Wilhelm von Humboldt Podcasts
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Hello Interactors,
Happy 2023! Today we launch into a season on topics related to human behavior. So much of how we interact with people and place comes down to language. It shapes how we communicate with one another, but how much does language shape our behavior? And if one language dominates, how much does that domination shape our global society?
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?
Last week I caught up with a friend of mine who left Microsoft soon after I did. He was a technology executive and is now pursuing a degree at Cambridge on ethics in artificial intelligence (AI). His coursework is very different from his engineering past and Taiwanese education. Fewer numbers, more words. He is reading multiple philosophy papers a week, sometimes 30 pages long. He must then write his own analytical essays. Predictably, these papers he is reading are written in English – his second language.
It can be challenging enough to read philosophy in a native language. When he encounters a word, he doesn’t understand, he often consults his Chinese dictionary to better understand the concept. But then when he compares that definition to the English dictionary definition, the meaning is sometimes different. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote,
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
For my bi-lingual friend for whom English is his second language, it seems the language is the battle against intelligence by means of the bewitchment of philosophy.
This is an increasingly common phenomenon around the world as English is the dominant language of higher education. An estimated one in six people on this planet speak some form of English. While seemingly small, it is the largest population to speak a common language in the history of our species. Still, with over 7000 different languages spoken around the world language diversity dominates.
In the United States 80% of households speak English only at home. Those homes are likely to remain monolinguistic. But as immigrant populations in America grow and Indigenous languages resurface the number of bilingual or multilingual households is expected to increase. When the first wave of immigrants came to America in the late 1800s, many children were encouraged to drop their native language in favor of English. My American born Italian father-in-law was discouraged to speak Italian and thus never learned it. Meanwhile, the cost of learning English was too great for his mother, so she was discouraged to learn English. They never shared a richly common language.
Even though the United States has never declared English the official language, it is often assumed. As a result, there exists not only a monolingual bias, but an English bias. Given the last two global trotting colonizing superpowers have English as the dominant language, it follows the English language dominates. As a result, schools, including higher education replete with international bilingual diversity, is also dominated by the English language and all that comes with it. That includes the branches of the field of cognitive science intent on understanding how language affects how the brain works.
It was my father-in-law’s strict dad that insisted he speak English only. His attitude was ‘you’re an American, so you’re speaking English.’ It was common for immigrant parents during these times to attempt to erase their past in hopes of appearing more ‘American’. But this attitude may have been buoyed by a long-held belief there exists a cognitive cost of switching between two or more languages. A belief that was surely substantiated by the high cost of learning a second language proficiently. It seems advantageous to just pick one and stick with it. And for many of those early immigrant children in America, that choice would have been English.
But I’m reminded of another friend who grew up in Malaysia learning English and Malay while speaking her native cultural language and English at home. Malaysia’s population is a blend of Malay, Chinese, and Indian descendants, and the informal language, Manglish, blends words from English, Chinese, and Tamil. She is so comfortable jumping between these languages that when she and her sister talk, they sometimes use words from multiple languages in a single sentence. For her, there is no cognitive cost in switching. In fact, she may even benefit from using many languages at once.
YES, UH-HA, I AGREE
Some research in cognitive science points to a ‘bilingual advantage’. Multi-lingual speakers showed a greater “ability to plan, focus, and execute a wide array of tasks’ compared to single language speakers and the effect was pronounced among older adults. As a result, replicated studies show performance varies greatly depending on the task, age, language experience, and frequency of switching languages. Still, as cognitive research increases in parts of the world where bilingualism is more common, more is sure to be learned.
The bulk of knowledge in cognitive science comes from studying WEIRD people. They are predominantly White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The ‘E’ could just as well stand for ‘English-speaking’. The discipline is dominated by English-speaking researchers, studying a sliver of the English-speaking population, writing papers in English, and in countries that that are culturally Anglocentric. This flaw has been recognized for nearly a decade. But increasingly more research uses diverse sample populations, in more diverse locations, and is conducted by less Anglocentric researchers who use English as a second language.
