The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

  To begin with, we can discard the pre-scientific, magical model in which the issues are usually framed:

  The “controversy” over whether heredity, environment, or some interaction between the two causes behavior is just incoherent. The organism has vanished; there is an environment without someone to perceive it, behavior without a behaver, learning without a learner. As Alice thought to herself when the Cheshire Cat vanished quite slowly, ending with the grin which remained some time after the rest of it had gone: “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”

  The following model is also simplistic, but it is a much better beginning:

  For we can now do justice to the complexity of the human brain, the immediate cause of all perception, learning, and behavior. Learning is not an alternative to innateness; without an innate mechanism to do the learning, it could not happen at all. The insights we have gained about the language instinct make this clear.

  First, to reassure the nervous: yes, there are important roles for both heredity and environment. A child brought up in Japan ends up speaking Japanese; the same child, if brought up in the United States, would end up speaking English. So we know that the environment plays a role. If a child is inseparable from a pet hamster when growing up, the child ends up speaking a language, but the hamster, exposed to the same environment, does not. So we know that heredity plays a role. But there is much more to say.

  • Since people can understand and speak an infinite number of novel sentences, it makes no sense to try to characterize their “behavior” directly—no two people’s language behavior is the same, and a person’s potential behavior cannot even be listed. But an infinite number of sentences can be generated by a finite rule system, a grammar, and it does make sense to study the mental grammar and other psychological mechanisms underlying language behavior.

  • Language comes so naturally to us that we tend to be blasé about it, like urban children who think that milk just comes from a truck. But a close-up examination of what it takes to put words together into ordinary sentences reveals that mental language mechanisms must have a complex design, with many interacting parts.

  • Under this microscope, the babel of languages no longer appear to vary in arbitrary ways and without limit. One now sees a common design to the machinery underlying the world’s language, a Universal Grammar.

  • Unless this basic design is built in to the mechanism that learns a particular grammar, learning would be impossible. There are many possible ways of generalizing from parents’ speech to the language as a whole, and children home in on the right ones, fast.

  • Finally, some of the learning mechanisms appear to be designed for language itself, not for culture and symbolic behavior in general. We have seen Stone Age people with high-tech grammars, helpless toddlers who are competent grammarians, and linguistic idiot savants. We have seen a logic of grammar that cuts across the logic of common sense: the it of It is raining that behaves like the John of John is running, the mice-eaters who eat mice differing from the rat-eaters who eat rats.

  The lessons of language have not been lost on the sciences of the rest of the mind. An alternative to the Standard Social Science Model has emerged, with roots in Darwin and William James and with inspiration from the research on language by Chomsky and the psychologists and linguists in his wake. It has been applied to visual perception by the computational neuroscientist David Marr and the psychologist Roger Shepard, and has been elaborated by the anthropologists Dan Sperber, Donald Symons, and John Tooby, the linguist Ray Jackendoff, the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, and the psychologists Leda Cosmides, Randy Gallistel, Frank Keil, and Paul Rozin. Tooby and Cosmides, in their important recent essay “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” call it the Integrated Causal Model, because it seeks to explain how evolution caused the emergence of a brain, which causes psychological processes like knowing and learning, which cause the acquisition of the values and knowledge that make up a person’s culture. It thus integrates psychology and anthropology into the rest of the natural sciences, especially neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Because of this last connection, they also call it Evolutionary Psychology.

  Evolutionary psychology takes many of the lessons of human language and applies them to the rest of the psyche:

  • Just as language is an improbable feat requiring intricate mental software, the other accomplishments of mental life that we take for granted, like perceiving, reasoning, and acting, require their own well-engineered mental software. Just as there is a universal design to the computations of grammar, there is a universal design to the rest of the human mind—an assumption that is not just a hopeful wish for human unity and brotherhood, but an actual discovery about the human species that is well motivated by evolutionary biology and genetics.

  • Evolutionary psychology does not disrespect learning but seeks to explain it. In Molière’s play Le Malade Imaginaire, the learned doctor is asked to explain how opium puts people to sleep, and cites its “sleep-producing power.” Leibniz similarly ridiculed thinkers who invoke

  expressly occult qualities or faculties which they imagined to be like little demons or goblins capable of producing unceremoniously that which is demanded, just as if watches marked the hours by a certain horodeictic faculty without having need of wheels, or as if mills crushed grains by a fractive faculty without needing anything resembling millstones.

  In the Standard Social Science Model, “learning” has been invoked in just these ways; in evolutionary psychology, there is no learning without some innate mechanism that makes the learning happen.

  • Learning mechanisms for different spheres of human experience—language, morals, food, social relations, the physical world, and so on—are often found to work at cross-purposes. A mechanism designed to learn the right thing in one of these domains learns exactly the wrong thing in the others. This suggests that learning is accomplished not by some single general-purpose device but by different modules, each keyed to the peculiar logic and laws of one domain. People are flexible, not because the environment pounds or sculpts their minds into arbitrary shapes, but because their minds contain so many different modules, each with provisions to learn in its own way.

