If language, and its representational or coding function, makes up the world, or if, as Wittgenstein said beautifully in his Tractatus, \u2018Reality is the shadow of grammar,\u2019 what kind of world would we have if we spoke a language that allowed of little or no abstraction, generalization, descriptions of the past or the future? A view of reality that is \u2018intensely and only immediate\u2019 seems puzzling and impractical. Yet there are Amazon tribes, notably the Piraha, who speak of and view their experience in just this way. If a man goes around a bend in the river, no observations about him can obtain except for xibipio\u2014he has gone out of experience.\u2019 They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers\u2014the light \u2018goes in and out of experience.\u2019
\nStarting in the second half of the last century, it became gospel in linguistics, the philosophy of mind and anthropology to hold that the cohering and time-continuity function of the mind was a result of the \u2018deep structure\u2019 of all languages, a Universal Grammar (\u2018UG\u2019) which allowed for expressing abstractions through a process called \u2018recursion.\u2019 Defined roughly as \u2018the ability to create complex structures out of simple structures,\u2019 a recursive language would take the fact that (1) there exists a man who is a hunter; (2) and who kills jaguars; (3) and who eats pig meat and express it in the sentence \u2018The very man who shoots jaguars himself eats pig meat.\u2019 But in Piraha no overlapping of phrases occurs. They would say only \u2018There is a man. He is a hunter who kills jaguars. He eats pig meat.\u2019 Chomsky, Hauser, Fitch: \u2018The Faculty of Language,\u2019 Science, 2002.
\nIf recursion is what Chomsky has called \u2018the essential property of language,\u2019 and a significant body of tribal languages are found in which there is no \u2018interior coding\u2019 or recursion, then either (1) Chomsky is wrong; (2) the tribal languages are anomalous and still explainable within the paradigm; or (3) we [ethnologists, anthropological linguists] are misunderstanding the mechanics of the tribal language.
\nChomsky\u2019s great detractor in the UG view of natural languages and codes, and thus of perception, is one Daniel Everett, a former linguistics professor at Carnegie Mellon and one of the world\u2019s experts on Amazonian triabal languages. The limitations of Chomsky\u2019s explanatory model first came clear when Everett sat down with a group of Amazonian Piraha in 1992. He wanted to study their concepts of quantity, and of expressing primitive quantity assessments. He gathered a group of Piraha elders in front of him, and between the group and himself placed a group of objects\u2014nuts, batteries, pea pods. The Piraha could perform the task of identifying and expressing quantities when two or three objects were concerned, but not when any more were introduced into the experiment. In fact, the Piraha do not have words for numbers above two, and are thus greatly challenged in the expression of large quantities. Gordon, \u2018Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence From Amazonia.\u2019 (1997); Evans & Levinson: \u2018The Myth of Language Universals.\u2019 Proceedings of the Australian National University.
\nEverett soon hypothesized a much less hard-wired and much more cultural\/environment explanation of why the Piraha, and indeed any potential language speakers, may not have signifiers or codes for colors, quantifications, numbers, or myths and stories. He posited the Piraha word xibipio to frame how the tribe perceived reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of immediate experience\u2014anything (and only things) they can see and hear, and that someone living has seen and heard and that person is, as we say in the law, \u2018available as a percipient witness.\u2019
\nBut how can life be lived entirely within this extreme (what Everett calls) \u201cimmediacy-of-experience\u201d principle? Everett\u2019s explanation is somewhat pedestrian, but not uninteresting. He sees embedding entities within entities as simply the way humans organize information, something that is found in all human intelligence systems. There is no specific linguistic principle for this\u2014no \u2018Universal Grammar\u2019 or \u2018deep structure of syntax\u2019 per Chomsky\u2014simply because concept-bundling is a general feature of cognition. As Everett put it, \u201cThe ability to put thoughts inside of other thoughts is just the way humans are, because we\u2019re smarter than other species. The Piraha have this cognitive trait . . . . but it is absent from their syntax because of cultural restraints.\u2019 Everett: Language: The Cultural Tool (Pantheon 2012).
\nThe Piraha\u2019s cultural, learned absence of abstraction-expressions and remote time descriptions in no way detract from their ability to function in their jungle domain. They are \u201csupremely gifted in all the ways necessary to insure continued survival in the jungle: they know the usefulness and location of all important plants in their area; they understand the behavior of local animals and how to catch and avoid them; and they can walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts and small game.\u201d Colapinto, \u2018The Interpreter,\u2019 (profile of Everett) The New Yorker, April 2007.
