Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  On the other hand, Pirahãs do have beliefs about the organization of nature. For example, they believe that the universe that they can see is structured into layers. There is the layer we walk on and breathe in, our biosphere, which they call xoí. If you ask a Pirahã how to say mato (the Portuguese word for “jungle”) in Pirahã, they will say xoí. But xoí refers to place of living, jungle, environment, personal space, and so on. For example, to tell someone to be motionless, as in a canoe when you are about to shoot an arrow standing up at a fish swimming just below the surface, you say “Xoí kabao xaabaati!” “Biosphere” is the closest English translation, but it is inadequate because the English word lacks a center, as the jungle is the center of the xoí for the Pirahãs. Such an exploration of Pirahã nature words begins to point us toward the inadequacy of the view of translation that simply matches up words and concepts. Culture and nature form each other, as Descola argues, and thus each triad of culture-language-nature is unique. Translation cannot be literal because a literal translation would be gibberish. Translation requires a certain liberty to communicate the aspects of meaning relevant to a specific, situational, culture-language-nature mapping.

  As another example, consider the Pirahã word bigí, which appears to mean “sky.” But it also means “ground.” How can the same word mean both “sky” and “ground”? Because the Pirahãs believe that the sky and the ground are each natural divisions, differentially permeable barriers, between our xoí and some other world’s xoí—above the sky or beneath the ground. The word bigí is thus only effectively translated as we understand the Pirahã cosmology. There is no easy, unique translation for this term either. And the list goes on.

  Moreover, there are also no translations from Pirahã into English for numerous kinship terms that other languages take for granted, such as mother, father, grandparent, niece, uncle, brother, sister, cousin, and so forth. They (as I point out in D. Everett 2005a and 2008) have the simplest kinship system ever documented and have only the words xoogii, “big” (used for “parent” or “grandparent” or “older sibling”); baixi, “parent or someone with power over you in a given situation”; xahaigi, “anyone of ego’s generation”; hoisi or hoaagi, “son”; and kaai, “daughter.”

  Pirahãs also lack all number words (a well-documented fact, however surprising, in M. Frank et al. [2008]; D. Everett [2005a]; C. Everett and Madora [2012]). Thus it is impossible to translate one, two, a million, or any other precise numerical concept into Pirahã. They also lack quantifiers (e.g., all, each, every, some, many), so translations of quantifiers, like numbers, can at best be approximated (D. Everett 2005a). And they also do not talk about “duty” or “salvation” or “sacrifice” or “atonement” and so on. I am not claiming that it would be impossible to translate these concepts into Pirahã, but the task is more than linguistic—it would require connecting cultural concepts from first-century Jewish culture to contemporary Pirahã culture, mediated through contemporary American culture, mediated through millennia of theology.

  But in addition to the lack of terms for easy translation, there is an even more difficult aspect of translation that I encountered in working with the Pirahãs: all speakers are (or at least were on my last visit) monolingual. When a Pirahã-language helper gives you a word or a phrase, only rarely are they able to translate it into Portuguese. Someone might tell me something and the verb form they employ could have seven or more suffixes. Then someone else (or even the original speaker) might repeat what was said, and the verb used could have the same root but only three suffixes, no suffixes, or very different suffixes than the first utterance. For stories it is impossible to get more than the briefest summary of the gist of the story in Portuguese, and that only from my most “bilingual” language teachers. So how does one translate stories and phrases and verbs from a language one barely speaks and which has no speakers who speak any language you understand (my situation in my early days among the Pirahãs)?

  My method was to use paraphrase. I purchased several small, inexpensive, but reasonable quality cassette recorders, in addition to a more expensive, high-quality digital recorder, with a professional-quality headset microphone. I used the higher-quality gear for recording texts. Then I would record the text from the digital recorder to a smaller analog cassette recorder. (The cassette was for playback to the Pirahãs, though not for analysis—that was the job of the digital device.) Then I would play back the cassette recording of a text for a Pirahã who had not been involved in the original telling of the text (either telling it or overhearing it told). Then, with a second recorder running, I would ask him to explain the text to me. As the text was explained by this second language teacher, very often the second speaker simply repeated the first speaker. But regularly, with varying frequency, the second speaker would change things the first speaker said, inserting value judgments about the content or form of the first iteration of the text, with perhaps some remarks about its storyteller as well (e.g., “He speaks poorly”; “He doesn’t know.”). He might use different verb forms, different verbs and nouns, different intonation and gestures, and so on. Often, following the second speaker, I would work with a third speaker, asking them to “tell me what they said,” referring to the first two speakers. I would play a line by the first speaker, and then the comments by the second speaker on that line, finally recording the comments of the third speaker.

