The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  I have taken the trouble to review Peirce’s theory of abduction both because of its possible value to linguistic theory and to call attention to the odd use to which Chomsky has put it.

  Chomsky has revived Peirce’s theory of abduction, not in order to arrive at an explanatory theory of language, but rather to attribute the capacity for abduction to the child who acquires language. In the same way that, as Peirce speculated, man is somehow attuned to the rest of the universe so that he is able to theorize successfully about it, so it is that “knowledge of a language—a grammar—can be acquired only by an organism that is ‘preset’ with a severe restriction on the form of grammar.”

  This innate restriction is a precondition, in the Kantian sense, for linguistic experience, and it appears to be the critical factor in determining the course and result of language learning. The child cannot know at birth which language he is to learn, but he must know that its grammar must be of a predetermined form that excludes many imaginable languages. Having selected a permissible hypothesis, he can use inductive evidence for corrective action, confirming or disconfirming his choice. (Chomsky)

  What is odd of course is not Chomsky’s idea that language can only be learned by an organism “preset” with a severe restriction on the form of grammar—this squares very well with the suggestion made in this paper that all sentences in any language must take the form of a coupling made by a coupler—but rather Chomsky’s proposal to shift the burden of explanation from the linguist, the theorist of language as a phenomenon, to the child, the subject under study. Chomsky’s theory of language is that the child is capable of forming a theory of language.

  Now Chomsky’s abdication may or may not be justified. Perhaps in the long run it will turn out that it is not possible to arrive at an explanatory theory of language in any ordinary sense of the word and that the only “explanation” available is that the child somehow hits on the grammar of a language after a fragmentary input. If this is so, we must face up to the fact that we have reverted to homunculus biology, explaining human potentialities both in spermatozoa and in children by supposing that each somehow has a little man locked inside. I believe, however, that by the serious use of abduction, hypothesis, not the attributing of it to the child but the figuring out of what goes on inside the head of a child, the theorist can hope to make a start toward the construction of a relatively simple and parsimonious model along Peircean lines.

  It is curious to note in passing that if one is seeking philosophical progenitors for Peirce’s theory of abduction and the realism underlying his analysis of the scientific method, one is inevitably led not to Descartes and a mind-body dualism but, according to Peirce, to Duns Scotus!

  7. Suppose one were to advance the following tentative hypothesis:

  The basic and genetically prime component of the LAD is a semological-phonological device through which semological elements are coupled with phonological elements. Such linkages form a finite inventory of semological-phonological configurations or “semophones,” stable functional entities which correspond to semantically contentive words, e.g., wet, yellow, sock, knee. These semophones in turn become available for couplings to form a large number of “open-open” combinations, which are nothing less than primitive forms of the adult NP-VP sentence.

  If this is the case, two questions arise: (1) Does such a model allow the possibility of looking for a neurophysiological correlate of the LAD—a possibility apparently disallowed by a basically syntactical model—and (2) if so, is there presently any evidence of such a correlate?

  For some time I had supposed that the basic event which occurs when one utters or understands a sentence must be triadic in nature (Percy). That is to say, sentences comprise two elements which must be coupled by a coupler. This occurs in both the naming sentence, when semological and phonological elements are coupled, and in the standard declarative NP—VP sentence which comprises what one talks about and what one says about it.

  Thus, when the father in Peirce’s example points out an object and utters the sound balloon and the son looks and nods, an event of the order of that shown in Figure 12 must occur somewhere inside both father and son.

  Later, when the son is older and utters some such sentence as That balloon is loose, a coupling of another sort occurs, as in Figure 13, also a triadic event.

  Let us say nothing about the physiological or ontological status of the “coupler.” Suffice it for the present to say that if two elements of a sentence are coupled, we may speak of a coupler. Indeed, the behavioral equivalent of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum may be: If the two elements of a sentence are coupled, there must be a coupler. The latter dictum would seem to be more useful to the behavioral scientist, including transformational linguists, than Descartes’s, because Descartes’s thinking is not observable but his speech is.

  Accordingly, I had supposed that what the neurophysiologist and anatomist should look for in the brain is not a neuron circuitry transmitting S-R arcs with little s’s and r’s interposed (what Peirce would call a series of dyads) of the following order:

  but rather a structural-functional entity with the following minimal specifications: (1) It must be, considering the unique and highly developed language trait in man, something which is present and recently evolved in the human brain and either absent or rudimentary in the brains of even the highest nonhuman primates. (2) It should be structurally and functionally triadic in character, with the “base” of the triad comprising what must surely be massive interconnections between the auditory and visual cortexes. What else indeed is the child up to for months at a time when it goes around naming everything in sight—or asking its name—than establishing these functional intercortical connections?

  It was with no little interest, therefore, that I came across the work of Norman Geschwind, who believes he has identified just such a recently evolved structure, “the human inferior parietal lobule, which includes the angular and supramarginal gyri, to a rough approximation areas 39 and 40 of Brodmann. In keeping with the views of many anatomists, Crosby et al. comment that these areas have not been recognized in the macaque. Critchley, in his review of the anatomy of this region, says that even in the higher apes these areas are present in only rudimentary form” (Geschwind). And further:

  In man, with the introduction of the angular gyrus region, intermodal associations become powerful. In a sense the parietal association area frees man to some extent from the limbic system…

  The development of language is probably heavily dependent on the emergence of the parietal association areas since at least in what is perhaps its simplest aspect (object naming) language depends on associations between other modalities and audition. Early language experience, at least, most likely depends heavily on the forming of somesthetic-auditory and visual-auditory associations, as well as auditory-auditory associations. (Geschwind)

  Such findings are adduced here as a matter of interest only and to show that at least the model here adumbrated gives a hint what to look for. Being fully aware of the strong feelings of many psychologists and psycholinguists against such localization of cognitive functions (e.g., Lenneberg and Premack), and being myself altogether incompetent to evaluate Geschwind’s findings, I suggest only that if a triadic theory of language acquisition is correct, one might expect to find some such structure. If Geschwind is right, what he has uncovered is the cortical “base” of the triadic structure of the typical semological-phonological naming sentence (Figure 14).

  The apex of the triangle, the coupler, is a complete mystery. What it is, an “I,” a “self,” or some neurophysiological correlate thereof, I could not begin to say.

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