Tim and the Germans

I am 99% sure who the commenter “Tim” at my Freakonomics asking about linguistics and hermeneutics is, and he provides an excellent opportunity to describe what being the Assistant Village Idiot is like. The title, like the job, was chosen because “Village Idiot” was taken. It is meant to have ambiguous meaning, both arrogant and humble, and that fits me well. Sure I’m a bright enough guy and love collecting information, but much of the point of this blog is that many issues aren’t really all that complicated. Despite the evasions people go through to avoid plain sense, many things are understandable even to the Village Idiot. So - sometimes, the Village Idiot designates me to explain them to you.

I had a predictive essay, complete with scoring, about another religious thinker recently. I will attempt this feat again. At no time will my fingers leave my hands. I admit, even though I know flat nothing about hermeneutics, I have an advantage, which I will illustrate with reference to a similar advantage Tim has in another sphere. Young Tim grew up in an evangelical denomination, but more to the point, he went to Baptist schools (With my son. That’s how I know). Tim’s antennae for detecting someone trying to sneak in a culturally Baptist idea under theological cover are always going to be better than mine. Minutes before the speaker has come near mentioning popular music, Tim is going to pick up the faint whiff on the breeze “He’s going to claim that rock music is unspiritual.” (Or that evolution is bunk, or whatever). In reading about an historical figure, Tim is going to perceive that a hagiography is being loaded into the blunderbuss before the rest of us do. There are some things that Tim is forever going to see coming from five hundred meters out. The number of topics that you can do this with will grow, Tim, which is why old people get grouchy.

Eventually, of course, enough new things happen in the world that grouchy old people start guessing wrong, but I think I’m still at least a decade out from that.

Hermeneutics. Linguistics. German name. So that must be post 1920. Assigned reading at North Park for some class (North Park is the Evangelical Covenant school, and the Covenant is a cross between the evangelical and mainstream denominations), so we will suspect that it’s attempting to inject Protestant Mainstream Academic into the discussion.

Though the German arrogance is quiet, and under the radar in this area, it is nowhere more complete than in Philosphy. German philosophers define themselves entirely in terms of each other, as if no one else exists. They might treat a Dutchman (Spinoza) or a Dane (Kiergegaard) as an honorary German for purposes of discussion, and they find the French philosphers amusing, but they put their energy into what they say versus what other Germans have said. So this big name in hermeneutics is going to be one more fitting himself into the mix. What did Kant say, and how does my work compare with his? In contrast to what Heidigger thought, what do I think is better? And Fichte and Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer – must see how they fit, too. The construction of a vast abstract system whose beauty can be contemplated by other Germans is the goal. Bertrand Russell, Hobbes, Bosanquet, JS Mill, Santayana - these people don’t really exist as far as the Germans are concerned. They might have a drink with Sartre or Derrida, but they really can’t make heads or tales of those intriguing Frenchmen.

(To be fair to the Germans on this, it is true that French philosophy largely consists of taking German ideas, which at least attempt some coherency, and screwing them up even further, so that personal morality becomes not just ignored, but denied. For this, see Foucault, DeMan, Artaud.)

In and amongst this will be the sordid biographies of impregnating the maid, obsessions with the best friend’s wife, complete estrangement from family, messy divorces, envy of other contemporary German philosophers and their preferments, misuse of money, and in the 20th C we must always ask “What did you do in the war?” The answer usually is “kept a low profile. But I really, really hated the Nazis.”

This contrast is not accidental and not simply ironic. It is two sides of the same coin. Simple piety is beyond them, therefore, they compensate by constructing these elaborate systems of knowing, sensing, intuiting. How to contemplate God. How to know the Truth. Insofar as moral considerations can intrude into the discussion, it is never the persoanl morality of individual actions. It is always the morality of the community’s actions that intrigues them. Huh. Fancy that.

Next: Putting the linguistic angle into hermeneutics will consist of stretching some obvious items into another of those vast systems. That words change in meaning over time is hardly surprizing, nor that different groups of people interpret abstractions such as liberty and truth in different ways a huge advance. These are reasonable cautions in approaching texts. And it’s way cool to talk about, because you get to bring in sociology and patiently explain how things don’t really mean what they seem to mean. It is also a great opportunity to tell other people what Jesus really meant. Which for all of us, if we are allowed to engage in such an exploration, always results in Jesus teaching exactly what the cool kids thought when we were young and impressionable. Example: find an important difference between what Jim Wallis teaches and what we used to say at church basement coffee houses in the 60’s. Or between Jerry Falwell and the social teachings of small Appalachian churches in the 1950’s. Philosophers don’t usually sink that low themselves, of course, contenting themselves with the abstract. It falls to those after to point out that contemplating the Absolute is much, much more moral than merely being honest.

