Human beings are obsessed with knowledge. We instinctively believe there are facts about the world which are true, which can be known, and which explain our experience of reality. But real knowledge – thoughts about reality which are true – is incredibly elusive. Human beings aren’t very good at dealing with this.

This post is quite a long and mainly philosophical one, and part of a thought in progress.

I Intuitive knowledge

The earliest forms of knowledge, it’s safe to assume, were the result of intuitive mental “theory-building” combined with instinct. We experience things and intuitively create “theories” to explain them. When we experience something that clearly contradicts our theory so far, we either amend the theory to fit the new information, or (more often) ignore what we experienced and try to forget it as soon as we can.

We do all of this automatically, without any conscious decisions taking place.¹

This intuitive knowledge is generally very useful for dealing with things that don’t change too quickly, but it is extremely rigid and doesn’t easily adapt to new situations.

It’s also strongly influenced by other forms of knowledge, which I imagine developed later in human (pre-)history.

II Introspective knowledge

The next form of knowledge might have been the result of conscious introspection: you experience something new, and it clashes so terrifically with what you know about the world that you find yourself trying to consciously figure out how to explain it.

This gives you more flexibility: you can employ the human knack for metaphor (“this thing is kind of like that other thing”) and create thoughts that are more complex and abstract. Unlike intuitive knowledge, it involves our conscious thought and we can make conscious decisions about what to believe.

Unlike intuitive knowledge, introspective knowledge is free from the restrictions of direct experience. This enables us to reach better, more general explanations, but also means a lot of our “theories” can be completely wrong and still maintain a hold on us; the more abstract a theory, the more difficult it is to encounter direct evidence against it.

III Cultural knowledge

I imagine that Introspective knowledge gave rise to what I consider the most powerful form of knowledge in human history: cultural knowledge.

Cultural knowledge includes everything people “know” because it’s what everyone around them “knows”. One example is prejudice against homosexual activity – which became common in the West only a few centuries ago but many people seem to consider “natural”. Primitive religions are another good example, but there are many, many others.

Imagine you’re part of an ancient tribe. The oldest woman in the tribe, known and respected for her experience and wisdom in all practical things, tells you and your family “a very important secret”: there is a deity – a being with powers unlike your own – which controls the growing of the wheat that sustains the tribe.

Like people, sometimes the deity is happy, and sometimes it is angry. But when the sun is shining and the deity is happy, the tribe’s crops bloom; and when the weather is bad and the deity is angry, the wheat fails, and the weak ones starve.

Because you don’t have any better knowledge to work with, and because your life truly depends on understanding how your source of nourishment works, you probably believe this story.

What happens next is that you tell your children about this deity, and they tell their children more or less the same story, and very quickly, your whole community comes to “know” that this is how the world works. (As the Dothraki often tell a baffled Daenerys Targaryen in A Song of Ice and Fire, “it is known.”)

IV The power of conformity

Cultural knowledge arises from introspective thought and we gain it through conscious social experience, especially in our childhood, though we usually forget where it came from within a few years.

Although it spreads in a conscious way, passed from one person to another using language, it becomes anchored in far deeper unconcious processes.

If you refuse to accept the social group’s beliefs, you may find yourself quite alone. Most people will not be open to talking about such things when you refuse to see “the obvious truth”.

You may have a feeling that what you’ve been told is nonsense, but that doesn’t mean you have a better theory to offer spontaneously. The easy way out is to accept what everyone around you knows to be true, or if you don’t accept it, to keep quiet; this saves you and others the torment of being a skeptic amongst conformists.

Because of the immense power of cultural knowledge, I’m convinced this is the most common form of knowledge. It doesn’t require any effort from any individual, only the repetition of information, and conformity. This means almost every thing that we know is probably cultural knowledge; it might not all be quite as false as the belief about the wheat god, but it could potentially carry all kinds of falsities that we never notice or question because we’re busy with other things.

V Scientific knowledge

I think of intuitive, introspective, and cultural knowledge as the basic forms, but there are certainly others. One I’d especially like to consider: scientific knowledge.

In the terms I used above, scientific knowledge is a hybrid form. It mostly rejects intuitive knowledge; it is based on introspective knowledge, but makes use of the tool that gives cultural knowledge its power – social sharing of information.

Scientific knowledge is, to me, a form of cultural knowledge which embraces and encourages the skeptics. The magnitude of that innovation can’t be exaggerated: it may well be one of the biggest steps taken by humankind since the evolution of complex (syntactic) language.

VI The meaning of science

Doing science, being involved in the creation of scientific knowledge, means making the effort to introspectively consider and challenge all intuitive and cultural beliefs. But it also means to share your skeptic thoughts, in the effort to socially form a theory that is more useful than any other theory so far.

