ON LANGUAGE AND LEARNING D. B. Timmins, PhD Background Have just been re-reading Ludwig Wittgenstein's Blue Book and Brown Book -- his preliminary studies for his better known Philosophical Investigations. The Blue and Brown books (called after the colors of their covers in their mimeographed version) were initially presented to Professor Wittgenstein's Cambridge University classes in 1933-35. I first became acquainted with them in 1958. I don't know whether it's maturity, having been away from linguistics for many years, or my recent study of Mandarin, which of all the languages I've studied is so superficially similar to English in its grammatical structure, while being so remarkably different in grammatical logic -- but my current reading of LW has brought insights which totally eluded me thirty years ago. Wittgenstein, together with Bertrand Russell, was one of the earliest and most significant contributors to modern analytical linguistics; and has a towering reputation as one of the greatest mathematicians, philosophers, and logicians of the Twentieth Century. Among his more important non-mathematical contributions was the notion that every grammatical construction, as well as the already-at-that-time better understood differing connotations of words themselves, have various levels of meaning and understanding (which LW takes pains to elucidate are entirely different operations). His great work, in which he was joined by Russell, was to develop methods to clarify just what level of meaning was to be associated with which specific expression of language, written, spoken, or otherwise -- the beginnings of symbolic logic. He did this, in part, by introducing the notion of "language games", simplified statements which facilitate analysis of just what is being communicated, or not exactly communicated, and how meaning (or understanding) can be altered by slight grammatical modification (today we'd probably call this "language modeling"). Near the end of his short life he became convinced that one neither learns nor uses language according to strict rules of logic and that there is something highly significant in this; though, as he warned, "philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does". This he felt had led linguists to serious error in their analysis of the meaning of both words and grammar. Neither linguists, nor, it seems, those devoted to developing "artificial intelligence" (the computer mavens -- the latter at least until recently, and then only when they were forced to reinvent the wheel) have paid much attention to this insight of Wittgenstein. Regrettably, LW said little about exactly what he meant in connection with this warning, perhaps giving excuse to both linguists and the developers of the computer for their insufficiency of attention to the concerns expressed nearly sixty years ago which might have avoided many errors of both analysis and application in the development of computer languages. In the meantime, computer experts have given inordinate time to developing strictly logical computer languages which have proved difficult to implement both by the human mind, leading to programming errors, and which have thus become the bane of computer users, as well as presenting barriers in seeking the solution to real world problems. To give the devil his due, however, this was perhaps an essential step in the technological evolution of computers, which in their simplest forms depend on such pure logic to make their systems operate. We now hear more and more about efforts to develop "fuzzy logic", requiring an entirely new type of computer designed to proceed with calculations on the basis of imperfect, or conflicting information, through parallel processing in which a series of computers are cross-linked to process incoming information simultaneously in a race for solutions in a manner believed to be akin to the less understandable logical way the synapses of the human mind make their decisions. This paper, elaborating on the insight which came upon re-reading LW's Blue and Brown Books, is offered in the hope of extending understanding of what I think Wittgenstein was seeking to tell us about the greater logic of the "illogic" of language and how this may be related to the new theories of "fuzzy logic"., Learning, Knowing, and Understanding Joan Robinson, a noted Cambridge Professor, economist, and author of the seminal economic study Imperfect Competition , once asserted in a Harvard lecture I attended, a thought which has forever stuck in mind: "To understand anything, one must first know everything. But to learn anything, one must ignore a great deal of everything ". Living in a world of constant evolution and change, an organism to survive must constantly through the learning process be adapting to new conditions, and must therefore constantly ignore a great deal of the less consequential which is going on. It must simultaneously selectively decide however what is essential to its survival and what can safely be ignored. An example of this may be found in genealogical research, where the same individual can at times be found with a certain christening date, yet the marriage register show him/her to have been born exactly a year later (or earlier), but in the same parish and with the same parents and the same month and day of christening given. At present, the researcher finds his machine treating these as completely separate individuals, necessitating a "match and merge" operation based on human judgment to resolve the issue. A successful "fuzzy logic" machine could presumably make this decision if instructed that young women often wish to appear a year or two younger when marrying, whereas young men may wish to appear a year or two older and that the exact day of christening in a small parish may be more convincing evidence of identity than a year of birth given later in life which may be either deliberately or inadvertently misstated. Strict Logic and Levels of Meaning What Wittgenstein had to say about levels of meaning was, like every great discovery, already present in the nature of language and grammar. And like every great discovery, once explicated, subject to the comment "So what's new? Everyone knows that." Yes, the theory of Supply and Demand was