The Dependence of Language on Consciousness

The Dependence of Language on Consciousness Jordan Zlatev Umeå University/Lund University FiCLA, 24-25 September 2004

Explaining the title • The first pitfall is discussing the relation between language and consciousness is terminological confusion. So let me begin by explaining in which I sense I use the three key words in my title.

Dependence • Most theorists allow some role for consciousness in their account of language, but only a marginal one, since the bulk of language knowledge and use lies “below the surface”: “The cognitive unconscious is the massive portion of the iceberg that lies below the surface, below the visible tip that is consciousness. It consists of all those mental operations that structure and make possible all conscious experience, including the understanding and use of language … it is completely and irrevocably inaccessible to direct conscious introspection” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 103)

Dependence • “Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consciousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather, they are inaccessible to conscious awareness and control.” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 11) • WRONG!

Dependence • My thesis will be that consciousness is a necessary condition for language, so it is a matter of strong, rather than weak dependence. Thesis 1(a) Consciousness is essential for language: without it language would be impossible. CorollaryWhile language arguably is also essential for human consciousness, consciousness as such does not require language. Thus consciousness is more basic than language – logically, phylogenetically and ontogenetically.

Language • Language is (primarily) a social institution for symbolic communication(Itkonen 1978, 1983, 2003). As such it consists of (a system of) rules (norms, conventions) for matching expressions and meanings. • In arguing for the dependence of language on consciousness, my argument is not simply that institutions (e.g. games) require someone to know them for them to exist. I will argue furthermore that our (individual) knowledge of language is dependent on consciousness, and furthermore: so are the learning and the useof language.

Language Thesis 1(b) Consciousness is essential for: • The existence of language (as a social institution) • Our individual knowledge of language • Our use of language • Our learning of language (as children and adults) It is very easy to find many rejections of one or more points of Thesis 1(b) in the literature:

Language • Knowledge … the unconsciousnessof mental grammar is still more radical than Freud’s notion of the unconscious: mental grammar isn’t available to consciousness under any conditions, therapeutic or otherwise. (Jackendoff 1994: 19) • Learning We all speak at least one [language], that one we acquired without a lick of conscious effort… (Bickerton 2003:77) We can acquire unconscious patterns unconsciously, with little or no deliberate training (Jackendoff 1994: 25). • Use In modern humans, syntactic and phonological organization of utterances, though learned, is largely automatic, not under conscious control. (Hurford: 49)

Consciousness From being a tabu subject for Science for most of the 20th century, the 1990s made consciousness respectable again… If there is anything of a consensus, it is that: Consciousness is not a unitary phenomenon. • Affective consciousness: Feelings (“core consciousness”, Damasio 1999) • Perceptual consciousness: Awareness of presence (“primary consciousness”, Edelman 1992) • Reflective consciousness: Judgement, Imagination, Recall, Planning (“the contemplative attitude” Werner and Kaplan 1963, Mandler 2004)

Consciousness • Again, it would be much too easy to argue that language in all its manifestations presupposes affective consciousness, for else there would be no “qualia”, and hence no intrinsic meaning(fullness) to our words (Zlatev 2003). • Similarly if there were no perceptual consciousness there would be no “states” or “events” to talk about but only a “booming, buzzing confusion”. • I will try to make the stronger claim: that language, in all its manifestations, requires (some form of) reflective consciousness.

“The Unconscious” • The contents of my present thoughts that are not in focus at the moment: even as I plan to go to the kitchen to cook some food since I feel hungry, I do not – and can not – focus on everything in the same moment: my way to the kitchen, the location of the food, the way to prepare it, my hunger etc. (Gurwitsch 1964) • What far from my thoughts as I plan my dinner, e.g. that Bush is (unfortunately) the president of the USA, or the image of my office – but that is something that I can bring “back” to consciousness if I wish, at least in principle. (Searle 1992) • Those processes in my brain and body that I can never be conscious of, e.g. all patterns of neuron-firings, the oxidation, the “autonomic” system regulating my breathing etc.

Public social reality Consciousness Memories Inaccessible to consciousness

(Knowledge of) Language • Language (as a social, public phenomenon) and knowledge of language are co-dependent concepts: each one implies the other. Both imply consciousness. • If language consisted simply of spatio-temporal utterances (“behaviours”), triggered by environmental stimuli, and producing “responses” in hearers, then it is conceivable that the “knowledge” governing their “use” could be in the (deep) unconscious. In fact the “language” of vervet monkeys can be accounted for in these terms (Sinha 2003).

