Embodied Language and Cognition

Manifesto

What do words mean? Each word brings with it a range of associations: images, sounds, smells, tastes, emotions, memories, places, events, and more. Certain words, such as the name of a recently lost loved one or a carefully targeted insult, can shoot through the whole body to its very extremities, jarring the entire being of the listener into immediate, intense response. There are no “mere semantics”; words are a tool to accomplish a purpose. Words can bring healing or cause harm. Words can inspire new ideas or shame them. Words drive humankind to action. Ultimately, words are the key to access the vast hidden world of the human psyche and the map to explore its hidden recesses.

How does language work? What function does it serve? In this blog I will argue that language is a mechanism for creating and influencing mental states, from cognitive abstractions all the way down to primitive drives and instincts. To my mind, the prior statement is roughly equivalent to the claim that the purpose of language is social cooperation. For how can people cooperate if they cannot place ideas in each other’s minds, if they cannot negotiate on joint action? To act together, people must communicate, and they must persuade each other.

The point of view that language is a tool for manipulating mental states subsumes the concept that language is a mechanism for transferring information, since information can be transferred by creating a mental state in the listener that represents it. Language, however, has significant uses that go beyond information transfer. Language is not merely about semantic content.

For instance, why do many people sometimes talk or sing when they are by themselves? There can be no information transfer when the same person is both speaker and hearer. Yet self-talk is a common tool for dealing with issues such worry or anxiety. Self-talk works because vocalizing positive statements exercises neural pathways that create positive mental states to counter existing negative mental states. Similarly, singing while alone serves to create desired mental states in the singer. Singing and self-talk represent two instances in which we can use language to influence our own mental state.

If language were primarily about the content of words, that is, if one could attach a concrete, formal meaning to each linguistic utterance, then there would have to be a complete synchrony between speakers and listeners. In this hypothetical scenario, it ought to be possible to speak so clearly as to never be misunderstood, at least if one is managing the content of one's utterances with sufficient care. In reality, such a complete synchrony never obtains. Misunderstandings and misperceptions are common features of human communication due to the abundant ambiguity and flexibility of language. Words themselves do not carry meaning. Rather, a certain meaning or intent within the speaker generates words, from which a separate meaning is constructed by the listener in context. Thus it makes more sense to speak of the mental interpretation of an utterance rather than its meaning, because different minds in different contexts might assign conflicting interpretations to a single utterance.

Words are often described as symbols, that is, as abstract labels that attach to some concept, event, entity, object, action, quality, or relationship. This of course ignores pronouns, deictics, and other words that serve a purely syntactic or connective purpose. But the symbolic view of words is alluring; it feels as though it matches the way that humans think about words, the way we name things.

With a bit of thought, however, one sees that individual words are used in ways that are far too unstable to be just symbols. The set of experiences labeled by a particular word may grow or shrink over time, and not just over long periods of time. The meanings of words can extend to new territory within the course of a single conversation by the use of analogy, metonymy, metaphor, simile, or other linguistic devices. If use of the particular analogy or other device becomes commonplace, it can even happen that the source of the analogy can be forgotten, bifurcating the meaning of a word or phrase that refers to two completely different things with no clear relationship between them known to either speaker or listener.

One of the standard examples of polysemy (that is, the property of words having multiple meanings) is the word bank, which comes from a Germanic source meaning table or shelf. The shelf of land beside a river came to be called a bank through Old Norse, and the table at which one has financial dealings came to be called a bank as well via Old French or Italian. Hence the two primary meanings of the word bank have a common origin in a word that became modern English bench, with that shared origin have been deleted, leaving in its place a bifurcated symbol for multiple distinct objects.

Yet, as mentioned above, such a drift in meaning can occur not only over the centuries but within a single utterance. Thus one can reference a book, which is a collection of printed pages between two covers, as being an effective paperweight and then immediately begin to talk about what the book says about a particular topic as though the book itself were a symbol for both the author and the object. A human interpreting the prior sentence has no difficulty in variously treating the book as a physical object in one case and as a proxy for a human writer in the other.

This flexibility in referential content is not rare or extreme in language; it is the common case. Thus one can bite into a sandwich, or take a bite out of crime, as though crime were a problem that had to be solved by being eaten. If someone were then to report suspicious behavior to the police, they might say that they were taking their little bite. And then they might ask their neighbors what their bite should be. One neighbor's bite might be to volunteer to help mentor nearby underprivileged youths, and that neighbor might encourage others to help him with his bite by volunteering themselves. Then the whole neighborhood might volunteer for any variety of causes not related at all to mentoring youths and preventing crime, and the time that they volunteer might be called a bite. And so within one paragraph, an entirely new meaning of the word bite has been invented, and few are the readers who would not understand the new intent of the word. If the word bite is a symbol, it is an extraordinarily malleable one. In human language, polysemy is the norm rather than the exception.

Rather than being pure symbols, words are associational triggers that reference various elements of the mind, memory, psyche, and subconscious. Just like an index at the back of a book enumerates the pages on which a word occurs, so a word evokes a set of mental contexts that have come to be labeled by this word. And just as one still has to search for the word on the page referenced in the index, so too one has to search for the meaning of a word within the mental context. So called literary devices such as metaphor, analogy, simile, metonymy, and others are actually commonplace strategies for interpreting words within context. Words themselves do not have specific meanings; rather, they are associative labels for aspects of human experiences that are dynamically applied by the listener to create interpretive meaning.

The interpretation of words is driven by human experiences or episodes, which I wll call narratives, that provide the context for resolving the words from an index to their referents. Narratives aggregate together a sequence of mental states into a coherent scenario, and in this blog I will develop over time the concept of mental states and thence their aggregation into narratives (which are themselves part of the mental state). I claim that these narratives are the means by which we humans consciously understand our own experience, and hence interpreting language into narratives is tantamount to experiencing these narratives in some residual form. That is, meaning in language is not represented in the brain so much as it is simulated by reliving in detached form the reconstructed narratives decoded from speech, with the consequence that the results of interpreting language can reach throughout the brain and body.

Summing up the thesis above, from an external perspective, I regard language as a joint process by which a speaker manipulates his own mental state and encodes it in context so that a listener can decode it from context and integrate it as part of the listener’s mental state. From a functional perspective, I regard language as a tool for manipulating mental states through narratives, which are understood by internally reliving the narrative through a simulatory process. The nature of the simulation arises analogically out of the embodied human experience and is dependent on it.

In future posts, about one per week, I will explore in more detail concepts such as narrative, mental state, simulation, and embodiment. Obviously, these ideas do not occur in a vacuum, so I will also discuss the relationship of my claims to relevant literature. My approach to this topic is primarily deductive rather than inductive; I prefer to imagine scenarios and intuit what must exist or how things must work. My intuition and imagination are fed by exposure to the vast body of experimentation and research that has been done on human neurobiology and psychology, and I will obviously revise my claims where they are in contradiction to the evidence.

I feel that the work of the theorist or philosopher is undervalued in the hard sciences, and that we are in need of broad ideas to guide our quest for understanding of the relationship between the brain and the mind. It is those broad ideas that I wish to explore in this blog, and language provides many clues as to the right direction. As for whether the ideas I present have value, that, dear reader, is for you to decide.