  • Since biological systems with signs of complex engineering are unlikely to have arisen from accidents or coincidences, their organization must come from natural selection, and hence should have functions useful for survival and reproduction in the environments in which humans evolved. (This does not mean, however, that all aspects of mind are adaptations, or that the mind’s adaptations are necessarily beneficial in evolutionary novel environments like twentieth-century cities.)

  • Finally, culture is given its due, but not as some disembodied ghostly process or fundamental force of nature. “Culture” refers to the process whereby particular kinds of learning contagiously spread from person to person in a community and minds become coordinated into shared patterns, just as “a language” or “a dialect” refers to the process whereby the different speakers in a community acquire highly similar mental grammars.

  A good place to begin discussing this new view of mind design is the place we began in discussing the language instinct: universality. Language, I noted early on, is universal among human societies, and as far as we know has been throughout the history of our species. Though languages are mutually unintelligible, beneath this superficial variation lies the single computational design of Universal Grammar, with its nouns and verbs, phrase structures and word structures, cases and auxiliaries, and so on.

  At first glance, the ethnographic record seems to offer a stark contrast. Anthropology in this century has taken us through a mind-broadening fairground of human diversity. But might this carnival of taboos, kinship systems, shamanry, and all the rest be as superficial as the difference between dog and hund, hiding a universal human nature?

  The culture of anthropologists t
hemselves makes one apprehensive about their leitmotif that anything goes. One of America’s most prominent, Clifford Geertz, has exhorted his colleagues to be “merchants of astonishment” who “hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange.” “If we wanted only home truths,” he adds, “we should have stayed at home.” But this is an attitude that guarantees that anthropologists will miss any universal pattern in human ways. In fact, it can lead to outright error as the commonplace is cloaked as the anomalous, as in the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. As one young anthropologist wrote to me:

  The Eskimo vocabulary story will get its own section in a project of mine—a book whose working title is One Hundred Years of Anthropological Malpractice. I have been collecting instances of gross professional incompetence for years now: all of the anthropological chestnuts that turn out not to be true, but maintain their presence in textbooks anyway as the intellectual commonplaces of the field. Samoan free sex and the resultant lack of crime and frustration, the sex-reversed cultures like the “gentle” Arapesh (the men are head-hunters), the “stoneage” pristine Tasaday (a fabrication of the corrupt Philippine Minister of Culture—nearby villagers, dressed down as matriarchal “primitives”), the ancient matriarchies during the dawn of civilization, the fundamentally different Hopi concept of time, the cultures that everyone knows are out there where everything is the reverse of here, etc., etc.

  One of the unifying threads will be that complete cultural relativism makes anthropologists far more credulous of almost any absurdity (Casteñeda’s Don Juan novels—which I really enjoyed by the way—are in many textbooks as sober fact) than almost any ordinary person would be, equipped only with common sense. In other words, their professional “expertise” has made them complete and total gulls. Just as fundamentalism disposes you to accept accounts of miracles, being of the trained anthropologist faith disposes you to believe in any exotic account from Elsewhere. In fact, a lot of this nonsense is part of the standard intellectual equipment of every educated social scientist, providing a permanent obstacle to balanced reasoning about various psychological and social phenomena. I figure it will make me permanently unemployable, so I am not aiming to finish it any time soon.

  The allusion to Samoan free sex pertains to Derek Freeman’s 1983 bombshell showing how Margaret Mead got the facts wrong in her classic book Coming of Age in Samoa. (Among other things, her bored teenage informants enjoyed pulling her leg.) The other accusations are carefully documented in a recent review, Human Universals, written by another anthropologist, Donald E. Brown, who was trained in the standard ethnographic tradition. Brown has noted that behind anthropologists’ accounts of the strange behavior of foreign peoples there are clear but abstract universals of human experience, such as rank, politeness, and humor. Indeed, anthropologists could not understand or live within other human groups unless they shared a rich set of common assumptions with them, what Dan Sperber calls a metaculture. Tooby and Cosmides note:

  Like fish unaware of the existence of water, anthropologists swim from culture to culture interpreting through universal human metaculture. Metaculture informs their every thought, but they have not yet noticed its existence…. When anthropologists go to other cultures, the experience of variation awakens them to things they had previously taken for granted in their own culture. Similarly, biologists and artificial intelligence researchers are “anthropologists” who travel to places where minds are far stranger than anywhere any ethnographer has ever gone.

  Inspired by Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG), Brown has tried to characterize the Universal People (UP). He has scrutinized archives of ethnography for universal patterns underlying the behavior of all documented human cultures, keeping a skeptical eye out both for claims of the exotic belied by the ethnographers’ own reports, and for claims of the universal based on flimsy evidence. The outcome is stunning. Far from finding arbitrary variation, Brown was able to characterize the Universal People in gloriously rich detail. His findings contain something to startle almost anyone, and so I will reproduce the substance of them here. According to Brown, the Universal People have the following:

  Value placed on articulateness. Gossip. Lying. Misleading. Verbal humor. Humorous insults. Poetic and rhetorical speech forms. Narrative and storytelling. Metaphor. Poetry with repetition of linguistic elements and three-second lines separated by pauses. Words for days, months, seasons, years, past, present, future, body parts, inner states (emotions, sensations, thoughts), behavioral propensities, flora, fauna, weather, tools, space, motion, speed, location, spatial dimensions, physical properties, giving, lending, affecting things and people, numbers (at the very least “one,” “two,” and “more than two”), proper names, possession. Distinctions between mother and father. Kinship categories, defined in terms of mother, father, son, daughter, and age sequence. Binary distinctions, including male and female, black and white, natural and cultural, good and bad. Measures. Logical relations including “not,” “and,” “same,” “equivalent,” “opposite,” general versus particular, part versus whole. Conjectural reasoning (inferring the presence of absent and invisible entities from their perceptible traces).

