Dark Matter of the Mind

Home > Other > Dark Matter of the Mind > Page 4
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 4

by Daniel L. Everett


  One way to build the case for dark matter would be to construct our understanding of it via an exploration of our knowledge of language. By this tack we can build on what is known about our most significant and largest set of intuitions and expert knowledge to offer an account of intuitions and expert and tacit knowledges across domains. This is not a new approach. Claude Lévi-Strauss used linguistic principles learned from Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, to invent “structuralist anthropology,” while Marvin Harris, Clifford Geertz, and others appealed to Pike’s concepts of etic vs. emic to construct very different approaches to the study of culture. Sapir, Whorf, Boas, and the early American anthropologists of course saw linguistics as one branch of anthropology, so it is not surprising that there would be some mutual influence of thinking about culture on thinking about language and vice versa, though history for some reason shows a fairly unidirectional flow during a period of time, from language to culture. In Language: The Cultural Tool (D. Everett 2012a), I attempted to show new ways in which cultural reflection might influence linguistic theorizing and language understanding, arguing that cultural values affect and effect some linguistic structures. And, of course, in modern times perhaps no one has been more insightful in analyzing the connections between culture and language than Michael Silverstein (see the various references to him in the bibliography and throughout the text), though there are many other superlative researchers.

  Kenneth L. Pike provided anthropologists and linguistics with the basic conceptual opposition that has affected both the study of culture and the study of language profoundly. Pike’s etic vs. emic dichotomy is crucial throughout the present study. As Pike put it:

  The etic approach treats all cultures or languages—or a selected group of them—at one time. It might well be called ‘comparative’ in the anthropological sense (cf. M. Mead, 1952: 344) were it not for the fact that the phrase ‘comparative linguistics’ has a quite different usage already current in linguistic circles . . . The emic approach is, on the contrary, culturally specific, applied to one language or culture at a time. (1967, 37)

  But the etic-emic relationship is a difficult empirical issue, he points out: “Regardless of how much training one has . . . emic units of a language must be determined during the analysis of that language; they must be discovered, not predicted [emphasis mine]—even though the range of kinds of components of language has restrictions placed upon it by the physiology of the human organism” (37ff).

  In a sense, then, we are engaged here in an exploration of how the “emic” in each of us shapes our language, our culture, and our construction of personal identity. It argues for “emicization”—the construction of an insider point of view, particularly the “dark matter” that makes us and our societies who and what they are. Dark matter is then emicization via aggregated apperceptions (personal interpretations of experiences), acquired concepts, and their cultural-internal interpretations. It is partially a function of the body (brain and fingers, at least—there is a sense in which my fingers know how to play the guitar) and culture. Dark matter is unique to every individual as every culture is unique for the group possessing it. This is inherent in the notion of emicization.

  In my sense, “mind” is an oblique reference, largely inaccurate, to the individual’s capability to know and arrange what they know. I take the peculiar view that knowledge is not merely a state of mind, but stored and created at least in part by actions, experiences, memory, relationships, and orientations.

  By “culture” I roughly mean (see chap. 2) what we know, our values, and the systematicization of our values, knowledge, and apperceptions as members of a given society. In other words, culture is societal systematicization, the hypernymization of terms; connection of facts to individual roles, and cultural objectives. Cultural systematicization often brings recursive, hierarchical structure to knowledge across all the mental dimensions just mentioned. It is not merely all our knowledge. Rather, it is the arrangement of our knowledge and values and roles.

  This all gets us to the primary thesis of this entire work: there is no useful notion of “human nature.” Rather than “human nature,” people are controlled by dark matter, acquired and shaped via culture, biology, and individual psychology. This leads to a replacement of the idea of human nature with the alternative concept of “personal nexus” or constructed self.

  Let me point out what I intend as the novel contribution of this book: from it emerges a new, linguistically inspired synthesis of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics to understand the self without nativist incantations.11 It is the proposal that tacit knowledge and the construction of the cultural-psychological-physical nexus just are what we know as “self.” There is no human nature if by this we mean a kind of a priori knowledge common to all and only humans.

  The chapters each build a distinct layer of the story. In the first four chapters, part 1, we lay out the three foundational components of my model of dark matter: culture-as-values, values-as-emicization, and culture-as-grammar. These points are preceded in chapter 1 with a definition and discussion of the nature of dark matter, and its pedigree in two principal lines, the Platonic and the Aristotelian. In chapter 2, we discuss a novel, ranked-value theory of culture. To do this we examine a number of historic and well-known definitions of culture offered over the past hundred or so years, concluding that all are inadequate and offering a simpler, yet more comprehensive and satisfying definition of culture that immediately incorporates the idea that it is the source and object of dark matter. Chapter 3 explains how culture and dark matter are acquired, focusing especially on the development of concentric circles of attachment in the Amazonian society of the Pirahãs. Chapter 4 examines the fundamental contribution of dark matter to our interpretation of the world around us and our ability to navigate through it.

