Glenda B. Claborne
Socio 500b
Feb. 22, 1999
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York, NY: HarperPerennial.

How could the idea of a "discrete combinatorial system" hold the key to understanding the creativity of human action that Mead and Joas have been trying to explain?

I. Discrete Combinatorial Systems

Discrete combinatorial systems are systems that have the capacity to generate an infinite number of combinations and permutations out of a finite number of discrete elements. Moreover, the combinations generated by these systems have properties that are quite distinct from the properties of their particular elements.

Language and genetic makeup are examples of systems based on a discrete combinatorial system. In language, an infinite number of sentences, each distinct from the other, can be formed based on a fixed set of rules or a code called the generative grammar and on a finite number of words that make up the mental dictionary of a person. Similarly, in genetics, an unlimited number of different genes can be strung based on only sixty-four codons, which are formed from only four nucleotides that make up the DNA molecule. The generative grammar is found to be universal among all human beings just as the sixty four codons of nucleotides are the same in all organisms.

Pinker illustrates the distinctness of sentences from their constituent words with the example of the simple sentences Dog bites man and Man bites dog. Each sentence has a meaning that is different from the meaning of any of the three words in it. Also, the use of the same three words in different order of sequence results in the two sentences having different meanings.

That elements retain their particular characteristics and that combinations attain an infinite range of properties in discrete combinatorial systems like language, differentiate these systems from blending systems. In blending systems like light, sound, geology, paint-mixing or cooking, the properties of the elements get lost in the average or mixture and the properties of the combinations lie between the properties of the constituent elements. For example, combining red, blue and yellow paints results in a grey mixture in which the individual colors are indistinguishable from each other unlike words in a sentence or nucleotides in a gene. Also the number of combinations of the primary colors to produce new colors or hues is very limited.

Discrete combinatorial systems such as language and genetics are also different from artificial word-chain devices. Word-chain devices can generate an infinite number of sentences just by moving from one list of words to another and picking words from the lists to make up sentences according to a set of rules programmed into the device. Word chain devices are discrete combinatorial systems but they are the wrong kind to describe the unfolding of human language. Language works not by forming long chains of words after another and storing them in the brain but by a set of rules that labels, connects, embeds or transposes chunks of thought called mentalese into a coherent network of meanings. Words are only the physical representations of thought and the mind can construe reality in a variety of ways The functions of the parts of speech that we normally learn in grammar school can be used by the mind to refer to whatever reality it can think of.

Pinker cites two consequences of the combinatorial nature of the generative grammar of language. One is the "sheer vastness of language." Each person has the innate capacity to produce an infinite number of sentences by the same logic that there are an infinite number of integers: one can always add a word to an existing sentence to make a new one just as one can always add the integer 1 to the highest number that is imagined to come up with a still higher number. Another consequence of the combinatorial nature of generative grammar is that "it is a code that is autonomous from cognition." We sense sometimes that a string of words do not sound quite right even though they are put together syntactically correct in the way we learn grammar at school. This is because "ungrammaticality is simply the consequence of our having a fixed code for interpreting sentences." The independence of syntax and sense is illustrated by nonsense verse and prose. We instinctively know when strings of words do not make sense but can exploit that fact for fun anyway.

That language is generated from an innate code of rules wired into an area of the brain and hypothesized to be programmed by a "grammar gene" is altogether different from Mead's theory that language evolves out of the social interaction of human beings. That language naturally unfolds from a fixed set of rules preprogrammed into the brain refutes the notion that language is a cultural artifact or that it is primarily a product of socialization. Pinker cites several findings among children, immigrants and deaf people to prove the argument that language is not acquired primarily through socialization but unfolds naturally according to an innate logic. Socialization only serves to spread what is already formed by that inner machinery in people's brains.

Pinker argues that the computational design of human language suggests that the mind works through several computational modules, each having their own structural and conceptual logic. The complexity of these modules, Pinker further argues, evolved from biological adaptation in foraging societies which, in terms of evolutionary time, constitutes ninety eight percent of known human existence. There are modules for numbers and mechanics that helped humans adapt to their physical world, modules for categories to make sense of the biological world as well as modules for law and order for social adaptation.

II. The key to understanding the creativity of human action that Mead and Joas have been trying to explain.

Common to all pragmatic theories, including Mead's and Joas' theories, is the emphasis on the situatedness of action. The meaning of action can only be constituted in real-life situations that call for creative solutions to obstacles. The theories may presume impulses, desires, or needs that are inherent in individuals and they may also assume ultimate values or goals of society, but they adamantly deny any notion of determinism in any of their assumptions. Pragmatism can only acknowledge any preexisting causation of action as unreflected or unconscious and ultimate values as socially constituted.

Based on Joas' review of pragmatic thought from Peirce to Dewey, one can imagine the pressure the pragmatists put on their thoughts to avoid going down the road to biological reductionism or the path to a stultifying moralism. The effort to avoid reducing all human action in terms of stimulus and response or in terms of moral compulsion to act was noble indeed but the pressure was there to collapse all explanations of action into the situation. Ironically, although Joas took us on a comprehensive tour of the intellectual history of theories of action so we may find the creative element that can integrate all of human action, he leaves us in vaguely defined situations with vaguely defined boundaries to hold onto. One gets the feeling that the only honest action one can do is to curl up in a fetal position and reflect on one's preconscious or prelinguistic self because there are no fixed reasons to lift one's hands toward ultimate values or to plant one's feet in firm foundations.

But a more honest, if not the most pragmatic, action to take to understand the creativity of human action is to consider the computational theory of the mind with its discrete combinatorial systems. The theory provides a fixed basis on which to anchor explanations of human action without positing that human action is already predetermined by innate forces. That each person has the capacity to utter an infinite number of sentences based on a finite set of rules of mental grammar and with a finite number of words in his/her brain suggests that a finite, fixed set of rules for action does not necessarily mean a closed system of action. In fact, it suggests the opposite, that of an open-ended, complex system. In a sense, the theory that the mind consists of open-ended complex modules enables a theory of the creativity of human action to have its cake and eat it too.

That the mind consists of prewired modules for understanding our natural, biological and social worlds does not reduce all adaptations to biological adaptation. At the very least, what we can conclude from a knowledge of innate modules in the mind that govern our actions is to reconsider our notions of omnipotent causes of human action such as culture, socialization, rationality, even a large brain. A knowledge of the logic of biological adaptation underlying many of our actions could at least help us differentiate what actions are primarily the result of natural adaptation and what actions are just technologies for social control. This is particularly important in the areas of norms and morality which Joas wrote are the foundations of sociology.

Pinker discusses the arbitrary rules of grammar that "language mavens" employ to standardize and refine the use of language but that these rules oftentimes go against the natural capacities of people to create their own language. The problematical question posed for ethics and morality is "When is intervention in natural processes justified?" Pinker himself avoids the issue when he cites the example of Ildefonso and other languageless adults who, when they surface, must be taught language first and not be studied first for how they manage without language for ethical reasons. To his credit, Pinker never claimed that the computational theory of the mind could explain all social and moral problems. At the end of his book, he enumerates three obvious points that can be gleaned from the knowledge that the mind, as shown by the capacities of a language instinct, is an amazing organ of computational modules:

The knowledge that the mind consists of logical structures that answers to the physical, biological and social worlds should make the mind and all that it can think of as much a part of the empirical domain of scientific study as things that can be touched, tasted, seen or heard.