Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence

Steven Pinker

I think it taps two of the mechanisms that make intelligence possible. Why would I spend a good chunk of my career studying the minutiae of irregular verbs? I chose that topic because I thought it shed light on bigger issues of cognitive organisation.

Why do we have 165 or so quirky exceptions like "stride", "strode"; "come", "came"; "sing", "sang"; "go", "went"? It's a consequence of the fact that we memorise words — that's one of two mechanisms behind language. We store by brute force, rote memory, arbitrary pairings between a sound and a meaning. The word "duck" doesn't look like a duck or walk like a duck, but I can use it to get you to think the thought of a duck because we've all memorised a pairing between that sound and that meaning.

We don't just blurt out words but we also combine them into phrases and sentences using rules that allow you to compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the parts and the way they're arranged. Those are the two mechanisms that make language possible. Because of the peculiarities of the history of a language, you can have that labour divided between the rule system and the memory system, and it's the tension between those two systems that gives rise to a lot of the quirkiness of language, including English irregular verbs.

Pinker

I might invoke Darwin more than Hayek. In the generation-to-generation transmission of an irregular verb, an irregular verb has to be memorised. Since memory thrives on frequency — the more often you hear something, the better you remember it — if any verb declines in frequency, a generation may never successfully master it. They'll default to the all-purpose add-ed rule, and the verb will go from irregular to regular. You've got an erosion of the stock of irregular verbs as they get filtered through the minds of children memorising them.

Pinker

"Dreamt" becomes "dreamed". It is prettier, and that's one of the reasons that lyricists and poets will prefer the irregular to the regular when there's a choice — "strode" over "strided", "strove" over "strived". Irregular forms fit the phonological template for a standard word in the language; they're more euphonious because they aren't assembled in a clunky way from the verb stem and this bit of detritus hanging on the end.

That is Hayekian in the sense that no one planned the language to be optimal. There are tradeoffs, multiple tugs. As millions of speakers make little adjustments, the language spontaneously evolves with some balance.

Pinker

Admittedly it would have been hard to have a movie called "Honey, I Shrank the Kids". In my style manual, The Sense of Style, I recommend hanging on to them. It's nice to have that three-way distinction. English conjugation is already so degenerate that it's nice to preserve what distinctions we have.

There are almost unpronounceable regular words like "sixths" or "edited" where, because you're sticking an extra bit on the end, you're messing up the nice contour of a standard word. That's another tension that, over the history of a language, will shape the balance of regular and irregular forms.

Pinker

It's not easy to pin down what the hypothesis is, partly because Chomsky himself revises his theory every decade or so, on a principle of Mao's Continuous Revolution. It's a moving target. Also, as you say, it was neither specified in a precise way nor field-tested against a dataset of language variation, which I think is unfortunate in terms of ordinary scientific practice.

With that caveat, I think there is such a thing as universal grammar in this sense: the child is biased to analyse the speech that he or she hears in particular ways. The child doesn't simply record sentences verbatim. There are certain kinds of rules and elements that a child is keyed to look for. There are commonalities across the world's languages that come from the fact that language is created anew every generation by the minds of children who construct it out of the data they get from their parents and peers.

Pinker

The metaphor of the module comes from my former colleague Jerry Fodor. You have evolutionary psychologists proposing the metaphor of the mind as a Swiss Army knife — or now it's more like a smartphone with a bunch of different apps. These can all be opposed to a view of the mind that would have a theory of everything, that there's just one principle.

Modules never quite seemed like the best metaphor. There is some organisation, but the problem is that snap-in components with very limited channels of communication between them — that's too strong. I think it's reasonable to say there are different faculties. The mind can have specialisation and structure without them literally being independent.

I would agree with Jon Haidt that there are different mindsets — different ways in which we can analyse the same set of events — and that a lot of political disagreement consists of what frame of mind, if you want, what module, you use to analyse a particular issue.

Pinker

I would distinguish the self-concept from subjective experience. People often use the word "consciousness" to refer to both: self-consciousness or self-knowledge on the one hand, and subjectivity or the qualitative nature of consciousness — qualia, what it is like to feel something — on the other. I think those are two different questions.

