The Act of Creation (86 page)

 

To
p. 595
. It is interesting to note that Hebb,
an enlightened behaviourist yet a behaviourist, considers as the chief
advantages of language that words can be used in varying combinations:
'In man . . . we also have a kind of behaviour, which, as far as we know,
does not occur in any other species. This is language. It includes sign
language as well as spoken and written words; and the chief problem does
not concern the ability to make the sounds of human speech, since lower
animals are not capable of sign language either. What puts language on a
higher level than the purposive communication of dog or chimpanzee is the
varied combination
of the same signs (words, pictures, gestures)
for different purposes. . . . The criteria of language are then: (1) that
it is usually purposive communication (though a number of non-purposive
uses is common also, as in talking to oneself), and (2) that two or
more items of the behaviour are combined in one way for one purpose and
recombined for other purposes' (Hebb, 1958, p. 209; his italics).

 

 

Is that all? Or may we at least add, with Hilgard, that 'without language
it would be well-nigh impossible to think of such abstract notions as
justice or reciprocal tariffs' (Hilgard, 1957, p. 315).

 

 

To
p. 601
. In Head's gesture-imitation experiments,
on the other hand, some kind of implicit verbal symbolization seems to be
indispensable, because reliance on visual or kinesthetic clues leads only
to the familiar mirror-confusion -- as any normal person will discover
by repeating the experiment.

 

 

To
p. 602
. One might further speculate that the
patient's inability to name the object shown on the printed card, while
he is perfectly capable of using words to explain that he cannot name it,
may be due to the fact that single object-names like tree, moth, etc.,
have a more arbitrary character qua phonetic labels learnt by rote,
and have more 'brittle' traces, than verbs and propositions which form
syntactic sub-wholes. A 'tree', after all, is originally a nonsense
syllable. One of Penfield's patients, shown a card picturing a foot,
said, 'Oh, I know what it is. That is what you put in your shoes'. After
withdrawal of the electrode, he said correctly 'foot'. Now why should
'foot' be more difficult to name than 'shoe'? Perhaps because the word
'shoe' occurred in a meaningful context -- Burt's Factor II of Verbal
Ability -- whereas 'foot' occurred in a naming context (Factor I) which
was blocked (see next note). In other words, the naming-code was out of
action, while the semantic code continued to function.

 

 

To
p. 603
. Burt divided Verbal Ability into a
word factor
dealing with words in isolation and a
language
factor
dealing with words in their context. The former he sub-divided
into a
receptive
factor of recognizing and understanding words
and into an
executive
factor for finding and selecting the right
word. The language factor is similarly sub-divided into a receptive
factor for understanding statements and an executive factor for literary
expression and verbal fluency. Burt's divisions followed in broad outline
Head's classifications of aphasia and substantiated the validity of the
latter, (
The British Journal of Educational Psychology
, Vol. XIX,
June and November, 1949).

 

 

 

 

 