I’m going to guess that the linguistics involved in Herr German’s hermeutics is going to be theory of mind, theory of meaning stuff, derived from Edward Sapir (look up Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), who was another German who was “in the air” through much of the 20th C. This is why I guessed “after 1920” for this philosopher. Sapir’s idea of the cultural relativism of meaning, as exemplified in language, would likely appeal to a German hermeneuticist. The fact that linguists, led by Chomsky and Pinker, are much less convinced of SWH, probably didn’t cause him to change his theories much if he lived that long.

Summary: Things to look for:

1. German philosophy indistinguishable from other Germans unless you really, really care about these things. How can we make it look like we’re contemplating Truth, God, Absolute, without getting stuck with things we don’t like? If we could work in theories of Art and talk about Schiller and Rilke, that would be extra cool.
2. Complete political passivity during the Nazi era. If he was too young for that, then activity in leftist social movements of the 50’s – 70’s – when it was safe - would be my second choice.
3. Something seedy in the biography. Morality that is corporate rather than personal.
4. Linguistic theory based on the cultural relativism of Edward Sapir.
5. Regular words used in specialized ways, usually capitalized, like “Phenomenon,” or “Meaning.” Of course, most philosophers do this.

I’m not going to do the scoring on this one. Just an educated guess this time.

Brains And Languages

Teri – I think it was teri, let me check; yes, teri wondered over at my review of The Power of Babel whether different families of languages operated in the brain in different ways. The short answer is “No, but…”

When people are using their first language, whether that be English, Hebrew, or Maori, the same parts of the brain light up. Sort of. There is some variation among individuals on this score, so we can’t definitively say there is no difference. There is enough similarity to give partial evidence for the Noam Chomsky-Steven Pinker view that there is some built-in language hardware in the brain. (The alternate view is that the very versatile and protean brain is less specialized than that, and could be used for a thousand different things, but we all happen to use language.)

Beyond that, however, things get very interesting. Different parts of the brain light up when we are speaking, hearing, reading, or writing, even in the same language. Words set to music are stored differently. Memorized pieces are stored differently. Sign language is stored and used differently. Not completely or radically differently for any of these, (there is always overlap) but enough to be quite certain that different processes are being engaged.

If you are bilingual from early childhood, you store things differently. If you add in a language (or two) a little later but before puberty, however, it will not only store in a different way, but will “move” the first language somewhat. Languages learned after puberty are each stored in a different strip of Broca’s area.

Edward Sapir, an early 20^th C linguist, believed that the language you speak conditions your view of reality. You may have seen reference to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or the book Language, Thought, and Reality in school. Same guy. Sapir was fascinated by the very different way that verbs are used in the Hopi language, and believed that being taught Hopi, especially as a first language, allowed one to understand some advanced physics concepts more easily than speakers of European languages could. This showed up in the 80’s as a pop-psych idea that people experienced understanding information differently, and that this revealed itself in language. Those who said “I see what you mean” were different from those who said “I hear what you are driving at” or “I follow what you are saying.” A charming idea, but one that has not been borne out by any research.

The Russian Alexander Luria, founder of neuropsychology, studied memory, brain injuries, and aphasia in an attempt to understand language and the brain in the era before there were any of the brain-scanning techniques we use today. If you have read Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, he records many of Luria’s cases and observations.

If you are interested in following this further, you can type “bilingual brain,” “aphasia,” or “psycholinguistics” into a search engine. Big names to watch for are Dahaene, Obler & Albert, and Kotik-Friedgut. As to the original question, it is Kotik-Friedgut who remarked that people who are bilingual seem to fall entirely within one of two camps, with no middle ground: those who perceive that they are a different “person” or “aspect” when speaking each language, and those who find the idea bizarre and foolish.

Links: Lighter fare: Uwashington ,Dartmouth , New Scientist , Lc Media

Journal articles: Oxford Journal, Oxford Journal, TC Library, Cambridge

Discussions:  Kotik-Friedgut ,  Kotik-Friedgut

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Mythbusting

 Why the worst idea in linguistics won't die, at Dead Language Society. I have written about both Sapir and Whorf over the years - in exactly the same posts. It is the very cool idea that the language we speak constrains our speech, so that having a different native language, or learning a new one, drives how we think. All those stories of "the German word Schadenfreude does not exist in English, and it is untranslatable." No, it's not. There is no one-to-one translation for the word, but it is easily translated if you allow phrases and multiple adjectives.  This is why your pastor can take apart a word in the NT from Greek and explain it to you, even though it is different from English - because it can be translated. At an overwhelming level, any thought that can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another.  That's going to be tough when one society has very different technology from another and it will take time, but it can be done. 

