LANGUAGE
The subject of language is one which has not been studied with
sufficient care in traditional philosophy. It was taken for granted
that words exist to express “thoughts,” and generally also that
“thoughts” have “objects” which are what the words “mean”. It was
thought that, by means of language, we could deal directly with what
it “means”, and that we need not analyse with any care either of the
two supposed properties of words, namely that of “expressing” thoughts
and that of “meaning” things. Often when philosophers intended to be
considering the objects meant by words they were in fact considering
only the words, and when they were considering words they made the
mistake of supposing, more or less unconsciously, that a word is a
single entity, not, as it really is, a set of more or less similar
events. The failure to consider language explicitly has been a cause
of much that was bad in traditional philosophy. I think myself that
“meaning” can only be understood if we treat language as a bodily
habit, which is learnt just as we learn football or bicycling. The only
satisfactory way to treat language, to my mind, is to treat it in this
way, as Dr. Watson does. Indeed, I should regard the theory of language
as one of the strongest points in favour of behaviourism.
Man has various advantages over the beasts, for example, fire,
clothing, agriculture, and tools--not the possession of domestic
animals, for ants have them. But more important than any of these
is language. It is not known how or when language arose, nor why
chimpanzees do not speak. I doubt if it is even known whether writing
or speech is the older form of language. The pictures made in caves by
the Cro-Magnon men may have been intended to convey a meaning, and may
have been a form of writing. It is known that writing developed out of
pictures, for that happened in historical times; but it is not known
to what extent pictures had been used in pre-historic times as a means
of giving information or commands. As for spoken language, it differs
from the cries of animals in being not merely an expression of emotion.
Animals have cries of fear, cries expressing pleasure in the discovery
of food, and so on, and by means of these cries they influence each
other’s actions. But they do not appear to have any means of expressing
anything except emotions, and then only emotions which they are
actually feeling. There is no evidence that they possess anything
analogous to narrative. We may say, therefore, without exaggeration,
that language is a human prerogative, and probably the chief habit in
which we are superior to the “dumb” animals.
There are three matters to be considered in beginning the study of
language. First: what words are, regarded as physical occurrences;
secondly, what are the circumstances that lead us to use a given word;
thirdly, what are the effects of our hearing or seeing a given word.
But as regards the second and third of these questions, we shall find
ourselves led on from words to sentences and thus confronted with fresh
problems perhaps demanding rather the methods of _Gestaltpsychologie_.
Ordinary words are of four kinds: spoken, heard, written, and read. It
is of course largely a matter of convention that we do not use words of
other kinds. There is the deaf-and-dumb language; a Frenchman’s shrug
of the shoulders is a word; in fact, any kind of externally perceptible
bodily movement may become a word, if social usage so ordains. But the
convention which has given the supremacy to speaking is one which has
a good ground, since there is no other way of producing a number of
perceptibly different bodily movements so quickly or with so little
muscular effort. Public speaking would be very tedious if statesmen
had to use the deaf-and-dumb language, and very exhausting if all
words involved as much muscular effort as a shrug of the shoulders. I
shall ignore all forms of language except speaking, hearing, writing,
and reading, since the others are relatively unimportant and raise no
special psychological problems.
A spoken word consists of a series of movements in the larynx and
the mouth, combined with breath. Two closely similar series of such
movements may be instances of the same words, though they may also
not be, since two words with different meanings may sound alike; but
two such series which are not closely similar cannot be instances of
the same word. (I am confining myself to one language.) Thus a single
spoken word, say “dog,” is a certain set of closely similar series of
bodily movements, the set having as many members as there are occasions
when the word “dog” is pronounced. The degree of similarity required
in order that the occurrence should be an instance of the word “dog”
cannot be specified exactly. Some people say “dawg”, and this must
certainly be admitted. A German might say “tok”, and then we should
begin to be doubtful. In marginal cases, we cannot be sure whether a
word has been pronounced or not. A spoken word is a form of bodily
behaviour without sharp boundaries, like jumping or hopping or running.
