Us and Them

David Berreby points out the obvious in his book Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind. Even though it may seem obvious, it still needs to be articulated, that much of our perception of the different kinds of people in existence is based on a fallacy which our categorizing mind has lured us into. Distinct categories such as black/white, sane/insane, gay/straight, French/American, Christian/atheist exist mainly because they are believed in, not as representations of any ultimate reality. (Sorry, Plato.) To help orient ourselves in the world and make sense of it, we base our generalizations and predictions about other people on the labels we attach to them, often without proper consideration, which can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. (For example in this very intelligent and well performed experiment by third grade teacher Jane Elliot who showed her students what racism means first-hand.)

So Berreby has cleverly collected specific examples of our narrow-mindedness and lack of logic in everyday life, illustrating how unconscious factors affect our thoughts and beliefs. The book is full of little nuggets of experience with the feature of human mind that ties all these actions together. This is more an intuitive sense than a testable hypothesis, but I am inclined to think we are fundamentally wired to divide up the world in opposites or complements, starting with our left and right brain halves and our mirroring body structure.

I deeply agree with the claim that categorizations of human types are arbitrary, and would take what Berreby says even further, to something akin to the Whorf hypothesis: that language parses the world along arbitrary lines and there is nothing universal in our concepts. (Paraphrasing here, but I believe that is essentially what it's about.) I feel there's some basic fallacy in the use of language: the belief that it's possible to accurately represent the world with it.

So when Berreby tries to make a point about how meaning is constructed in the mind, and he writes:

In 1957, the developmental psychologist Roger Brown showed that asking English-speaking children to look for a "sib" caused them to search for a thing, while asking about a "sibbing" caused the kids to look for an action. [...] Brown had found evidence of a mental faculty for grammar - for telling nouns from verbs. [...] No toddler could say, "I know that nouns and verbs are distinct," but young minds followed that rule anyway.

I think he is not being radical enough and is just going against his own statements. He tried to make a point earlier in the book about how arbitrary our categories are. Well, the same applies in this case. It would be wrong to conclude from the experiment that kids had recognized nouns as distinct and different from verbs. These are artificial groupings, and are just one possible way of describing reality, and explaining it after it has already happened. Kids were not following any "rule" for nounness as opposed to verbness. These categories don't actually exist, ancient Sanskrit grammarians invented them. Kids were just recognizing a pattern and assigning meaning to a phonetic unit smaller than a word. They guessed that something with an -ing at the end is similar to a group of other things they knew with -ing at the end. (But technically, "a sib" and "a sibbing" are both nouns.) This is not unusual, as we often try to guess the meaning of an unknown word from its parts, or from the sound of it. Think of English words beginning with schm- for example. Why do most of them have some kind of negative connotation? How do you interpret a word you've never heard before that begins with schm-? I'm guessing the same mechanism of pattern-recognition was at work with the children for the word that ended in -ing: -ing words tend to have doing or moving something in common. The grammatical category of "verb" as opposed to other categories of words need not be invoked as an explanation. Just patterns, and probability. In fact, that is exactly why I think adults have such trouble learning a new language: because they tend to approach it as a set of distinct rules and set categories translated relatively to what they already know, rather than as repeating, flowing, interesting patterns.