Moral Seeming

In moral philosophy we find distinctions between moral language, moral psychology, and moral reality. Interrelations between these areas are explored. Moral psychology tends to dwell on questions about moral motivation—does it consist in moral beliefs, moral desires, or moral sentiments? I wish to add a further topic: what I call moral seeming.[1] There are delicate questions of terminology here: how should we describe this moral seeming? We don’t normally speak of moral seemings (plural), so what noun would better serve our purposes? We might speak of moral impressions or appearances or presentations or perceptions or even sense-data, but for a variety of reasons I prefer sensations; so, I shall employ this (technical) term with the proviso that I mean a special class of psychological events in which something seems a certain way to the subject—as in “It seems to me that X is wrong”. Intuitively, the subject has the subjective feeling that X is wrong—even if he might go on to add, “But I don’t believe X is really wrong”. This is what people are getting at who use the phrase “gut feeling”: it is a kind of pre-reflective automatic response to a moral situation. My suggestion is that such sensations are ubiquitous in moral consciousness: they exist alongside moral judgments or beliefs; they belong to a more primitive level of moral awareness (perhaps young children have only such sensations). These sensations have an epistemic role in moral reasoning, providing reasons to form moral judgments, analogous to sense experience; thus, there is such a thing as moral epistemic phenomenology—moral sensations. The doctrine that these exist could be called “moral sensationalism”. It might be objected that such things don’t exist, because you would never say “It seems to me that murder is wrong”, since that would imply that you aren’t really sure that murder is wrong. But this objection conflates logical implication and conversational implicature. The case is just like saying “It seems to me there is a red bird over there”. I won’t go into this, as the distinction is well known and indisputable. I will take it that the existence of moral seeming (moral sensations) is hard to deny; in any case, I will accept it in what follows. My question concerns the role of such sensations in moral mentation—where they fit in, what they signify, how they relate to moral reality.

Let’s compare moral seeming to modal and grammatical seeming. In each of these areas it is common to speak of “intuitions”—we intuit the truth. For “intuition” the OED gives “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning”. I have no objection to intuitional psychology, but I think the term is slightly misleading in the present context, because it suggests something more intellectualist than the facts require. The word “sensation” captures these facts better—we need to bring out the primitiveness more clearly. Thus, we say that something seems necessary or that a string of words seems grammatical—this is how they strike us, present themselves to the mind. We don’t have a mere “intuition”, as if we are guessing or speculating. In any case, moral seeming is like modal and grammatical seeming—what we might call “first impressions”, correctable in the light of further thought. They are fallible and corrigible. You might have an impression that eating meat is morally permissible but later come to the conclusion that it is not, or that homosexuality is wrong but later come to realize that it is not. Moral consciousness operates on two levels, corresponding to immediate impressions and considered judgments, which do not always march together. Can you see how it mirrors ordinary visual perception and associated beliefs? Once moral seeming is recognized, the similarity to empirical thought becomes evident (though there are clear differences); in particular, there are such things as normative sensations, impressions of value. It starts to seem appropriate to speak of the “moral sense” and of “moral sensibility”.

How far can the analogy be pushed? Can there be moral illusions as there are perceptual illusions? I think there can be: you might be under the moral illusion that homosexual sex is morally wrong, or that masturbation is wrong, or sex before marriage, or atheism, or eating certain foods on certain days. These things seemwrong to you, but in reality, they are not—and they might continue to seem wrong even when you change your moral position on them. There might be moral equivalents to the Muller-Lyer illusion; moral sensation might be “encapsulated”, in Fodor’s term, unalterable by the “central system”.[2] Could there be “moral blindsight”? A person can make true moral judgments but has no moral sensations to go along with them—he just leaps to the judgment and skips the seeming stage. He might be a sensational moral blank but a competent moral judge. He is a sort of Kantian freak—no primitive moral awareness but competent moral rationality. Conversely, someone might be stuck at the childlike sensational level, full of moral impressions but lacking considered moral judgment (aren’t a lot of people like this?). Generally, moral sensation can be shaped and educated, to some degree, like perceptual sensation; but it would be wrong to assimilate moral sensation to moral thought—the distinction always exists. The relation between reason and sensation in the moral case is as complex as it is in the ordinary perceptual case, and strikingly similar.

