Birds, Butterflies, and Language

OK, I'm going to probably commit a straw man fallacy here, but I'm too lazy to dig up the original argument to which I am going to object.

In graduate school, one of my professors was very much into pragmatism, especially the work of Richard Rorty - who in turn referenced Donald Davidson alot. So I read some Rorty and Davidson, and this one argument of Rorty's in particular dealt with the notion of alternative conceptual frameworks. The gist of that notion, first of all, is that if we assume that the human mind plays a role in presenting reality to each one of us, and if we grant that through history and across the globe the human mind varies, then we can conclude that to some non-trivial degree the human experience of reality is varied. So the ancient Greeks, with their worldview or conceptual framework, experienced a different world, or different aspects of the world, than did the Indians of the Vedas and the Mayans of the Americas and the Mongols of Asia and the 21st century Japanese, etc..

To the degree that a worldview is conceptual, it is evident in the language one speaks. Further, differing worldviews will be expressed in differing concepts. Further, the greater the difference between two worldviews, the greater the conceptual differences as expressed in concepts - and hence in language. A language different from mine signals an experience of reality different from my experience of reality.

Now, the arguments both by Rorty and by a proponent of the possibility of alternative conceptual frameworks are long and complicated, and can't always be compacted into a few words. But I'm not going to be thorough here; all I want to do is get to the gist of something I've been thinking about in regard to a specific objection that Rorty - with references to Davidson - makes against this notion of alternative conceptual frameworks.

There were two points is his objection in particular that I've thought about ever since I read them at least fifteen years ago. The first is an argument that concluded with a reductio ad absurdum, as it's called. Rorty argued that, if this notion of alternative conceptual frameworks was correct, then there could be worldviews so radically different from our own, expressed in concepts - and language - so alien that we wouldn't even recognize it as a language. If this were true, then there might be language-speakers all around us without us even recognizing them as such - trees and butterflies could have a language. But, since we know that trees and butterflies don't have languages, argued Rorty, then the premises of the notion of alternative conceptual frameworks are wrong somewhere.

The second point he made, in the course of making this first point, was that if you encounter some behavior of some living being, and you claim it is expressing itself using language, but you can't show how that behavior is correlated in any way to that being's environment, then you have no basis for claiming that in fact this being is engaged in language behavior.

OK... So, those are the two objections. My reaction to the first, even at the time fifteen years ago, was to say, "Well, of course trees and butterflies have a language, to themselves. So this isn't a reductio ad absurdum, and so this doesn't undermine the argument for the possibility of alternative conceptual frameworks." It is so obvious to me that through history, even and especially recent history, humans have extended the boundaries of what they accept as sentient, intelligent, autonomous behavior - including the languages of slaves, barbarians, dogs and whales - that I am expecting that it is only a matter of time before we know, not just that trees and butterflies have languages, but the details of their grammar, and we will be able to communicate with them directly.

The second objection - that of a lack of correlation between an entity's putative language behavior and the entity's environment - is what's really been on my mind recently. This is because of the robins that have taken up residence in our neighborhood, beginning this spring. They perch on the rooftops - and go from rooftop to rooftop - early in the morning and late in the evening, chirping away. For many mornings now I've lain in bed, half asleep, listening to them. They don't have one regular, rote, song. They repeat patterns, but they change subtly and not so subtly as they go along. So it might sound like this (writing phonetically of course):

cheep cheep charp chup
cheep cheep charp chup
cheep cheep charp
cheep charp cheep
cheep charp chup chup
cheep chup
....
chootle chirp
chootle chirp chirp

etc.

As I lay listening, I wonder what it is they are saying. That's when I start thinking about Rorty's objection: does their chirping correlate to their environment?

Well, immediately I think: what part of the environment? What about the environment? And then I ask: how does my own language, my own speaking, correlate to my environment? If I'm outside talking to my wife, would the robin know that my language correlated to my environment? Would it be able to determine that the various sounds I was making correlated to the time of day, temperature, humidity, season?

Of course this is ridiculous. In fact, the more advanced a human child gets in their language, the less is it correlated to any obvious physical environment. That's exactly the nature of language: it is freedom from physical determinism regarding behavior.