Huey Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, once said, “Power is the ability to define phenomena.” Isn’t that right in line with many of your observations?
Yes, exactly. Although I would add that it doesn’t mean that these debates are just about words. The words are means for trying to change people’s minds, but there is something that you’re trying to change their minds about. We’re not just trapped in a world of language. Take “invading Iraq” versus “liberating Iraq”—those are different ways of framing the same military action, but there is a fact involved here as to which it is, and that depends on whether the majority of the population resented the former regime and welcomes the new one, or vice versa. So although you may choose one frame rather than the other in order to persuade people to believe the one thing rather than the other, that doesn’t necessarily mean that one frame is as true or as good as the other. This continues my general theme: It’s important to understand the great power of language, but one shouldn’t overestimate it. One shouldn’t think that we just live in a fantasy world of our own linguistic creations.
You say that language exposes our limitations, but you also insist that it can show us a way out of them. In fact, you have a linguistic superhero, don’t you, in the reality of the metaphor?
Yes, I have two superheroes, actually. One of them is metaphor, the other combinatorics. Metaphor would be the way in which we transfer and transform ways of thinking that came from the realm of very concrete actions like pouring water or throwing rocks or closing a jammed drawer, and so on. But we can leach the content from them and use them as abstract structures to reason about other domains. We can talk about the economy rising and falling, as if it were a domain. We can use graphs to convey mathematical relationships as though they were lines and shapes drawn in space.
An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets. And although we use these metaphors of concrete things to stand for abstract concepts, that doesn’t keep us from putting a different twist on those same metaphors of the concrete and using them to describe other and quite different abstract concepts. When we put together the power of metaphor with the combinatorial nature of language and thought, we become able to create a virtually infinite number of ideas, even though we are equipped with a finite inventory of concepts and relations. I believe it is the mechanism that the mind uses to understand otherwise inaccessible abstract concepts. It may be how the mind evolved the ability to reason about abstract concepts such as chess or politics, which are not really concrete or physical and have no obvious relevance to reproduction and physical survival. It can also enable us—when we lose ourselves in the words of a skilled writer, for instance—to inhabit the consciousness of another person.
You argue that metaphor and combinatorics should be keys to our education, that we should be taught to think and to use language in a way that will promote our development and productivity. Why?
We must tap the mind’s ability to grasp things in familiar ways and then to stretch them to apply to new ideas and areas of thought. But we also have to be mindful of the fact that there are ways in which any metaphor may or may not correspond accurately to the thing you’re using it to explain. So just using or pointing out the metaphor isn’t enough. To make it true and useful, one then has to add all these qualifications, like, well, yes, it’s like this in one regard but not in another. So, for example, the mind is like a computer in that it depends on information storage, but it’s not like a computer in that its accuracy isn’t highly reliable and it doesn’t work serially but rather in parallel. Or that natural selection is like a design engineer in the sense that parts of animals become engineered to accomplish certain things, but it is not like a design engineer in that it doesn’t have long-term foresight. So the analogies in a metaphor can give with one hand but take with another. That is, it can give you insight but also lead to a lot of bogus conclusions if it’s used carelessly. But surely metaphoric insights, the seeing of resemblances and connections, can give rise, and have given rise, to countless innovations in science, the arts, and many other fields of endeavor.
Yet don’t you think that most education, and what most people believe education should be, is just the opposite of what you describe? Don’t many people think it should be a kind of indoctrination in our society’s conventional ideas?
An important key to doing that is to tap the little kernel of motivation to know the truth and not allow ourselves to be fooled or misled. That’s there in everybody, somewhere. You don’t like to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin of life or the fate of the planet?
There’s a part of all of us that doesn’t want to be duped, and we have to be persuaded that in certain realms—like politics, like ethics, like science—the whole point of the activity is to get at the truth, to discover and reveal how the world really is. I think, in large part, truth-seeking institutions, like science and history and journalism, aim to strengthen that reality muscle. We need that all the more because there are other parts of the mind that militate against it, that want to be walled off from reality, such as the part of the mind in each of us that concerns itself with how we look to ourselves and to others, the self-deceptiveness that makes us want to project the most positive image to the world, whether it’s the truest image or not.
This built-in bias is something that has been established by social psychology, called a self-serving bias or what you might call the “Lake Wobegon effect” (you know, that’s the place “where all the children are above average”). Well, a majority of people believe that they’re above average in any positive trait, or if not themselves, then certainly the group that they belong to.
Is there a particular kind of scientific or intellectual inquiry that you’re especially drawn to?
Yes. I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something. I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I’m an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.
It’s intuition that tells me that, although I don’t understand the thing yet, and even though I don’t know what the answer is going to turn out to be, there’s something big there—something important—that I won’t be able to answer unless I understand a lot about the mind at a very deep level.
So my concentration on the choices of regular and irregular verbs was driven by my sense that it would reveal something about mental computation. The years that I spent studying verbs and what they mean involved a leap of intuition that this would be a way of tapping into human concepts and cognitive framing—in other words, the stuff of thought. That if you could really understand why the verb “fill” differs from the verb “pour,” and both of them differ from the verb “load,” you’d penetrate deeply into human thought patterns.
It’s a rabbit hole phenomenon—namely, there’s just a little opening, but there’s something very rich and deep and important and mysterious, something big, going on down there, beneath the surface. And that lure has always governed which phenomenon I chose to explore.