  Nonlinguistic vocal communication such as cries and squeals. Interpreting intention from behavior. Recognized facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt. Use of smiles as a friendly greeting. Crying. Coy flirtation with the eyes. Masking, modifying, and mimicking facial expressions. Displays of affection.

  Sense of self versus other, responsibility, voluntary versus involuntary behavior, intention, private inner life, normal versus abnormal mental states. Empathy. Sexual attraction. Powerful sexual jealousy. Childhood fears, especially of loud noises, and, at the end of the first year, strangers. Fear of snakes. “Oedipal” feelings (possessiveness of mother, coolness toward her consort). Face recognition. Adornment of bodies and arrangement of hair. Sexual attractiveness, based in part on signs of health and, in women, youth. Hygiene. Dance. Music. Play, including play fighting.

  Manufacture of, and dependence upon, many kinds of tools, many of them permanent, made according to culturally transmitted motifs, including cutters, pounders, containers, string, levers, spears. Use of fire to cook food and for other purposes. Drugs, both medicinal and recreational. Shelter. Decoration of artifacts.

  A standard pattern and time for weaning. Living in groups, which claim a territory and have a sense of being a distinct people. Families built around a mother and children, usually the biological mother, and one or more men. Institutionalized marriage, in the sense of publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman eligible for childbearing. Socialization of children (including toilet training) by senior kin. Children copying their elders. Distinguishing of close kin from distant kin, and favoring of close kin. Avoidance of incest between mothers and sons. Great interest in the topic of sex.

  Status and prestige, both assigned (by kinship, age, sex) and achieved. Some degree of economic inequality. Division of labor by sex and age. More child care by women. More aggression and violence by men. Acknowledgment of differences between male and female natures. Domination by men in the public political sphere. Exchange of labor, goods, and services. Reciprocity, including retaliation. Gifts. Social reasoning. Coalitions. Government, in the sense of binding collective decisions about public affairs. Leaders, almost always nondictatorial, perhaps ephemeral. Laws, rights, and obligations, including laws against violence, rape, and murder. Punishment. Conflict, which is deplored. Rape. Seeking of redress for wrongs. Mediation. In-group/out-group conflicts. Property. Inheritance of property. Sense of right and wrong. Envy.

  Etiquette. Hospitality. Feasting. Diurnality. Standards of sexual modesty. Sex generally in private. Fondness for sweets. Food taboos. Discreetness in elimination of body wastes. Supernatural beliefs. Magic to sustain and increase life, and to attract the opposite sex. Theories of fortune and misfortune. Explanations of disease and death. Medicine. Rituals, including rites of passage. Mourning the d
ead. Dreaming, interpreting dreams.

  Obviously, this is not a list of instincts or innate psychological propensities; it is a list of complex interactions between a universal human nature and the conditions of living in a human body on this planet. Nor, I hasten to add, is it a characterization of the inevitable, a demarcation of the possible, or a prescription of the desirable. A list of human universals a century ago could have included the absence of ice cream, oral contraceptives, movies, rock and roll, women’s suffrage, and books about the language instinct, but that would not have stood in the way of these innovations.

  Like the identical twins reared apart who dipped buttered toast in their coffee, Brown’s Universal People jolts our preconceptions about human nature. And just as the discoveries about twins do not call for a buttered-toast-in-coffee gene, the discoveries about universals do not implicate a universal toilet-training instinct. A theory of the universal mind is doubtless going to be as abstractly related to the Universal People as X-bar theory is related to a list of universals of word order. But it seems certain that any such theory will have to put more in the human head than a generalized tendency to learn or to copy an arbitrary role model.

  With the assumption of an infinitely variable human nature from anthropology out of the way, let’s look at the assumption of an infinitely acquisitive learning ability from psychology. How might we make sense of the concept of a general, multipurpose learning device?

  Explicit pedagogy—learning by being told—is one kind of general-purpose learning, but most would agree it is the least important. Few people have been convinced by arguments like “No one ever teaches children how Universal Grammar works, but they respect it anyway; therefore it must be innate.” Most learning, everyone agrees, takes place outside of classroom lessons, by generalizing from examples. Children generalize from role models, or from their own behaviors that are rewarded or not rewarded. The power comes from the generalization according to similarity. A child who echoed back a parent’s sentences verbatim would be called autistic, not a powerful learner; children generalize to sentences that are similar to their parents’, not to those sentences exactly. Likewise, a child who observes that barking German shepherds bite should generalize to barking Doberman pinschers and other similar dogs.