understood by merchants, even before Adam Smith, if in such rough and ready form they'd have had difficulty in explaining it to anyone outside the trade. And the concepts of rent and foreign trade were being applied by landowners and tenants and importers and exporters even before Ricardo gave them exact content and meaning. But as a result of their work, now even farmers and laborers can take into account the effects of price inflation on their personal and household interests in a manner more precise than even the most experienced merchant or banker could have ventured a hundred and fifty years ago. Language Logic and the Evolution of Science It is perhaps because of the different underlying logics of various languages that civilization, and above all science, that greatest, most glorious, rewarding, and potentially most threatening aspect of civilization, has shifted its locus of major activity across the centuries according to the stage of evolution of human understanding and the type of processing logic most useful at any given moment in bridging the next stage of scientific progress. Greek, perhaps the most sophisticated and elegant of the languages of its time -- was enabled by reason of both its structure and the social organization of its City States to afford leisure to a substantial class, permitting sufficient reflection and speculation to gave Europe its first science, theater, and literature. This is not to say that Greece did not borrow heavily from both Egypt and the Orient, but it made historically notable progress in mathematics, art, the theater, politics, architecture, and literature by reason of the insights its language logic offered in analyzing and processing the phenomena presented to Greek minds. Latin, with its more "here and now" processing logic, in due course eventuated in Rome's military triumph over the Mediterranean world. Results: the great engineering marvels which even today can be seen from Hadrian's Wall on the Scottish border to Volubilis in North Africa, and from Merida near the Spanish border with Portugal to the Eastern Mediterranean. Nor does this take into account the fact that Caesar came nearer to achieving the enduring dream of European political unity than any time since, including Charlemagne's, Carlos Segundo's, Napoleon's, and Hitler's attempts to do so by war and conquest. Spanish and Italian, both bastardized remnants of Latin with not inconsiderable Arabic admixture, appear to have been ideal vehicles for the reintroduction of the ancient wisdom preserved, but not notably advanced by the Moslems during their occuption of much of Europe. Marco Polo's trip to China, bringing back cannon, gunpowder, and printing, thus improving the technology of warfare -- as well as geographical considerations, all played essential roles in this regard, though I make no attempt to put forward a simple, single cause argument for history here. Chinese, perhaps because of the great emphasis placed on social harmony by Confucianism, seems to have aborted its early scientific thrust. Despite the first invention of gunpowder, clocks, rockets, and steam engines, these were all sublimated into a "toy syndrome" in the Middle Kingdom, eschewing the benefits of their evolution into machinery of production and rapid transportation in the interest of avoiding their destructiveness as weapons of war. China, perhaps the first country to develop a written language, also was among the first to recognize the potential of phonetic script. But, again China aborted this advance, possibly because it had already developed an important literature and considered itself too far down the road to reverse course by changing its system of written language -- much as English has given up hope of rationalizing its spelling as the Scandinavian countries have felt it possible to do, perhaps because of their much less impressive accumulation of great literature. The great German scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt gave us a great insight into why this may be so. Humboldt became convinced from his study of languages that different tongues provide different intensities of response to life. Taking over Schlegel's concept of "higher" and "lower" grammars, Hummboldt argued that different languages penetrate reality in different ways, to different depths, and from different perspectives. To Humboldt, Greek is light, playful, and highly nuanced. Latin, by contrast, is sober, grave, masculine, and laconic. In commenting on this difference, George Steiner in his seminal After Babel , gives his own evaluation of Latin script as "perfectly expressive of the linear, monumental weight of the language. Both are the active mold of the Roman way of life." The linguist Jost Trier saw things quite similarly. To Trost, every language structures and organizes reality in its own manner, thereby determining the aspects of reality peculiar to that given language. Steiner suggests that often a language will filter out from the field of potential recognition even more information than is included in this field, i.e. that language structure may intrude elements which do not exist in reality. This is perfectly consonant with the latest theories of how the human brain interprets reality when confronted by an optical illusion, visualizing triangles which aren't there, making straight lines bowed, and judging one of two lines of equal length to be longer or shorter than the other. This is one of the most difficult problems in trying to develop computers which can read imperfect human handwriting. Sapir, in an article dated as early as 1929, says, "The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached." Thus the Hopi Indian assessment of what is happening, Hopi inferential reasoning, and the Hopi evaluation of long ago events is delicately susceptible of provisional modes far beyond the indicative, imperative, and (rapidly disappearing) subjunctive modes of English. Indeed, some who are familiar with both physics and Hopi have suggested that Hopi may be a language much more adapted to explaining astro-physics and wave particle phenomena than any of the languages which led to the development of these theories. The shaping influence of the observer on the phenomenon observed (the Heisenberg