\nSo one can have recursive cognition (i.e., be truly and fully human), but simply not have a recursive language. The reason is that the language does not have to service a culture in which abstractions are utilized in large portions of experience. There is a powerful, transcendental immediacy to the observations that the Piraha need to get things done in a day\u2019s time. Since they do not have myths or stories that deal with past experience, or experience they do not immediately see, Everett has it that the insertion of phrases inside one another simply has no function in an entirely present-tense consciousness. Such a form of thinking states thoughts only in discrete units. The Piraha would never say \u201cI saw the dog that was down by the river get bitten by the snake\u201d simply because there is no use recording such events. They could conceive of a response to only an immediate experience statement, something like \u201cWhy is the dog by the river there howling so loud with pain?\u201d They would say, instead of the recursive phrase above, \u201cI saw the dog. The dog was at the river. A snake bit the dog.\u201d Because the Piraha accept as real only observation statements (things they can verify in their immediate visual field) they have no use for embedded clauses like \u201cthat was down by the river.\u201d Recursive functions are not observation statements, but rather supporting, quantifying, or qualifying propositions. In other words, they are abstractions, generalities.
\nThe cognitive urge\u2014the philosophical urge\u2014to ground the world it what is observable and immediately verifiable is not only a feature of primitive societies. The Logical Positivist philosophers of between-the-wars Vienna also believed in a \u201cverification principle\u201d much like what precludes recursive structures from Piraha language. While Wittgenstein saw a lot to admire in the Positivists, he thought verificationism was going too far, even in his early, later discarded masterpiece, the Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus. And in his final word on language, the later, fascinatingly anthropological aphorisms of the Philosophical Investigations, he came to a view of speech as a largely cultural construct (and not hard-wired), and as a derivative perceptual tool, not unlike Everett\u2019s. He was ultimately a conventionalist and not a nativist. There could be a \u2018language instinct\u2019 as modern scholars have defined it, but it was guided entirely by environmental forces.
\nWittgenstein asks us in the PI to imagine a tribe like Everett\u2019s Piraha, a people who never have occasion to deal with quantities larger than can be marketed and exchanged within the ground space directly in front of them. Their entire concept of \u2018amount\u2019 or \u2018quantity\u2019 could be anchored solely to how much ground something covers. Explanations of another concept of quantity would be lost on them, and would lead to humorous communicative puzzles. Imagine the impossibility of imparting to them our notion of amounts. Suppose one were standing in their market and had fifty blocks of wood sitting next to one hundred blocks of wood, both being the same quantity (to them) simply because they each occupied the same threefoot square portion of ground. Once you took the hundred piece bunch and spread it around to demonstrate that that pile constituted more wood, they would agree only because it covered more ground.
\nSo there is now a more robust view of how language coding, and the core grammar behind it, can be something very, very much cultural and environmental. The Swiss linguist Michael Tomasello, commenting on Everett\u2019s papers, said recently: \u201cBecause the Piraha talk about different things [than we do], different things get grammaticalized.\u201d He added that \u201c[U]niversal grammar was a good try, and it really was not so implausible at the time it was proposed, but since then we have learned a lot about many different languages, and they simply do not fit one universal cookie cutter.\u201d
\nBrent Berlin, a cognitive anthropologist at the University of Georgia, also commented on the richness and originality of Everett\u2019s approach, and said: \u201cIt [Chomsky\u2019s UG] acts as if, in some inexplicable way, almost mysteriously, language is hermetically sealed from the conditions of life of the people who use it to communicate. But this is not some kind of an abstract, beautiful, mathematical, symbolic system that is not related to real life.\u201d
\nSignifiers, linguistic coding, things standing for other things: they are not the crystalline grid that Chomsky and (the early) Wittgenstein thought they were. They do not spring up out of the mind in isolation from communicative immersion. They live and breathe, are learned and forgotten and learned again, and shift from one set of denoted objects to the other. Like the Piraha man walking around the bend in the river, they \u201cpass in and out of existence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If language, and its representational or coding function, makes up the world, or if, as Wittgenstein said beautifully in his Tractatus, \u2018Reality is the shadow of grammar,\u2019 what kind of world would we have if we spoke a language that allowed of little or no abstraction, generalization, descriptions of the past or the future? A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[46,41],"class_list":["post-2065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-issue-06","tag-essays","tag-print"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QZgE-xj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2065"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2068,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065\/revisions\/2068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}