The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  How indeed can a sensible, a vocable, an odd little series of squeaks and grunts, mean anything, represent anything? Therein surely lies the mystery of language. The word buttermilk and the word William (if I know a William) mean, represent, the objects referred to in a wholly different sense than thunder means rain, and different too from the etymological intention of the word. There is an articulation of word to thing so powerful that word can still be taken for thing (i.e., the false onomatopoeia of words like fuzzy, scream, limber, slice). Is not a profound avenue of thought opened up by the realization that the sound I make can become for me the thing I see? Marcel has said that when I ask, “What is that flower?” I am not satisfied merely to be given a definition. I am only satisfied to be told, “That flower is a lupin,” even though the word lupin may convey nothing to me.

  But now we find the real paradox—the first unscientific answer, which consisted in giving the name of the flower, although it had practically no rational basis, yet satisfied the demand in me which the interpretation by reduction tends on the contrary to frustrate.

  Can this satisfaction be dismissed as just a prelogical remnant of the superstition of identifying words with things, or is this “superstition” in fact the very condition of our knowledge (and our ignorance)? When I am told as a child that this flower is a lupin, when you name something for me and I confirm it by saying it too—what I know now is not only that the flower is something but that it is something for you and me. Our common existence is validated. It is the foundation of what Marcel calls the metaphysics of we are instead of I think.

  What then is this extraordinary faculty, if as Mrs. Langer believes, it is neither a refinement of an animal function nor an idealist logos which constitutes the world? It is, according to Mrs. Langer, a basically human need.

  This basic need, which is certainly obvious only in man, is the need of symbolization.

  Symbolization is the essential act of the mind, whether it be in art, in language, in rite, in dreams, in logic, and as such cannot be grasped by conventional biological concepts. It is an “elementary need” of the new cerebral cortex. There is no other way, it appears, of accounting for the “impractical” uses of language and the “perversity of ritual.”

  Now something is wrong here.

  In what sense does Mrs. Langer speak of a “need”? Everyone agrees that in the genetic or naturalist schema the responses of an organism to the environment are adaptive and are specified by the needs of the organism. These needs are variously characterized as sex, hunger, defense, etc., but are all reducible to the service of two basic biological requirements: maintenance of the internal milieu and parturition. Moreover, a response can be evaluated simply by the degree of success with which it fulfills the need. Now how can the basic human need of symbolization be subsumed under these valid biological categories? Can it be subsumed at all, except nominally: by calling it a “need,” a need of symbolization as there is a need of food? One represents things by symbols simply because one needs to do so. But a need in the biological sense is always but one term in a functional schema, thus, for example: need: sex, manifesting as drive: sexual activity, serving the function: propagation of species. Simply to call the symbolic transformation a need and let it go at that is to set up an autonomous faculty which serves its own ends, the equivalent of saying that bees store honey because there is in bees a need of storing honey.

  This is an intolerable disjunction, intolerable from any reasoned point of view, whether it be materialism, idealism, or realism. On the one hand, Mrs. Langer has seen that the naturalist theory of meaning, however admirable may be its effort to account for all meaning under the one rubric of causal relation between organism and environment, leaves out precisely what she has hit upon as the very essence of meaning—on the other, she senses that there is no reason at all to drag in the whole apparatus of idealism with its denial of subsistent reality.

  If the language symbol is not just a sign in an adaptive schema, and if it does not itself constitute reality but rather represents something, then what does it represent?

  It is regrettably at this point that she drops the whole epistemological problem, so charged with implications, and turns to aesthetics. There she sets forth to perfection the truly distinctive character of the symbol: that it neither signifies another meaning nor constitutes meaning anew, but that it represents something. And so she can speak of the truth and falsity of the art symbol, according as it does or does not succeed in representing its subject.

  If, by the same token, it ever be admitted in the field of cognition that the symbolic transformation is not an end in itself, a “need,” but a means, a means of knowing, even as is the art symbol—then the consequences are serious indeed. For it will be knowledge, not in the sense of possessing “facts” but in the Thomist and existential sense of identification of the knower with the object known. Is it not possible that this startling semantic insight, that by the word I have the thing, fix it, and rescue it from the flux of Becoming around me, might not confirm and illuminate the mysterious Thomist notion of the interior word, of knowing something by becoming something? that the “basic need of symbolization” is nothing more or less than the first ascent in the hierarchy of knowledge, the eminently “natural” and so all the more astonishing instrument by which I transform the sensory content and appropriate it for the stuff of my ideas, and that therefore the activity of knowing cannot be evaluated according to the “degree to which it fills a biological need,” nor according to the “degree to which the symbol is articulated,” but by nothing short of Truth itself?

  It must remain to be seen how valuable a hermeneutic of knowledge Mrs. Langer’s new key will prove to be. We may admire the intrepidity with which she sets forth without regard for philosophical labels or consequences, while at the same time reserving the right to examine these latter, especially in view of her professions of allegiance. It is not impossible that the consequences of this particular “generative idea” may surprise even its gifted delineator.

