Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

Most of the time, our brain shields us from the complexity, automatically doing its best to reason its way through the possibilities. If we hear Put the block in the box on the table, and there’s just one block, we don’t even notice the fact that the sentence could have meant something else. Language alone doesn’t tell us that, but we are clever enough to connect what we hear with what it might mean. (Speakers also use a range of “paralinguistic” techniques, like pointing and gesturing, to supplement language; they can also look to their listeners to see if they appear to understand.)

But such tricks can take us only so far. When we are stuck with inadequate clues, communication becomes harder, one reason that emails and phone calls are more prone to misunderstandings than face-to-face communication is. And even when we speak directly to an audience, if we use ambiguous sentences, people may just not notice; they may think they’ve understood even when they haven’t really. One eye-opening study recently asked college students to read aloud a series of grammatically ambiguous[38] sentences like Angela shot the man with the gun (in which the gun might have been either Angela’s murder weapon or a firearm the victim happened to be carrying). They were warned in advance that the sentences were ambiguous and permitted to use as much stress (emphasis) on individual words as they liked; the question was whether they could tell when they successfully put their meaning across. It turns out that most speakers were lousy at the task and had no clue about how bad they were. In almost half the cases in which subjects thought that they had successfully conveyed a given sentence’s meaning, they were actually misunderstood by their listeners! (The listeners weren’t much better, frequently assuming they’d understood when they hadn’t.)

Indeed, a certain part of the work that professional writers must do (especially if they write nonfiction) is compensate for language’s limitations, to scan carefully to make sure that there’s no vague he that could refer to either the farmer or his son, no misplaced commas, no dangling (or squinting) modifiers, and so forth. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s words, “The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.” Of course, sometimes ambiguity is deliberate, but that’s a separate story; it’s one thing to leave a reader with a vivid sense of a difficult decision, another to accidentally leave a reader confused.

Put together all these factors — inadvertent ambiguity, idiosyncratic memory, snap judgments, arbitrary associations, and a choreography that strains our internal clocks — and what emerges? Vagueness, idiosyncrasy, and a language that is frequently vulnerable to misinterpretation — not to mention a vocal apparatus more byzantine than a bagpipe made up entirely of pipe cleaners and cardboard dowels. In the words of the linguist Geoff Pullum, “The English language is, in so many ways, a flawed masterpiece of evolution, loaded with rough bits, silly design oversights, ragged edges, stupid gaps, and malign and perverted irregularities.”

As the psycholinguist Fernanda Ferreira has put it, language is “good enough,” not perfect. Most of the time we get things right, but sometimes we are easily confused. Or even misled. Few people, for example, scarcely notice that something’s amiss when you ask them, “How many animals did Moses bring onto the ark?”[39] Even fewer realize that a sentence like More people have been to Russia than I have is either (depending on your point of view) ungrammatical or incoherent.

If language were designed by an intelligent engineer, interpreters would be out of a job, and Berlitz’s language schools would be drive thrus, no lifetime commitment required. Words would be systematically related to one another, and phonemes consistently pronounced. You could tell all those voice-activated telephone menu systems exactly where you wanted them to go — and be assured they’d understand the message. There would be no ambiguity, no senseless irregularity. People would say what they mean and mean what they say. But instead, we have slippage. Our thoughts get stuck on the tip of the tongue when we can’t recall a specific word. Grammar ties us in knots (is it The keys to the cabinet are… or The keys to the cabinet is… Oh never mind…). Syntax on the fly is hard.

This is not to say that language is terrible, only that it could, with forethought, have been even better.

The rampant confusion that characterizes language is not, however, without its logic: the logic of evolution. We co-articulate, producing speech sounds differently, depending on the context, because we produce sound not by running a string of bits through a digital amplifier to electromagnetically driven speakers but by thrashing our tongues around three-dimensional cavities that originated as channels for digestion, not communication. Then, as She sells seashells by the seashore, our tortured tongues totally trip. Why? Because language was built, rapidly, on a haphazard patchwork of mechanisms that originally evolved for other purposes.

6. PLEASURE

Happiness is a warm puppy.

— CHARLIE BROWN

Happiness is a warm gun.

— THE BEATLES

To each his own.

— Traditional saying

WOE BETIDE THE HUMAN BEING who doesn’t know what happiness is; yet woe to the writer who tries to define it. Warm guns and warm puppies are merely examples of happiness, not definitions of it.

My dictionary defines happiness as “pleasure” — and pleasure as a feeling of “happy satisfaction and enjoyment.” As if that weren’t circular enough, when I turn to the word feeling, I find that a feeling is defined as “a perceived emotion” while an emotion is defined as a “strong feeling.”

No matter. As the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said about pornography (as opposed to art), it is hard to define, but “I know it when I see it.” Happiness may mean sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, the roar of the crowd, the satisfaction of a job well done, good food, good drink, and good conversation — not to mention what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of “flow,” of being so absorbed in something you do well that you scarcely notice the passage of time. At the risk of offending hard-nosed philosophers everywhere, I propose to leave it at that. For my money, the real question is not how we define happiness, but why, from the perspective of evolution, humans care about it at all.

At first glance, the answer seems obvious. The standard story is that happiness evolved in part to guide our behavior. In the words of the noted evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nesse, “Our brains could have been wired so that [eating] good food, [having] sex, being the object of admiration, and observing the success of one’s children were all aversive experiences [but] any ancestor whose brain was so wired would probably not have contributed much to the gene pool that makes human nature what it is now.” Pleasure is our guide, as Freud (and long before him, Aristotle) noted, and without it, the species wouldn’t propagate.[40]

That much seems true. In keeping with the notion that pleasure serves as our guide, we automatically (and often unconsciously) sort just about everything we see into the categories “pleasant” and “unpleasant.” If I show you a word like sunshine and then ask you to decide, as quickly as possible, whether the word wonderful is positive, you’ll respond faster than you would if shown an unpleasant word instead (say, poison instead of sunshine). Cognitive psychologists call this accelerated response a positive priming effect; it means that we constantly and automatically categorize everything we encounter as good or bad.

This sort of automatic evaluation, largely the domain of the reflexive system, is remarkably sophisticated. Take, for example, the word water; is it pleasant? Depends on how thirsty you are. And