In 2022, a group of scholars published a paper investigating how over-reliance on English may hinder cognitive science. It included a chart that illustrates a sampling of differences emerging from these more diverse studies. It shows how aspects of the written and spoken English language differ culturally, linguistically, and cognitively from certain other languages. For example, English speakers tend to frequently rely on words of gratitude to maintain healthy social relations. One study revealed English speakers were four times more likely to say ‘thank you’ than other languages. A language in Ecuador, Cha’palaa, doesn’t even have a word for ‘thank you’. Even ‘please’ is avoided without conflict. Thirsty? ‘Give me water’ is sufficient and considered polite.
Conversely, languages other than English tend to use words more frequently that promote and sustain social cohesion. One of the more extreme versions of this is Japanese where attention to social behavior is more closely monitored by all members of society. During conversation, the person whose ‘turn’ it is to speak is listening and looking for short affirmative confirmation, like ‘yes’, ‘uh-huh’, or head nods without losing their ‘turn’. Meanwhile the listener is listening and watching for breaks in phrasing to offer forms of affirmative confirmation. Linguists call this ‘back-channeling’ and can be found in cultures rich in social cohesion. Perhaps the English language and the American egocentric culture isn’t helping to heal our societal divisions.
The ordering of words in Japanese versus English has cognitive implications too. All languages have a linguistic ‘head’ that determines certain properties of a phrase. The Japanese language puts the head at the end of a phrase while English puts it at the beginning. This has implications for differences in working memory between Japanese and English speakers. When recalling a sequence of figures, like numbers, objects, plants, or animals, Japanese speakers have higher precision on the last item in the list and English speakers the first.
Cognitive differences in ordering arrangements can extend beyond listed figures to spatial reasoning. For example, English speakers use their own relational viewpoint as a frame of reference when describing spatial locations, like ‘left’ or ‘right’. In contrast, certain native languages in Australia and Namibia use cardinal directions like ‘west’ or ‘east’. These differences in linguistic encoding are shown to influence learning of spatial configurations, search and find tasks, and tracking moving objects. Again, the apparent egocentrism of English speakers is seemingly creeping into even how we see ourselves in the world.
ADVERSITY TO DIVERSITY
The ’left-right’ bias shows up not only in space, but also time. English speakers typically think of a timeline as going from left to right. This ‘left-to-right’ bias can be attributed to many factors, including the ordering of words in a sentence or a math equation. Solving a math problem or writing a sentence in English involves ‘starting’ on the left and over time ‘ending’ up on the right. Those taught to read and write or do math in English or similar languages thus have a linguistic coding in the brain that associates the past with the ‘left’ and the future with the ‘right’.
But those who have not been exposed to these encodings have no such associations. And given there are 7000 languages spoken in the world, that accounts for a lot of humans. As more humans gain access to the internet, more and more of these languages and cultures will be exposed to the 1.2 billion internet users speaking English. The fastest growing languages online are Chinese (0.9 billion), Spanish (0.4 billion), and Arabic (0.2 billion). More people in America speak Spanish than all of Spain.
Given this growing linguistic diversity, these researchers conclude cognitive science is not doing nearly enough “to live up to its original mission of developing an interdisciplinary exploration of ‘the mind’”. They say English language dominance may be the field’s “original sin” and call for a commitment “to research that seeks to systematically explore, generalize, and falsify our models of human cognition by exploring non-English-speaking peoples and societies.”
As we enter a new year, English speaking students, like my continuing adult education friend, will be returning to classes and campuses dominated by the English language. Others will be drawing that timeline planning the next quarter. Many spent this holiday season exchanging in culturally supported niceties perpetuated by language. Santa only delivered the presents if the child had been saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all year. We will spend the next year looking to do the same as we all struggle to keep those new year’s resolutions.
The words ‘spent’ and ‘spend’ bring up another peculiarity of English – tenses. It turns out those living in countries using languages that don’t have an obligatory future tense like English may be better at keeping their resolutions. They tend to smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. And, hey, tax time is also just around the corner in the United States. It turns out those not obliged to use future tense in their language also save more.