What is the intentional content of a moral sensation—how does it represent moral reality? In particular, is it absolutist or relativist? For example, does it represent the wrongness of needlessly causing pain as a cultural universal (a moral absolute) or as culturally relative (merely local)? That is, does it seem to you that causing pain is always wrong no matter the state of cultural belief, or does it seem to you that it can be sometimes wrong and sometimes right (or neutral) depending on the culture? This is not a question I have ever seen asked, presumably because the idea of moral seeming has not cropped up before. The answer to it, I believe, is that moral seeming is absolute—even if considered moral judgment is relativist. Accordingly, relativism can be revisionary of ordinary moral seeming: morality seems absolute but in fact it is relative. Moral sensations make an error about the nature of moral reality. Moral phenomenology suggests objectivity and absoluteness, but critical moral philosophy urges moral relativism. Our given moral sensations lead us into error. But in my opinion, this lack of convergence converts into an argument against relativism, because of the difficulty of explaining the alleged error. Without going into this in detail (it is familiar ground), I think that no plausible explanation can be given for why moral impressions are absolute except that moral reality is absolute. The reason moral sensations have the content they have is that moral reality has the nature it has. The imputation of error on that scale is just not credible. Moral impressions are absolutist because moral facts are—content follows truth. It is the same with non-moral impressions, and moral impressions simply conform to a general pattern. If they had a relativist content, we would never be prone to moral absolutism; but we are so prone (rightly in my view), so the odds are that our sensations suggest it. But if they do, then the best explanation of this fact is that moral absolutism is true. Even the convinced moral relativist must accept that we are all absolutist at the most basic level of moral awareness—we sense right and wrong as universal and fixed not as local and variable. It does not seem to people that their moral convictions are merely relative and optional; they have a strong impression of universality, rightly or wrongly. This is so regardless of their reflective philosophical views about morality.

Here is a difficult question: in cases where people have the wrong moral views, are their moral sensations different from their opinions? For example, do slave-holders tacitly sense that slavery is wrong, or meat-eaters tacitly sense that meat-eating is wrong, or capital punishment, or child labor? I think it is possible that they do: they sense it but they disregard the evidence of their senses (their moral sense in this case). For it is hard to see how they could fail to sense it, given the obviousness of the wrong. Granted, there is always self-deception, stupidity, willfulness; but at some level, aren’t people aware that what they are doing is pretty nasty, however much they try to excuse it? Didn’t children in the age of slavery have the distinct feeling that slavey was wrong, especially in its more violent aspects? They have to be indoctrinated out of these natural feelings. If this is true, then moral progress might not be as dramatic as we suppose—perhaps it largely consists in falling back on our natural moral reactions. Or am I being too kind—were people (even children) the absolute moral swine they appear to be back in the bad old days? Did they experience not even a trace of moral concern for those tortured and murdered in front of them? Was there no inner voice whispering, “This is wrong”? I like to think that their primitive moral sense was not as depraved as their actions (and beliefs). The same is true for contemporary atrocities.

Do some things seem worse than other things to our moral sensibility? I rather think so, just as our beliefs distinguish degrees of moral badness. It seems worse to murder than to steal, and stealing seems worse than promise breaking. If so, moral sensations vary in intensity—just like visual and auditory sensations. There could therefore be a kind of psychophysics of moral sensation: the greater the wrong, the stronger the sensation. Visual sensations can vary in brightness, and moral sensations can vary in intensity of condemnation. This seems phenomenologically correct: we can have mild or strong moral reactions to perceived wrongs (“That seems really, terribly, wrong to me!”). Some moral sensations may make as cry out and stamp our feet, while others elicit only a slight shake of the head. Here moral seeming touches moral feeling—the sensation is emotionally imbued. Emotions can vary in intensity too, and they combine with moral impressions to produce a scale of behavioral response. There might even be the analogue of quantitative psychophysical laws in the moral domain: we could scale moral sensations as a function of moral seriousness—the more atrocious the crime, the more intense the subjective response. There could be a new field: “psycho-ethics”—the study of the mathematical relations between ethical reality and ethical psychology. Its first law: moral sensations vary logarithmically with moral wrongness.