A lot of people think that scientific knowledge is even more like cultural knowledge: that what scientists think about their area of investigation is merely an opinion; that scientific knowledge is just dogma; that any experienced scientist in some field can tell you the truth about anything in that field.

People who think these things are mostly wrong.

While scientific communities are susceptible to dogma and orthodoxy, the scientific method and the scientific culture are brilliantly designed to encourage serious skepticism regarding established knowledge. As a result, scientific orthodoxies never last more than a few decades in fields where the scientific method is functional and research is active.

Individual scientists do have opinions, more than knowledge. But scientific opinion is based on relatively serious investigation of realtively well-defined issues – unlike everyday opinions, which are based on cultural knowledge and relate to vague intuitive questions about reality.

But scientists do not know reality, and discovering reality is not the goal of scientific theory. The goal is to provide a better explanation than any other explanation so far, which means that an even better explanation should be just around the corner (that is, probably less than 20 years away.)

Because of this, it’s safe to assume that this means we’re slowly getting closer to true knowledge of reality, but there’s no reason to believe we’ll ever reach it.

A scientifically literate individual informed about the current state of some field can tell you about the most realistic understanding available for that field’s set of phenomena. But if that individual is intellectually honest, they will not call this “the truth”. Just a close approximation which is close to a good match for the information available so far.

VII Convergence and confusion

In the past century or two, humanity is experiencing a very odd transformation. We are, as always, obsessed with knowledge; but we have developed scientific knowledge enough that some results – gravity, atoms and molecules, bacteria and viruses, et cetera – are understood so well that we can really make use of them in our day-to-day life. At the very least, we can use technology which is based on them, and we do, every day.

What this leads to is the integration of scientific knowledge into our cultural knowledge. When we culturally-know something, we think of it as “true reality” – even if the original source is skeptical, provisionary, scientific.

Once a belief becomes cultural knowledge, it doesn’t change nearly as easily as actual scientific knowledge.

Unlike intuitive and cultural knowledge, scientific knowledge is not created to help us deal with the world around us; science is about understanding for the sake of understanding.

So we end up with cultural knowledge that we have a hard time shaking off, but also isn’t very useful in our day-to-day lives. Even worse, it was never meant to be “the truth”, and it’s probably a decade old – or five, or ten² – and we intuitively think of it as “the truth” because nobody in our day-to-day interactions dares question it. Trying to find out what current thoery says doesn’t help, because current theory is less mature and useful, and still needs a lot of testing before it can be relied on.

It’s important to understand that this applies to every single human being. It also applies to all scientists, for everything outside of the fields they’ve seriously studied.

Sometimes, cultural biases and orthodoxy can even creep in on a scientist’s home turf and “contaminate” research – but the scientific method will clean it up within a few years if that research becomes well-known.

VIII Practical questions

What should we do about all of this? I really don’t know. It’s not my field, and I doubt there’s a definitive answer – or a close approximation – in any field, anyway. (Philosophy is even worse than science at reaching definitive answers.)

What I personally try to do is simply to identify my beliefs about the world, and try to identify where they come from and how important it is to me to hang on to them.

I try to keep in mind that “knowledge” is an illusion; that the most reliable kind of “knowledge” is the intuitive kind, which is, however, also the least accurate and the least flexible.

I try to keep in mind that anything I think I “know” could be a cultural bias. I try to remember that this applies to scientists, too, and that even the best theory is just a reliable approximation so far, and could change deeply within my lifetime.

Most of all, I try to recognize my biases, and often have to decide whether I can live with them or have to reconsider what I “know”.

What I try to never do is defend a bias simply because I happen to hold it. If I realize I don’t know why I think some thought, that thought is suspicious and I keep it to myself until I’ve looked into it again more seriously.

I can’t say any of this is fun or easy – or even that I go through with it as much as I’d like to – but considering my (introspective) beliefs about knowledge, I’d (intuitively) be uncomfortable with doing it any other way.

If you’ve made it so far in this unusually long post, maybe you’d like to share some of your thoughts/bliefs/”knowledge”. Did I miss any important form of knowledge? Is there any better way to deal with the weaknesses of the forms I discussed? Is there any point you’d like me to say more about?

References

The subject of this piece is one I’ve enjoyed thinking about for years, and I’m not sure where I stole my ideas from. A few sources that were probably influential, in no particular order, are:

• Daniel Greenberg, Worlds in Creation. Sudbury Valley School Press
• Paul Graham, What Can’t be Said. Essay on paulgraham.com
• Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge University Press
• David W. Lightfoot’s introduction in Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures. Mouton De Gruyter
• James A. Michener, The Source: A Novel. Random House (see my review on this blog)

Footnotes

1. What exactly “conscious” and “decision” are would be the topic for another long post, or maybe a whole new blog.
2. For example, I heard that what is considered “normal body temperature” is the result of findings from one small study over a hundred years ago, and not considered accurate anymore.