Is a man running or walking? In a walking-race the umpire may have
great difficulty in deciding. Similarly there may be cases where it
cannot be decided whether a man has said “dog” or “dock”. A spoken word
is thus at once general and somewhat vague.
We usually take for granted the relation between a word spoken and a
word heard. “Can you hear what I say?” we ask, and the person addressed
says “yes”. This is of course a delusion, a part of the naive realism
of our unreflective outlook on the world. We never hear what is said;
we hear something having a complicated causal connection with what is
said. There is first the purely physical process of sound-waves from
the mouth of the speaker to the ear of the hearer, then a complicated
process in the ear and nerves, and then an event in the brain, which
is related to our hearing of the sound in a manner to be investigated
later, but is at any rate simultaneous with our hearing of the sound.
This gives the physical causal connection between the word spoken and
the word heard. There is, however, also another connection of a more
psychological sort. When a man utters a word, he also hears it himself,
and so that the word spoken and the word heard become intimately
associated for anyone who knows how to speak. And a man who knows how
to speak can also utter any word he hears in his own language, so that
the association works equally well both ways. It is because of the
intimacy of this association that the plain man identifies the word
spoken with the word heard, although in fact the two are separated by a
wide gulf.
In order that speech may serve its purpose, it is not necessary, as it
is not possible, that heard and spoken words should be identical, but
it is necessary that when a man utters different words the heard words
should be different, and when he utters the same word on two occasions
the heard word should be approximately the same on the two occasions.
The first of these depends upon the sensitiveness of the ear and its
distance from the speaker; we cannot distinguish between two rather
similar words if we are too far off from the man who utters them. The
second condition depends upon uniformity in the physical conditions,
and is realised in all ordinary circumstances. But if the speaker were
surrounded by instruments which were resonant to certain notes but not
to certain others, some tones of voice might carry and others might
be lost. In that case, if he uttered the same word with two different
intonations, the hearer might be quite unable to recognise the
sameness. Thus the efficacy of speech depends upon a number of physical
conditions. These, however, we will take for granted, in order to come
as soon as possible to the more psychological parts of our topic.
Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A
spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential
time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having
an essential space-order. As to what we mean by “matter”, that is a
question with which we shall have to deal at length at a later stage.
For the present it is enough to observe that the material structures
which constitute written words, unlike the processes that constitute
spoken words, are capable of enduring for a long time--sometimes
for thousands of years. Moreover, they are not confined to one
neighbourhood, but can be made to travel about the world. These are the
two great advantages of writing over speech. This, at least, has been
the case until recently. But with the coming of radio writing it has
begun to lose its pre-eminence: one man can now speak to multitudes
spread over a whole country. Even in the matter of permanence, speech
may become the equal of writing. Perhaps, instead of legal documents,
we shall have gramophone records, with voice signatures by the parties
to the contract. Perhaps, as in Wells’s _When the Sleeper Awakes_,
books will no longer be printed but merely arranged for the gramophone.
In that case the need for writing may almost cease to exist. However,
let us return from these speculations to the world of the present day.
The word read, as opposed to the written or printed word, is just
as evanescent as the word spoken or heard. Whenever a written word,
exposed to light, is in a suitable spatial relation to a normal eye, it
produces a certain complicated effect upon the eye; the part of this
process which occurs outside the eye is investigated by the science of
light, whereas the part that occurs in the eye belongs to physiological
optics. There is then a further process, first in the optic nerve and
afterwards in the brain; the process in the brain is simultaneous
with vision. What further relation it has to vision is a question
as to which there has been much philosophical controversy; we shall
return to it at a later stage. The essence of the matter, as regards
the causal efficacy of writing, is that the act of writing produces
quasi-permanent material structures which, throughout the whole of
their duration, produce closely similar results upon all suitably
placed normal eyes; and as in the case of speaking, different written
words lead to different read words, and the same word written twice
leads to the same read word--again with obvious limitations.
So much for the physical side of language, which is often unduly
neglected. I come now to the psychological side, which is what really
concerns us in this chapter.