The philosophical problem of sentience, or qualia, or the hard problem of consciousness, I think might ultimately be a quirk of our own way of analysing the world — the mind reflecting on itself is naturally going to be puzzled by some aspects of itself.

We know from neuroscience that there is no aspect of consciousness that does not have some physical correlate. There's no ESP. There's no life after death. It's all information-processing and neurons. Why it should feel like something to me to be that network of neurons, I don't think we have a satisfying answer to. It may not be a scientific puzzle at all — Dan Dennett being the most famous philosopher to claim that it isn't a coherent intellectual question.

I tend to gravitate toward a view sometimes called "mysterianism": that there may be some facts about the universe that are true, and we'll never be satisfied that we intuitively understand them. Not because there is some mystery in the sense of an undiscovered scientific principle, but because our very way of grasping reality might make certain things puzzling to us even though we know at a more explicit cognitive level that they're true.

A heap of neurons that registers the environment, organises the information, and acts on it — including a model of itself — from my point of view, it feels like something. Why that should be true? I don't know. There are some cases where human intuition hits a wall and this is one of them.

Pinker

They may not be, for any practical purpose, determined — there may be processes that are chaotic, that are nonlinear, where some ions zig instead of zag because of Brownian movement or maybe even quantum phenomena. As a result the whole system might behave in a way that is physically determined but for all practical purposes random.

In theory perhaps Laplace's demon would be able to tell us what each of us will do next. But some things that are true in theory are so mind-bogglingly complicated that they may as well not be true. I don't think there's any miracle that goes on in the brain when we make a decision. In that sense, we're determined. On the other hand there is so much unpredictability that for all intents and purposes we're not.

Pinker

That's not too far from the way I would see myself. Not so much taking an intermediate position that's just "find the Goldilocks zone." Rather, I do believe in the Enlightenment vision that by understanding our world — the world is intelligible, we can understand it — progress in understanding and therefore progress in rational action are possible. Including, pointedly, understanding ourselves.

There is such a thing as human nature. It can be studied scientifically the way other phenomena are studied. Understanding human nature is valuable because we can then discount illusions that are quirks of our own makeup, and understand what gives humans fulfilment and what resources we have to work with in improving a political system.

The middle ground isn't finding the arithmetic mean between two extremes. Rather it's trying to go down a level to more fine-grain causal mechanisms underneath the phenomena. In the case of language — I've always been bored by the question of whether language is innate or learned. It's neither. It's not halfway in between. Rather there is an innate structure that does the learning. Let's characterise the nature of the learning mechanism in terms of its information-processing abilities. Once you have that, that is the solution to the nature-nurture problem.

Pinker

What are we doing here if you don't believe in reason? Why don't we have an arm wrestle or a beauty contest? By the very act of posing this question you're committed to reason. It's too late. You've already committed yourself.

Hume emphasised that humans are subject to irrational passions and biases, but one of the reasons he did philosophy was to expose some of those fallacies, the better that we should work around them. His argument about reason being a slave to the passions was partly a conceptual point: the ability to go from A to B using reason doesn't tell you what B should be. That's different from the psychological claim that people are permanently irrational. People can be made more rational — by what we're doing now, and by science, which takes your beliefs and allows reality to refute them or not.

We don't have human sacrifice anymore. We don't throw virgins into volcanoes to get better weather. We don't have too many hereditary monarchies. Fortunately, we don't only have irrational passions. We do have this big frontal cortex grafted onto a brain which now and again can override our passions. We can exert self-control. We can count to ten. Not uniformly, not always reliably, but enough that it's something we could celebrate and try to encourage.

Pinker

I never got rap music. I don't want to say it's overrated. It may be that I'm overrated, or at least I overrate myself. I was probably born too soon.

Pinker

Underrated. I like it.

Pinker

I'm for it. Even though every individual human brain might have its quirks and be irrational, it is possible for a collective enterprise that works by certain rules to have a kind of rationality that none of the individual minds has. Also, people who are experienced in market transactions don't fall for the kinds of fallacies that behavioural economists are fond of pointing out. You really can't turn a person into a money pump. Put a person in a situation where there's real money at stake, and all of a sudden they're not so irrational.

