparatus that can be relied on to generate...