It isn’t surprising, from an evolutionary point of view, to find that the human moral faculty has the two-tiered structure I am suggesting. As a social species, becoming sensitive to moral distinctions, we would need a fast-response reflexive system to guide our behavior towards others. This is the system of moral seeming—moral impressions based on initial appearances and employing general rules (“He steal—bad!”). Superimposed on this, we have the slow, holistic system commonly known as moral reason, which takes immediate moral impressions as input and delivers considered moral verdicts as outputs (“We find you guilty of the crime of stealing and sentence you to twenty lashes”). This is the general form of all our thought, all our knowledge, and moral thought is just a special case. I have called the lower-level system “sensation” with some misgivings, given the connotations of that term, intending to point to the psychological role played by the designated mental elements. The idea is to indicate the immediate quasi-sensory nature of the relevant psychological processes—the way they give rise to episodes of seeming. This needs to be added to our overall moral psychology. There is good seeming and bad seeming, right and wrong seeming, as well as associated beliefs, desires, emotions, and acts of will. The moral faculty has many departments and interactions between them. It is quite a bit richer than has commonly been supposed. No doubt it will continue to evolve.[3]

[1] For background on seeming, see my “Seeming” and “A Philosophy of Seeming” on this blog.

[2] See Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind (1983).

[3] It is odd that philosophers (and psychologists) have tended to have oversimplified views of the nature of moral psychology—from simple sentimentalists to simple rationalists. Perhaps this results from a tendency to regard moral psychology as a minor department of the human mind, one that runs on simple principles. Emotivism is the extreme case: moral psychology is nothing but surges of emotion without structure or liaisons. And this in turn might result from an inability to recognize how complex moral reality itself is. We need to recognize that morality is as complex and multifaceted as reality in general—plural, mind-taxing, elusive, inscrutable. It’s hard for the human mind to get itself around morality; it needs all the help it can get.

Language As Thought

I am going to present a new theory of language—a new philosophy of language. Or perhaps I should say newish because elements of it are already out there, particularly in Chomsky.[1] The question is what language is—what fundamentally constitutes it, what its primary mode of being consists in. And the idea is that language is a type of thought: it is identical to thought of a certain type—the linguistic type (not the imagistic type). So, this is to be an identity theory: language is identical to thought, reducible to it, nothing more than thought. In particular, it is not speech: speech is not language at all but its expression or externalization. Language is psychological not acoustic; it is a kind of category mistake to identify language with speech, like identifying pain with pain behavior. The theory is mentalistic not behavioristic—internalist not externalist. Language is essentially inner, though it can have outer manifestations. It’s entirely in the head never in the body (not in the mouth or ears). Ultimately, it is in the brain: it is a cognitive structure that is realized in the brain. Linguistic competence is a mental system located in the brain; linguistic performance (speech) is located in the body. Language is soundless and imperceptible; speech is noisy and perceived (the ears are involved). Internal cognition is not sensorimotor activity. The language faculty is a faculty of thought not of speech; it is an ability to think in a certain way not to make sounds in a certain way (or gestures). If you want empirical evidence for this theory, you need look no further than ordinary experience: language is always going through our minds even when speaking isn’t at issue.[2] We use language inwardly all the time but we speak intermittently. In principle, we could use language inwardly and not speak at all: the language faculty can exist in the absence of the speech faculty. In any given day, you may be a hive of linguistic activity but not make a sound; this activity is a type of thinking, neither more nor less. Speech acts are irrelevant to language, mere offshoots of it; they are not of the essence. There cannot be language without thought, but there can be language without speech (by sound or sign).