Pinker

Underrated. No construction could have survived in the language for more than 1,500 years if it didn't serve some purpose. There are circumstances in which the passive is the better choice — in particular when the topic of a conversation, the entity already in the spotlight, is the done-to or acted-upon. In fact, the two most famous style guides in the English language, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, both accidentally use the passive in the very sentence in which they say don't use the passive.

Pinker

My optimism doesn't consist of prophecy in that sense. It consists of looking at what has happened and noting that the pessimistic view is factually incorrect. People believe that we're living in unusually violent times and we're not. How to project that into the future is a separate set of questions.

There are two weaknesses in your chain of reasoning. One is that every form of physical accomplishment follows an exponential curve of getting cheaper and cheaper but can level off. Plane travel hasn't got faster and faster — if you extrapolate from the Wright brothers to 1957, then it just totally levelled off. It is not necessarily true that there will be a $10,000 nuclear weapon. The other is: how much desire is there for that kind of destruction? The rate-limiting step on terrorist destruction is how many people think that it's a good idea to cause a lot of damage for no particular reason.

One of the reasons that we've gone now more than seventy years without a nuclear weapon being used in war is that they're just not terribly useful as weapons to accomplish anything.

Pinker

I'll give you climate change and nuclear war.

Pinker

I don't think there's a natural arc toward destruction of civilisations. In fact, one could make the argument that it goes the other direction. War is a pretty stupid thing to do. You blow a lot of stuff up. You kill people. You don't end up with anything you couldn't have gotten from some other means. As soon as you become too belligerent, you give other people an incentive to destroy you. It's just as plausible to me that as civilisations advance, rather than having more and more destructive wars, they could continue the trend that we've been on since World War II and eventually make war obsolete.

Pinker

I'm sceptical of the premise. As someone very interested in genetically influenced traits, and excited in the '90s at the possibility that we'd find the gene for this and the gene for that, I now appreciate that even traits that have a heavy genetic component — which most traits do — the genetic influence is distributed over thousands and thousands of genes, each of which increments or decrements the trait by a smidgen, and many of which have a mixture of positive and negative effects. The idea that you'll put in the gene for musical ability in your child turns out to be factually incorrect. That's not the way genes work.

Pinker

We almost certainly are. We're in the midst of a mass extinction of languages. I don't think it will result in everyone speaking English — even under the most dire predictions, say ninety percent of languages go extinct, that leaves six hundred. No one is going to be giving up Spanish or Hindi or Russian or Chinese any time soon. The growth of translation software and national media, combined with national pride and just the inertia of growing up with a language, means we're not going to have a single language driving out all the others.

Pinker

Politically motivated campaigns to change language can have an effect, as we see in the euphemism treadmill — the fact that we don't use the word "negro" anymore. But it's easier to do it with nouns and verbs than with closed-class or grammatical items like pronouns. Since the '70s there have been proposals to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun into English and none have caught on.

The reason there is often a cycling is that the change in attitudes you want to affect by changing the language meets resistance in the rest of our psychology. As long as there's still some kind of negative connotation to an entity, then changing the label will just result in the new label picking up the emotional aura of the concept.

Pinker

There is an intellectual equivalent of tribalism. We tend to think of intellectual disagreements like the Red Sox versus the Yankees. It's deeply pleasurable to read arguments that support a view you already hold. Ideally, what we want is an arena in which the rules of the game make it so that no matter how emotionally tied you are to your belief, if it's wrong, it'll be shown to be wrong and it'll just be too embarrassing to hold on to.

How we could set up the rules so that despite all of the quirks of human nature — such as intellectual tribalism — are overcome in our collective arena of discourse is an absolutely vital question.

Pinker

I'm writing a book whose tentative title is The New Enlightenment: A Manifesto for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress, where I argue that the Enlightenment philosophers got a lot of stuff right, that a lot of their dreams are starting to come true, that a lot of dimensions of human well-being, when quantified as I tried to do in The Better Angels of Our Nature, turn out to be going in a good direction.