Pink Floyd or language acquisition? Pinker or Which One's Pink? Is it an either/or or is it both?
Both. Tonight I'll try to segue from listening to Steven Pinker discuss his latest book on the relationship between word choice and human nature, to listening to the great Pink Floyd cover-band Which One's Pink? rattle off some of the best chosen lyrics describing the nature of human existence ever put to song. I'll focus on trying to tease out the connections...
I am toying with this one as a kind of warm up: Pinker advocates what he calls "Learnability Theory" to explain the complex process of language acquisition. In his own words, it posits a theoretical scenario involving four parts:
1. A class of languages. One of them is the "target" language, to be - attained by the learner, but the learner does not, of course, know - which it is. In the case of children, the class of languages would - consist of the existing and possible human languages; the target - language is the one spoken in their community.
2. An environment. This is the information in the world that the learner has to go on in trying to acquire the language. In the case of children, it might include the sentences parents utter, the context in which they utter them, feedback to the child (verbal or nonverbal) in response to the child's own speech, and so on. Parental utterances can be a random sample of the language, or they might have some special properties: they might be ordered in certain ways, sentences might be repeated or only uttered once, and so on.
3. A learning strategy. The learner, using information in the environment, tries out "hypotheses" about the target language. The learning strategy is the algorithm that creates the hypotheses and determines whether they are consistent with the input information from the environment. For children, it is the "grammar-forming" mechanism in their brains; their "language acquisition device."
4. A success criterion. If we want to say that "learning" occurs, presumably it is because the learners' hypotheses are not random, - but that by some time the hypotheses are related in some systematic - way to the target language. Learners may arrive at a hypothesis - identical to the target language after some fixed period of time; - they may arrive at an approximation to it; they may waiver among a - set of hypotheses one of which is correct.
Now, if we were to suppose that the Pink Floyd oeuvre was a language (the target language) and a concert the "environment," then what we are left with is to explain a learning strategy and a success criterion. My theory is that there is such a wide gulf between enlightened and cretin Floyd fans because the Floyd linguistic universe is only suitable to a select number of individuals with the preexistent "hypotheses" necessary to penetrate Floyd's deep grammar, and hence meaning. Hearing a Floyd song, or recognizing a Floyd tune or string of lyrics is not the same thing as comprehending and learning Floyd--once learned, it becomes a language tool that can be used as a stand-alone communication system, albeit only with other enlightened Floyd-language users.
One of the crucial preexisting "hypotheses" necessary for learning the language of Floyd is the spectral-nihilism algorithm, which is essentially a predisposition of the individual brain to interpret existence and "input" as significant in its spectral relations--the way different levels and modes of perception and existence interact with one another--but which are insignificant and devoid of ultimate meaning when taken as a whole--that is, a thorough-going nihilism about the ultimate ground of being.
More on Floyd acquisition after I see the show...
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