The two questions we have to answer, apart from the problems raised
by sentences as opposed to words, are: First, what sort of behaviour
is stimulated by hearing a word? And secondly, what sort of occasion
stimulates us to the behaviour that consists in pronouncing a word? I
put the questions in this order because children learn to react to the
words of others before they learn to use words themselves. It might be
objected that, in the history of the race, the first spoken word must
have preceded the first heard word, at least by a fraction of a second.
But this is not very relevant, nor is it certainly true. A noise may
have meaning to the hearer, but not to the utterer; in that case it
is a heard word but not a spoken word. (I shall explain what I mean
by “meaning” shortly.) Friday’s footprint had “meaning” for Robinson
Crusoe but not for Friday. However that may be, we shall do better
to avoid the very hypothetical parts of anthropology that would be
involved, and take up the learning of language as it can be observed in
the human infant of the present day. And in the human infant as we know
him, definite reactions to the words of others come much earlier than
the power of uttering words himself.
A child learns to understand words exactly as he learns any other
process of bodily association. If you always say “bottle” when you give
a child his bottle, he presently reacts to the word “bottle”, within
limits, as he formerly reacted to the bottle. This is merely an example
of the law of association which we considered in the preceding chapter.
When the association has been established, parents say that the child
“understands” the word “bottle”, or knows what the word “means”. Of
course the word does not have _all_ the effects that the actual bottle
has. It does not exert gravitation, it does not nourish, it cannot
bump on to the child’s head. The effects which are shared by the word
and the thing are those which depend upon the law of association or
“conditional reflexes” or “learned reactions”. These may be called
“associative” effects or “mnemic” effects--the latter name being
derived from Semon’s book _Mneme_,[6] in which he traces all phenomena
analogous to memory to a law which is, in effect, not very different
from the law of association or “conditioned reflexes”.
[6] London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.
It is possible to be a little more precise as to the class of effects
concerned. A physical object is a centre from which a variety of
causal chains emanate. If the object is visible to John Smith, one
of the causal chains emanating from it consists first of light-waves
(or light-quanta) which travel from the object to John Smith’s eye,
then of events in his eye and optic nerve, then of events in his
brain, and then (perhaps) of a reaction on his part. Now mnemic
effects belong only to events in living tissue; therefore only those
effects of the bottle which happen either inside John Smith’s body,
or as a result of his reaction to the bottle, can become associated
with his hearing the word “bottle”. And even then only certain events
can be associated: nourishment happens in the body, yet the word
“bottle” cannot nourish. The law of conditioned reflexes is subject
to ascertainable limitations, but within its limits it supplies what
is wanted to explain the understanding of words. The child becomes
excited when he sees the bottle; this is already a conditioned reflex,
due to experience that this sight precedes a meal. One further stage
in conditioning makes the child grow excited when he hears the word
“bottle”. He is then said to “understand” the word.
We may say, then, that a person understands a word which he hears if,
so far as the law of conditioned reflexes is applicable, the effects of
the word are the same as those of what it is said to “mean”. This of
course only applies to words like “bottle”, which denote some concrete
object or some class of concrete objects. To understand a word such
as “reciprocity” or “republicanism” is a more complicated matter, and
cannot be considered until we have dealt with sentences. But before
considering sentences we have to examine the circumstances which make
us use a word, as opposed to the consequences of hearing it used.
Saying a word is more difficult than using it, except in the case of
a few simple sounds which infants make before they know that they are
words, such as “ma-ma” and “da-da.” These two are among the many random
sounds that all babies make. When a child says “ma-ma” in the presence
of his mother by chance she thinks he knows what this noise means, and
she shows pleasure in ways that are agreeable to the infant. Gradually,
in accordance with Thorndike’s law of effect, he acquires the habit
of making this noise in the presence of his mother, because in these
circumstances the consequences are pleasant. But it is only a very
small number of words that are acquired in this way. The great majority
of words are acquired by imitation, combined with the association
between thing and word which the parents deliberately establish in the
early stages (after the very first stage). It is obvious that using
words oneself involves something over and above the association between
the _sound_ of the word and its meaning. Dogs understand many words,
and infants understand far more than they can say. The infant has to
discover that it is possible and profitable to make noises like those
which he hears. (This statement must not be taken quite literally, or
it would be too intellectualistic.) He would never discover this if
he did not make noises at random, without the intention of talking.