“Deep unconscious” Utterances “competence” (Chomsky), “cognitive unconscious” (Lakoff & Johnson)

(Knowledge of) Language However, language consists of rules (norms, conventions) – with criteria for correctness – such as those allowing the following intuitions: • John loves Mary. *Loves John Mary. • A dog is an animal. *A dog is a number. • Give me the book! is a REQUEST. *Give me the book! is an ASSERTION.

(Knowledge of) Language • These rules (norms, conventions) must be mutually known (known to be known) by the members of the community (Itkonen 1978) • This knowledge must be either conscious, or accessible to consciousness. • Evidence: all speakers of all languages can perform judgements of correctness!

Rules (norms, conventions) Utterances Intuitions of correctness (judgments) “tacit” knowledge of the rules Biological mechanisms, procedural skills

”2 kinds of data” Utterances Intuitions (judgments) “competence” (Chomsky), “cognitive unconscious” (Lakoff and Johnson)

(Knowledge of) Language • Why and how should unconscious mechanisms produce conscious judgements? • Judgements of what? Not of “correctness” – since that is a normative notion… • …but of “grammaticality” – the “constraints” of the underlying system (cf. Platzack) • But since “mental grammar” is inaccessible – then what is the object of the speakers’ intuition?

Rules (norms, conventions) Utterances ?? Intuitions (judgments) ?? “competence” (Chomsky), “cognitive unconscious” (Lakoff and Johnson)

(Knowledge of) Language • “… we have here a confusion between the following two types of entities: on the one hand, the concept of ‘correct sentence of a language L’, which is the object of conscious knowledge; on the other, utterances of language L, which are manifestation of unconscious ‘knowledge’. In the former ‘knowledge’ equals consciousness, while in the latter, ‘knowledge’ is a hypothetical dispositional concept.” (Itkonen 1978: 82)

(Knowledge of) Language • I agree, but I would argue that even the latter “knowledge” to the extent that it knowledge of something, i.e. an intentional phenomenon, cannot be in the “deep unconscious”, but must rather be accessible to consciousness. • Notice that I am not denying that there are “unconscious” procedural skills and biological mechanisms that are involved in language production and comprehension. What I am denying is (a) that they are properly called “knowledge” and (b) that they are solely responsible for language use.

Searle’s connection principle • “All unconscious intentional states are in principle accessible to consciousness” (Searle 1992: 156). • All intentional states have aspectual shape: whatever they are about is seen from a certain perspective rather than other, so that extentionally identical entities such as “the Evening Star” and “the Morning Star” have different aspectual shapes. • Aspectual shape cannot be exhaustively characterized in “third-person” predicates – either as brain states or as behaviors (supported by Quine’s (1960) thesis of the indeterminacy of translation). => “The notion of an unconscious intentional state is the notion of a state that is a possible conscious thought or experience”. (Searle 1992: 159)

Searle’s connection principle • The meaning of an utterance can not be exclusively characterized by external “third person predicates”, including the conventional meaning of the sentence. • Rather, it is co-determined by the intentionality of the speaker (Speaker meaning) as well as the interpretation of the hearer (Hearer meaning). • Neither of the latter can be characterized as “automatic procedures” performed in the “deep unconscious”. • Evidence: novel metaphor, analogy, implicatures, indirect speech acts etc. • Ergo, our “dispositional knowledge” to produce and interpret speech also involves consciousness.

Rules (norms, conventions) Utterances Knowledge of rules, intentions “tacit” knowledge of the rules Biological mechanisms, procedural skills

Language use • An example of the necessity to take into account the speaker’s (and hearer’s) consciousness in speech production: the phenomenon of “information structure” (e.g. Chafe 1994). • Given-new information structure is based on the (mutual) accessibility of referents.

Language use “4.71 John’s brother has just got back from Texas. 4.79 Assertion 1: John has a brother X. 4.80 Assertion 2: X has just got back from Texas. Why foreground one assertion rather than another? The answer must depend on the speaker’s intentions and her guesses about the knowledge held by the participants. For example the speaker might judge that the listener knows 4.79 but that 4.80 is new information, and therefore needs to be foregrounded. … Note too that a speaker can use 4.71 even if the listener does not know John has a brother. In such a case both assertions are new but the speaker has decided to rank them in a particular order.” (Saeed 2003: 104)

Language learning • Rationalists: “We can acquire unconscious patterns unconsciously, with little or no deliberate training” (Jackendoff 1994: 25). • Empiricists: “Implicit learning is an unconscious process… yielding abstract knowledge. Implicit knowledge results from the induction of an abstract representation of the structure that the stimulus environment displays, and this knowledge is acquired in the absence of conscious, reflective strategies to learn.” (Reber 1989: 219)

