Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale, ‘Why Are There Different Languages? The Role of Adaptation in Linguistic Diversity’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 649-60.

The argument here is that linguistic diversity may result from the social, physical, and technological environments in which languages develop, rather than from gradual, random change. Acoustic adaptation to ecological niches is well known in animals, for example; maybe it works for humans too. Whistle languages can reach further across difficult terrain, whereas ‘a temperate climate with open vegetation allows for easier transmission of consonants and/or higher frequency sounds than warmer climates with denser vegetation, which better propagate vowels’. There is a correlation between humidity and the use of rising and falling pitch in languages; perhaps dry air affects the ability to perform those tones consistently. The difference could be genetic rather than, or as well as, climatic, they argue. It’s possible that landscape has an effect too: ‘languages spoken in environments with salient topography (mountains or large bodies of water) sometimes grammaticalize these geographic features for spatial deixis, while languages spoken in environments more strongly shaped by human artifacts tend to rely on reference to artifacts and speaker-centered coding (e.g., left and right)’. It’s a nice idea, that languages shape themselves around the things they have to address.
      I found all of this quite intriguing. The comments on ‘how written language has been responding to the pressures imposed by modern electronic communication’ were reasonable too, but less engaging to me: it just seems less enlivening to observe this sort of adaptation as it’s happening during our stressed-out efforts to get things done, than to think about how over long millennia jungles, ice fields, deserts, and mountains impinged on local speakers. I wrote about something similar a while ago, in relation to Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams.

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Sayuri Hayakawa, Albert Costa, Alice Foucart, and Boaz Keysar, ‘Using a Foreign Language Changes Our Choices’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 791-3.

This (and the previous article, to some extent) makes me think, as I often do, of the particular, perhaps skewed way that interdisciplinary topics appear in the pages of Trends in Cognitive Sciences. This is about ‘how foreign language affects choice’; apparently it does, and this makes a difference to judgments of risk, morality, and more. The authors deem this ‘surprising’, but I am not sure it is. I suppose that’s because I have a broad, woolly sense that somewhere between history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and so on, there’s a field in which our understanding of how languages work on us is growing, or could grow.
      In this essay, though, what matters are experimental results, and these are, the authors argue, gathering into a significant trend. Using a foreign language can reduce decision biases, such as loss aversion, perhaps because it is less bound up in emotions. In one study, subjects perceived more benefit and less risk; in another they were more lenient about taboo violations, in some cases; in another there were signs of more ‘utilitarian’ responses to ‘highly emotional moral dilemmas’. The authors say, interestingly, that the definition of what’s ‘emotional’, and how that varies between languages, is a tricky area. There’s something very interesting here; it feels bitty but the attempt to bring it together is valuable.

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These things were on my mind this weekend because I went to see the film Arrival. Now this film is good enough for me to want to avoid revealing its secrets, even though that makes it rather hard to talk about. Suffice to say, it does interesting things with the structure of languages, the way our minds work, and the nature of time; and it has aliens in it. It is a film that, unlike most of the ones I’ve seen recently, works with a hyper-extreme .
      It’s not breaking any confidences to say that the film, and the , revolve around the question of how you communicate with entities which are completely different from you. A few clicks of the mouse and I found myself reading about the ways in which designers of nuclear waste facilities are trying to send messages to people who would still be endangered by radiation if they visited the sites after tens of thousands of years.

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The wonderful, horrifying problem is not just the difficulty of defining visual messages that would mean the same to future humans (or others). It’s also that the history of archaeology tends to suggest that, faced with such signs, people anything like us would think ‘Brilliant, I have found the treasure-filled tomb of my dreams! Indiana Jones!’. So it’s taking a lot of ingenuity (actually I am not sure it’s come to anything much yet).
      The two sites I’ve read about are at Yucca Mountain in the US, which is discussed in this piece on the ‘Anthropocene’ era by my friend Robert Macfarlane, and at Olkiluoto, Finland, which featured in a documentary called Into Eternity. There’s some more detail on how the Americans thought about doing it in this Slate piece. I haven’t read it yet, but Gregory Benford’s Deep Time sounds like it has a lot to say on the matter of communicating across millennia in general.
      As if my mind wasn’t full enough of words and thoughts and time, Youtube telepathically realised that I needed to know about the new OK Go video that has just come out. I’ve included one before and feel like I should do so again. Enjoy. Wonder whether it was all worth it. Decide it was.

