Language Essay Example For Students

Language Essay IntroductionTo awaken from the dream means recognizing the illusory nature of this constricted self concept and perception of the body and mind, not as a means as of gasping at the ephemeral pleasures of the world or as a prison enclosing the self, but as an instrument for learning and communicating in various languages. Before the MoveTwo months before moving to New York, my friend William, thought he would be kind enough to warn me about the vast culture of the, Big Apple. William begins by telling me that I would not be able to survive the cultural diversity and I would not be able to get a good paying job or housing because of my ethnicity. Well, was he very wrong. Since I commuted to and from New York three times, a week I decided to put in a transfer from the company I was employed with to work in their satellite office in New York. When speaking with Cindy, one of the customer service representatives already living and working in New York, I mentioned to her that I was relocating to the New York office but did not have a place to live. Immediately, Cindy who I did not meet at the time offered me full living quarters with all the amenities for a charge of $445.00 a month. Gleefully, I accepted without even looking at the place. Moving dayI had two oversized suitcases and my brother at my side, who kept telling me to, You can make it. Because I was somewhat familiar with my surroundings, it was no problem for me to jump on the E train from Manhattan to Queens, New York. It was not until my brother Jerry and I got to Jamaica Queens that Williams words replayed in my mind. You will not be able to survive the cultural diversity. There were so many people from different cultural background gathered in one place ranging from: Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadians, Indians, Hispanics, Caucasians, Blacks and Mexicans. They were shopping, walking, talking, waiting for the bus and catching the dollar vans, going to their different destinations. After I stood there for a moment (relieving myself of the shock), while almost getting knocked down, I called Cindy on my cell phone to let her know I had arrived at the arranged pick-up spot. Prior to that day, when speaking with Cindy, I never knew she masked her Trinidadian accent. I heard her loud in clear, when she said, Chile Ill be dere and what cha look like. I told her I was black, with golden blond wavy hair, tall, medium built, wearing blue jeans, brown penny loafers and an oxford shirt. Veil of IllusionWhen Cindy drove by four times in her red pathfinder looking for me, I laughed. I had to wave my company backpack so that she would be able to find me. She jumped out of her truck, ran over to me, hugging and touching my face as if she could not believe I was black. Quite naturally, I had to grab her hand to let her know, I am live and in living color. Cindy blurted out, I just knew you were white and no one at the company would give me a description of how you look, and they just told me wait and see. I was curious to know why Cindy responded to me they way she did. Therefore, I asked Cindy, What eluded her to think that I was not black. Sure enough, she told me, it was the way I spoke and how I pronounced and annunciated my words. It was at that moment when I began to realize the misconception people have when it comes to language and communication. A month after I settled in apartment at Cindys house, I went to go and meet William at the Puerto Rican Day Parade. I saw a few of my co-workers and they began speaking Spanish to me, Como su el fin de samana? Buena, habla manana por la manana en trabajo (How is your weekend, Good, speak with you tomorrow at work). William had this incredulous look of surprise on his face, because he never new that I spoke Spanish. Since when did not verbally express his surprise, I told him that I learned to speak Spanish when I was taking voice lesson. In addition, I refuse to limit my learning abilities to not understanding others. Persuasive Essay: "Defining Freedom As Found In The Theme(S) Of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn"Brother John maintains, for instance, that he need not tell himself the words tape recorder, magnetic tape, red button on the left, turn, push and so forth . . . in order to be capable of properly operating a tape recorder. . . . (Roche Lecours and Joanette, p.20) The Deaf who lack Signa group whose numbers are diminishing today, thank goodnesslack Brother Johns specific language-mediated apprenticeships, but we simply dont knowyetwhat structures in their brains are indirect products of the language that most of their ancestors in recent millennia have shared. The evidence that Donald adduces for the powers of language-less thought is thus potentially misleading. These varieties of language-less thought, like barefoot waterskiing, may be possible only for brief periods, and only