Steven Pinker: prediction

Transcript context

…Thanks to both of you for inviting us to an intelligent, literate conversation that I’d like to imagine you always have over almost every meal. [laughter] I’d like to hear you speak about just how central language is to being human. I’m thinking of J. L. Austin and John Searle on speech acts in a social constructed world all the way up to — I think it’s called — the Whorf hypothesis, that the language we use limits what we can experience and do. I think language is central to everything else that’s human. I think that it has very much figured in our evolution by making social cooperation that much easier — namely, with language, for example, you can make an agreement to do a favor for someone now in exchange for a very different payback or a payback very far in the future, something you can’t do when you’re just bartering physical goods. I think that since our species lives on information, information is the ultimate trade good because it is a nonrivaled good. You can share it with someone else without being deprived of it yourself. It can be multiplied, and that makes it the ideal medium of reciprocity, conferring a large benefit to someone else at a small cost to oneself. It lubricates the kind of cooperation that is hyperdeveloped in humans. It’s also, I think, tied in with the fact that we’re a technological species, that we live by our wits, by our know‑how. That with language, if you make a discovery, you can spare other people from having to remake that discovery. You can pool innovations that are invented across a huge catchment area. I don’t, though, endorse a version of linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir, according to which we can only think thoughts for which there are words in our language. If that were true, then you’d have to ask how did language originate in the first place. It wasn’t given to us by Martians. We developed language because we had ideas that existed prior to our being able to articulate them, for which we coined words. Language is always changing. Again, this gets back to Hayek’s notion of spontaneous order and distributed intelligence. Even though any given language is an exquisite system for conveying complex thoughts, it was never designed by a committee. It emerged because millions of people had ideas that they struggled to express. They would coin a bit of jargon. They would invent a circumlocution. It would go viral. It would become entrenched as part of the language. Languages, of course, are always continuing that cycle. Our language is different from the language of the Founders, which is different from the language of Shakespeare. The fact that we’re always adding to the language, we’re losing bits of the language, as we talked about in the case of irregular verbs, shows that it isn’t itself the medium of thought. You can always invent a circumlocution if your language doesn’t have a preexisting word. A lot of the brain is devoted to forms of thinking that are not just trading in words, not just assembling words. I think Whorf went too far, but there’s no doubt that language is an inherent part of what makes us unusual as a species. And unique?…

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