He also makes it clear that this tacit knowledge is regularly drawn upon by children acquiring their native language and that this explains their rapid acquisition of their native language(s).8
Chomsky achieved arguably his most impressive result with the mathematical hierarchy of grammars now known as the Chomsky hierarchy. As his model of transformational grammar (a type of context-sensitive grammar) analysis began to conquer the intellectual world, he introduced a further, even more influential proposal. This was the idea that the ability of humans to learn their languages so quickly—perfect mastery before adolescence was claimed—and the fact that the structural principles of all human languages were apparently deeply similar, if not identical, could only be understood if the linguistics capacity were identical and innate in all humans. Along the way—in a(n in)famous 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, a behaviorist account of language learning—he was perceived to have demolished the idea that children could learn languages merely by stimulus-response conditioning. Children’s minds—not merely their behavior—were implicated in language learning, Chomsky reasonably argued, and among their mental attributes they must have some a priori “solution space”—if they are trying to learn language, how can they possibly know what it is they are trying to learn without innate a priori knowledge of where or how to find solutions? The UG that Chomsky eventually came to propose was quite detailed and structured. His idea of an innate UG became and still remains by far the most influential of all proposals on the tacit, dark matter of the mind.
Chomsky’s case for innate tacit knowledge of language was made all the more persuasive to many because it was so technical, as one gleans from remarks by various interlocutors in the debate registered by Piatelli-Palmarini (1980). In an astoundingly brief time, Chomsky arguably came to dominate his field as no other scientist had ever done before, not even Einstein in physics or Darwin in evolutionary studies. After Chomsky, for a multitude of researchers, rationalism was taken as settled and proven. Empiricism, on the other hand, came to be regarded as passé. In spite of the prevailing zeitgeist, though, there is nevertheless a vital and contemporary empiricist tradition that offers a different explanation of dark matter.9
In later sections we discuss how concepts are acquired if they are not innate or in some other way a priori. My intention here was simply to provide a brief pedigree for the idea of innate tacit knowledge. It is worth remembering that for many decades, through the philosophy of Russell, Quine, James, Pierce, and others, as well as the psychology of B. F. Skinner, rationalism was not a particularly popular perspective. Empiricism to my mind has the virtue of rejecting the psychic unity hypothesis, which seems to tear and strain to fit the range of human cultures into its bed of Procrustes. To reiterate, psychic unity is unconvincing to me because it places the locus of human equality in what can only be described as shared concepts rather than biological heritage and capacities, and because it places the focus of human knowledge in the mind alone, rather than in the encultured individual.
More substantial insights into human nature—especially as this is revealed through the origins, nature, and use of dark matter—are better illuminated through science than philosophy. Philosophy is useful in stepping back to take a look at the issues from a higher perspective, perhaps, but the ancient philosophers were are best at suggesting questions rather than answering them. Like Paul Churchland (2013), Patricia Churchland (2013), and Unger (2014), among others, I believe that a science of the mind has to precede or at least accompany a philosophy of the mind/brain in order to make progress on the understanding of how people learn and think.
These writers are all part of an enormous, bifurcated tradition of the study of epistemology in Western literature. This forked road leads to (at least) two distinct views on the nature of tacit knowledge. From Plato to the present day, there are those whom we have reviewed above that advocate for a priori tacit knowledge, or innate ideas. The alternative we take up next is the view that all humans form tacit memories, knowledge, dispositions, and the like, from experience, not from universal ideas, a shared unconscious, or the same elementary ideas. All those that we have been discussing up to this point are Platonists in the sense that their theories were built on the foundation of universal, innate, tacit knowledge, regardless of the many other differences between them.
The clade of rationalism we have been discussing may be summarized as shown in figure 1.3. This chart is incomplete in many ways, obviously omitting a number of major thinkers; it merely highlights the writers focused on here. There were of course influences from others on Kant, Descartes, Chomsky, and so on, beyond Plato. But Plato’s influence was foundational, as intended by the direct lines. Bastian’s influence seems more direct on some writers, however, as I have attempted to indicate on the chart.
Figure 1.3
THE ARISTOTELIAN VIEW OF KNOWLEDGE
The same general considerations apply to the interpretation of the Aristotelian tradition, where arrows indicate intellectual influence along the parameters most relevant to our concerns relative to dark matter. Figure 1.4 (simplistically) illustrates that the roots of the empiricist tradition extend back to Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle (384–322 BCE).
Figure 1.4
Aristotle initiates empiricism in works like his Posterior Analytics, where he states:
So it emerges that neither can we possess them [premises of syllogistic reasoning] from birth, nor can they come to be in us if we are without knowledge of them to the extent of having no such developed state at all. Therefore we must possess a capacity of some sort, but not such as to rank higher in accuracy than these developed states. (2007d, 136)
In this first statement, Aristotle draws a stark dividing line between his understanding of innate a priori tacit knowledge (there is none) and Plato’s. Both Aristotle and Plato attribute a great deal of importance to a priori knowledge. But while for Plato this prior knowledge is inborn, for Aristotle our ability to solve problems is based on knowledge acquired through experience, thus a priori to him means “knowledge acquired prior to encountering this problem.” To be sure, we are able in Aristotle’s view to acquire knowledge at all due to an innate capacity to learn, but such a capacity is not, he makes clear, to be confused with specific knowledge.