  Armed with these commentaries and the original text, I would return to the high-quality recording of the original and transcribe and translate it (to the best of my ability). I transcribed it all in detail—phonemes, intonation, accent, morpheme breaks, sentence boundaries, and so on. Then I would read my transcription to yet other Pirahãs, sometimes serially, sometimes in a group, offering my interpretation and soliciting their comments, criticism, and corrections of my pronunciation, interpretation, and so on. Thus did they supply the overt material in the recordings, their translations of their own dark matter, via their interpretations of the texts. In this way I learned culture, covert→overt language, and individual personalities through a laborious process of dialogue.

  Summary

  This chapter examined the notion of a culture-based semantics, based on emic understanding of a given language’s semantic fields. By way of illustration, we examined the effects of different approaches to meaning and culture via an examination of translation controversies in biblical studies. We then saw how different approaches were manifest in genres of translation. In particular, we considered and accepted the idea of meaning negotiation as a type of dance in which each interlocutor matches the meaning moves of his or her partner in communication. We were led to conclude by the role of culture in the grounding and imputation of meaning, that not everything—perhaps not much at all, can be said to be intertranslatable crossculturally or cross-linguistically. One way in which culture enters in to translation and discourse, we argued, was through the notion of relevance as developed in relevance theory.

  We concluded with a discussion of the methodology of translation in what Quine (1960) labels “radical translation.”

  PART THREE

  Implications

  9

  Beyond Instincts

  We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

  FREUD, Introductory Lectures

  No “Man in a Can”

  The idea that there is a psychic unity of mankind via a set of innate, phylogenetic concepts and/or instincts that unfold ontogenetically and largely set the parameters of our identity, of our “human nature,” is what I refer to as the “man in a can” view of cognitive science. Not only do I find this view simplistic, anti-intuitive, anti-anthropological, and anti-evolutionary, I think that the research results obtained under man-in-a-can assumptions—for example, by linguists and psychologists working on universal grammar, or psychologists working in evolutionary psychology—are unimpressive, an unfortunate cul-de-sac in the p
rogression of knowledge about our species.

  In this chapter, therefore, I lay out a case against instincts, looking at and rejecting several proposals on instincts—especially those that entail “native concepts”—proposed in the literature, all of them relatively popular with scientists and/or the general public.

  We started this book with some questions, which included the following: If you give a lecture, how might you know from people’s faces whether they are understanding you? When you use a concept, why do you believe that you understand it? Why do you like the music that you like? How do you know that the cry you heard is from your own child? How can people tell without looking whether someone is running upstairs or downstairs? How do you know what your mother looks like? What does tofu taste like? Why do you say “red, white, and blue” instead of “white, blue, and red”? I made the case that apperceptions, values, violable value hierarchies, and knowledge structures of the enveloping culture in conjunction with the idiopsychology of each individual lead to the formation of dark matter, and that this dark matter is the answer to each of these questions, depending on the history of the individual.

  Evolution and the Minimization of Instincts

  If the concepts of culture, apperception, and dark matter we have been constructing to this point are on the right track, then they leave little role for instincts. Perhaps a better way to put this is that the theory of dark matter implies a minimization of instincts. It is not that instincts are incompatible with culture or dark matter. Rather, they just become less relevant to the discussion. For example, if we indeed learn from all around us and participate in culturing and languaging, such that by these activities we also construct ourselves, then a great deal of what we want to account for is accounted for (W. Prinz 2012, 2013). The question is, why then reserve other aspects of the self for instincts, rather than pressing on and searching for evidence that our higher cognitive activities are learned? A closely related question is, how scientific is talk about instincts in the first place? (The answer here is “not very.”) Of course, the concept of instincts is common enough in the literature on animal behavior, evolutionary psychology, and Chomskyan linguistics, among other fields. Instincts are of interest in the context of the present discussion because to the degree that they are claimed to represent innate knowledge, they would support the Platonic-Bastian tradition of dark matter, over the Aristotelian perspective I am urging. Considered from the vantage point of the conception of knowledge here, however, the existence of innate dark matter would represent an additional source of knowledge for our species, in addition to apperception and culturing. Since we know that postpartum acquisition of knowledge takes place and that general learning is responsible for a great deal of how people come to construct a sense of self and group identity, one could reasonably argue that instincts would complicate the picture of human development, going against the inherent cognitive and cerebral plasticity of the species, and that appeal to epistemological nativism should be limited by Occam’s razor unless very strong evidence exists for them. Part of the purpose of the present section is to argue that no strong evidence exists—and that a huge gap exists between the postulation of (epistemic) instincts and convincing arguments for them. As a preview, here are some of the things that bother me about proposals that important aspects of human knowledge are innate (e.g., morality, language): (i) the nonlinear relationship of genotype to phenotype; (ii) failure to link “instincts” to environment—today’s instincts are often tomorrow’s learning, once we learn more about the environmental pressures to acquire certain knowledge; (iii) problematic definitions of innateness; (iv) failure to rule out learning before proposing an instinct; (v) the unclear content of what is left over for instincts after acquired dark matter is accounted for; and (vi) lack of an evolutionary account for the origin of an instinct.

