Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  Sapir arrived at a propitious moment in the history of North American anthropology and linguistics. Like Kant, Sapir was born in Prussia. He moved to the US with his parents as a young boy. Perhaps related to his multilingual background, he completed both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Germanic philology at Columbia University, initially on a prestigious Pulitzer scholarship (Columbia was at that time one of the few or only research universities to place no restrictions on the admission of Jewish students). He decided to pursue his PhD at Columbia, where two of the most important and influential intellectuals in American history had offices in the same building, John Dewey and Franz Boas. Boas accepted him as an advisee.

  As we have seen, Boas believed in the psychic unity of mankind at least partially due to the influence of his former supervisor, Adolf Bastian. Boas’s views were by no means as extreme as Bastian’s, but his collection of texts from North American languages was partly motivated by a desire to see how elementary ideas were permuted by local cultures. Boas was also influenced by pragmatism, through his colleague Dewey, as well as earlier writers such as Peirce. Sapir eventually diverged from Boas, coming to believe that human differences were vital to understanding Homo sapiens, abandoning any vestige of Bastinian shared concepts. If he used any phrase similar to “psychic unity,” it was in terms of universal capacities, not universal beliefs or knowledge. Cultures, for Sapir, could vary tremendously, and it was culture that made us who we are, by providing us with our core knowledge, concepts, values, and so on. For Sapir, culture was the epitome of dark matter, in that it was manifested by patterns that each individual implemented in his or her own thinking and activities, howbeit unconsciously for the most part. As Sapir put it, “We act all the more securely from our unawareness of the patterns that control us” (1985, 549; emphasis mine).

  This applies to all of us. As I write this chapter, I work hard to put into written form what I believe are my own individual ideas. And yet I know that these ideas are available to me, interesting to me, and largely interpreted by me as a member of a specific culture who also possesses a specific individual life history. Or as Sapir might put it, “One is always unconsciously finding what one is in unconscious subjection to” (1985, 549; emphasis mine). Under the latter proposal we can fit Nazism, the Manson family murderers, the growth of scientific paradigms, the marketing strategies of clothing stores, the zeitgeist, and “national opinions.”

  Sapir thus diverged strongly from Boas as regards acquired vs. innate tacit knowledge. As Sapir developed his ideas on culture and psychology, he arrived at insights that are still at the cutting edge in the cognitive sciences. For example, in his posthumously edited The Psychology of Culture, he develops the concept of the individual and psychology as instrument, manifestation, and builder of culture:

  Any form of behavior, either explicit or implicit, overt or covert, which cannot be directly explained as physiologically necessary but can be interpreted in terms of the totality of meanings of a specific group, and which can be shown to be the result of a strictly historical process, is likely to be cultural in essence. (Sapir 1993, 37)

  In this passage Sapir blends the tacit and the explicit, the individual and the social into a single definition (more like a description) of culture. His references to the tacit here grew from his experience with the intuition of native speakers, while writing his 1908 PhD dissertation under Boas on Takelma. Tony Tillohash, the Southern Paiute speaker, worked with him on the psychological reality of the phoneme, and this work further affected Sapir’s sense of the connection between psychology and culture, both for what of this relationship could be seen overtly and what was not overt (see also Wallace 1970).

  In 1931 Sapir was invited to join the faculty of Yale University with a partial charge to study the impact of culture on personality. But he faced his own problems with the dark matter of prejudice. One of four Jewish faculty out of a total of 569, he was denied admission to the Faculty Club, by anonymous vote, literally blackballed. The Faculty Club was where faculty voted on and debated administrative policy—more like a faculty senate in today’s terminology.

  Sapir’s work is the best of the era, in any case. The unsurpassed quality of his research and writings on culture and the connection between culture and psychology ended with his death, none of his students developing these subjects with either the eloquence or insight of their teacher.

  Moving on from Sapir to the central representative figure for this discussion of the Aristotelian tradition of dark matter, we come to Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), a pioneering contributor to ideas of tacit knowledge. Polanyi was an important contributor to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. Though the range, quality, and significance of his writings is impressive, his work on tacit knowledge is in focus here. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1926 Polanyi emigrated to Germany, where he was appointed professor of chemistry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1933 he left the Reich of Hitler for the University of Manchester, where he was first a professor of chemistry for more than a decade, later becoming professor of social sciences. (The Polanyi home was evidently an intellectual incubator: one son, John Polanyi, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1986; the other son, George, is a well-regarded British economist.)

  Polanyi disagreed with his Manchester colleague Alan Turing when the latter claimed that the mind was a computer, its thinking largely reducible to rules. Polanyi’s own view was much more nuanced and humanistic. He opposed the positivistic account of science and personal knowledge (which means that he rejected the popular concept that truth and human knowledge can be restated or discovered by algorithms). Rather Polanyi (building upon a perspective he first developed in his Gifford Lectures [1951–1952] at the University of Aberdeen and later published as his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge) argued that all knowledge is the result of personal judgments and commitments. And he argued that we quite reasonably believe more than we can prove. Likewise, and of particular relevance here, it thus follows that we know more than we can say.