principle) and the statistics of indeterminacy, are inherent in Hopi as they are not in English, or Russian, or German. Returning however to our discussion of the Renaissance: students came from all over Europe to study at Salamanca to take advantage of the early progress at this great university following the expulsion of the Moors and the reflowering of Western Civilization based on the knowledge of antiquity preserved during the centuries long Muslim occupation. As the Renaissance progressed, the subtleties of Italian, and later still French, their vocabularies and grammar fortified by the inventive language of the troubadours, and medieval court ceremonial in response to the early success of the French monarchy in evolving the first successful nation state in Europe, made Paris succeed both Spain and Italy as the great center of learning. Oxford and Cambridge later came into their own as scientific thinking advanced further, with the pared-down and practical logic of English resulting from the necessarily simplified structure of a language which had had to survive successive reforgings by Brits, Latinized Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Frenchified Norsemen pushing to the fore the subject-verb- predicate thought processes of its Newtons, Harveys, Kelvins, and Watts' -- soon entailed the invention of the spinning jenny, Jacquard weaving, the steamship, and the locomotive. Science next advanced into chemistry and physics: and German with its insistence on stuffing all available information into the forepart of its sentence structure, then summing up with a powerful verb to synthesize what happened after all the preceding phenomena have been analyzed and processed, soon overtook and surpassed England in the forefront of science. Students were soon trekking from all over the world to study in Dresden, Heidelberg, and Berlin. In short order, Science got beyond cause and effect into realms of probability and uncertainty. And as the number of students returning from study in Europe became numerous enough to staff its universities, America emerged as the great center of scholarship and learning and has retained this lead for the past half century. It should not be overlooked however that some of the greatest conceptual breakthroughs came from Swedes and Danes such as Niels Bohr whose mother tongue and thinking logic had been formed by the Scandinavian bards whose inventiveness in developing language similes to make possible the great Eddic poetry which entertained remote households during the long, dark, arctic winters, or during the extended sea voyages of those who had gone a-viking, enriched these languages with all sorts of extraordinary quasi-logical associations. It should be well noted, however, that more contemporaneously, and at a presumably now appropriate stage of scientific evolution, the number of orientals -- Chinese and Japanese -- who have been winning Nobel recognition for such extraordinary concepts as negative matter, quarks, bubble universes, string dimensionality, and intergalactic wormholes, has been increasing notably. And Hopi Indians may be next in line. It would appear that this may be because the oriental thought process is, at this stage of scientific development, better equipped to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty -- given the long and respectable position of yin and yang, with its attendant concept of opposition in all things and interpenetration of forces, has made oriental philosophy more of a force in contemporary science than European thought logic, based as these languages are on essentially straightforward cause and effect, being or non-being, logic or absurdity, which were of such enormous value at earlier stages of understanding. And, it is argued, this is precisely because their languages are more adapted to thinking in terms of the noumenal absurdities of logic -- Chaos Theory, Fractal Mathematics, etc. -- which contemporary science seems to be telling us underlie phenomenal reality. Emergence of English as Chief World Second Language Notwithstanding the findings of the Nobel Committees, however, it seems that two of every three world leaders is able to communicate in English. Every fifth Chinaman in the country which comprises a quarter of the world's population seems to speak at least some English. And even France appears to have given up its fight to keep out the contamination of Franglais -- a leading national objective under the regime of Charles DeGaulle a short twenty-five years ago. English is the chief second language of India, the second largest nation in the world; indeed, English is the only language which Indians have in common. English is also the second language of most Europeans and Latin Americans. The question therefore naturally arises whether this will mean that the underlying thought processing logic of English , which especially dominates in the realm of computers and computer programming, will eventually override, and thus eliminate competing language logics? If so, what does this portend for the evolution of science as it comes up against ever more esoteric demands for new concepts? May we be arriving not only at the "End of History" but at the "End of Science"? The question is akin to the preoccupation of environmentalists about the possible destruction of potentially valuable future medical and scientific discoveries by reason of biological extinctions. One suspects that this will be less of a problem in the realm of language. Despite the PRC's continued emphasis on social order, even the most culturally conservative among the Chinese government no longer view it as necessary to sublimate scientific thought into "toy mode" -- both because they have learned that to survive in the modern world they cannot afford to let the possible social dangers of scientific progress outweigh its benefits; and, possibly because thinking about quarks and black holes appears to hold less current danger for society or the state than thought more directly aimed at social reform. Historically, the elites of all countries from ancient Rome (where Greek was the language of culture), to Norman England and Tsarist Russia (in each of which French was the language of Court and Society), have taken care to educate