But these researchers admit these studies deserve scrutiny. There is much debate about how culture and history shape language and how language shapes culture and history. Teasing out language from cognition and culture will continue to confound scholars, researchers, and practitioners. However, advances in neuroscience and brain imaging together with increased diversity of research subjects, locations, and researchers are sure to yield more practicable results. These tools didn’t exist at the onset of the study of language.
In 1863, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, and brother of the more famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, wrote three volumes on comparative linguistics after studying the Kawi language of Java. He noted then there “resides in every language a characteristic worldview.” One day we may be able to discern just what elements of worldview cognition are common to all human brains – and the brains of other animals – regardless of language and culture.
Until then, this is all that is left to write for today. In English. While my sentences have flowed from left to right, the beginning is at the top and the end is here at the bottom. I wish to ‘thank you’ for reading or listening and invite you to ‘please’ click ‘like’ or leave a nice comment. If you feel so obliged. It’s been my ‘turn’ to speak, now it’s yours.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io -
Hello Interactors,
The social sciences sometimes unfairly get a bad wrap for being a ‘soft science’. But are they? In pursuit of a better understanding the role uncertainty plays in economic analysis, I stumbled across some research that ties John Maynard Keynes’s embrace of uncertainty with a resolute defense of the ‘soft sciences’ by one of the heroes of the ‘hard sciences.’ And you thought physics was hard.
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
CYBERSAIL
“The hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; the soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.”
This quote is by the groundbreaking Austrian American polymath, Heinz von Foerster from his essays on information processing and cognition. He went on to state:
“If a system is too complex to be understood it is broken up into smaller pieces. If they, in turn, are still too complex, they are broken up into even smaller pieces, and so on, until the pieces are so small that at least one piece can be understood.”
This strategy, he’s observed, has proven successful in the “hard sciences” like mathematics, physics, and computer science but poses challenges to those in the “soft sciences” like economics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and others.
He continues,
“If [social scientists] reduce the complexity of the system of their interest, i.e., society, psyche, culture, language, etc., by breaking it up into smaller parts for further inspection they would soon no longer be able to claim that they are dealing with the original system of their choice.
This is so, because these scientists are dealing with essentially nonlinear systems whose salient features are represented by the interactions between whatever one may call their “parts” whose properties in isolation add little, if anything, to the understanding of the workings of these systems when each is taken as a whole.
Consequently, if he wishes to remain in the field of his choice, the scientist who works in the soft sciences is faced with a formidable problem: he cannot afford to lose sight of the full complexity of his system, on the other hand it becomes more and more urgent that his problems be solved.”
Von Foerster studied physics in Austria and Poland and moved to the United States in 1949. He started his career in 1951 as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. In 1958 he received grant funding from various federal government agencies to start a Biological Computer Laboratory.
Von Foerster understood the cognitive process humans use to break down large complex problems into smaller discrete linear steps. With the advent of computers, they then typed those instructions into punch cards and fed them into the computer to process. A linear process of which humans and computers can both do. He and his lab then devised a way for a computer to do something humans cannot – conduct multiple calculations at the same time by breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces “until the pieces are so small that at least one piece can be understood.” With that they invented the world’s first parallel processor.
While von Foerster helped to bring about a machine that could do what a human could not, they also discovered what a human can do that a machine cannot. Indeed, a parallel computer can break down and execute calculations across a network of instructions, but it can’t take in additional input from its environment and decide to adjust course depending on the nature of the results. It operates in a closed system with the information it has been given and with limited input.
I like the metaphor of sailing to better understand this. When I’m at the tiller of a sailboat steering with a course in mind, I must continually monitor the environment (i.e. wind speed, direction, tides, currents, ripples, waves), the sails (angles, pressures, sail shape, obstructions), the crew (safety, comfort, skill, attitude, joy, fear, anxiety) and the course and speed of the boat (too fast, too slow, tack, jibe, steer). I am using all my senses which continually input information as conditions change. My brain is making calculations and judgements resulting in decisions that in turn impact the conditions. For example, a sudden turn and the sails will fail, the water under the boat will be redirected, air and water pressure gradients will shift, and a crew member may fall or go overboard. All these shifts in conditions in turn impact my subsequent calculations and decisions instant by instant. It’s a persistent feedback loop of information created by human interactions with the boat, the crew, and with nature.