  Our discoveries, according to Polanyi, are driven by our values, commitments, and passions. Scientists choose the questions that are important to them from personal and social values. The context of our work, thoughts, and relationships to reality is our tacit knowledge. Polanyi viewed his discovery of the “structure of tacit knowing” as his most important discovery, across all the fields he worked in.

  He was also one of the early advocates of “emergence”—the idea that not all human abilities, properties of the world, life forms, and so on, are reducible to lower-level properties that interact with higher-level features. His concerns with personal knowledge and emergence led him to study expert knowledge—for example, connoisseurship, musical ability, visual arts—rather than standard epistemology directly. We can see this concern reflected, however indirectly, in Michael Silverstein’s (2003) modern work on “indexicals.” Polanyi also exerted strong influence on the epistemological work of Thomas Kuhn. There is obvious resonance with Polanyi’s work on expert knowledge as opposed to mechanistic processes in work by Freedman (2010) on causal inference and statistics (as well as works like Elster 2007). Some of Polanyi’s most intriguing applications and developments of the notion of personal knowledge and tacit knowledge, however, are his writings on animal reasoning, animal personhood, and animals’ tacit knowledge. This is consistent with his nondualistic approach to knowledge as well as the thesis of this study.

  Other figures include major names such as Russell, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Quine. I will end this section with a brief summary of Quine. If my purpose here were to develop a distinct perspective on empiricism, Quine would obviously be a central figure. However, Quine had little to say about tacit knowledge or dark matter in ways that directly impinge on this book. However, he did make forceful arguments for empiricism that have not yet been answered successfully, in my opinion.

  His primary ideas relevant to our inquiry here include his naturalism, extensionalism
, empiricism, naturalized epistemology, analyticity, holism, underdetermination, radical translation, indeterminacy and inscrutability (see Harman and Lepore 2014, 2ff). Without going into detail on these points, the upshot is that Quine believed that what we take to be nonnegotiable in our beliefs (called by some “analytic truths”), resulting from our lives, beliefs, and other forms of dark matter, are truths we are not prepared to disbelieve; for example, “a bachelor is an unmarried man” and “2 + 2 = 4.” Other than this, they have no special claim to truth that falls outside of empirical acquisition or verification—for instance, as analytic sentences as opposed to synthetic sentences (Quine 1951). All that we know, we know via our senses and how these are interpreted—that is, apperceptions. There is no a priori knowledge. Moreover, communication across individuals and cultures is always underdetermined; either there will be multiple translations of a statement by one person into the dark matter of another, and it is hard to choose between them; or there is simply indeterminacy—there is no way to choose between translations. Across native speakers of the same language, this underdeterminacy/indeterminacy is one of the hallmarks (and overall salutary; see D. Everett, forthcoming) of human language and is key to understanding the evolution of human communication.

  Quine’s work thus is foundational for the present work, but because only in a few places did he mention indirectly our unknown knowns, he doesn’t figure in our discussion again until the discussion of radical translation in chapter 8.

  Summary

  This chapter provided an overview of the pedigree of dark matter, tracing two broad traditions, the Platonic and the Aristotelian. The thesis of this book falls within the Aristotelian, empiricist line of descent. The first part of the chapter looked at kinds of knowledge and several proposed sources of that knowledge, from linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists. The chapter also defined what is meant by the term dark matter, discussed its major divisions into unspoken and ineffable, and underscored how it is distinct from other types of knowledge, including tacit I. We looked at knowledge-how vs. knowledge-that, for example, arguing, along with others, that any dividing line between such knowledges is at best blurry.

  In this regard, the chapter also considered the Pikean view of knowledge as “particle, wave, and field,” illustrating its points with the linguistic knowledge of sound units, phonemes and allophones. Next the chapter discussed the Platonic tradition of innate knowledge, continuing from Plato to Chomsky and beyond, via many others. This section also looked closely at the influence of the thesis of the “psychic unity of mankind” first proposed by Adolf Bastian. Following this, we surveyed different works in the Aristotelian tradition of dark matter.

  Having established the pedigree and some of the nuances of different ideas of the notion of dark matter, we are prepared to move to the next chapter for a discussion of one of the two major forces in the creation of dark matter: culture.

  2

  The Ranked-Value Theory of Culture

  The study of ‘interpersonal relations’ is the problem of the future. It demands that we study seriously and carefully not just what happens when A meets B—given that each is not only physiologically defined, but each also has memories, feelings, understandings, and so on about the symbols they can and must use in their interaction . . . In any [specific] situation when two people are talking, they create a cultural structure. Our task, as anthropologists, will be to determine what are the potential contents of the culture that results from these interpersonal relations in these situations.