after a preparatory period that includes the very feature whose absence is later so striking. There are ind irect ways of testing the hypotheses implied by these doubts. Consider episodic memory, for instance. When a dog retrieves a bone it has buried, it manifests an effect on its memory, but must the dog, in retrieving the bone, actually recollect the episode of burying? (Perhaps you can name the current U. S. Secretary of State, but can you recall the occasion of learning his name?) The capacity for genuine episodic recollectingas opposed to semantic memory installed by a single episode of learningis in need of careful analysis and investigation. Donald follows Jane Goodall in claiming that chimpanzees in the wild are able to perceive social events accurately and to remember them (p.157)as episodes in memory. But we have not really been given any evidence from which this strong thesis follows; the social perspicuity of the chimpanzees might be largely due to specialized perceptual talents interacting with specialized signssuppose, for instance, that there is something subtle about the posture of a subordinate facing a superior that instantlyvisuallytells an observer chimp (but not an human observer) which is subordinate, and how much. Experiments that would demonstrate a genuine capacity for episodic memory in chimpanzees would have to involve circumstances in which a episode was observed or experienced, but in which its relevance as a premise for some social inference was not yet determinedso no inference could be drawn at once. If something that transpired later suddenly gave a retrospective relevance to the earlier episode, and if a chimpanzee can tumble to that fact, this would be evidencebut not yet conclusive evidenceof episodic memory. Another way of testing for episodic memory in the absence of language would be to let a chimpanzee observeoncea relatively novel and elaborate behavioral sequence that accomplishes some end (e.g., to make the door open, you stamp three times, turn in a circle and then push both buttons at once), and see if the chimpanzee, fa ced with the need to accomplish the same end, can even come close to reproducing the sequence. It is not that there is any doubt that chimpanzee brain tissue is capable of storing this much informationit can obviously store vastly more than is required for such a simple featbut whether the chimpanzee can exploit this storage medium in such an adaptive way on short notice. And that is the sort of question that no amount of microscopic brain-study is going to shed much light on. 7. The art of making mistakes: the next storyThis brings me to my final step up the Tower of Generate-and-Test. There is one more embodiment of this wonderful idea, and it is the one that gives our minds their greatest power: once we have languagea bountiful kit of mind-toolswe can use them in the structure of deliberate, foresightful generate-and-test known as science. All the other varieties of generate-and-test are willy-nilly. The soliloquy that accompanies the errors committed by the lowliest Skinnerian creature might be Well, I mustnt do that again! and the hardest lesson for any agent to learn, apparently, is how to learn from ones own mistakes. In order to learn from them, one has to be able to contemplate them, and this is no small matter. Life rushes on, and unless one has developed positive strategies for recording ones tracks, the task known in AI as credit assignment (also, known, of course, as blame assignment!) is insoluble. The advent of high-speed still photography was a revolutionary technological advance for science because it permitted human beings, for the first time, to examine complicated temporal phenomena not in real time, but in their own good timein leisurely, methodical backtracking analysis of the traces they had created of those complicated events. Here a technological advance carried in its wake a huge enhancement in cognitive power. The advent of language was an exactly parallel boon for human beings, a technology that created a whole new class of objects-to-contemplate, verbally embodied surrogates that could be reviewed in any order at any pace. And this opened up a new dimension of self-improvementall one had to do was to learn to savor ones own mistakes. But science is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections. It has been plausibly maintained, by Nicholas Humphrey, David Premack and others, that chimpanzees are natural psychologistswhat I would call second-order intentional systemsbut if they are, they nevertheless lack a crucial feature shared by all human natural psychologists, folk and professional varieties: they never get to compare notes. They never dispute over attributions, and ask for the grounds for each others conclusions. No wonder their comprehension is so limited. Ours would be, too, if we had to generate it all on our own. **Let me sum up the results of my rather swift and