  In part 2, beginning with chapter 5, we look at dark matter in grammar, texts, gestures, translation, individual values, and the interpretation of lived situations. In this chapter’s discussion of the presupposed dark matter of texts, the focus is on discourse and how it is constructed by and imbued with dark matter, tacit information reflecting cultural values, knowledge, and roles. Chapter 6 examines the emergence of grammar from culture and individual apperceptions via emicization. Chapter 7 reviews the role of gestures in bringing culture and grammar together, while simultaneously providing a separate level of organization that—in conjunction with prosody—enables hearers and speakers to better understand or communicate themes, discourse flow, and content. This chapter also argues that in spite of claims to the contrary, gestures support the Aristotelian, empiricist view of language ontogeny and phylogeny over the nativist, Platonic conception of dark matter. It does this in part via a critique of Goldin-Meadow’s (forthcoming) work on “homesigns,” gestures invented by what she believes are children without linguistic input—the nonhearing children of hearing parents who invent signs in order to communicate. In chapter 8 we continue with this theme in the realm of translation, looking closely at how dark matter enables us to reinterpret texts, individuals, and the world around us, and to communicate our own interpretations to others, intra- and interculturally.

  Moving on to part 3, we discuss the implications of the theory developed to this point for two issues of fundamental and urgent importance for understanding human psychology and human evolution. In chapter 9 it is argued that there is nothing like instincts or modules in our higher-level cognitive abilities (e.g., language), the interpretative principles of the world around us, Bastian’s elementary ideas, Freud’s tripartite mind, Campbell’s monomyth, and so on. This chapter considers and rejects several proposed instincts, specifically considering, as a concrete, detailed case study, why recent work on a “phonology instinct” seems to be mistaken. The final chapter, 10, argues that human nature is reducible to an understanding of our bodies, our memories, our intelligence, and our apperceptions. There is beyond these matters no “psychic unity of mankind”—no s
ingle human nature.

  PART ONE

  Dark Matter and Culture

  1

  The Nature and Pedigree of Dark Matter

  Adherence to an epistemology is not something which merely ‘happens to a person but instead it reflects a component of his moral development. In some sense he is . . . morally responsible for adopting an epistemology even though it can neither be proved nor disproved to the satisfaction of those who oppose it.

  KENNETH PIKE, With Heart and Mind: A Personal Synthesis of Scholarship and Devotion

  This chapter provides a definition and pedigree of the notion of dark matter, tracing two broad clades of descent—the Platonic and the Aristotelian. I align my own work with the Aristotelian, empiricist line, arguing in favor of this tradition throughout the remainder of the book.

  The first section of the chapter looks at kinds of knowledge that linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists have proposed that are relevant for our present concerns. I give a definition of dark matter, its major divisions into unspoken and ineffable, and how it is distinct from other types of knowledge, including tacit knowledge. We look at knowledge-how vs. knowledge-that, for example, arguing, along with others, that no clear dividing line exists between such knowledges.

  In this regard, I also discuss knowledge as “particle, wave, and field,” borrowing these three perspectives from the work of Kenneth Pike. I look at linguistic knowledge of sound units—phonemes and allophones (the local variants of phonemes)—in order to exemplify these epistemological perspectives.

  Next we move to a discussion of the Platonic tradition of innate knowledge, continuing from Plato to Chomsky and beyond, via many others. This section also looks closely at the influence of the thesis of the “psychic unity of mankind” first proposed by Adolf Bastian. Following this, we survey different works in the Aristotelian tradition of dark matter. We then reach the conclusion of this chapter, also providing a survey of the major lessons learned here.

  Kinds of Knowledge

  As we have seen, over the last few decades, the two biggest proponents of tacit knowledge have arguably been Michael Polanyi and Noam Chomsky, though with radically different conceptions of the nature and source of this knowledge. Chomsky’s conception of tacit knowledge descends from Plato; Polanyi falls closer to Aristotle’s ideas. In contemporary research, forms of the debate over tacit knowledge are to be found in the contrasts between evolutionary psychology vs. embodied cognition, questions about whether computers can replicate human cognition in any significant sense, on the nature of concepts (what does it mean to hold a concept), in translation theory, expert systems, the assumptions that drive business decisions, the behavior of populations vs. individuals, and so on. The belief that humans share basic concepts and other knowledge innately has been a popular one in the history of Western thinking. Some of the more prominent examples beyond the two just mentioned include Freud’s notion of the unconscious forces that drive human psychology; Jung’s theory of “collective unconsciousness”; Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth”; the work of Cosmides, Tooby, and Pinker in evolutionary psychology; and Jerry Fodor’s work on mental modules.

  I want to argue, to the contrary, that humans are designed to be flexible, that “human nature”—when characterized as inborn cortical, hardwired information, and instincts—is incompatible with flexibility. Humans adapt as well as upright primates might be expected to have done in the world in which they live. We are able to vary behaviors in similar environments and to respond effectively to environmental change, in the sense that their psychologies and cultures can solve problems of various types encountered by the species worldwide. Cultures are evolution’s ultimate solution to the problem of providing adaptive flexibility—so much so that the most important cognitive question, as others have put it, becomes not “What is in the brain?” but “What (culture/society/environment) is the brain in?”