their children bilingually, considering this an asset facilitating rule, commerce, travel, and cultural enjoyment. Only in contemporary America, it seems, is bilingualism confined to the underclass. Is there any reason to suppose that with the spread of democracy and prosperity to broader sections of humanity, that the new elites in Africa, Asia, India, and Latin America will adopt any different attitude towards the benefits of bilingualism than the elites of history? As former Business Manager of a large international school in Beijing, I can assure readers that the well-to-do parents of children from at least forty-four non-English speaking countries are standing in line to enroll their children in this English-language school to give them what is widely recognized as the best possible endowment for a successful adult life -- a facility in written and spoken English. Nevertheless, virtually all of these children speak another mother tongue in the home. With the increased possibility of travel, desktop publication and FAX distribution for specialized markets (think what samizdat was able to do in the Soviet Union even using such primitive methods as non-word-processor-produced carbon copies and hand to hand distribution); and taking into account the expansion of music, the theater, and television programming to world-scale markets, any reasonably sized language group can expect sufficient access to the media to preserve itself, however universal second languages may become. Thus, one has confidence, contrary to the widely feared elimination of species which is taking place in the ecology, that the potentially valuable, slightly variant processing logics of the hundreds of world languages which may someday make their own contribution to breakthroughs in the social or scientific spheres will be preserved. Some further comments reinforcing this view will be put forward in the final section of this paper. Regarding the Contributions of Alternate Forms of Language Logic Twenty-eight years ago in the process of writing a graduate school seminar paper, I undertook a comparative study of the thinking of William James, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, James Bryant Conant, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Sometime later reading the paper I was quite struck by my wisdom, wondering how I'd ever come up with such impressive findings (this happens not infrequently when one forgets that one's best papers usually consist primarily of the accreted wisdom of great minds one has stitched together into a new and [sometimes] novel coherency). Indeed my Professor thought it worthy of publication and so suggested. Regrettably, at the time I was so centered in a non-academic career to which I was eager to return, that I took no steps towards publication. In the meantime, the paper has disappeared. I wish it were available. But I recall its main thrust and will here repeat its argument sans attributions and footnotes. Russell/Whitehead/Conant and Wittgenstein all agree that whether or not all languages have deep-wiring that predisposes all humans without the most severe mental deficiency to language acquisition (as latterly argued by Noam Chomsky), there is nothing to predispose different languages to assume the same processing logic to resolve probability and uncertainty, i.e. to all decide unambiguously that one "merge and match" logic is superior to another. Many, if not most languages thus have different logic patterns in processing their inputs from the phenomenal world. And, it seems, these different logics have, as asserted above, had differential importance and value at different stages of the evolution of science. The question thus arises, as preliminarily considered above, and taking into account the expansion of music, the theater, and television programming to world-scale markets, whether any reasonably sized language group can expect sufficient access to the media to preserve itself, however universal second languages may become. Desk Top Publishing and Micro-Marketing Both radio and television are becoming increasingly micro-market oriented. Hispanic television in the United States today constitutes a major network of its own. Black television broadcasting is rapidly catching up. And CNN (in English) is now a major factor in the distribution of world news. It is said that Saddam Hussein received most of his news about what what going on in United States thinking during the Gulf Crisis by watching CNN in his office. Desk top publishing has made possible the printing of virtually anyone's writing at rock bottom price. And FAX has made possible the distribution of both advertising (and during the Tiananmen events) of provocative political instructions and exchanges, even in the most politically controlled and repressive nations. Again, reflect on what samizdat accomplished in the USSR even under the most repressive conditions, even without word processor or FAX distribution. It has become the author's conviction that, unlike previous eras where one dominant tongue could replace another by limiting access to schools and monopolizing the press, even less dominant still-existant languages, will be able to preserve their written form because of cheap audio-recorders, inexpensively made quasi-professional VCR movies, and desk-top publication of the works of local authors who will not have to depend on acceptance of their works by publishers in one or another of the "world" languages. And that, as noted with regard to Black and Hispanic television in the United States, micro-marketed television will contribute to preserving the spoken form of many, if not most, of the smaller language groups around the world so that those possessed of the thought logics of these languages will at least have the chance of contributing to future generations of scientific breakthroughs where their particular form of processing logic might provide an avenue of progress. Substantiating this view, we are contemporaneously seeing the reemergence of linguistically based political movements is the Baltic and Southern Republics of the former Soviet Union and the language-based fragmentation of the Serbian, Croatian, and Slovak constituents of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.