Aristotle thus breaks with his teacher and develops a concept of general ability in a flexible brain. He is evidently unconvinced by Plato’s perspective in the Meno, though he does cite it occasionally in the deferential manner expected of a disciple. Aristotle sees a distinction between nature and convention, such that by nature Homo sapiens has a “social instinct” (in book 1 of his Politics, he states that “A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature”), though it is only by convention that man’s specific societies and languages arise. Aristotle thus begins a new tradition. Though there are many passages in Aristotle (as in most ancient and many modern philosophers) that seem to be self-contradictory on superficial readings, the distinctions of Aristotle’s philosophy, subtle or striking, launched thought on a distinct trajectory that, in the intervening 2,400 years, has led to a radically different approach to knowledge from his teacher’s, especially as touching on what I am calling dark matter.
A couple of representative citations from Metaphysics are (2007a, 1):
Now from memory experience is produced in men; for the several memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience . . . science and art come to men through experience. [emphasis in the original]
And also:
If then a man has the theory without the experience and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail.
And:
We conclude that these states of knowledge [the “skill of the craftsman” and the knowledge of the man of science] are neither innate in a determinate form, nor developed from other higher states of knowledge, but from sense perception.
And:
So
out of sense-perception comes to be what we call memory, and out of frequently repeated memories of the same thing develops experience; for a number of memories constitute a single experience.
Most controversially, Aristotle is responsible for the characterization of the mind as a “blank slate,” or tabula rasa: “Mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought” (2007b, 662). “And,” he asks,
how could we learn the elements of all things? Evidently we cannot start by knowing anything before. For as he who is learning geometry, though he may know other things before, knows none of the things with which the science deals about which he has to learn. (2007a, 511)
The contrast here with Plato’s Meno could hardly be starker.
The successors of Aristotle proposed ideas at least as powerful and persuasive as the successors of Plato. There are several I want to discuss in what follows, found in the diagram above, because they seem most pertinent to my own perspective of human cognition and nature developed below. On the one hand, the three philosophers associated with the founding of empiricism—Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—are crucial. On the other, there is the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir, who never quite fits any set.10
John Locke (1632–1704) disagreed strongly with the rationalism and dualism of Descartes. In particular, he took issue with the Cartesian proposal that knowledge is comprised of those ideas which our minds conceive clearly and distinctively. Our ideas, according to Locke, to the contrary, are acquired by living and thinking. And our knowledge derives from the interaction of facts with our ideas, that is, in our determination of the fit between our ideas and the facts (as the philosopher John Searle [1983] would say, their “mind→world” fit). Locke rejected, following Aristotle, innate tacit knowledge.
Like Aristotle, Locke did not believe that the absence of knowledge on a tablet means that the tablet has no other properties. It has the capacity to receive and store information and more. Neither philosopher thought of the tabula rasa as devoid of capacity to be written on, not even of capacity to write upon itself. In my reading, they meant by tabula rasa not that there were no innate abilities, but that there were no innate specific concepts. Certainly the mind, in Locke’s view, would possess nothing like the specific innate tacit knowledge of a universal grammar, Bastian’s elementary ideas, Freud’s unconsciousness, or Campbell’s monomyth.
Locke has been criticized for, among other things, not having an explicit account of how, if our minds are blank at birth, humans can categorize or indeed learn anything. Where does the notion of “sameness” come from, the indictment goes, that enables a person to categorize x and y as belonging together but c as belonging to a different class? To my mind, this criticism lacks force. It seems to derive from a common confusion of knowledge with ability. Animals, certainly my dog, have the capacity to categorize. My dog recognizes the difference between humans and cats and dogs and trees, and between me and any other male. There is no need to propose a priori knowledge, though, for either my dog or me. We have bodies with visual systems, tactile systems, olfactory systems, auditory systems, and so forth, that are able to recognize physically those external properties that seem independent of specific objects such as physical similarities in colors, tastes, touch, and so on. (I will have more to say on this when I contrast embodied cognition with evolutionary psychology later on.) Thus this criticism of Locke does not present any serious problem. We simply must keep straight the distinction between innate capacities and innate knowledge.11
For Locke, the mind builds ideas from experience. The mind binds and shapes experiences within our consciousness. These experiences do not come preinterpreted or precatalogued or prewired. Locke agreed with Aristotle that the mind is a blank slate. Locke proclaimed the self to be a continuation of consciousness, built upon individual experiences and sensory experiences, rather than prewired or a matter of destiny.