XV
LEARNING TO THINK
Let me return to the early development of verbal matrices.
From about the eighteenth month onward, the child acquires new words at a
faster rate; about the same time it begins to correlate single words into
word-sequences, and later on into sentences. The earliest word-sequences
are again produced by spontaneous, undirected vocal activity, in which
meaningful words alternate with strings of nonsense syllables and with
words imitated but not yet understood. Some children have the uncanny
gift of imitating the phonetic patterns of adult speech so well that
from the next room their babbling sounds like a meaningful monologue. If
we are to believe Bertrand Russell, his daughter at the age of eighteen
months, 'when supposed to be sleeping, was overheard saying to herself:
"Last year I used to dive off the diving-board, I
did
." Of course,
"last year" was merely a phrase repeated without understanding. . . .' [1]
This philosophical comment seems to imply, oddly enough, that the
remainder of the sentence was pronounced with understanding.
Frequently the first meaningful string of words refers to a sequence
of events. Fenton's unusually precocious son, also at the age of
eighteen months, 'uttered soon after seeing his father climb into an
automobile with another man and drive away, the words, "Daddy, school,
man, auto".' [2] This sounds exactly like the 'picture-strip language'
of the primitive (as Kretschmer called it [3]) -- the unrolling of a
visual sequence, where each single word symbolizes a complete event. 'The
speech units of the child belong to no single class of words because
they are (i.e. stand for) not single words but sentences.' [4] Even
the first verbal labels have a not merely denotative, but an operative
character; they do not refer to objects in vacuo, but to 'action-objects'
[5], that is to say, to the functional relevance of the object to the
child. 'Chamberlain, Tracy, Dewey, Binet and othen have shown that the
child's symbols are action-words, i.e., their content is action. There is
also practically universal agreement on the fact that the first symbols
of the child are in reality word-sentences designating action and object
or subject, or all three at once.' [6]
This, of course, is again a far cry from any S.-R. theory of language
learning. The command TURN RIGHT is a simple and definite verbal stimulus,
which, one would think, should be easy to associate with a definite motor
response; but many children and some normal adults have considerable
difficulty in distinguishing between right and left. This fact is
used by Hebb as an elegant proof that the
concept
(of right-
left-sidedness) precedes the
word
for it: 'The child can very
readily learn at the age of three that "right" and "left" each refers to
a side of the body -- but ah me, which one? . . . What is set up first
is a conceptual organization. By the age of six the word "right" clearly
and immediately means sidedness to the child. A considerable conceptual
elaboration has already occurred, and the stimulus effectively arouses
that structure; but it arouses no prompt, specific response. . . . With
such facts, it becomes nonsense to explain man's conceptual development
as exclusively consisting of verbal associations.' [7]
The point becomes clearer when we realize that between the ages of two and
four many children are equally confused about 'up-down', 'back-front',
etc.; but they only confuse opposites with
each other
, never
'left' with 'up' or 'front' with 'down'. [8] This shows that the
child forms at an early stage sensory-motor matrices of 'up-downness',
'left-rightness', etc.; and that the verbal labels acquired later on
may become attached to the matrix as a whole, before directions within
the matrix are verbally discriminated. This does not mean, of course,
that abstraction preceded discrimination, since both are aspects of the
same process; it only means that there is often delay and confusion in
the verbal labelling of pre-verbal concepts.
This brings us to the central problems of the evolution of symbolic
thought: abstraction and concept-formation.
Abstraction, Discrimination, and Transfer
In common usage 'abstract' thought is regarded as a specifically human
faculty, and more particularly as a prerogative of the scientific
mind. The
Concise Oxford
defines abstraction as 'the process of
stripping an idea of its concrete accompaniments'. There are, however,
obvious analogies between the abstraction of ideas -- the formation of
concepts -- and perceptual generalization -- the extraction of invariant
features, stripped of their accidental accompaniments, from varied
situations. It is therefore frequently asserted or implied that abstract
thought is merely the extension, along a continuous scale, of selective
processes which operate already in the rat and even lower down. I shall
first briefly recapitulate those aspects of the abstractive process
which are indeed continuous with animal learning -- until we arrive
at the point where the line again breaks. I shall again use the term
'generalization' in the sense indicated above -- and not in the sense of
'spreading of responses' (see
p. 537
ff.).

 

 

The continuum of abstractive processes can be extended down into
the inorganic domain. The green-grocer's balance abstracts from a
pound of peaches and a pound of potatoes the one feature which it has
been programmed to recognize as relevant, their weight. A barometer,
programmed to compensate for variations of temperature, can be regarded
as a model for perceptual size-constancy -- the apparatus programmed
to compensate for distance. The same barometer used as an altimeter
may serve to illustrate the reversible figure-ground relation. Each of
these programmes is represented by a code which determines which type of
stimulus should be regarded as relevant and abstracted from experience,
and which not.