A computer cannot yet steer as a human would in such conditions. They lack the necessary level of sensory input from changing environmental conditions as well as judgement and control over the information these senses provide. The study of the information derived from these complex phenomena derives its name from the Greek word for “navigator”: κυβερνήτης (kubernḗtēs), or as it has come to be called – Cybernetics. How we got from ‘kuber’ to ‘cyber’ I’m not sure, but I have a hunch that is about to be revealed.
KEYNESIAN BRAIN CHAIN
One of the founders of Cybernetics in the 1940s, Norbert Weiner, defined it as “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal.” Other founders said it is the study of “circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems." Another member of the founding group, the influential cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, said it’s "a form of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand."
Von Foerster’s seminars in Cybernetics grew to be very popular at the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 70s. But these early adopters were not the first to use this term to describe complex social information exchanges creating causal feedback loops. In 1834 the French mathematician, inventor of the telegraph, and namesake of the electrical current measurement Amp, André-Marie Ampère, used the term cybernétique to describe the “the art of governing or the science of government.” Perhaps that’s how we got from ‘kuber’ to ‘cyber’.
Either way, whether it’s political science, economics, or other social sciences of so-called “soft sciences” these early cross-discipline thinkers felt the urge to find ways to solve hard problems. Problems so complex they become impossible to deal with or track – they become intractable. One economics professor emeritus out of the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Robert Delorme, encountered these intractable problems in his work. He has since sought ways to establish a framework to deal with such problems that draws on the work of von Foerster. But also, on someone we mentioned last week, the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Delorme was studying institutional patterns in public spending between Great Britain and France over long time periods. This yielded a great deal of quantitative data, but also qualitative data including behavioral differences between how governments and markets interacted with each other and within each country. Delorme also studied traffic fatality data between the two countries and hit the same challenge. While there were mounds of quantitative data, the qualitative data was quite specific to the country, their driving cultures, the individual accident circumstances, and the driver’s individual behavior. In trying to break these complex problems down into smaller and smaller pieces, he hit the dilemma von Forester spoke of. The closer he got understanding the massive mound of data in front of him, the further from his initial research economic question he got.
To better model the uncertainty that culminated from behaviors and interactions in the system Delorme turned to the tools of complexity economics. He considered real-world simulation tools like complex adaptive systems (CAS), agent-based computational economics (ACE), agent-based models (ABM), and agent-based simulation (ABS). But he realized this tool-first approach reminded him of the orthodox, or ‘classical’ style of economic inquiry Keynes was critical of. While he recognized these tools were necessary and helpful, they were insufficient at explaining the complexity that arises out of the events in “the real world”.
Delorme quotes Keynes from his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money where he recognizes Keynes’s own need to break complex problems into smaller and smaller pieces while still staying true to the actual problem. Keynes acknowledged, “the extreme complexity of the actual course of events…” He then reveals the need to break the problem down into “less intractable material upon which to work…” to offer understanding “to actual phenomena of the economic system (…) in which we live…”
According to Delorme, Keynes, his economic philosophy, approach, and writings have been criticized over the years for lacking any kind of formalization of the methodologies he used to arrive at his conclusions and theories. So, Delorme did the work to comb through his writing to uncover an array of consistent patterns and methodological approaches which he’s patched back together and formalized.
He found that Keynes, like a helmsman of a boat, adapted and adjusted his approach depending on the complexity of the subject matter provided by the economic environment. When faced with intractable problems, he applied a set of principles and priorities Delorme found useful in his own intractable problems. The priority, he found, was to take a ‘problem first’ approach by confronting the reality of the world rather than assuming the perfect conditions of a mythical rational world common in traditional economics.
Again, using sailing as a metaphor, imagine the compass showing you’re heading north toward your desired destination, but the wind is to your face and slowing you down. It’s time to decide and act in response to the environmental conditions. Disregard the tool for now, angle the boat east or west, fill the sails, and zig zag your way toward your northerly goal while intermittently returning to the tool, the compass.
