Language and Human Understanding

VI. Human and Animal Organisms as Systems Dynamically Geared to the Environment

295 VI Human and Animal Organisms as Systems Dynamically Geared to the Environment “Mechanisms” in a Holistic and Teleological Framework The holistic approach of J. J. Gibson and some other recent psychologists is key to understanding the shape of the psychology required for explaining the learning and use of language, including the part played by the brain and by our human evolutionary background. Gibson’s environment-geared or “ecological” model of visual perception makes the cognitive aspect of perception inseparable from the gearing of our motor activity to the natural environment, a model intelligible only in the context of an Aristotelian conception of human unity and function. Gibson’s way of thinking about perception provides a model for how we should think about the human use of speech—speech being adapted not just to the natural environment in general, but to the social environment of a community of people speaking the same language. Within this social environment it will be the norm for hearer and speaker to understand the same by what the speaker has said. This norm determines how we describe and assess deficiencies in speech and its understanding. In this model, speaking and hearing, with the brain functioning relevant to them, are inseparably integrated and geared to express the thoughts and understanding which the speaker wishes to communicate to the hearer. The physical is integral to our linguistic functioning, but semantics and pragmat- 296   Psychology Of language learning & use ics, involving intellect, are indispensable both to the description and explanation of our language and to the functional description and explanation of the organization of the brain which this activity involves. Any scientific account of the workings of the human mind has to recognize the non-computer–simulable character of its operations established in chapter V. Hubert Dreyfus reached the same conclusion in his What Computers Still Can’t Do of 1979, establishing the same nonmechanistic view of human beings to which my arguments lead. My approach has different starting points, in this chapter applying Gibson’s holistic conceptions to identify the shape of the psychology required for explaining the learning and use of language . Section 1. Human Beings as Integrated Unities: Gibson’s Work as a Key to Escaping Physicalism (a) The impossibility of any kind of physicalist account, even of a holistic kind At the end of chapter III we observed how many linguists and psycholinguists , Chomsky and Jackendoff among them, anticipate or presume that linguistic structures are resultant upon the structures of neurological functioning within the brain, structures of which they say that linguistic theory provides abstract functional descriptions. Such accounts involve difficulties for human identity to which Daniel Dennett has presented the most sophisticated relevant approach.1 Dennett’s suggestions therefore require particular attention. However, what I argued earlier excludes any such ultimately purely physically based explanation of the workings of speech and language. For in our earlier chapters we saw how the informality with which we are able to use words and yet still be reliably understood by our hearers shows the impossibility of simulating our use of language or thought mechanically in the mathematical sense of the word “mechanical”.2 Rather, the use of understanding 1. Dennett’s apparent sophistication in Consciousness Explained reflects his response to “linguistic” philosophy of the period 1940–70, including his doctoral supervisor, Ryle. Dennett’s treatment of the “reality” of mental patterns (see chap. VIII of this volume) is independent of the issues of identity raised in this chapter. 2. This even excludes simulation through the adoption of a Dynamical Systems approach, although, as Timothy van Gelder points out, such approaches can allow the possibility of digital simulation: “Program (that is, physically configure) a computer (a concrete computational system) so that it produces sequences of symbol-configurations which represent points in the state trajectories of the abstract dynamical model under consideration. In such a situation, the computer does not itself constitute a model of the cognitive process, since it does not contain numerically measurable aspects changing over time in the way that aspects of the target system [the real system which it is being attempted to model in terms of dynamical systems Human and Animal Organisms   297 is indispensable in the use of language. Physical explanations are inadequate to explain either the linguistic behavior illustrated in chapters I and II or the open-ended variety and number in the methods of establishing truth in mathematics and...