I knew the essay was going to include the very slight exceptions, such as Russian light blue and dark blue, and even though it is after the paywall jump, I am going to bet that the Amazonian language Piraha and its lack of numbers will be brought forth as a stronger exception.  But really, you aren't ever going to meet any speakers of Piraha, so there's no need to know it. Linguistic Relativism isn't true, even though we would like it to be.

Waves of Native American Languages

 Four Waves of Migration From Siberia. Very similar to what we have seen before.

 Edward Sapir noted the n-, m- pronoun sequence over a century ago, but it fell out of favor because the "splitters" among linguists wanted there to be 150+ Native American language families and did not like seeing unifying similarities.

Even when they hit you in the face. The theory was that all the tribes were borrowing and influencing each other's pronouns in the interest of trade and communication. Except pronouns are among the most stable, long-lasting words in a language. Sapir and Joseph Greenberg believed their were three groups: Amerind, by far the largest and comprising most native languages, Na-Dene, which includes Navajo, Hopi, and the Athabaskan languages, and Eskimo-Aleut, arriving last and confined to the Arctic. The linguists who reject Greenberg most frequently do so because they (loudly and sometimes angrily) reject his technique of multilateral comparison in favor of the more traditional bilateral comparison used to identify language similarities and groups.

But the genetic evidence keeps building up year after year. So now it's up to four waves, but the first one does not seem to have clear influence. The drums are beating.

I admit that I have some nagging memory of Johanna Nichols and some controversy, which didn't show up in her Wikipedia page. Also, timelines for language relationship have been bouncing around a fair bit lately, so the sequence may matter more than the numbers.

Personal Pronouns

Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. Aragorn, in Lord of the Rings.

The topic of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - the idea that the language we speak influences or even controls what we think, and more properly called Linguistic Relativity - came up in the comments section over at Chicago Boyz.  It shows up from time to time in comments sections at Maggie's Farm as well. There is a strong version, that echoes Orwell's 1984, that modes of thought can be prevented (or created) by eliminating (or requiring) certain words or phrases. This is about as thoroughly discredited as it gets in cognitive science.  There is no evidence that people who don't have Gemütlichkeit in their language can't get the concept.  It just takes a while to get it across.  Vocabulary is efficiency.

The weak version, that one's language influences, on a percentage basis, how one thinks hasn't fared much better.  There is some soft evidence that there are slight differences in perception of color according to one's original language, but this is undermined by the fact that those learning a new language can rapidly switch to the new way of looking at things.  Similarly, languages have many different ways of describing where something is, and there is often an initial difficulty in describing what one means in a new language.  How much this is the language and culture and how much is cognitive remains controversial, but no solid evidence that there are enduring differences has been found. Some of you may remember the idea of NLP, neurolinguistic programming as a method of changing how one thinks about things in order to communicate with others.  The theory is that there is a fundamental difference in saying "I see what you mean" versus "I hear what you are saying" or "I get what you are driving at" or "I understand you." A charming idea, but again, one that has eluded any measurable difference.

People really, really like this idea. It was part of the 19th C nationalisms. Groups have always tied their identities to their language, but this took on an intensified form of "we even think differently than other groups." Because all languages have words and phrases that do not translate linearly, people take this as evidence of a difference in thinking. Because there are cultural differences, people come to believe that language drives these rather than reflects them. In the 20s and 30s the idea became very popular among anthropologists, and it spread to other fields - and to writers like Orwell - over the next decades. I loved the idea as an undergraduate, and held on to it for decades, without really thinking about whether it was true or not.  It seemed self-evident, once one had broken through and been introduced to it. How could your mother-tongue not influence your thinking, for Pete's sake? I wonder now if some of its intuitive proof nature comes from the experience of intelligent people (or at least those with high vocabulary, which is very similar) speaking with those who lack both the words and concepts for things.