Four views of the nature of language may be distinguished: language as a means of communication, language as speech, language as a medium or vehicle or instrument of thought, and language as thought itself (or one type of thought). The first two views are distinct because there could be speech without communication, as in soliloquy; and the second two are distinct because only the last proposes an identity theory, as opposed to a correlation theory. Language could be an instrument of thought and yet not be reducible to thought—it could be a distinct existence, yet correlated. It could indeed be maintained that speech provides the instrument of thought—as I think is commonly assumed. X can be an instrument of Y without X being Y. According to the view I am describing, however, language is no more a medium of thought than the brain is the medium of the mind; the brain is the mind. It doesn’t stand apart from the mind but constitutes the mind (this is not to be a “physicalist”). When we think in images they constitute the thought—they are not just its vehicle or carrier or clothing or correlate. When we think in language the language forms the essence of the thought—it isn’t just thought’s accomplice or helper. So, the mentalism I am defending is stronger than merely the claim that the essence of language is to be found in its thought-assisting role (as opposed to its communicative role); it is the claim that language is nothing other than a species of thought. We have an innately given language faculty and its primary output is thoughts of a certain type—not speech behavior or acts of communication or even thought vehicles (tools, crutches, bearers).

What type? What distinguishes linguistic thoughts from other types of thought (assuming there are other types)? We might not have the full answer in the current state of knowledge, but we have enough to give the idea some substance: recursiveness, hierarchy, finite basis, infinite potential, digital discreteness, logical form, propositionality, meaning. Such thoughts have just the properties commonly attributed to language—because they are what language really is. Speech doesn’t have these properties, not intrinsically anyway, but thought does, in virtue of the innate language faculty. To think linguistically is to think in accordance with these features. Language is defined by these features, and thought has them in abundance. It might be said that thought isn’t the only thing to have these features—don’t acts of communication have them too? And isn’t there such a thing as body language and whale language and the language of the genes and computer language? All this is irrelevant, however, just so much metaphor and extended usage. The word “language” as it exists in ordinary parlance has many meanings; I am concerned with the correct scientific account of a specific ability we observe in human nature. I am concerned with what the primary reality of language consists in—what language intrinsically is not what might be described derivatively as language (e.g., speech behavior). It aids clarity to insist on a degree of terminological purism: only inner thought is language in its primary meaning—original language not derivative language (compare original and derivative intentionality). We could write “Language” to indicate the domain in question and allow other uses of “language”, but I think in scientific and philosophical writing we do better to insist on strictness—it’s good for the soul to exercise some terminological discipline. Thus, there is no language but thought language–literally, scientifically. We might hear the word as meaning “mind-language” or “internal-language” or “brain-language”—so as to exclude such irrelevancies as “body language” or “the language of love” or “computer language”. All language in the restricted scientific sense is a language of thought—with the proviso that this language isn’t just of thought but thought’s inner structure. It is thought-language, brain-language. When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am” he could have said, “I cogitate linguistically, therefore I am”. Man is a thinking being, i.e., a being with linguistic modes of thought (defined as above). The primary (biological) function of language is to form a specific type of thought, presumably because this type of thought has adaptive advantages. Speech came later and might not have come at all. It might be called the externalization of language, but it isn’t the genuine article, the heart of the matter. Speech is a by-product of language proper not its pith.

The study of language is therefore the study of this internal system. Linguistics and philosophy of language are primarily concerned with this region of reality. They might study other things too (speech, communication), but it invites confusion to say that these are studies of language. We need to clean terminological house and keep distinct things distinct, not use the word “language” loosely and ambiguously. This means that a lot of philosophy of language (and maybe some linguistics) is confused: it is really about communication and speech not language proper (i.e., what goes through our heads all day when we are not actually speaking). The work of Austin, Searle, Grice, Quine, Davidson, Dummett, later Wittgenstein, and many others is not about languageat all, and indeed officially repudiates what I am calling language. So-called linguistic behavior isn’t language at all, just the external sensorimotor expression of language (an effect of language)—speech acts, illocutionary force, language games, speaker-meaning, verbal assent, assertion, command, communication, etc. None of this is about language at its core, though it may be perfectly worthwhile in itself. It is notable that earlier work in philosophy of language was about language in the strict scientific sense I am advocating—work by Frege, Russell, and early Wittgenstein. For these philosophers were not concerned with language as a social institution but with language construed as a type of mental representation confined to the individual (and later maligned for this stance). They viewed language simply as a form of thinking: hence the theories of sense and reference, function and object, acquaintance and description, sense-data and inference, objects and pictures, saying and showing. None of this has anything to do with speech or communication; it is purely inner—language as a mental phenomenon. It is about symbolic thought as such, which is what language fundamentally is. Language is an abstract structure, syntactic and semantic, formally defined, existing in the mind. Speech maps onto this structure in various ways, but it isn’t thus structured intrinsically: it’s just noise, atmospheric perturbations, flexing of the larynx and tongue. I would say it is a category mistake to suppose that such physical phenomena can be accurately described as forming sentences or phrases or words, still less as having meaning, reference, logical form, and entailments; that is sheer projection. The self-same noises could exist and have none of these properties. Language is not a physical thing (except in so far as the brain is physical).[3]