superficial survey. Our human brains, and only human brains, have been armed by habits and methods, mind-tools and information, drawn from millions of other brains to which we are not genetically related. This, amplified by t he deliberate use of generate-and-test in science, puts our minds on a different plane from the minds of our nearest relatives among the animals. This species-specific process of enhancement has become so swift and powerful that a single generation of its design improvements can now dwarf the R-and-D efforts of millions of years of evolution by natural selection. So while we cannot rule out the possibility in principle that our minds will be cognitively closed to some domain or other, no good naturalistic reason to believe this can be discovered in our animal origins. On the contrary, a proper application of Darwinian thinking suggests that if we survive our current self-induced environmental crises, our capacity to comprehend will continue to grow by increments that are now incomprehensible to us. Further ReadingRodney Brooks, 1991, Intelligence Without Representation, Artificial Intelligence Journal, 47, pp.139-59. William Calvin, 1990, The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence, New York: BantamRichard Dawkins, 1976, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Daniel Dennett, The brain and its boundaries, review of McGinn, 1990, in TLS, May 10, 1991 (corrected by erratum notice on May 24, p29). Jared Diamond, 1992, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, New York: HarperMerlin Donald, 1991, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. PressRichard Gregory 1981, Mind in Science, Cambridge Univ. Press. Ray Jackendoff, 1987, Consciousness and the Computational Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/A Bradford Book. Julian Jaynes, 1976, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston: Houghton MifflinFrank Keil, forthcoming, The Origins of an Autonomous Biology, in Minnesota Symposium, details forthcomingAlan Leslie, 1992, Pretense, Autism and the Theory-of-Mind Module, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1, pp.18-21. Colin McGinn, 1990, The Problem of Consciousness, Oxford: Blackwell. Allen Newell, 1990, Unifed Theories of Cognition, Harvard Univ. Press. Howard Margolis, 1987, Patterns, Thinking and Cognition, Univ. of Chicago Press. Andre Roche Lecours and Yves Joanette, Linguistic and Other Psychological Aspects of Praoxysmal Aphasia, Brain and Language, 10, pp.1-23, 1980. John Holland, Complex Adaptive Systems, Daedalus, Winter, 1992, p25. Nicholas Humphrey, 1986, The Inner Eye, London: Faber Faber. David Premack, 1986, Gavagai! Or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. B. F. Skinner, 1953, Science and Human Behavior, New Yorkl: MacMillan. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, 1986, Relevance: a Theory of Communication, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. L. Wilsson, 1974, Observations and Experiments on the Ethology of the European Beaver, Viltrevy, Swedish Wildlife, 8, pp.115-266. Endnotes1. See the discussion of Steven Kosslyns concept of visual generativity and its relation to language, in Donald, 1991, pp.72-5. 2.This is an elaboration of ideas to be found in my Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away, 1974, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, 5, pp.169-87, reprinted in Brainstorms, 1978. 3. For more on the relationship between luck and talent (and free will and responsibility), see my Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, 1984. 4.R. Dawkins, 1976, The Selfish Gene, Oxford Univ. Press. See also my discussions of the concept in Memes and the Exploitation of the Imagination, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1990, 48, pp. 127-35. and in my book, Consciousness Explained, 1991. 5.This idea is defended in chapters 7 and 8 of Consciousness Explained. 6.See my review of Newell, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence, special issue devoted to Newells book. 7. Cf. Dennett, 1991, Mother Nature versus the Walking Encyclopedia, in W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and D. Rumelhart, eds., Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 8. Such belief-like states are what I have called opinions (in Brainstorms, ch. 16.)9.In Consciousness Explained, I deliberately made upas an implausible but possible fictiona case of temporary total aphasia: there is an herb an overdose of which makes you incapable of understanding spoken sentences in your native language . . , adding that for all I knew, it might be fact, not fiction (p.69). If Brother Johns epilepsy could be brought on by an overdose of an herb, the case would be completeif Brother Johns case is the fact it seems to be. A review of the original report (Roche Lecours and Joanette, 1980) leaves unanswered questions, but no grounds for dismissal that I could detect.