Generativist models Output utterances Input utterances “competence” LAD/UG

(Simple) connectionist models Output utterances Input utterances “know how”

Language learning • Three prominent developmental psychologistswho quite independently from one another have pointed out the role of consciousness in language learning with respect to three different domains: • Mandler (2004): preverbal concepts • Bloom (2000): word meaning • Tomasello (1999, 2003): word meaning and grammar

Mandler (2004): perceptual meaning analysis • “Procedural knowledge, both perceptual and motor, in inaccessible to consciousness. … In spite of taking in lots of information at once … it is also relatively slow to learn, and learning is accomplished by associative strengthening, typically over a number of trials, as in operand conditioning or perceptual schema formation. It aggregates frequency information… This is also part of language learning.” (p. 55) • “Declarative or conceptual knowledge, in contrast, is accessible to awareness … It requires attention to be encoded into this format; this means that it is selective. … The system can learn information in a single trial (in small quantities, of course) simply by being told. In comparison to procedural knowledge, it isrelatively context-free.” (p.55)

Mandler (2004): perceptual meaning analysis Types of information represented Procedural (Sensorimotor skills) Declarative(Conceptual knowledge) Implict Processing ExplicitProcessing Implict Processing Activation(enables priming) Elaboration(enables recall)

Mandler (2004): perceptual meaning analysis • “Through perceptual meaning analysis they [infants] consciously analyze what objects are doing. The results of this process – interpretations of the world that suffuse the mind with meaning – are also accessible to consciousness.” (p. 292) • Object examination task: 6 months old infants form super-ordinate (rather than basic-level) concepts such as ANIMAL, VEHICLE, FURNITURE • “Generalized imitation” task: infants generalize on the basis of the super-ordinate category, rather than on the basis of perceptual similarity. • Deferred imitation as evidence for pre-linguistic recall (≠ recognition); Spontaneous imitation of a novel event after a 24 hours delay (Melztoff 1988) and novel sequences of events (Carver and Bauer 1999), from 9 months.

Mandler (2004): perceptual meaning analysis • Explanation in terms of unconscious processing (“priming”) is problematic because amnesic patients were unable to perform deferred imitation: deliberate or spontaneous. However: • Amnesics retain the ability to perform grammaticality judgments, showing that they are not deprived or reflective consciousness just because they loose the ability to recall (episodic memory). • Suggesting that the role of (reflective) consciousness in relation to knowledge of language and language learning is not identical (semantic ≠ episodic memory).

Bloom (2000): Theory of mind • “… it is impossible to explain how children learn the meanings of a word without understanding of certain non-linguistic mental capacities, including how children think about the minds of others and how the they make sense of the external world.” (Bloom 2000: 2)

Bloom (2000): Theory of mind Word learning is not done on the basis of “association” (Mandler’s procedural knowledge) since it involves: • Fast mapping (learning from a single instance): ”Unless there is conscious encoding, most observable information does not enter memory” (p. 32) • “The fact that object name acquisition is typically both fast and errorless suggests that its not a form of statistical learning” (p.59). • At most half of the children’s first words refer to basic-level object terms; the rest to locations (beach, kitchen), actions (kiss, nap), social roles (doctor, brother), natural phenomena (sky, rain), and time (morning, day) – as well as actions (go, sleep) and properties (big, good). (Nelson, Hampsson and Shaw 1993)

Bloom (2000): Theory of mind • Understanding communicative intent (Baldwin 1991, 1993, 1996); Experiments: • An 18-month old child is given a novel toy to play with. Another toy is put in a bucket in front of the experimenter. As the child is playing with the toy, the experimenter looks at the toy in the bucket (at the moment invisible for the child) and says: “It’s a modi”. The child looks at the experimenter, follows his gaze to the object and learns the term “modi” to be the name of the hidden toy. • A child is playing with a novel toy and a disembodied voice says, “It’s a modi”. The child does not learn this to be the name of the toy he is playing with.