  Our minds and our cultures are constructed symbiotically. The relationship between culture and psychology is not supervenience, though each influences, shapes, and enhances the other. Because of this I want to argue here that nativist ideas are for the most part superfluous in understanding human cognition, once we recognize the universal platforms of human cognition, the nature of the tasks humans have to perform, and the ways in which humans “live culturally” and come to acquire the dark matter of their minds, which ultimately shapes who they are as well as how they think about and relate to the world around them.

  The flexibility and cognitive resources of humans are found particularly in the dark matter of our minds—the tacit knowledge we acquire from lived experience. This knowledge comes from many sources. Culture, or “culturing,” is but one of those. Material environment is another. The nature of the task another. But the role of culture in domains where it was once considered irrelevant is vital to the understanding of ourselves and our species.

  The knowledge I am concerned most with is any knowledge-how or any knowledge-that that is unsaid in normal circumstances, unarticulated even to ourselves or, at the extreme, ineffable (Levinson and Majid 2014). It comes from personal observation and social expectations (standards, values, and so on). It is shared and it is simultaneously personal. It is acquired via emicization and apperceptions. The sense of self is just these plus memory.

  Variation is where the action is at in understanding ourselves, our conspecifics, and our species as a whole. We should not be too quick to look for the invariant, the abstract generalizations. We should first attempt to fully describe (Geertz 1973) and reflect on the particular (James [1906] 1996). And variation operates at multiple levels simultaneously. The two broad intersection planes of variation that concern us here are individual psychology and group culture.

  Another crucial idea is that human cognition and behavior are not law-like. When we attempt to understand human cognition and human actions, we are not doing physics. We do not expect exceptionless laws. We expect rather a confluence of dynamic, shifting properties. Answers will not be simple many times and they will focus as much on variation, if not more so, than they will on constancy. I am less interested in universals and more in understanding, and I do not believe that the former is always the basis of the latter.

  In fact it seems that understanding is often list-like and descriptive, rather than abstract and general (see James [1906] 1996 as well as Fodor’s (1998, 40ff) lexical semantics). The best way to judge the success of our proposals is their consonance with what we know more generally about the world, and the inclusivity and utility for those trying to deepen their understanding of the cognitive life of Homo sapiens.

  I am certainly not the first to develop the thesis that nurture is at least as important as nature in understanding the thought and behavior of humans and other animals. Among the books that take on this subject from different angles are Paul Ehrlich’s (2001) Human Natures (biology); Alison Gopnik’s (2010) The Philosophical Baby (child development); Jesse Prinz’s (2014) Beyond Human Nature (philosophy), and Philip Lieberman’s (2013) The Unpredictable Species (neuroscience and linguistics). But the approach to the issue of human nature and knowledge is different here. First, it is based on anthropological and linguistic field research on some highly interesting and distinctly un-Western cultures. Second, a major—and unique—concern of this study is a new understanding of culture, and the interaction of culture with individual psychology. This interaction, as mentioned, is referred to in this work as “emicization,” borrowed from Pike (1967).

  For convenience, let’s repeat the earlier definition of dark matter:

  Dark matter of the mind is any knowledge-how or any knowledge-that that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usually unarticulated even to ourselves. It may be, but is not necessarily, ineffable. It emerges from acting, “languaging,” and “culturing” as we learn conventions and knowledge organization, and adopt value properties and orderings. It is shared and it is personal. It comes via emicization, apperceptions, and memory, an
d thereby produces our sense of “self.”

  Since the literature is already rich with discussions of the unconscious, culture, and tacit knowledge, I offer figures 1.1 and 1.2 as a way of understanding how dark matter is different. Dark matter is a combination of culture and individual psychology, produced by the culturing of the individual as well as the individual’s apperceptions, interpretations of others, and personal psychology. The basic theses to be explored in regard to this idea include the following: First, we experience the world culturally, in a specific temporal-geographical-axiological context. Second, we slot our experiences into a “cultural field” or “table,” a matrix of values and knowledges that establishes the relationships of experiences to one another hierarchically and which is vital to our emerging sense of self and belonging. I call this (see chap. 2) C(ultural)-grammar.1 Third, we interpret our experiences individually and jointly, based on the cultural concepts that we have internalized. Fourth, we employ episodic memory consolidation and reconsolidation to form our complete autobiographical memory and thus our identities.

  Figure 1.1

  Figure 1.2

  As an attempt to illustrate the latter points, let’s consider the components of bike riding, from learning to mastery. Ryle ([1949] 2002) distinguished between “knowing-how” and “knowing-that.” As Polanyi ([1966] 2009) interprets Ryle, knowing-how consists in the ability to act. This ability, so it is claimed, cannot be made fully explicit. As Polanyi (ibid.) observes for bike riding, we acquire knowledge-how by doing something. Explicit instructions are less useful than examples.

 

‹ Prev