Language is all around us. It is everywhere, everyone uses it, and people are interested in languages wherever you go — people like languages. I get into spontaneous conversations about language with non-linguists several times a week. But when I tell people that I study linguistics, and moreover, that I’m into grammar theory, many are nearly shocked. “Grammar theory?! Why? Grammar is so boring!”. This post is an attempt to explain why, of all things, I love grammar.

First I will say a little about the traditional, or naive, view of grammar. The way I used to think of grammar, the way most people are probably used to thinking of grammar, is that grammar is something like religious dogma. There are do’s and don’ts, and their goal is to make your language usage correct and beautiful. It is commonly held that there is a right way to speak English (or German, or Hebrew, or Dutch, or Russian, etc.) and that there is a wrong way. Many are even convinced that without instruction in the correct rules of the grammar for their native language, speakers will talk and write the wrong way.

Another commonly held strange belief that confuses the matter is that every word has a certain meaning. So traditional grammars label, for example, the verb form write as “present tense”, and another form of that verb, wrote, gets the label “past tense.” Each correctly describes a typical way to use the form, but that description can’t explain all usage in any clear way. The naive language afficionado may then, as is Bill Bryson in his Mother Tongue (which I just read), be shocked to find that the innocent present-tense write is being used in such a patently past-tense sentence as “I used to write on my blog” (to use my own example). But grammar is a little bit more complicated than that.

Symbols, a system of symbols.

The way we look at language and grammar changed forever in the later part of the 19th century, when Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist (who incidentally got his PhD at the University of Leipzig, where I study), came upon an important realization. He realized that any symbol is made up of meaning on the one hand, and of form on the other hand; he realized that the connection between the two is purely arbitrary; he realized that language is a system of such arbitrary symbols.

This means that it is an arbitrary choice of English speakers to say “I used to write” and of Hebrew speakers to say ‘nahagti likhtov’, which means the same. It means we assign different sounds to express this thought simply because we are speaking different languages – there is no logical reason to say “to write” rather than Hebrew ‘likhtov’ or Spanish “escribir” or Russian ‘pisat’’. This is a little bit obvious on the one hand, especially if you speak more than one language. But it is startling, because we are used to thinking that words simply mean something. In truth, there is no connection between “tree” and the physical object that we refer to with the word; the word is just a short burst of sounds that we agree to use to communicate about our bark-covered, leafy friends.

These insights had impact in many fields of philosophy and social science in the decades that followed. A particularly big step was taken in the mid-1950’s by a young American linguist named Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argued – and still argues –

• that language is a system,
• that it is a system unique to human beings (other animals can’t produce language of the kind humans use, even with help),
• that it is a system universal to all human beings (even the most isolated human cultures use language),
• and that this system is an inborn feature of the human brain.

Chomsky has argued much more than just this, and has identified recursion as the key feature of human language that makes it so useful and fundamentally separates it from other animals’ communication – but I will spare you the details. The logic is solid, trust me. There has been an ongoing debate about some of the points above ever since Chomsky first began to publish, but I will spare you those details as well for now.

Generativist grammar theory.

Modern grammar theory is a direct result of Chomsky’s Generativistic approach, an approach which Chomsky has developed over the past half-century, publishing a new version of his theory every decade or so. Chomsky’s works have transformed all of linguistic theory, even amongst those who disagree with his hypotheses or his approach.

Chomsky and other generativists have demonstrated that every native speaker of a language has an internal grammar that allows them to instinctively know what is a possible sentence in their language and what is not, and to only speak or write in a way that fits this grammar. This means that a native speaker cannot use their language in a wrong way. To demonstrate, here is a grammatical English sentence:

(1) “I used to write on my blog, but now I rarely do”.

This is not a grammatical sentence of English:

(2) “I wroted on-blog-a-mine, now-but I not-much does“,

nor is this:

(3) “I on my blog to write used, but now do I rarely“,

and of course not this:

(4) “Kcha plip plip blugu, muppu muppu fla gen“.

There are, of course, different ways in English to express the thought behind sentence (1), such as this:

(5) “I don’t write on my blog as much as I used to”.

But for some reason, (2), (3) and (4) are not utterances that an English speaker would produce in place of (1) or (5). These example sentences would look very different in another language, but there would always be sentences that are part of the language and possible sentences that are not. Generative grammar theory tries to figure out how this works, how native speakers structure language.