He then gradually finds that he can make noises like those which he
hears, and in general the consequences of doing so are pleasant.
Parents are pleased, desired objects can be obtained, and--perhaps most
important of all--there is a sense of power in making intended instead
of accidental noises. But in this whole process there is nothing
essentially different from the learning of mazes by rats. It resembles
this form of learning, rather than that of Köhler apes, because no
amount of intelligence could enable the child to find out the names of
things--as in the case of the mazes, experience is the only possible
guide.
When a person knows how to speak, the conditioning proceeds in the
opposite direction to that which operates in understanding what others
say. The reaction of a person who knows how to speak, when he notices
a cat, is naturally to utter the word “cat”; he may not actually do
so, but he will have a reaction leading towards this act, even if for
some reason the overt act does not take place. It is true that he may
utter the word “cat” because he is “thinking” about a cat, not actually
seeing one. This, however, as we shall see in a moment, is merely one
further stage in the process of conditioning. The use of single words,
as opposed to sentences, is wholly explicable, so far as I can see, by
the principles which apply to animals in mazes.
Certain philosophers who have a prejudice against analysis contend that
the sentence comes first and the single word later. In this connection
they always allude to the language of the Patagonians, which their
opponents, of course, do not know. We are given to understand that a
Patagonian can understand you if you say “I am going to fish in the
lake behind the western hill”, but that he cannot understand the word
“fish” by itself. (This instance is imaginary, but it represents the
sort of thing that is asserted.) Now it may be that Patagonians are
peculiar--indeed they must be, or they would not choose to live in
Patagonia. But certainly infants in civilized countries do not behave
in this way, with the exception of Thomas Carlyle and Lord Macaulay.
The former never spoke before the age of three, when, hearing his
younger brother cry, he said, “What ails wee Jock?” Lord Macaulay
“learned in suffering what he taught in song”, for, having spilt a cup
of hot tea over himself at a party, he began his career as a talker
by saying to his hostess, after a time, “Thank you, Madam, the agony
is abated”. These, however, are facts about biographers, not about
the beginnings of speech in infancy. In all children that have been
carefully observed, sentences come much later than single words.
Children, at first, are limited as to their power of producing sounds,
and also by the paucity of their learned associations. I am sure the
reason why “ma-ma” and “da-da” have the meaning they have is that they
are sounds which infants make spontaneously at an early age, and are
therefore convenient as sounds to which the elders can attach meaning.
In the very beginning of speech there is not imitation of grownups, but
the discovery that sounds made spontaneously have agreeable results.
Imitation comes later, after the child has discovered that sounds
can have this quality of “meaning”. The type of skill involved is
throughout exactly similar to that involved in learning to play a game
or ride a bicycle.
We may sum up this theory of meaning in a simple formula. When through
the law of conditioned reflexes, A has come to be a cause of C, we will
call A an “associative” cause of C, and C an “associative” effect of
A. We shall say that, to a given person, the word A, when he hears it,
“means” C, if the associative effects of A are closely similar to those
of C; and we shall say that the word A, when he utters it, “means” C,
if the utterance of A is an associative effect of C, or of something
previously associated with C. To put the matter more concretely, the
word “Peter” means a certain person if the associated effects of
hearing the word “Peter” are closely similar to those of seeing Peter,
and the associative causes of uttering the word “Peter” are occurrences
previously associated with Peter. Of course as our experience increases
in complexity this simple schema becomes obscured and overlaid, but I
think it remains fundamentally true.