  15

  A THEORY OF LANGUAGE

  A Martian View of Linguistic Theory,Plus the Discovery That an Explanatory Theory Does

  Not Presently Exist, Plus the Offering of a Crude Explanatory Model on the Theory That

  Something Is Better than Nothing

  ALTHOUGH THE WRITER of this paper is not, strictly speaking, a Martian, his distance from and innocence of standard linguistic disciplines is, if not extraterrestrial, at least extralinguistic. Accordingly, this paper can commend itself to readers more by reason of its ignorance than its knowledge. What virtues it may have are mainly those of its perspective. I do not presume to compare myself to the boy who noticed that the king was naked nor linguists to the king’s subjects. Yet innocence—and distance—may have its uses. Just as a view of the earth from space may reveal patterns in forested areas and deserts which might be missed by the most expert foresters and geographers—because they are too close—so it is that what follows is what might be seen from a Martian perspective, that is to say, a perspective worlds removed from the several admirable disciplines of linguistics.

  Imagine, anyhow, a Martian astronaut of average intelligence and an average scientific education. He lands on earth with the assignment of making a brief survey of the status of earth sciences. After taking cram courses in physical, chemical, and biological sciences, he reads up all he can on theoretical linguistics. Upon his return to Mars, and after thinking things over, he fancies he can see a thing or two which might be useful to earth linguists—by virtue of his perspective. It is somewhat as if he had been in orbit a hundred years ago when Sir Richard Burton and Captain Speke were thrashing around East Africa in search of the Nile’s source. From his altitude the astronaut can beam down instructions to the explorers: “No no no! You’re too far west! Head due east and in fifty miles you’ll strike a large body of fresh water. Proceed north along shore until…”

  What the Martian sees in the case of earth li
nguistics is a, to him at least, remarkable bifurcation of theoretical effort of such a nature that the central phenomenon is straddled and, as he sees it, largely missed—as if Speke were on one side of Lake Victoria and Burton on the other. There is, on the one hand, a triumphant tradition in modern linguistics taking several forms and variously named, “descriptive,” “structural,” “transformational,” associated with people like Bloomfield, Harris, Chomsky—varied theoretical approaches, to be sure, yet sharing one important trait in common: that of approaching the phenomenon of language through a formal analysis of the corpora of languages, an analysis which abstracts both from the people who speak the language and the things they talk about. Semantics or the relation between words and things, the Martian notices, is mentioned now and then but is treated by and large like a bastard at a family reunion. Kinship is admitted, yes—after all words are often used to mean things—but the visitor does not exactly fit into the family. He, the Martian, recalls, for example, Bloomfield’s model where “experience” is stuck onto an otherwise neat hierarchy of phonemes, morphemes, and such, somewhat like a sore thumb; or the transformation model (Chomsky) which specifies a “central syntactic component” to which a somewhat mysterious “interpretive semantic component” is added as a kind of afterthought.

  This is one branch of the bifurcation then, the structural-descriptive-generative analysis of language as a corpus. The other branch is not so much a working science as it is a shared belief, a faith that human language must surely be of such-and-such an order. Until a few years ago it was set down, again with all the fervor of an article of faith, that human language must not be different in kind from communication in other species. Proposals to the contrary were taken as a rejection of the entire scientific tradition of the West (Hockett). The traditional model was of course that of the behaviorists and learning theorists with one or another refinement, for example, Bloomfield’s notion of language as “secondary response.” The trouble was that this model worked only in carefully chosen cases: Jack getting thirsty and saying “Water” and Jill going up the hill to fetch it, or Malinowski’s example of the Trobriand Island fisherman shouting “Mackerel here!” whereupon other fishermen respond by paddling over. But the theory didn’t seem to work when, the fishing over, the feast eaten, the islanders were sitting around the fire spinning tales about long past or mythical events.

  No less astonishing to the Martian is the more recent countervailing view that human language is utterly unlike animal communication (Chomsky), so much so that it was felt necessary to revive the old Rationalist notion of innate ideas to account for it (Chomsky). Maybe Hockett was right after all. Anyhow, what strikes the Martian most about the controversy is the extreme character of the alternatives. If he understands correctly, it appears as if, once the inadequacy of the behaviorist model is admitted, one has no choice but to chuck “empiricism,” rummage in the philosophical attic, and dust off a somewhat decrepit mind-body dualism. Surely, thinks the Martian, empiricism as it applies to science is not a dogma about the nature of the mind—that it is a tabula rasa or whatever—but rather a proposition about the practice of the scientific method, namely, that the scientist relies on data which he obtains through his senses, to account for which he constructs theories and models, and to confirm the latter he must return to sense data.

  In what follows, the Martian will revive another idea, not quite so dusty nor so far removed from the practice of science. This is Charles Peirce’s theory of abduction, which is an analysis of scientific hypothesis formation, peculiarly apposite, as the Martian sees it, to linguistic theorizing, and which avoids such ideological extremes as mechanism and mentalism.

  From an orbital perspective, it is possible to make other, more or less elementary observations.