Intention, meaning, form.

Another important realization that Chomsky has given us is that a grammatical form is not necessarily a meaningful form; not every grammatical sentence makes sense. Chomsky’s classic example is (6) “colorless green dreams sleep furiously.” There is no way to rule out the form of sentence (6), but there is also no reasonable way to interpret its meaning, except perhaps in the context of a highly surreal post-modern poem. A form can be permitted by the grammar without carrying coherent meaning; form and meaning are very separate things – continuing de Saussure’s line of thought.

One of the secret joys of linguistics is getting to spend time on this kind of absurd sentence, but it also illustrates a fascinating and important point: every speaker of a language has a formal grammar for that language – a system for producing grammatical utterances, forms that are permissible in the language – and this component is responsible for form alone. There is then another component of grammar that is in charge of making sense of things, which is different in every language as well.

For example, some say we must never use a double negative in English. Others say there ain’t nothing wrong with double negatives. In Russian, everyone agrees that they are mandatory – the sentence “I didn’t see anybody” is, if my Russian is to be trusted, ‘nikavo ne videl’, literally ‘[I] didn’t see nobody’. In fact, Russian has not only double but even triple negatives – the question ‘kto kavo videl?’, “who saw whom?”, can be answered ‘nikto ne videl nikavo‘, literally “nobody didn’t see nobody”, meaning “nobody saw anybody”. In standard varieties of English the Russian pattern would have no meaning. Some would say Russian is just illogical, or perhaps that English is, but really they just have a different way of presenting the same meaning. In Russian you just negate everything in the sentence, whereas standard English uses one negative element (“nobody”) and then only uses “any“-items, which aren’t actually negative, but are mandatorily used together with negatives. These are simply different ways to give form to a particular meaning.

Coming back to our little verb write, let’s see how a grammar theorist would label these forms. write would be, for example, the bare verb form. In English this is usually used for the present tense (I write, you write, they write) but it is also used in the infinitive to write. There is a particular meaning of the verb use which lets us make a particular kind of past tense, which I would call past habituative: “I used to write”. It is created by taking the preterite (“simple past”) of use – used – and putting it together with an infinitive. Used to write, used to run, used to think – etc. A linguist would note that this is a perfectly normal way of using the bare form of an English verb.

It doesn’t make sense in a literal way – the sentence doesn’t mean I “used” anything – but it’s a form that English uses to express a certain meaning. The Modern Hebrew equivalent is created using the verb ‘linhog’, the most common meaning of which today is “to drive”, but which also means to “to be of the habit”. write is present-tense in some situations but not so much in other situations, just like use or ‘linhog’ have different uses. Forms cannot be so simply labeled by meaning; the link between form and function is not as simple as we may have liked it to be.

To complicate things, logicians and semanticists, who study the meaning of words and sentences, have also made the distinction between meaning and intention, both of which are involved in the semantic content of language. “You will give me back my book” and “give back my book!” have the same basic meaning, but they express a different intention, and get a different grammatical form. In spoken Modern Hebrew the only difference between the two would be the intonation — in both cases the sentence is ‘takhzir li et hasefer sheli’.

Strange languages. Remarkable things.

It is remarkable that form is sometimes so independent from meaning and intention, and that meaning and intention sometimes have such an effect on form. But what is truly fascinating to me is that the way these levels of meaning and form are related to each other is in each language systematic. The way form and meaning are constructed, and the way they are related, are systematic, and it seems they are all fundamentally based on the same principles. Even the differences between languages appear to be systematic, although the system is not clear yet. Still, without being entirely sure exactly what the “building blocks of grammar” are, we are able to easily compare between languages as different as English and Dyirbal. (The former is a very strange language originating on an island off the northwest of Europe but spoken by over 1½ billion people spread around the world. The latter is a very strange language of aboriginal Australia spoken by only a handful of people.)

Modern linguistics, or more particularly language typology, has managed to refine the way we look at languages and compare them, such that from just a few words describing the features of a language, a linguist can get an idea of how that language works without ever having heard a word of it. We can compare and summarize how languages deal with different things, such as marking tense on verbs or negating a proposition, even though they choose very different forms to express them.

Grammar theory is about figuring out how this works, what the underlying system is which gives rise to languages that are so different yet so similar. We are figuring out not only what differences there are, but also why and how they arise. We are working towards a theory of grammar that hopefully will one day be able to capture how any given language in the world separates the grammatical forms from the ungrammatical. On the way, we get to see how people say things in all kinds of different languages (there are over 6,000 languages spoken worldwide!), we get to argue and hypothesize, we get to play around with funny example sentences, and we get to write about it. I can’t imagine anything much better than that.