This idea of linguistic relativity is strongly present in our attempts to remake language for political purposes. It became a goal early on for feminists to remake the masculine-assumed nature of English, as in chairman, mankind, congressman. The use of Ms had two objectives, one which fits this conversation and one which doesn't.  It is true that the new abbreviation sought to remove the greater emphasis placed on a woman's marital status than a man's, especially after the similar but age-reflecting distinction  Master-Mister dropped out of use for male.  That fits this discussion.  Yet I think the privacy concern, though related, is a little different. It's none of their damn business whether I'm married or not. I have some sympathy with that.

The belief was that changing the language would change people's attitudes, or at least help that along. I think that would be hard to measure either way, but given that language doesn't seem to drive attitude change as much as reflect it, and sometimes forced change creates backlash, I am unsympathetic to further enforced changes.  I think the idea of driving change is behind the insistence on trans people insisting on different personal pronouns.  They think that putting the language in line will help put attitudes in line over time.  I think this is misguided, and as I just suggested, the backlash may actually make things worse. Having to focus on pronouns takes my focus off whatever else a person is saying, and therefore, hearing them less well.

Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes

Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes by E Randolph Richards and Brandon J O'Brien.

Recommended. It discusses many of the ideas we have talked about here: the emphasis on family, tribal, community perspectives in the cultures of Bible times, and how they play out now; seasonal time versus chronological time; honor and shame in culture compared to conscience and guilt; language and emphasis revealing different understandings of scripture, which evangelicals often miss; hearing versus reading.  Some of the examples they use are the same as ones I or a commenter has used here.

I wondered briefly if it were not too elementary, and if I couldn't have done nearly as well myself, just writing off-the-cuff. That soon went away.  They extended the standard "cross-cultural considerations for missionaries" anecdotes beyond what I had considered, and also found other topics which had not occurred to me. For example, in their discussion of time they note that the focus on beginning, middle, and end and getting things in their proper chronological order is much stronger in Western cultures than in most others. Yet they mention seasonal time only in passing and focus more on kairos, which has more to do with "the fullness of time," or "in its proper season." The latter is used twice as often as chronos in the NT. They relate this distinction back to scripture verses related to Jesus's coming, death and resurrection, and second coming, giving a clearer idea what the original hearers of scripture would have understood.

I had expected something slightly different, more of a comparison of what Americans culturally assume in reading some Bible events to what Mediterranean, and specifically Jewish assumptions would have been.  There is plenty of that.  But there is also reporting on modern Christians in other cultures (one of the authors taught in Indonesia for years, so that figures prominently) and how they perceive what they read. Sometimes their experience seems closer to Bible culture, sometimes it is only also different and also a block to understanding. The authors do overstate at times, as in contrasting the individualism of American culture with the community/family emphasis of other cultures. The contrast is real, but it is not entire. There is some indiviualism in other places, and plenty of tribal identification here.

There is one repeated error that threatened to undo the whole book for me.  They assert the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in a strong version - the idea that language does not merely reflect how we speak, but determines it.  It is one of those ideas that keeps coming back, impossible to kill because it would be so cool if it were true. There are scraps of evidence of not-entirely-trivial influence of language on thought in very specific contexts, but the bulk of the evidence shows otherwise, even though researchers are often hoping for linguistic relativity to be true. Richards and O'Brien assert that it is a big question mark whether it is cart or horse, and conclude it is a circle.  Well, no it isn't. However, it doesn't much mar the book as they focus on the practical results that languages have different words, different aspects, and different approaches, which illustrate the different thinking of other cultures. Though they continue to assert that these differences go a long way to causing the thinking, it can nearly always be ignored as not changing the sense of their main point.

They spend more time on the me-focus of modern culture, including modern evangelicals, than I would have liked, as I think the discussion is crowded with too many cliches for clarity at present. It was the topic of Sunday's sermon, however, and perhaps it should continue to be a major focus, however weary I am of the repetition. I would also have liked a more nuanced discussion of some examples in the penultimate chapter,  in which they list cultural virtues (e.g efficiency, planning) that are wrongly considered biblical and moral rather than practical; and some which may even be counter to biblical principles, such as tolerance, seeking leadership, or fighting for freedom (as opposed to justice).  I suspect that their intent was to throw these topics out there for the readers to consider on their own, not discuss them in detail.  Still, I felt there was much to be said and I would have liked more.

They close with a better context for verses and sections which we read individually - Jeremiah 29:11,  Romans 8:28, or with the hidden assumption that it is all about the time we were born into, Matthew 24 - showing that the common interpretations may in fact be badly out-of-focus, even wrong. I was never especially prone to fall into those particular errors, but they do remain common, and it is good they included those.