  It seems to the Martian, to begin with, that the transformationalists’ assault on the learning-theory model was both long overdue and remarkably successful (Fodor and Katz, Chomsky) and that, as a consequence, the latter has been dismantled and can no longer be entertained as a serious explanation of language as phenomenon. The watershed was probably marked by the appearance of Chomsky’s celebrated review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Linguistic theory would never thereafter be the same.

  But, unless the Martian is very much mistaken—and it is here that he does resemble somewhat the boy who noticed something wrong with the king—it appears to him that while the prevailing behaviorist theory has been dismantled, no other theory has been advanced to take its place, this in spite of all the talk by transformationalists about “explanatory models.”

  It is somewhat as if the Ptolemaic geocentric universe had been dismantled but Copernicus had not yet come along with his heliocentric model.

  Accordingly, the assumption will be made in what follows that linguistic theory has not yet reached the level of explanatory adequacy of, say, seventeenth-century biology. It was then that, following the work of Harvey and Malpighi, it became possible to construct crude but accurate models of cardiac and renal function; to suppose, for example, that the heart is like a unidirectional pump or the kidney is like a filter. One may not say as much at the present time about the unique human capacity for language. True, a schema of sorts has been suggested (Chomsky; Katz) to show what happens when a child exposed to fragments of a language acquires a competence in that language: primary linguistic data→ LAD→ Grammar (where LAD is the Language Acquisition Device). What seems fairly obvious, however, is that despite claims to the contrary this schema is in no sense an explanatory model. It is no more than a statement of the problem under investigation. The “LAD” appears to be a black box whose contents are altogether unknown.

  Finally, the Martian shall make bold to put forward a crude model not entirely of his own devising—Charles Peirce is its earthly progenitor.

  1. Descriptive or structural linguistics cannot be regarded as a theory of language if the word theory is used as it is used in other sciences.

  Structural or descriptive linguistics (Harris) deals with regularities in certain features of speech. These regularities are in the distributional relations among the features of speech in question, i.e., the occurrence of these features relative to each other within utterances. The procedure of structural linguistics is “to begin with the raw data of speech and with a statement of grammatical structure…essentially a twice-made application of two major steps: the setting up of elements, and the statement of the distribution of these elements relative to each other. First, the distinct phonological elements are determined and the relations among them investigated. Then the distinct morphological elements are determined and the relations among them investigated.” (Harris)

  Such a discipline is undoubtedly beyond reproach—as far as it goes. Indeed one might well agree with Lévi-Strauss in setting up the method of structural linguistics as a model for anthropologists, a distributional method which Lévi-Strauss in fact applies to other cultural phenomena such as art, myth, ritual, religion, even cooking (Lévi-Strauss).

  Yet it must not be forgotten that this method, rigorous as it is, does not pretend to be other than descriptive. Thus if one were studying hematology, one could imagine a science called “structural hematology” which consisted of a description of the cellular and chemical components of the blood and of certain “distributional” relations between them, e.g., a high nonprotein nitrogen is regularly associated with a low hemoglobin. But such a discipline, however rigorous, could never serve as a theory of blood formation or as a theory of the function of hemoglobin. Accordingly, the method of structural linguistics has at its core a fundamental ambiguity. This ambiguity can be expressed by two questions which presently go not only unanswered but unasked: (1) Does structuralism make the assumption that both language and culture are by their very nature phenomena of such an order that the search for distributional regularities is a terminus ad quern for both linguists and anthropologists? (2) Or is it rather the case that the current status of both arts is so primitive that we a
re necessarily at a stage comparable to Linnaean taxonomy, and so it goes without saying that at some future time linguistics shall arrive at a general explanatory theory bearing roughly the same relation to descriptive linguistics that Darwinean theory bears to Linnaean taxonomy?

  The answer to either question is not clear, because, for one reason, the questions are not asked. What is clear is that in any case descriptive or structural linguistics is not a theory of language in the ordinary use of the word theory.

  2. Behaviorism, both in its early Pavlovian and Watsonian versions, and in the later refinements of modern learning theory, does indeed offer a plenary model of language as phenomenon, which meets all the specifications of explanatory theory except one: It is wrong.

  S-R theory, however modified by little s’s and r’s, by “intervening variables,” “dispositions to respond,” “habit structures,” “generalization and analogy,” “stimulus control,” “network of associative connections,” and the like, fails to address itself to, let alone explain, those very features of language behavior which set it apart from other forms of animal communication, e.g., the phenomenon of symbolization or naming, the sentence as the basic unit of language behavior, the learning performance of a child, who, upon exposure to a fragmentary input of a language, is able to utter and understand any number of new sentences in the language—this after a relatively short period and without anyone taking much trouble about it.

  3. Transformational generative grammar is not an explanatory theory of language, although it has been advertised as such (Chomsky). That it fails to serve as such is not a consequence of its stated objective, which is in fact correct; namely, to specify the character of the device which mediates the processing of the input, the primary data, and the output, the grammar of the language. Nor does it fail as theory primarily because of the putative and unconfirmed status of so-called “deep structures,” from which surface structures are derived by transformations (Hockett).