 

 

Built-in perceptual analysers for the recognition of species-specific
sign-releasers may be described as the result of the phylogenetic
abstraction of biologically relevant stimulus-patterns. We may regard
this abstractive power, with Lashley, as 'one of the primitive basic
functions of organized nervous tissue'. [9]

 

 

Turning to acquired behaviour, we must distinguish between learning under
natural and artificial conditions. In both cases the animal must learn
to abstract relevant patterns from its environment as a
conditio sine
qua non
of properly reacting to them. With animals in their natural
habitat this happens either during maturation, or, in adult animals,
after a few repetitions of a certain kind of experience. Since the
animal attends only to stimuli which are biologically relevant to it
-- to which its perceptual organization is 'attuned' -- the learning
process consists essentially in the sharpening and modification of its
built-in perceptual analysers. In the laboratory situation, however,
the animal must in the first place readjust to an artificial universe,
in which stimuli which it would normally treat as irrelevant, become
all-important. When this revaluation is well under way, the cat in the box
will begin to abstract from its bewildering enviroament the significant
patterns of loops and bolts in general, regardless of variations in their
position and shape. But this will be a slow, repetitive process because
abstraction is a function of relevance, and relevance in this case must
be inferred by induction; the cat is caught in a vicious circle. Even so,
its powers of abstraction are considerable -- see the perfunctory lick
reduced to a symbolic performance (
p. 570
). The rat
in the maze is in a more favourable position: it likes exploring highways
and byways; and the cognitive map which it abstracts from a number of
concrete tries provides it with a matrix of remarkable plasticity --
see Lashley's extirpation experiments,
pp. 458
f.

 

 

The child's pre-verbal concepts are derived from abstractive processes
which form a continuous series with animal learning -- from the early
development of its perceptual constancies and its 'sensory-motor
intelligence' to the crystallization of 'object concepts'. The child
learns to recognize its mother before it learns the word 'ma'. Unlike
the gosling whose nervous system is ready, a few hours after its birth,
to receive the imprint of the mother-goose all in one piece, the helpless
infant must slowly, and perhaps painfully, abstract the concept of its
mother as a stable, unvarying entity from a series of her very varied
appearances, all different in shape, and disconnected in time. The breast
first, more tactile than visual, monopolizing the whole perceptual field;
a fully-clad figure with conceded breasts, standing or bending over; a
series of faces appearing at intervals, never looking quite the same --
such must have been the fragmentary, concrete experiences out of which
the unitary mother concept was extracted in the first three weeks of
our existence -- if only we could remember.

 

 

However, owing to the nursing mother's exceptional importance to,
and sustained bodily contact with the child, the formation of the
mother-concept must also be regarded as an exceptional process in which
several successive stages are telescoped into one. Other object and
action concepts emerge more slowly and hesitantly, even if the object is
a person. The adult's awareness of other people's personal identity is
based on empathy -- which is a projective phenomenon, in some respects
comparable to the stroboscopic effect. But in the babe the experience of
its own identity is still hazy, and so is its awareness of the personal
identity of others. When a feature F, which is important to the child,
is common to several individuals whose other attributes are less important
to it, then the child will abstract, conceptualize, and name that shared
feature in preference to the collection of features which constitutes
each individual's personal identity. This can happen even if one of the
persons concerned is the father -- at the stage before the father becomes
functionally important to the baby. A baby is often taught the word
'da-da' before it has learned to recognize its father -- except for some
vague features such as largeness or bulkiness, which are equally found in
other appearances. As a result, it applies the label 'da-da' 'widely and
often embarrassingly to large individuals of all shapes, sizes, ages, and
colours'. [10] Abstraction and discrimination are guided by relevance;
and the relevant experience in this case is some feature of dada-ness
shared by lots of visitors who -- their colour, age, etc., being as yet
irrelevant -- are not discriminated as individuals. It is the same with
the gosling, which in the first stage of imprinting follows all human
shapes, and only later on confines its attention to the keeper. During
the first stage individual differences in appearance are seen, but not
'taken in' and retained, because they are not yet relevant to the gosling;
during the second stage the distinguishing marks become relevant became
the gosling has learned that keepers produce food, while other humans do
not. Thus the sharpenings and modifications of discriminatory codes are
the result of changes in the scales of relevance. In the first stage of
development, all 'dada-ish' visitors to the baby -- and all human beings
to the gosling -- are regarded as 'for all intents and purposes the same
thing'; in the second stage they no longer are, because the intents and
purposes have changed.