My takeaway is that I will do all Bible reading with a forced emphasis on hearing it as directed to the church and the community rather me personally.  I don't know how long I will hold to that particular approach. Until the fullness of time, perhaps. I already do this somewhat, but it won't hurt to ramp that up, to hear God's teaching as a member, a part, rather than as a special snowflake. This also looks at first glance to be helpful in discerning when Jesus is talking to an individual and when to a group.

Cursive Myths

The importance of cursive to the development of children seems to spawn myth after myth.  This week a woman assured me that it taught children to have more continuity of thought, and that this was research, not an hypothesis. How one would measure that seems an interesting research design.

It's just one of those zombie ideas that people want to be true, like the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity.  It just won't die. As I don't share the idea myself, I have little insight into the motives for it. For some it may simply be that they were good at it.  Others think it looks better, and attempting beauty is good for us. It was important in our grandparents' education, so traditionalists think it must thus be obviously superior to whatever-the-hell-they-teach-kids-now. There is a particular attraction to ideas that it is neurologically important, or that it builds character. Again, how on earth would we eliminate selection bias in measuring that? 

I was forever given extra penmanship practice in grades school, sometimes being kept in from recess. It was considered important that I learn to hold the implement loosely at the proper angle, rather than squeezing the pencil until my fingers ached. This was presented to me as an approach that not only made the letters look better, but would train me to be more "relaxed."  Well, I did have a dozen symptoms of anxiety, yes, from pica to bruxism and beyond, but I never experienced holding a small wooden rod loosely and trying to do something intentional with it as having any positive effect.

Replication Crisis

Mid century 20th psychology is about the psychology of cool ideas. Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo ended up in every Psych 101 textbook, even after the evidence for their famous studies started to erode (and eventually collapsed). That's why social psychology especially is having a replication crisis - because they did a lot of poorly designed experiments to try and illustrate various points that people thought were true because they hoped were true. After WWII people were fascinated by the question of what would cause otherwise decent people to do evil things.  It was an era that believed more and more that environment could make you do anything, so "experiments" were designed not to study that - certainly not to research that, but to illustrate those ideas. 

If that sounds like something that is more artistic expression than it is science, well, yeah. Exactly. People in those fields who wanted to do actual science existed, and a much greater percentage exists now. But no one did New Yorker articles on them, no one talked about them in college bull sessions, no one referenced them from lecterns (and pulpits!) to make their own favored points. We still see it with such nonsense as such as priming, which is a follow on from the Hidden Persuaders school of belief who is worried that "they" can make you do just about anything. One of my favorite rants i, mentioned just a few posts ago, is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relatively, that we think in different ways because we grew up with a different language. It just sounds like it would be cool if it were true.

I wish I could track down the quote but have come up empty.  Maybe I thought of it myself and attributed to some senior psychologist complaining about the banal state of experimentation these days.*"You can't just put the horses out on the track and let them run anymore," meaning you could no longer think up creative experiments with far-reaching implications as much. Well, but that's the point. Are these horses representative of horses in general? Is this race a good measurement of horse abilities in general or only of particular types of horses? Does the horse behavior come naturally out of what horses are or is it imposed by trainers and jockeys? Is it different if there's a crowd? These are the things we actually want to know if we are scientists. Though admittedly it IS much more fun to watch a horse race and maybe even put down a bet on it.   

Consider Margaret Mead's Coming of Age In Samoa, described as "a proponent of broadening sexual conventions." Well fine.  Just do that on your own time without calling it science, wouldja? Or the top thinkers in psychology and sociology from their earliest decades, the Freuds, Jungs, Skinners, Webers and Durkheims  Remember my discussion of Art from Goethe's Three Questions, one of my most-visited posts in 20 years.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed that Three Questions be asked about any work of art. They must be answered in order.

1. What was the artist trying to do?

2. How well did he do it?

3. Was it worth the doing?

We wanted them to do science. They wanted to put ideas they thought were true forward, and tried to squeeze that into the form dominant and the time. Everyone considered science-y things as the most intellectual. Not necessarily rel science, though that was nice, too. They were artists masquerading as scientists. It doesn't make them wrong.  But for things like replication and advancement of knowledge rather than theorising, it doesn't cut the mustard.

Science fiction is very cool. In many ways it's more fun than actual science. And it often can tell us something about human behavior or technical possibilities. But ultimately, it's literature, not science, even if it is greatly influenced by real science, as with Isaac Asimov.

*Because it would be really cool if some senior psychologist agreed with me, you know?