Why don’t we see this more clearly? Surely, it’s because language as a mental faculty is hidden to normal perception, even though it is perfectly evident to introspection. Speech, however, is perceptible, whether it takes the form of sounds, marks, or gestures. We thus gravitate towards behaviorist conceptions, attributing to behavior what properly belongs to the mind. It is really quite obvious that there is a sharp distinction between animal minds and animal communication systems—the latter greatly under-express the former. The two capacities evolved for different reasons. The animal has a cognitive life as well as a behavioral life; its thought processes, such as they may be, are not constrained by its ability to express itself in external acts of communication. To adopt a communication-based view of animal cognition would be absurd (though not unheard of). We are essentially the same: our speech is a poor guide to our thought. Speech serves one sort of purpose, thought serves another. It is a mistake to think that language is all about speech and communication; its original function lies in what it provides in the way thought. We evolved a new way of thinking, augmenting imagination-based thought, and then subsequently deployed it to produce external speech—not vice versa. That is the simple truth. It just so happens that the basic facts of language are hidden from observation, silent and invisible. This prompts us to assign its properties to external facts, and then to project speech into the mind. The phrase “inner speech” is a misnomer: we don’t internalize what is essentially external; we externalize what is essentially internal. We commit a kind of “object-expression” fallacy, assigning to the mere expression of internal language the inner nature of the object expressed—treating the expression as if it were the object. Yet at the same time we recognize—what is quite obvious—that language has an inner psychological reality, because we experience it every day in our conscious mental life. Language courses through the conscious (and unconscious) mind. It may be that as children we acquire the ability to think linguistically well before we learn to vocalize linguistically; the cognitive language faculty develops before the speech faculty. Certainly, the child does not first learn to speak and only subsequently learns to think linguistically in the interludes between acts of speech. What is called “language acquisition” should really be called “speech acquisition”, because these two things by no means coincide and speech is clearly what is meant. Actually, there isn’t much research about language acquisition in the proper internalist sense—how exactly might this be studied? Speech is much easier to observe than inner monologue (or dialogue). We will never get a good psychology of language, or a good philosophy of language, or a good linguistics until we recognize that language is an inner mental phenomenon—speech being just an imperfect and adventitious sign or symptom of it. If we want to take a linguistic turn, it needs to be an internal linguistic turn. If that should prove impossible, we are shit out of luck.[4]

1. See, for example, chapter 1 of What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2018). Also, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (2016).

[2] Chomsky makes this point on p.14 of Creatures.

[3] Strictly speaking, there is no “phonological component” in the study of language, though there is in the study of speech. No single thing has both a syntax and semantics and a phonetics.

[4]Prim reader, please excuse the vulgarity, but there exists no polite way to express the underlying thought. We might see the reluctance to accept the mental nature of language as a fear of natural mystery: if language is essentially a hidden psychological structure, lurking obscurely in the brain, then the study of language could be prone to eternal ignorance, or at least methodological intractability. We can’t even examine it under a microscope. By contrast, a behaviorist approach gives us hope of progress. This is a case of changing the subject in order to find something to say. A cruel dilemma. I should note that introspection is hardly stellar when it comes to discerning the workings of mental language. The question of whether we think in the language we speak is notoriously maddening and obscure. My sense is that we do not, except around the edges.