“The Augustinian Infant” “When [my elders] named any thing, and as they spoke turned towards it, I saw and remembered that they called what they would point out by the name they uttered. And that they meant this thing and no other was plain from the motion of their body, the natural language, as it were, of all nations, expressed by the countenance, glances of the eye, gestures of the limbs, and tones of the voice, indicating the affections of the mind, as it pursues, possesses, rejects, or shuns. And thus by constantly hearing words, as they occurred in various sentences, I collected gradually for what they stood; and having broken in my mouth to these signs, I thereby gave utterance to my will.” (Augustine 398/1961) • The present analysis (and evidence) rehabilitates Augustine against Wittgenstein’s (1953) ridicule…

Tomasello (1999, 2003): functionally based distributional analysis • Learning a grammar is an inductive process, but this is “smart induction” since it is based on meaning and understanding communicative intent. • “…functionally based distributional analysis: to understand the communicative significance of a linguistic structure of any type, the child must determine the contribution it is making to the adult’s communicative intention as a whole. … [T]his process does not in any way conflict with or compete with processes of cultural learning; the only issue here is that what units children are imitatively learning and how they manage to isolate these units so that they can imitatively learn their conventional use.” (p.147) • Tomasello does not refer to consciousnesses, but to analysis, abstraction and understanding. Are they conceivable without consciousnesses?

Tomasello (1999, 2003)

Consciousness in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) The role of “consciousness” in second language learning, in particular in relation to the role of “rules” is currently being heatedly debated. Three basic positions: • Conscious learning of linguistic rules is impossible in all but the most simple cases, and even there it is inferior to unconscious “acquisition”. (Kraschen 1985) • Conscious rules are useful to focus attention on selected aspects, which are then learned by unconscious inductive processes. (Sharwood Smith 1991) • Consciousness is essential for noticing features and the understanding of the structures of the language being acquired is done through rules. (Schmidt 1990)

Consciousness in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) • Kraschen, Reber, Paradis…: effective “acquisition” of a second language proceeds unconsciousnly (either by setting UG parameters or by induction) for all but the “simplest” grammatical phenomena, such as Plural in English is formed by adding –s, not by explicit conscious learning! • Conflation of three very different phenomena: • Conscious attention to or induction of explicit rules • Ability to report the rules • Explicit learning

Consciousness in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) • “Rules” in SLA = “rules of (pedagogical) grammar” ≠ theoretical grammar rules ≠ rules of language! The latter are intuitively known and constitute our knowledge. (Itkonen 1978) • Rules of language are primarily “simple rules”. “Complex rules” are arrived to through generalization/analogy (Tomasello 1999, Itkonen in press) • “Implict tasks” vs. “explicit tasks” promote different styles of (conscious) processing: data-driven vs. concept-driven

Consciousness in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) • Richardson (1996): “Both detection and noticing require attention. Consequently, the view taken here is that there can be no learning, or encoding in memory without attention. … Awareness is critical to noticing, and distinguishes it from simple detection.” (ibid: 61) • “Explicit and implicit information processing require conscious attention to form at input, but … implicit information processing is data-driven and results in the accumulation of instances, whereas explicit information processing is conceptually driven, involving access to schemata in long-term memory.” (ibid: 64)

Consciousness in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Short term memory Elaboration Noticing detection awareness Long term memory

Summary and conclusions Reflective consciousness (C) is essential for: • The existence of language (as a social institution): language exists as a form of mutual knowledge (Itkonen 1978), this knowledge is not (just) procedural, but declarative, implying accessibility to C. • Our individual knowledge of language: all speakers of a language can perform judgements of correctness, and judgement is a process requiring C. Our knowledge of language rules is intentional (has an object) and flexibly applied (“aspectual shape”). Searle (1992)

Summary and conclusions Reflective consciousness (C) is essential for: • Our use of language: the flexibility of rule application, based in part on the awareness of the hearer’s knowledge state and on decisions, requires C (Chafe 1994). • Our learning of language (by children and adults): forming preverbal concepts (Mandler 2004), understanding communicative intent (Tomasello 1999, Bloom 2000) and learning grammatical generalizations (Tomasello 1999) presuppose some form of analysis => C. (Nearly) all learning requires attention, and explicit learning requires noticing, implying C.

Negative implications • By pushing the knowledge, acquisition and use of language into the (deep) unconscious, linguists and psychologists have misrepresented it. “For years now, leading representatives of theoretical linguistics have been arguing that humans, being governed by a blind ‘language instinct’, can be exhaustively described in physico-biological terms. … [T]his conception has been shown to be fundamentally false. Humans are also, and crucially, social, normative, and conscious beings, occasionally capable of acts of free will.” (Itkonen 2003: 183)

Negative implications • Philosophers occasionally claim that (the illusion of) consciousness is produced by language (Dennett 1991). But if consciousness as a whole, and deliberative consciousness is particular is more basic than language, then this can not be the case. • Once this is acknowledged, one can (and must) still ask how language gives human consciousness its particular characteristics (Vygotsky 1962, Donald 1991, 2001).

The Dependence of Language on Consciousness