  Knowing a person’s genome tells us very little about how that person’s genes are going to interact with their environment. As we saw in chapter 2 with the discussion of Dutch height, roughly the same genes can produce shorter-than-average people or the tallest people on the planet, depending on their interaction with the environment. To belabor this point for a moment, there is never a period in the development of any individual, from their gamete stage to adulthood, when they are not being affected by their environment. It would be misguided, therefore, to think that newborns of any species begin to learn from their environment only when they are born. Their cells have been thoroughly bathed in their environment before their parents mated—a bath whose properties are determined by their parents’ behavior, ecological surroundings, and so on. The effects of the environment on development are so numerous, unstudied, and untested in this sense that we currently have no wholly reliable basis for distinguishing environment from innate predispositions or instincts.

  Another reason for doubting the usefulness of terms like instinct and innate is that many things we believe to be instinctual can change radically when the environment changes radically, even aspects of the environment that we might not have thought relevant. For example, in 2004 a group of scientists led by Kerry Walton (Walton, Benavides, et al. 2005) carried out experiments on the ability of rats to right themselves in a low-gravity environment. What they discovered was that the self-righting routine (the way in which they come to their feet) that many had thought to be instinctual was ineffective in low gravity. But the rats didn’t simply fail to self-right. They “invented” a new strategy that worked while they were weightless. They showed behavioral flexibility where none had previously been expected. As the authors put it (ibid., 593), “Postnatal motor system development is appropriate to the gravitational field in which the animal is reared.” But then it is unlikely that it is innate, rather than “negotiated” as the body resonates (J. J. Gibson 1966, 1979) with its environment. Likely, the innate aspect should these be limited to the musculature and physiology, providing a non-concept-based ability to self-right, one that normally develops in earth-based gravity.

  Consider further the relevance of innateness (also referred to as nativism) for linguistics. In the 1960s linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and others became excited and fascinated with Chomsky’s bold and brilliant revival of Cartesian rationalism in the form of the hypothesis known most commonly as universal grammar. In the intervening decades, hundreds if not thousands of researchers inspired by Chomsky have conducted research on human language under nativist—usually Chomskyan nativist—assumptions. However, as we take stock of the tens of thousands of man-hours invested in this endeavor, I am not aware of a single psychological analysis in which UG is causally implicated. There is not a single analysis I have seen in which the solution could not have been reached without UG. There are in fact no predictions and no analysis of any linguistic fact in which UG is crucial. When we survey the literature on instincts that has arisen since Chomsky’s earliest work on universal grammar, we find a strong desire to find “design” instead of “evolution,” especially in the context of the nature of human cognition. Though some refer to this as “designer appeal,” I prefer “Bastian appeal.”

  We find it in Chomskyan linguistics—the work responsible more than any other for reviving the moribund philosophical school of rationalism, in particular the dualistic rationalism of Descartes, which separated the mind from the body—but also in theories inspired by it, such as evolutionary psychology, innate morality, natural semantic metatheory, and many others. It is the desire to find the Platonic conceptual a priori, to think that somehow we are the product of our genes rather than, in conjunction with our societies, the shapers of our phenotype.

  To deny instincts in one domain does not entail denial of the obvious fact that our genes impose strong limitations on us. There obviously are things such innate characteristics—eye color, adipose cell concentration, blood type, height, and so on. The question here, however, is whether there are Bastian-like innate conceptual structures. Carruthers, Laurence, and Stich believe that there are:

&nbs
p; Though they [evolutionary psychologists] are broadly sympathetic with the sociobiologists’ attempts to give evolutionary explanations of cultural phenomena, evolutionary psychologists maintain that sociobiology’s focus on behavior and its neglect of psychology are misguided. When genes influence behavior, they argue, they do so by building brains with a bevy of specialized mental modules. Behavior is the result of the interaction between these mental modules and the environment. (2007, 9)

  Moreover, Tooby and Cosmides (1992, 91) go so far as to claim that there is a single human metaculture—a cultural UG, in other words—that is “evoked” by experience. Carruthers, Laurence, and Stich (2007, 11) claim this means that “as in the case of Chomskian parameters, the information required to deal with the problem at hand is innate, and the environment serves only to trigger the appropriate package of information.” This includes, for example, food-sharing within band-level groups.

  The HM (human metaculture) of Cosmides and Tooby is perhaps the most radical form of Bastianism or Platonistic a priori knowledge that has been proposed since the Meno (and largely falsified as a claim about human nature, if animals with quite different cognitive organization turn out to have culture—see Laland et al. [2009] and Whitehead and Rendell [2014]). In what follows I want to argue that all forms of innate conceptualism—Platonic a priori knowledge, all Bastianisms—are detriments to understanding, passé, and deeply flawed. We are prepared to move beyond these primitive notions of design and instinct on to a more empirical, scientific understanding of human behavior, knowledge, and the dark matter arising at the intersection of culture and the individual.