Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

6. Descartes Thought Wrong

CHAPTER 6 Descartes Thought Wrong IT SOMETIMES SEEMS that much of modern science has been carried on as if man was put into the world to have dominion over it,just as Genesis says. But it is an illusion to believe that by being objective we can describe things exactly as they are. Our minds, thoughts, and languages are part of the expanding universe, subject to its physical and biological laws, not separate from them. What we see is determined by the way we see. In the nineteenth century, for example,James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz discovered that light-what we see and what lets us see-is only one segment of a wide spectrum of perceptible electromagnetic energy. Science and technology since then have made it possible for us to "see" something ofthe vastness ofouter space and a long way into the particles and forces of subatomic space. Linguistics, though, is still hampered by an ancient belief, stated by Plato and reaffirmed in the seventeenth century by Rene Descartes, that mind and language are unrelated to the lowly material universe, and that our souls are likewise independent of our bodies. Cognitive science shows that what we know and think results not just from the way things are but also from the way our thinking and knowing have evolved. Philosophers over the years have considered many possible relations between the physical universe and perception.These range from the idea 78 Descartes Thought J¥rong 79 that things are just as they appear to be to the belief that the universe exists only in our conceptions of it. And how do we form our conceptions ? Our senses and experiences play a m~or role, but to conceive of our world as science now sees it, we must have not only telescopes and microscopes but also more sophisticated means of extending our senses and conceptions. The physical sciences have expanded our understanding of the universe because their theories are tested by experiment and modified when experimentation, new observations, and new theories require it.The sciences that study us, however, have had less success. Cognitive science has succeeded in bringing the study of mind, society, language, and culture closer to what is known about brain and behavior; but some people hold on to the idea that language is nevertheless unrelated to animal communication . If it is true that what we see is determined by the way we see, we should be paying more attention to exactlly how we do see. The difference between central and peripheral vision and their respective roles in showing us what we see has been known for some time. Central, or foveal, vision reacts to very small differences in light and therefore can show fine detail. Peripheral vision very accurately monitors movement-its speed, direction, manner, and path. Guided by our ability to see and analyze movement, we may be able to track a flying insect and catch it in a net. Our peripheral vision may also have told us whether it is the kind ofinsect that zips by in a straight line or one that flits up and down as it flies, like a moth or butterfly. When we catch and hold it still, however, we can focus it on the central area ofthe retina and make an exact identification . All this is well known; less well known, less studied is how the nature of vision relates to language and how language relates to it. I believe that language investigators who ignore the physical characteristics of our eyes-and hands-risk being mistaken in their theories. In 1957 Noam Chomsky presented the phrase structure rules ofgenerative-transformational grammar. Its familiar first rule is S ~ NP +Vp, or, "A sentence may be rewritten as a noun phrase plus a verb phrase."! But this itselfcould be an index: natural events have the pattern: Insectsfly. Creatures act. Things change. Possibly this pattern has affected the nature of the sign 80 Descartes Thought Wrong (in both the semiotic and the signed language sense) that represents them-and the right side of Chomsky's formula. Natural events, human physiology, and language are related. First, actions occur in the natural world around us-things move or change. Second, our visual system uses one set of neural cells to see things and a different set to see movement or changes.Third, our upper limbs can both change their appearance and move. All...