There is an interesting and valuable book by Messrs. C. K. Ogden and
I. A. Richards, called _The Meaning of Meaning_. This book, owing to
the fact that it concentrates on the causes of uttering words, not on
the effects of hearing them, gives only half the above theory, and that
in a somewhat incomplete form. It says that a word and its meaning have
the same causes. I should distinguish between _active_ meaning, that
of the man uttering the word, and _passive_ meaning, that of the man
hearing the word. In active meaning the word is associatively caused by
what it means or something associated with this; in passive meaning,
the associative effects of the word are approximately the same as those
of what it means.
On behaviourist lines, there is no important difference between proper
names and what are called “abstract” or “generic” words. A child learns
to use the word “cat”, which is general, just as he learns to use
the word “Peter”, which is a proper name. But in actual fact “Peter”
really covers a number of different occurrences, and is in a sense
general. Peter may be near or far, walking or standing or sitting,
laughing or frowning. All these produce different stimuli, but the
stimuli have enough in common to produce the reaction consisting
of the word “Peter”. Thus there is no essential difference, from a
behaviourist point of view, between “Peter” and “man”. There are
more resemblances between the various stimuli to the word “Peter”
than between those to the word “man”, but this is only a difference
of degree. We have not names for the fleeting particular occurrences
which make up the several appearances of Peter, because they are not
of much practical importance; their importance, in fact, is purely
theoretic and philosophical. As such, we shall have a good deal to say
about them at a later stage. For the present, we notice that there are
many occurrences of Peter, and many occurrences of the word “Peter”;
each, to the man who sees Peter, is a set of events having certain
similarities. More exactly, the occurrences of Peter are _causally_
connected, whereas the occurrences of the word “Peter” are connected by
similarity. But this is a distinction which need not concern us yet.
General words such as “man” or “cat” or “triangle” are said to denote
“universals”, concerning which, from the time of Plato to the present
day, philosophers have never ceased to debate. Whether there are
universals, and, if so, in what sense, is a metaphysical question,
which need not be raised in connection with the use of language. The
only point about universals that needs to be raised at this point is
that the correct use of general words is no evidence that a man can
think about universals. It has often been supposed that, because we can
use a word like “man” correctly, we must be capable of a corresponding
“abstract” idea of man, but this is quite a mistake. Some reactions
are appropriate to one man, some to another, but all have certain
elements in common. If the word “man” produces in us the reactions
which are common but no others, we may be said to understand the
word “man”. In learning geometry, one acquires the habit of avoiding
special interpretations of such a word as “triangle”. We know that,
when we have a proposition about triangles in general, we must not
think specially of a right-angled triangle or any one kind of triangle.
This is essentially the process of learning to associate with the word
what is associated with _all_ triangles; when we have learnt this,
we understand the word “triangle”. Consequently there is no need to
suppose that we ever apprehend universals, although we use general
words correctly.
Hitherto we have spoken of single words, and among these we have
considered only those that can naturally be employed singly. A child
uses single words of a certain kind before constructing sentences; but
some words presuppose sentences. No one would use the word “paternity”
until after using such sentences as “John is the father of James”; no
one would use the word “causality” until after using such sentences as
“the fire makes me warm”. Sentences introduce new considerations, and
are not quite so easily explained on behaviourist lines. Philosophy,
however, imperatively demands an understanding of sentences, and we
must therefore consider them.
As we found earlier, all infants outside Patagonia begin with single
words, and only achieve sentences later. But they differ enormously in
the speed with which they advance from the one to the other. My own two
children adopted entirely different methods. My son first practised
single letters, then single words, and only achieved correct sentences
of more than three or four words at the age of two and three months.