  EDWARD SAPIR, The Psychology of Culture1

  This chapter addresses the concept of culture from a linguistic perspective, drawing on optimality theory and tagmemics’ slot:filler concept, among others. One question that it tries to answer, raised initially in the introduction, is, does each member of a culture, X, participate in a collective intention to “live according to the values of culture X”? Whatever the answer to this question (and the answer is, “occasionally”), the larger question this chapter looks at is, how is culture even possible? Is a society like a football team? Or perhaps like an orchestra? Or is culture simply the overlap in values, roles, and knowledge of individuals who live together and talk together? These questions try to get at the larger issue of how cultures hang together at all. In what sense might e pluribus unum describe culture? Since I claim that culture is an abstraction, it can only be found in the individual. It is the result of an emic gestalt in individual culture members, in a way to be made clear as the discussion progresses.

  To get at these questions, I propose a model of culture in which the individual is the bearer of culture and the repository of knowledge, rather than the society as a whole. It examines the very idea of culture and its effect on the nature of national and local societies and individuals, via examples such as the height of the Dutch, the teacher in the classroom, businesses, and so on.

  More specifically, the chapter lays out a theory of values, which is necessarily prior to a theory of culture (epistemically, not temporally). We then examine the value studies made famous by Kluckhohn’s research group in Rimrock, New Mexico. We also consider Rokeach’s theory of values and show how it can inform a theory of cultures.

  The importance of the individual to the notion of culture leads to a discussion of culture as the core of cognition, requiring us to consider whether machines are capable of thinking (as McCarthy [1979], among others, argues) or not (as Dreyfus [1965, 1994] and the current discussion maintain). The argument is that machines cannot think because they lack culture and without culture there is no semantic understanding, no background, no dark matter in which thought can occur.

  Other issues addressed in this chapter include “mining” dark matter from textual analysis, as well the emergence and nature of societal norms and conventions. The chapter concludes with a summary of its findings.

  Individual vs. Social Knowledge

  Dark matter is not simply another term for culture. But there is a clear connection between the individual, their community, and the formation of dark matter in individual minds. Like language, culture is an abstract noun, and we can never expect to find a “culture” or a “language” in the real world. Rather, what we find are people—people speaking and acting with one another. Their mutually shaping activities of “languaging” and “culturing” build similar values, concepts, social roles, linguistic constructions, and so on, in each person. Language is both action and knowledge simultaneously. And so it is with culture as well.

  For example, consider the following interactions between two linguists:

  A. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

  B. “They sure do.”

  The general population may have no idea what A’s utterance means. But A and B know that this is a famous example sentence in Chomsky’s early writings that is designed to show that a sentence can be grammatical yet meaningless. For the two linguists, A’s sentence is an insider joke and B’s response a humorous rejoinder. The function of the exchange might be largely phatic, simply to say, “Hey, we are both linguists.” But additionally, B’s reply shows that A’s utterance is not in fact meaningless, because it indicates that whatever green ideas are, they sure sleep intensely.

  Now consider the following. Persons C and D are watching the New England Patriots play the Miami Dolphins. The Patriots take the lead. C and D both yell “Yes!” and high-five one another. In this joint action, they show knowledge that there is a game of football, knowledge of how this game is scored, shared value ranking for the Patriots relative to the Dolphins, knowledge of what high fives are like and what they are for, knowledge that they are both rooting for the same team, and reinforcement of all of the above.

  From such activities come knowledge-how, knowledge-that, community belonging, shared communication, and so forth—various forms of dark matter elicited, strengthened, and formed by very simply paired actions. These exemplify the role of culturing and languaging as dark matter and as
forming dark matter. From these actions the individual creates from his or her etic experiences an emic gestalt of society.

  In chapter 1 we traced the different historical sources of theories of dark matter—a priori and a posteriori tacit knowledges. The chapter made the case that there are two major traditions forming the major epistemological divide in approaches to the tacit. The Platonic tradition holds that humans are born knowing things. As we have seen, the principal contemporary proponent of this Platonist line is Chomsky, who has spent the last sixty years or so developing the theory of universal grammar, the idea that all humans are born with innate linguistic knowledge.

  On the other side, there is the Aristotelian tradition in which knowledge is learned, facilitated by human capacities. This tradition ranges across the centuries to Sapir, the present work, and many others.

  A LINGUISTIC TURN IN ANTHROPOLOGY?

  I want to begin this section of the larger exposition with a claim that some might find startling or simply wrong: in the study of cultures and languages, the methods of linguistics are by and large superior to those of modern anthropology. Thus not only is linguistics a branch of anthropology, but it is the model branch for studies of ethnography. I offer no arguments for this now, though I have commented on the long tradition of linguistics as anthropology. But the proof is in the pudding, as we will see.

  With this axiological preliminary, I plan to continue our discussion by developing a theory of culture based on the Aristotelian conception of tacit knowledge, arguing at the same time that tacit knowledge is too narrow as normally conceived and thus that it must be replaced by my idea of dark matter and is subsequently shaped by the dark matter of individuals thinking, speaking, and living together.