Language Identity

Given plausible empirical assumptions, we can argue on conceptual grounds for two counterintuitive theses: (1) there is only one human language, and (2) this language is not learnable. It will turn out that these statements are not as counterintuitive as they seem. In fact, they follow from well-known considerations advanced by Noam Chomsky, and widely received.[1] I will not argue for these positions, though I will articulate them in ways that may not be familiar. The first claim is to be understood on the model of theoretical identities in science, like “heat is molecular motion” or “Hesperus is Phosphorus”. Thus, we have “English is identical to Spanish”, despite appearances. There is the language, on the one hand, and its expression in speech on the other: the former is an abstract structure realized in the brain; the latter is the sensorimotor externalization of that abstract mental structure. The structure is identical from speaker to speaker—it is a human universal—while the external expression varies. There could be a language distinct from this common human language, perhaps spoken by Martians (or whales), but in fact our human language is a fixed commodity. By common consent, what distinguishes it are grammatical peculiarities: recursive rules, hierarchical structure, digital discreteness, finite uniform lexicon, infinite potential, and perhaps other features. What this structure sounds like when coupled with an articulatory system is beside the point. You can see the logic here by recalling that even in what we call a single language there is wide variation in pronunciation and vocabulary—as in different dialects. Mutual comprehension is not a necessary condition of language identity. What is called “English” is itself a combination of other languages (Greek, Latin, German, Anglo Saxon); the classification is conventional and pragmatic. It isn’t a scientific natural kind. What if I were to decide to alter my native English by swapping words around—using “hot” to mean cold and “cold” to mean hot, and likewise across the language? Or pronouncing English words in a strange way that no one else can understand. I would still be speaking English, intuitively, though sounding completely foreign. And what of bilingual speakers who speak in a mixture of English and Spanish—what language are they speaking? You can say what you like, but what is clear is that they are speaking human—not Martian (or whale). The commonality would be much more salient to us if we were surrounded by aliens speaking radically different types of language (non-recursive, linear, analogue, finite, etc.) Compared to that we are all speaking the same language, just using different dialects of that shared language. The same could be said of the concept of race: we humans are all the same race as compared to Martians and Venusians or Neanderthals. Language is like anatomy: there is a universal shared human anatomy, despite some superficial variations (compare water). In the same way we all share an identical conceptual scheme (despite claims to the contrary). Human language is basically innate, and what is innate to the species is a universal. We all have the same language instinct; there is no English language instinct different from the Spanish language instinct. We all have the same basic body plan, genetically fixed, and we all have the same language plan, genetically fixed. That is the Chomskian position, and it generates the thesis that all human languages are identical—English is Spanish, deep down. That language can be articulated differently, depending on where you live, but it is one and the same from instance to instance. English can be spoken in many ways (not all of them acoustic), and written in many ways, and among these ways is what we call Spanish, paradoxical as that may sound; just as English speakers are speaking Spanish when speaking English. For the languages in question are literally identical. You can learn different dialects of this language, as when an English speaker learns the Spanish dialect (or a southerner in England learns the Geordie dialect)—that is, you employ different sounds when you speak. You learn a different articulation of the same language—because that is what the science of linguistics has discovered (as we are assuming). We have an a posteriori identity claim, backed up in the usual way. We don’t now think that ice and steam are not water because they are not liquid, and likewise we shouldn’t think that Spanish isn’t English because it sounds different from a common form of English (that spoken in the British Isles). Water is H2O whatever form it may take, and English is a certain sort of cognitive structure in whatever outer form it may assume. Language proper is in the head and humans have the same type of head (viewed scientifically). The rest is practical and conventional—like not saying “I spilled water on the floor” when you upset the ice tray. If the neuroscientists investigate the brains of different types of speakers and find a common neural structure, corresponding to linguistic competence, they will have confirmed the Chomskian hypothesis—that language mastery is a human universal rooted in the brain. The philosophical point I have wanted to make is that this is an instance of scientific identity claims—“heat is molecular motion”, “pain is C-fiber firing”, and the like. We have discovered a posteriori that English is identical to Spanish (French, Russian, Swahili, etc.). In the jargon, these terms are rigid designators of identical referents that generate true a posteriori identity statements–necessarily true statements to boot. Not only is English identical to Spanish; it is necessarily identical to Spanish. In no possible world is English not identical to Spanish (though the claim is epistemically contingent). It might indeed turn out that “Spanish” speakers do not speak the same language as English speakers—for it may be that their brains house a radically non-human language structure—but we have good reason to believe that Spanish-speaking people have normal human brains. I like to think this identity thesis might help international relations—fundamentally, we all speak the same language. The identity thesis is good politics as well as sound philosophy of language. Compare meeting a broad Geordie for the first time and thinking he must be speaking a foreign language, perhaps a variant of Old German, and then discovering he is speaking English after all—wouldn’t that be a nice thing to know? Different sounds are coming out of his mouth, but inside his head the same machinery is chugging away. Ditto for the Spanish speaker. We just have to let go of the prejudice that people who don’t sound like us speak a different language. We can already see this on the assumption that there is a universal language of thought, but now we see that even the spoken language is universal—just not the way it is spoken. People with different idiolects can speak the same dialect, people who speak different dialects can speak the same language, and people who speak (what look like) different languages can speak the same underlying language. All humans speak Human; and that is the only languagethey speak—the rest is variations on that language. This is what the science is telling us.