I recently read the last few issues of Trends in Cognitive Sciences to see what could be of interest for the blog. (That’s one of the things I do here, in case you hadn’t realised.) It struck me that several articles made reference to something that might not be well-known to all my dear readers: Bayesian Probability. I thought it would be good to pin it down so I can refer back to it, and it’s an interesting part of what some theorists of the mind are doing at the moment.
      Thomas Bayes (c. 1701-1761) was a mathematician, philosopher, and minister, who developed a way of understanding probability in terms of knowledge and/or belief. So the important thing in probability is not a mathematical statement of frequency, but rather an assessment of likelihood which starts from pre-existing factors and then changes according to new information. The maths bit – there’s always a maths bit – comes in defining the changes to assessments of probability that result from new, partially or wholly unexpected information.

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It’s not completely clear to me (perhaps not to others either) whether we should stress the belief element here, and deal with the individual as the site of probability judgments, or whether we should see this as a kind of logical operation. Maybe that’s not a good distinction when it comes to the psychological implications of Bayesian thinking: in the mind, logical and subjective are interlocked.
      What Bayes offers to cognitive science is twofold: (i) a model of how the mind responds to its environment, wherein by necessity it has a prediction of what might happen, and then has to modify that prediction as new factors become apparent; and (ii) some maths to give this fluid, organic idea of thought a bit more specificity.

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Some important related concepts:
* Predictive Coding / Predictive Processing: you can read more about this in a description of a brilliant-sounding workshop in Amsterdam here. The idea is that we have evolved to predict the world around us, and to modify those predictions constantly, and as efficiently as possible.
* Free Energy: this relates to the former idea, I’d say, but focuses on how to conceive of the discrepancies between expectation and actuality caused by bad prediction. The general idea is that the mind’s strategy is to minimise this ‘free energy’, by processes of inference and updating. One key proponent, Karl Friston, has suggested that this avoidance of (let’s call it) surprise is verging on ‘’.

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This way of thinking about cognition seems full of potential for literary studies. In a novel, for example, the dynamics of expectation and surprise are carefully managed; sometimes the probabilistic environment is altered in ways that seem lifelike, sometimes not. Sometimes the narrative voice may appear to experience the processes differently from the reader. I won’t go on to generalise more, because I hope that more specific thoughts along these lines will follow in later posts. Instead, I will refer you to a couple of excellent essays by my friend Karin Kukkonen, who was, I think, the first person I ever heard using the word ‘Bayesian’. The first one I ever listened to, anyway.

* Karin Kukkonen, ‘Bayesian Narrative: Probability, Plot and the Shape of the Fictional World’, Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 123 (2014), 720- 739.
* Karin Kukkonen, ‘Presence and Prediction: The Embodied Reader’s Cascades of Cognition’, Style, 48 (2014), 367-384.

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, 2015)

I was in Oslo last week to give a paper as part of this group‘s seminar. One of the things I talked about was Rita Felski’s book, which has caused something of a stir. Her argument is that literary criticism and literary theory are now completely dominated by ‘‘. One way or another, the field revolves around ‘critique’, her key word for this tendency.
      Readers, especially in university theory courses, are taught that they have to seek out the things that literature doesn’t want to yield: we have to detect biases, unveil ideologies, excavate abuses. She argues that this is so ubiquitous that it has become a self-involved and circular endeavour, and that we should seek out ways of defining a ‘postcritical reading’:

Rather than looking behind the text – for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives – we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible. This is not idealism, aestheticism, or magical thinking but a recognition – long overdue – of the text’s status as co-factor: as something that makes a difference, that helps makes things happen.

