Alan G. Gross
Abstract
This chapter argues that a well-respected experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker, burst upon the scene with his first book, The Language Instinct, a masterly performance that made us feel that our unique ability to speak and understand language was a daily miracle linguistic science had com-pletely unraveled. His second popular science book, How the Mind Works, was another blockbuster; it went beyond his area of immediate competence, presenting us with a completely worked-out computational theory of mind.
The Better Angels of Our Nature reinterpreted history, insisting that, contrary to popular belief, violence had diminished over time. Every one of Pinker’s major works shared a single overriding assumption: science could be relied on to shed significant light on subjects far removed from the laboratory or the observatory; science could astonish us by its revelations about language, about the mind, about human behavior generally, and about violence in particular.
The scientific sublime is invoked and evoked in each of these cases.
Although the rhetoric of science has become a vigorous subfield within rhetorical studies, the rhetoric of popular science has been largely ignored. Popular science books and essays create a formidable barrier to scholars in the humanities: their study involves the knowledge of science in fields as diverse as myrmecology and
mathematical biology. There is a second problem, one I have tried to face. Despite a half century of effort on the part of its scholars, rhetoric has never really shed its pejorative connotations. In my latest project, The Scientific Sublime: How Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe, to be published by Oxford University Press, I felt I was relatively safe concerning my knowledge of science;
after all, I had been in the field for a quarter century. But the pejorative connota-tion of rhetoric gave me pause. Calling my work The Rhetoric of Popular Science and employing rhetorical terminology explicitly seemed unnecessarily to narrow my audience. This avoidance did not mean that I would avoid rhetorical analysis;
I just wouldn’t call it rhetorical analysis. This chapter on Steven Pinker is a rhe-torical analysis; indeed, given that it deals with a master rhetorician, how could it not be?
In The Scientific Sublime, all the authors with which I deal — Steven Pinker, but also Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Stephen Hawking, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson — employ a single, overarching rhetorical concept, the sublime, first identified in late antiquity in a treatise by Longinus. On the Sublime claimed that certain literary passages generated awe, for example: “God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” Awe was an emotion Aristotle did not mention in his Rhetoric; still, awe can easily join the emotions he does mention. When, after having disappeared for centuries, On the Sublime reappeared in early modern Europe, it began a cultural journey of some significance; it led to an expansion from literature to nature, and from nature to science. In the eighteenth century, there developed a scientific sublime, a category of experience that generated a sense of wonder at the discoveries of science. The sublime, I claim in this chapter, is a persuasive resource that Pinker and his fellow scientist-popularizers consis-tently employ.
Pinker employs this persuasive resource to amaze us with the facts and theo-ries of science. On these topics his rhetorical skills, consistently energized by the sublime, rightly impress us with his ability simultaneously to inform and to con-vince. But Pinker also uses these skills and this persuasive resource to advocate for positions on which there is deep and long-standing professional disagreement.
Of course, Pinker is entitled both to hold and to convey his professional stands to his readers. But it is also possible to feel that in these instances his employment of the scientific sublime might well mislead them because opposing sides are not given a fair shake. Readers might come to believe that these stands and opinions are not just stands and opinions.
The Scientific Sublime
In his History of Astronomy Adam Smith provides us with the first satisfactory analysis of the psychology of the scientific sublime, a new category of experience derived from Longinus. According to Smith, a path to the sublime opens when a spectacular natural event — an eclipse of the sun, for example — captures our attention and causes
the imagination and memory [to] exert themselves to no purpose, and in vain look around all their classes of ideas in order to find one under which it may be arranged. They fluctuate to no purpose from thought to thought, and we remain still uncertain and undetermined where to place it, or what to think of it. It is this fluctuation and vain recollection, together with the emotion or movement of the spirits that they excite, which constitute the sentiment properly called Wonder, and which occasion that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart, which we may all observe, both in ourselves and others, when wonder-ing at some new object, and which are the natural symptoms of uncertain and undetermined thought. What sort of a thing can that be? What is that like?