What about the second thesis—that human language is not learnable? How can that be true, you may ask, given that people have demonstrably learned to speak English etc. But be careful: it doesn’t follow from the fact that someone knows something that he learned it. You do not learn what is already in you. What is innate is not learned, so the innate human language is not learned—only its sensorimotor expression is. The Geordie accent is learned but not the language onto which that accent is directed. Speakers of natural human language don’t learn that language, only dialects of it. But that doesn’t answer the question at issue—whether that language can be learned. And surely it can be, in this sense—a suitably intelligent person could learn it without already possessing it innately. A Martian, say, could learn it as a second language: first he knows Martian innately; then he learns the different language Human as an additional language. This can’t be too difficult for a sophisticated intelligence not already innately equipped with Human (Mr. Spock would find the task a piece of cake). However, that doesn’t answer a slightly different question: is a fundamentally different language learnable by a normal human child? And the answer to that question must surely be no, because the human child can only learn a particular human language by exploiting his or her innate linguistic capacity, so won’t have the equipment to learn a different type of language, say Martian. By the same token, a Martian child will not be able to learn Human. So, we can say that human language is not learned by a human child and is not learnable by a Martian child—though it is probably learnable by a smart Martian adult. Maybe this latter mastery will be stilted and unnatural, unlike normal human mastery, so it won’t be learnable in the same way a human learns it. In other words, it is really not true that the language of humans is learnable: it is not learned by human children, and it cannot be learned by other children with a different innate endowment. It is either possessed by being innate, as in the human case, or it is not possessable at all, as in the Martian case (or only partially learned by the intelligent adult Martian). In short, languages proper are not learnable at all, though they can obviously be possessed. The reason they are not learned is that they are innate, and their being innate is connected to their being singular: there is one human language and it is innate, and therefore not learned. Thus, contrary to tradition, there are not multiple human languages that are learned by people; there is one human language and it is not learned. The error comes from identifying language with speech, competence with performance. That is, it comes from assuming a behaviorist view of knowledge of language: linguistic behavior is both variable and learned—not so linguistic competence. It is constant and unlearned, universal and a priori (in one sense of that term). Everyone speaks the same language, and no one learned that language. The language faculty is a species-wide instinct that admits of no learning. It is necessarily shared (by humans) and necessarily not acquired—like human anatomy and instincts in general.[2]

[1] These are well-worn themes of Chomsky’s and hardly need restatement. For recent discussion, see his What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016).