This sounds to me like ‘acknowledging’ the text in a way akin to things said by Stanley Cavell (whom she discusses) that I’ve discussed in the blog before, here. She is interestingly wary about some historicist approaches: ‘History is not a Box’, she says, arguing that we should think about what connects across time rather than what does not. Her main solution is to recommend an approach derived from the sociology of Bruno Latour. This requires an approach, an Actor Network Theory, that sees literary texts as ‘nonhuman actors’ working with us.

In various ways I feel sympathetic towards this. I think the book spends more time on the problems than on the solution. I also think the value of sceptical questioning is still considerable in all kinds of contexts and it may be that we need to find new ways of doing it. However, it seems right to me to think about how texts and readers work together as an alternative to seeing them as, in one way or another, at odds or in tension.
      My sympathy for the argument encountered a strange obstacle when I began to wonder why the things that I and others have been doing — cognitive approaches to literature — were not mentioned significantly. As it happens, I have spent a fair bit of time with people explictly discussing alternatives to the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. The essay mentioned here is one of the results — admittedly quite an unobtrusive intervention, but still. Felski herself mentions affordances, and these are central to Terence Cave’s recent book Thinking with Literature (review here), but the link is yet to be made. In general, if we are looking for a transhistorical approach with an interest in the shared contexts and resources of writer and reader, then cognitive approaches have something to offer.
      So I began to wonder: why isn’t it there? It may be that cognitive literary studies are simply marginal in the literary theory environment that Felski describes. Perhaps they aren’t part of the landscape because a fear of scientific hegemony puts people off. It is also true that some of the best work in cognitive theory can be linked with the culture of critique: for example, foundational work by Elizabeth Hart and Ellen Spolsky strove to demonstrate the compatibility of their approach with assumptions of post-structuralism. By focusing on indeterminacy, gaps, failings in cognition, they were also probing the underlying faultlines.
      I came quite close to going back to my hotel room and e-mailing Rita Felski straight away to ask her why. It was pointed out to me that it might be hard to get the tone right, that a friendly question might seem like an accusation. It might seem like I was saying ‘why are you ignoring us?’, which I really am not. The specific contributions I refer to above are either below the radar or very recent indeed. A dose of Norwegian rain dampened my enthusiasm further. OK, it would have been a weird thing to do, but I am intrigued: work to be done, links to be forged.

It’s that time again! Well, I look forward to it, anyway. I wrote a review of the year for 2014-15 here and for 2013-14 here, and that nearly makes it a tradition, right? It’s a chance for me to identify some trends and patterns in what’s been covered, so here I go again.

Looking back, I am pleased with some little clusters of posts…
* On refrains, and bridges between brain and mind. It started here, continued here and here. Then Florence Hazrat took this up with reference to ‘ear-worms’ here and I finished the flurry here.
* On turn-taking, a favourite topic of mine; I got back into it briefly here, took a look at the rhythms of silences here, and stayed in the general area when writing about gender and voice modulation here.
* On creativity, self-generated thought, and Milton’s poems here and here; some similar questions were still ongoing in my discussion of Charles Fernyhough’s new book here.
* On slow thinking and metastability here and here and here.
* On some interesting critiques of important aspects of cognitive science and cognitive literary theory, here (extended mind) and here (mind-reading / theory of mind).

That’s a lot of links; and it makes it seem like a busy year, which it was, and not just because of the blog. It’s still proving a satisfying medium in itself, and it becomes all the rewarding when I hear directly or indirectly that people have been reading my posts. Many thanks for the time you give to it!
      I had a plan to feature another clip from a baseball film again. (Don’t ask why; there was no good reason.) But I only did it once so it isn’t even nearly a tradition. In lieu, then, of one of the many excellent bits of Moneyball, I’ll include something different. It’s Dexys’ cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’, and I think it’s quite superb, although I don’t know quite how it gets away with making an uplifting version of that particular song. A proper survey of Youtube will uncover several unspeakable acts of tonal butchery as people get the mood all wrong (Sinatra! Crosby! Carly Rae Jepsen! What were you thinking?), so it’s all the more impressive that Dexys make it work. I listen to it every day and so should everyone.