Steve Watson

On the Possibility of Higher Dimensional Languages

Reading Nikhil Mahant, Why alien languages could be far stranger than we imagine I was pleased to note that he canvassed the possibility of communication systems that were, as he says, non-linear – but by which he really meant not language-like in the way that language is defined for philosophical uses. The example he gives is the possibility of languages that are ‘map-like’ rather than ‘language-like.’ This is something that he may have developed from the idea that the Mind’s semantic system might be map-like rather than language-like – an option discussed in Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson’s (1996/2007) Philosophy of Mind and Cognition. I found it to be a fascinating alternative for a theory of mental structure, but I’m not sure how that might work for a language. Mahant suggests that it might be a pictorial system, but I doubt that such a system could really be a language.

(A pictorial system really couldn’t instantiate the sort of recursiveness that seems to be not just necessary to languages but also fundamental to thought. We really do believe that the range of possible thoughts and ideas is effectively infinite – or at least, so far beyond the possibility of individual special instantiation as to make it impossible to explain our capacities without something like recursion.)

The problem is more obvious when it’s wondered what the medium might be for such a non-linear language. A map-like system enhanced in some way to have the semantic power of a linear language would require a very different form of expression from any we’ve seen so far. On the other hand, when I’ve considered non-linear systems, I’ve often thought that an octopus’s chromophores could create a 2-2½d signalling system of adequate semantic power. Gripping hand, however, any inter-agent communication is going to have to be sequential and therefore effectively 1d, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that very fact makes it necessary for the intra-agent or atomic form of communication to also be sequential.

Consider how languages are useful as means of transmission of concepts or ideas from one communicant to another. Those ideas have to be constructed internally before they can be communicated – or, at least, that is the ideal of the system; it wouldn’t be surprising if the actual process of construction and expression were reflective and involved many feedback loops, and note that most people accept that they don’t really ‘know’ what they’re going to say until they’ve said it. In any case, it’s very hard to imagine mental processes equivalent to complex thought that did not issue in some sort of 1-dimensionally expressible ‘thought.’ What would a 2-d thought look like? Could a 2-d thought be equivalent to a 1-d thought like ‘Harry is happy’? Would it just be a mental image of an Euler diagram? Would thoughts too complex for an Euler diagram then be unthinkable?

My fundamental reason for doubting 2+-d languages, however, is that I have a rudimentary theory of the evolutionary origin of the language faculty that sees it as developing from the capacity for planned action, and planned actions are all 1-d sequences to be performed with 2-d tree-like structures only in their formation histories. That mirrors the TG version of language and it still seems the most obviously reasonable version of language to me, despite the Minimalist Program’s unaccountable popularity amongst linguists.