Next there is George Berkeley (1685–1753), who went so far as to argue (as my friends the Pirahãs might have argued themselves, were they interested in Western philosophy) that abstract ideas are a fiction. Berkeley was a writer of iconoclastic brilliance. His criticisms of Newton’s physics in De Motu ([1721] 1990) anticipated by nearly two hundred years the later arguments of Mach and Einstein. His work ([1709] 2011) Essay towards a New Theory of Vision was initially controversial but is now well accepted. Berkeley developed the philosophy of subjective idealism in which he argued that there are only spirits and ideas. Forgetting spirits for now, his view of ideas was that while there clearly are objects, they are objects only in our minds, and without a mind there would be no facts of the matter about them. There may be things outside our minds, but we can never know them because the mind is all that knows.
Berkeley’s view is quite different from the eliminative materialism popular among many today. It certainly differs from the perspective I adopt here, in which there is no mind of any kind (except as an imprecise way of talking about brains), only bodies and the world (cultural, biological, ecological, etc.) in which they move.
The principal way, however, in which Berkeley advanced Aristotelian empiricism was in his denial of the ability to abstract away from immediate experience in order to discuss properties disembodied from such experience—that is, he criticizes the very notions of abstraction and generalization. As he put it ([1710] 1990, 10): “I deny that I can abstract one [property] from another, or conceive separately, those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated; or that I can frame a general notion by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid.”
It is interesting that some cultures—for example, the Pirahã (D. Everett 2005a, 2008)—agree with Berkeley on the problematic nature of abstractions, for similar though not identical reasons. Whereas some before him naively denigrated generalization, Berkeley shows that such denial can in fact be an interesting and sophisticated position. Moreover, American pragmatists, especially William James, showed a similar, though weaker, distrust of generalizations.
Then there is David Hume (1711–1776), who argued against our facile interpretations of causality, based on what he intended to be a Newtonian-inspired theory of human nature. Hume’s influence is pervasive in the history and practice of philosophy and science, on Darwin, Kant, and many, many others. Most modern researchers on the mind and most modern philosophers acknowledge a debt to Hume. The thread of his work continues through modern cognitive science. According to Fodor (2003, 234) Hume’s 1739 Treatise is “the founding document of cognitive science.”
The subtitle of Hume’s famous Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) is “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method into Moral Subjects.” His view was that ideas only make sense or exist through experience. In his discussion of experience, he elaborates conceptions of impressions and ideas that fit well with what we refer to here as apperceptions: “Ideas are the faint images of [sensations, desires, passions, and emotions] in thinking and reasoning” ([1739–40] 1978, book 1, parts 1, 4).
One of Hume’s most important ideas relative to our current discussion is that our a priori reasoning cannot be the source of our ideas of cause and effect. This is because—absent experience—we can reason about causes without effects and effects without causes, whereas in our experience they must occur together. Causal inferences are thus a matter of experience, not a priori reasoning. In my terms, causes are registered in our apperceptions and forms of our dark matter, however the latter is instantiated.
The next name in the line of descent from Aristotle is William James (1842–1910). James’s particular take on empiricism came to be known as radical empiricism. He claims that our experience necessarily underlies our debates and that only our experiences possess the sense of continuous structure (through memory). Therefore, there is no need for theoretical support for our own experiences.
Radical empiricism is the construction of one’s understanding by means of one’s singular experiences. In this J
ames shows the influence of the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson (a friend of his father’s) and Henry David Thoreau (Emerson’s handyman). James’s work is rich and, along with Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and others, led to American pragmatism (though Pratt [2002] argues that the Wampanoag Indians’ influence on Roger Williams and through him Thomas Jefferson played a foundational role in this uniquely American contribution to philosophical thought). The influence of the pragmatists Peirce and James permeates not only philosophical thought, but also early linguistics and anthropology. Through Dewey, a colleague with an office at Columbia down the hall from Boas, and Peirce’s work on signs (which influenced Saussure), pragmatist influence can be seen in the emphasis of Boas and Sapir on the particular, a preference for inductive and abductive reasoning over deduction, and various other ways.
From this tradition emerged perhaps the greatest linguistic anthropologist / anthropological linguist of all time, Edward Sapir (1884–1939). Sapir makes the case that human psyches and human cultures blend in subtle, complex, and always particular ways, such that generalizations regarding the nature and sources of tacit knowledge are often misguided. Instead—as a pragmatist might—Sapir’s work shows that the particular and the variable, rather than the universal or invariable, are where the intellectual gold is to be mined.
Sapir’s pioneering research, essays, books, and articles on North American Indian languages, on historical linguistics, phonology, descriptive linguistics, and psycholinguistics, as well as other subjects, are among the most important of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, personal, cultural, and historical circumstances—ironically, since the nexus of these factors was the focus of Sapir’s studies—reduced his influence and prevented his ideas from having the effect on later generations of anthropologists and linguists they should have had.
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