My daughter, on the contrary, advanced very quickly to sentences, in
which there was hardly ever an error. At the age of eighteen months,
when supposed to be sleeping, she was overheard saying to herself:
“Last year I used to dive off the diving-board, I _did_.” Of course
“last year” was merely a phrase repeated without understanding. And
no doubt the first sentences used by children are always repetitions,
unchanged, of sentences they have heard used by others. Such cases
raise no new principle not involved in the learning of words. What does
raise a new principle is the power of putting together known words into
a sentence which has never been heard, but which expresses correctly
what the infant wishes to convey. This involves the power to manipulate
form and structure. It does not of course involve the apprehension
of form or structure in the abstract, any more than the use of the
word “man” involves apprehension of a universal. But it does involve
a causal connection between the form of the stimulus and the form of
the reaction. An infant very soon learns to be differently affected by
the statement “cats eat mice” from the way he would be affected by the
statement “mice eat cats”; and not much later he learns to make one of
these statements rather than the other. In such a case, the cause (in
hearing) or the effect (in speaking) is a whole sentence. It may be
that one part of the environment is sufficient to cause one word, while
another is sufficient to cause another, but it is only the two parts
in their relation that can cause the whole sentence. Thus wherever
sentences come in we have a causal relation between two complex facts,
namely the fact asserted and the sentence asserting it; the facts
as wholes enter into the cause-and-effect relation, which cannot be
explained wholly as compounded of relations between their parts.
Moreover, as soon as the child has learned to use correctly relational
words, such as “eat”, he has become capable of being causally affected
by a relational feature of the environment, which involves a new degree
of complexity not required for the use of ordinary nouns.
Thus the correct use of relational words, _i.e._ of sentences, involves
what may be correctly termed “perception of form”, _i.e._ it involves a
definite reaction to a stimulus which is a form. Suppose, for example,
that a child has learnt to say that one thing is “above” another when
this is in fact the case. The stimulus to the use of the word “above”
is a relational feature of the environment, and we may say that this
feature is “perceived” since it produces a definite reaction. It may
be said that the relation _above_ is not very like the word “above”.
That is true; but the same is true of ordinary physical objects. A
stone, according to the physicists, is not at all like what we see
when we look at it, and yet we may be correctly said to “perceive” it.
This, however, is to anticipate. The definite point which has emerged
is that, when a person can use sentences correctly, that is a proof of
sensitiveness to formal or relational stimuli.
The structure of a sentence asserting some relational fact, such as
“this is above that”, or “Brutus killed Cæsar”, differs in an important
respect from the structure of the fact which it asserts. _Above_ is
a relation which holds between the two terms “this” and “that”; but
the _word_ “above” is not a relation. In the sentence the relation is
the temporal order of the words (or the spatial order, if they are
written), but the word for the relation is itself as substantial as
the other words. In inflected languages, such as Latin, the order of
the words is not necessary to show the “sense” of the relation; but in
uninflected languages this is the only way of distinguishing between
“Brutus killed Cæsar” and “Cæsar killed Brutus”. Words are physical
phenomena, having spatial and temporal relations; we make use of these
relations in our verbal symbolisation of other relations, chiefly to
show the “sense” of the relation, _i.e._ whether it goes from A to B or
from B to A.
A great deal of the confusion about relations which has prevailed in
practically all philosophies comes from the fact, which we noticed
just now, that relations are indicated, not by other relations,
but by words which, in themselves, are just like other words.
Consequently, in thinking about relations, we constantly hover between
the unsubstantiality of the relation itself and the substantiality of
the word. Take, say, the fact that lightning precedes thunder. If we
were to express this by a language closely reproducing the structure
of the fact, we should have to say simply: “lightning, thunder”, where
the fact that the first word precedes the second means that what the
first word means precedes what the second word means. But even if we
adopted this method for temporal order, we should still need words
for all other relations, because we could not without intolerable
ambiguity symbolise them also by the order of our words. All this will
be important to remember when we come to consider the structure of the
world, since nothing but a preliminary study of language will preserve
us from being misled by language in our metaphysical speculations.
Throughout this chapter I have said nothing about the narrative and
imaginative uses of words; I have dealt with words in connection
with an immediate sensible stimulus closely connected with what they
mean. The other uses of words are difficult to discuss until we have
considered memory and imagination. In the present chapter I have
confined myself to a behaviouristic explanation of the effects of
words heard as stimuli, and the causes of words spoken when the words
apply to something sensibly present. I think we shall find that other
uses of words, such as the narrative and imaginative, involve only new
applications of the law of association. But we cannot develop this
theme until we have discussed several further psychological questions.