[2] The necessity here is nomological not metaphysical—in some possible worlds, humans might not speak Human, because of brain re-wiring. The point is that the language instinct is like other instincts: there is just one sex instinct, say, not multiple sex instincts depending on your country of origin; and no one learns to have a sex instinct (by definition). The instinct can be variably expressed, depending on the surrounding culture, but it would be misplaced behaviorism to suppose that the instinct itself were thus plastic. It is loose talk to speak of “human languages” (plural); similarly, for talk of “language learning”. Ordinary language is out of step with scientific language here—not for the first time. Commonsense linguistics must give way to theoretical linguistics.

Intelligence Assessment

There is something I used to do routinely that I don’t do anymore: assess other people’s intelligence. As a professor, it’s part of the job—forming opinions about other people’s intellectual abilities. Sometimes it seems like the main part of the job. It comes in many forms: grading, admissions, letters of recommendation, job interviews, promotions, tenure decisions, book reviews, refereeing, replies to critics, question periods, random conversations. I did it all the time; it was part of my daily life. Now I don’t do it anymore. And I feel better for it.  I don’t think it’s good for a person—all that judging, scrutinizing, criticizing. It’s a lot of responsibility and it casts a pall over the proceedings: fear, suspicion, the constant need to impress. It also inevitably makes you think too much about your own intelligence—am I good enough, do people approve of me? Admittedly, I haven’t done much of that in the last thirty years, but as a young man it was hard to avoid. It’s a relief not to have to bother with it anymore. It isn’t that I don’t evaluate people’s minds anymore (you wouldn’t believe what I actually think of people), but it isn’t so morally important—you can make or break people. And it’s not easy—it’s dirty work but some poor sod has to do it. Because intelligence is hard to judge, which is why psychologists have such a hard time with the subject. I’ve seen a lot of bad judgment in my time—and confident bad judgment. It creates a nasty atmosphere. A philosophy department is like a cauldron of insecurity, paranoia, and outright terror. No wonder philosophers are so awful! And yet it is unavoidable. Still, it’s good to be aware of it, so that its excesses can be detected and curbed. Curb your lack of enthusiasm. Don’t be overwhelmed by being underwhelmed. Take it easy, for pity’s sake. I have had to do far more criticizing than I would have liked, and I’m glad to be rid of it. It’s not fun, it’s not healthy. Constant criticism is a downer. It would be so much nicer to have nothing but praise for everyone.

I remember, in particular, job interviews. I had a carefully crafted methodology for them, which perplexed my colleagues. I would ask difficult questions, obnoxious questions, and stupid questions—on purpose. The stupid questions were intended to simulate what the interviewee might encounter from students or know-nothings—to see how they would handle that kind of situation. These questions could be very telling. Obnoxious questions were intended to reveal how the candidate would deal with a common type of objector—would they be fazed and flabbergasted, or calm and cool? Of course, my colleagues thought I was being obnoxious just to derail the candidate, rather than to give him or her the chance to shine. But my difficult questions were the most cunning: how would the candidate react to a telling criticism or a deep problem? Here again, the idea was to give the person a chance to show their real philosophical worth, as opposed to trotting out routine answers. When they struggled, intelligently struggled, that was to their credit; they could see the problem and refused to give a facile answer. My colleagues thought I was trying to nail the person, discredit them, eliminate them. The exact opposite was my intention, and again this kind of exchange often brought out the best (or the worst) in them. It’s not simple, this intelligence assessment lark: bland and routine is not going to cut it.

It takes a lot of intelligence to be an intelligence assessor. It takes experience and practice, self-awareness, sympathy, a readiness to use the scalpel or bludgeon. Nor is it easy to hold up under such assessment—I felt for these people, I really did. I was there myself once upon a time, trembling, dry-mouthed, trying to keep calm. It’s the dirty little secret of academic life, seldom spoken of, frequently felt. I think a workshop on intelligence assessment would not be a bad idea, especially for people new to the job.[1]

[1] The other smutty secret is the horror of grading. Is there anything worse than trying to decide between a B and a B minus? Don’t you just hate to compile a grade sheet? It’s bad enough having to say that someone is just not that bright, but to have to put a number on it! The whole system of grades is a table of torture for all concerned.