What Delorme found next was Keynes’s embrace of uncertainty. Instead of finding comfort in atomizing and categorizing to better assess risk, Keynes found comfort in acknowledging the intricacies of the organic interdependence that comes with interactions within and among irrational people and uncertain systems and environments. He rejected the ‘either-or’ of dualism and embraced the ‘both-and’ open-endedness of uncertainty. In other words, when there is a sudden shift in wind direction, the helmsperson can’t either ram the tiller to one side or adjust the sails. They must both move the tiller and adjust sails.
REPLICATE TO INVESTIGATE
To better deal with complex phenomena, and to further form his framework for how to deal with them, Delorme also found inspiration in the work of one of my inspirations, Herb Simon.
What Delorme borrowed from Simon was a way “in which the subject must gather information of various kinds and process it in different ways in order to arrive at a reasonable course of action, a solution to the problem.” This process, as characterized by the cybernetic loop, takes an input by gathering information and assesses and decides on a reasonable course of action. This solution in turn causes a reaction in the system creating an output that is then sensed and returned into the loop as input. This notion of a looping system made of simple rules to generate variations of itself is reminiscent of the work by a third inspiration for Delorme, John von Neumann.
Von Neumann was a Hungarian American polymath who made significant contributions to mathematics, physics, economics, and computer science. He developed the mathematical models behind game theory, invented the merge-sort algorithm in computer science, and was the first known person to create self-replicating cellular automata. And for all you grid paper doodlers out there, he first did it first on grid paper with a pencil. Now these simple processes are done on the computer.
By assigning very simple ‘black and white’ rules to cells in a grid (for example, make a cell white or black based on whether neighboring cells are black or white) one can produce surprisingly complex animate and self-replicating behavior. One popular example is Gosper’s gliding gun. It features two simple cellular arrows that traverse back and forth left to right across the screen on a shared path. When they collide, they produce animated smaller and simpler cellular offspring, an automaton, that rotate as they animate themselves diagonally to the lower right corner of the page or screen.
Delorme noticed von Neumann used this self-replication phenomena to describe a fundamental property of complex systems. If the complexity of automata is under a certain threshold of complexity, the automaton it produces will be less complex or degenerative – as is the case with Gosper’s arrow. However, if the threshold of complexity is exceeded it can over produce. Or, in the words of von Neumann, “if properly arranged, can become explosive.”
What Delorme’s research suggests, I think, is that to address complex intractable economic problems one must devise a looping recursive system of inquiry that self-replicates output intended to affect the next decision by the researcher. This makes the researcher both an observer and a participant in the search for solutions. The trick is to maintain a certain threshold of complexity such that the output doesn’t, again, become overwhelming or explosive.
In other words, instead of pointing tools at a mound of data in attempts to describe a static snapshot of what is in the world, create a circular participatory system that recursively produces something that affects how one might adjust what it produces in near real time.
As Delorme writes, “Complexity is not inherent to reality but to our knowledge of reality, it is derivative rather than inherent.” He then quotes science philosopher Lee McIntyre, who offers, “complexity exists ‘not merely as a feature of the world, but as a feature of our attempts to understand the world.”
I’m not sure what this kind of system looks like practically speaking, but I think the software tool developed by the economist Steve Keen, Minsky, is a start. Keen created this dynamic simulation software to model approaches to macroeconomics after he predicted the 2008 financial crisis. He hopes to entice people away from the static, equilibrium-fixated style of economics taught and practiced today.
The amount of data available to dynamically assess economic outcomes involving complex human behavior, human-made systems, and the natural world continues to push thresholds of complexity. We are creators, observers, and interactors of information in our own self-perpetuating recursive constructions of reality. But as von Forester suggested, even as we break down complex problems into parts, we can’t lose sight of the whole.
That reminds me of a quote from another ‘von’ the linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt – the younger brother of the famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. In 1788 he wrote,
"Nothing stands isolated in nature, for everything is combined, everything forms a whole, but with a thousand different and manifold sides. The researcher must first decompose and look at each part singly and for itself and then consider it as a part of a whole. But here, as often happens, he cannot stop. He has to combine them together again, re-create the whole as it earlier appeared before his eyes."
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io