are the questions which, upon such an occasion, we are all naturally disposed to ask. (Smith, Essays 39)
Two other senses of wonder are evoked when we answer these questions. The first is the discovery of a pattern in nature, a sense not noticed by Smith: the Babylonians could predict eclipses but not explain them. Such explanations evoke Smith’s other sense of wonder. His example is the satisfying astonishment that greeted Ptolemaic astronomy on its introduction in ancient Greece, a system that made mathematical sense of the heavens:
If [the system of concentric spheres] gained the belief of mankind by its plau-sibility, it attracted their wonder and admiration; sentiments that still more confirmed their belief, by the novelty and beauty of that view of nature which it presented to the imagination. Before this system was taught in the world, the earth was regarded as, what it appears to the eye, a vast, rough, and irreg-ular plain, the basis and foundation of the universe, surrounded on all sides by the ocean, and whose roots extended themselves through the whole of that infinite depth which is below it. (Smith, Essays 56)
Achievements such as this cannot be appreciated by ordinary folk: the problems they solved would never have occurred to them (Smith, Essays 45). Moreover, they would regard the efforts to find a solution as worthless because without practical application:
It is in the abstruser sciences, particularly in the higher parts of mathemat-ics, that the greatest and most admired exertions of human reason have been displayed. But the utility of those sciences, either to the individual or to the public, is not very obvious, and to prove it, requires a discussion which is not always very easily comprehended. It was not, therefore, their utility which first recommended them to the public admiration. This quality was but little insisted upon, till it became necessary to make some reply to the reproaches of those, who, having themselves no taste for such sublime discoveries, endeavor to depreciate them as useless. (Smith, Sentiments 272)
For Smith, it is in Newton’s Principia that these abstruser sciences culminate:
Can we wonder then, that it should have gained the general and complete approbation of mankind, and that it should now be considered, not as an attempt to connect in the imagination the phenomena of the Heavens, but as the greatest discovery that ever was made by man, the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all closely con-nected together, by one capital fact, [that is, gravity], of the reality of which we have daily experience. (Smith, Essays 105)
C. P. Snow gives us another example — the second law of thermodynamics, the principle that all closed systems eventually run down: “it has its own som-ber beauty; like all major scientific laws, it evokes reverence” (Snow 72). Of course, Snow cautions, “it needs understanding, which can’t be attained unless one has learnt some of the language of [science]” (72). This is exactly what scientist-popularizers hope to communicate to a mass audience. Unlike well-known popular science physicists like Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, and Lisa Randall, however, Steven Pinker does not limit himself to the abstruser sciences. He sets as his goal the evocation of our sense of wonder at the latest discoveries in linguistics, psychology, and history, his own and those of others. To do so, he employs a category of cultural experience Adam Smith applied to science itself, the sublime.
The Language Expert
In the latter half of the tenth century, the Anglo-Saxon monk, Aelfic, wrote a homily on daily miracles, the power of God to sustain the universe moment by moment, a marvel hidden in plain sight:
God hath wrought many miracles and daily works; but those miracles are much weakened in the sight of men, because they are very usual. A greater miracle it is that God Almighty every day feeds all the world, and directs the good, than that miracle was, that he filled five thousand men with five loaves:
but men wondered at this, not because it was a greater miracle, but because it was unusual. Who now gives fruit to our fields, and multiplies the harvest from a few grains of corn, but he who multiplied the five loaves? The might was there in Christ’s hands, and the five loaves were, as it were, seed, not sown in the earth, but multiplied by him who created the earth. (The Sermones Catholici 185)
Steven Pinker strives to be the Aelfric of linguistics, to explore with us the ordi-nary miracle of language acquisition and use. He labors successfully to make clear and cogent to the general public the recondite insights of Noam Chomsky, the linguist who claimed that the intricate patterns that characterize the world’s languages, their differing surface structures, were the consequence of a com-mon core, a deep structure, a universal grammar, the generator of all languages.
The success of The Language Instinct, and of Pinker’s two subsequent books on language, was due in part to the clarity of his exploration of this phenomenon.
But it is not this clarity that makes his work compelling; it is his evocation of the scientific sublime, a revelation that shows us that something we all pos-sess — something we all take for granted — is a daily miracle that repays our careful scrutiny, an examination that reveals a human capacity that science lays bare and explains.
Pinker reveals linguistics as the science that shows us just how much of a miracle language is, and the wonder that is evoked when we understand how language works. All of us routinely turn its storehouse of words and rules into an infinite number of possible sentences, each newly minted for the occasion.
Because we achieve these articulate heights by the age of three, we can’t have learned language just from hearing our parents speak. We must have been primed in advance; each of us must have an all-purpose language generator packed inside
our skulls. Of course, we all speak different languages: French children learn French, American children, English. But this is only because a universal gram-mar, an innate capacity, made learning any language possible. It is this gramgram-mar, modified to accommodate the rules of particular languages, that generates the sentences we speak. If American, we learn that almost all adjectives precede their nouns. Americans say, “the blue ink.” If French, we learn that adjectives generally follow their nouns. The French say “l’encre bleu.” Modern linguistics tells us that these differences obscure commonalities, persistent patterns that are themselves a source of wonder; it also reveals the generator of these patterns, their explana-tion, a source of wonder even more impressive than the first.
Modern linguistics deals not only with the miracle of language, but with the miracle of speech. If we had language, but not speech, we could still communi-cate effectively: the profoundly deaf do it every day. Most of us, however, rely on our ability to convey our thoughts through the sounds we make. This capacity to form sounds into words and sentences and to perceive those sounds as words and sentences evolved in coordination with the universal grammar, a simultaneous development so impressive it gives some philosophers pause when evolution is given as their explanation. Even Pinker, a man who will insist in later work that he knows how the mind works, doubts our ability to understand human speech recognition: “The human brain . . . is a high-tech speech recognizer, but no one knows how it succeeds” (Pinker, Instinct 183); in fact, “no system today can duplicate a person’s ability to recognize both many words and many speakers”
(Pinker, Instinct 162). Pinker also explains why the speech generator is just as miraculous as the speech recognizer:
First, one of the six speech organs is chosen as the major articulator: the lar-ynx, the soft palate, tongue body, tongue tip, tongue root, or lips. Second, the manner of moving that articulator is selected: fricative, stop, or vowel.
Third, configurations of the other speech organs can be specified: for the soft palate, nasal or not; for the larynx, voiced or not; for the tongue root, tense or lax; for the lips rounded or unrounded. Each manner or configuration is a symbol for a set of commands to the speech muscles, and such symbols are called features. To articulate a phoneme, the commands must be executed with precise timing, the most complicated gymnastics we are called upon to perform. (Pinker, Instinct 171)
Phonemes form words, those groups of letters separated by spaces on the printed page. In fact, those spaces exist only on the page: in reality, speech is a steady,
seamless stream of sound. While our ears and our brain experience this stream, we hear sentences made up of words, an extraordinary transformation. That a three-year-old can have mastered this mental and physical feat is truly astonishing.
Each language also has its phonetic fingerprint, the growl of German, the lilt of French. This is how the great comedian, Sid Caesar, seemed to speak German or French while actually speaking nonsense. Pinker quotes a woman who produced under hypnosis the following pseudo-Slavic nonsense: “Ovishta reshra rovishta. Vishna beretishti? Ushna barishta dashto” (Pinker, Instinct 172). Once the shape of a language is firmly embedded, however, the pattern is resistant to change. Every Chinese child speaks unaccented Chinese. But few American adults can learn to speak unaccented Chinese: almost all speak it with an American accent. Although the language is clearly Chinese, the pattern of sounds that speakers generate is tainted indelibly by their native tongue. “Here is Jack and the Beanstalk” with an Italian accent: “Unans appona taim uase disse boi. Neimmse Giacche. Naise boi. Live uite ise mamma. Mainde de cao”
(Pinker, Instinct 172). While most adults cannot go from language to language and sound like natives, many actors can. In the old-time radio show, Life with Luigi, J. Carrol Naish and Alan Reed adopted an Italian accent, transforming
“Jack and the Beanstalk” into “Giacche enne Binnestauche.”
Just as there are rules for grammar, there are rules that govern phonetics, determining how features are arrayed into phonemes and words. In the writ-ten language, many verbs end in “ed” in the past writ-tense: slapped, jogged, bedded.
While these endings are all spelled the same way, they do not sound the same way. In slapped the “ed” is pronounced “t”; in jogged it is pronounced “d”; in bed-ded it is pronounced “ed.” In each case, the reason is phonetic, and a rule applies.
After an unvoiced vowel, we get “t”; after a voiced vowel, we get “d”; after a “d”
(or a “t”), we get “ed.” In each case, the constraints of our speech apparatus deter-mine our pronunciation.
But if this is so, why do we persist in tolerating the gap between pronun-ciation and spelling? Why not spell words just the way they sound: slapt, jogd, bedded? Isn’t English spelling irrational? Certainly, it does not make sense to have a “b” in debt or a “k” and a “gh” in knight. They are there only because history put them there: the “b” because of a mistaken analogy with Latin, the
“k” and “gh” because these letters were once pronounced. The arrival of dictio-naries regularized spelling and fixed these oddities, seemingly forever. As Pinker points out, however, phonetic spelling would only make things worse. We would spell “courage” differently from “courageous,” “muscle” differently from “muscu-lar.” The fact is that “writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds
of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear” (Pinker, Instinct 191).
Taking Sides
Pinker’s three books on language introduce us to two lively controversies in lin-guistics: the origin of language and the origin of concepts, the ideational forces behind language. I have already noted that Pinker’s greatest theoretical debt is to Noam Chomsky, the most influential advocate of the theory that language is generated by a set of rules built into our brains. Chomsky’s 1957 Syntactic Structures created a revolution in the study of language. Two years later, in a devastating review of a behaviorist approach that language is a form of con-ditioning, B. F. Skinner’s view in his Verbal Behavior, Chomsky reminded us of his alternative, one that would prove fruitful indeed. He saw the grammar of a language as a mechanism that generates sentences in the way that a deductive theory generates theorems. For him, linguistics should be viewed as a study of the formal properties of such grammars. With a precise enough formulation, this general theory could provide us with a uniform method for determining how sentences are generated, used, and understood. In short, it should be possi-ble to derive from a properly formulated grammar a statement of the integrative processes and generalized patterns imposed on the specific acts that constitute an utterance (Chomsky, “A Review” 55–56). As Newton reduced the workings of the universe to the law of gravity and the laws of motion, Chomsky reduced language to the operation of this grammar. It was awe inspiring when Chomsky first brought these ideas before the public; it is still awe inspiring. The trouble is, it might not still be science; it might not be true, an uncomfortable fact of which Pinker is well aware.
Despite its tremendous success and legion of followers, the universal gram-mar met with almost immediate challenges from many quarters (Harris). And these challenges have not abated. Three decades after Chomsky’s initial rev-elation, for example, David Rumelhart and James McClelland proposed an
Despite its tremendous success and legion of followers, the universal gram-mar met with almost immediate challenges from many quarters (Harris). And these challenges have not abated. Three decades after Chomsky’s initial rev-elation, for example, David Rumelhart and James McClelland proposed an