The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler Read Free Book Online Page B

sentence,
     which makes the model appear as a sentence-analysing, rather than
     a sentence-generating, model.

** The NP-VP division is more expressive and easier to handle than
     the related categories of subject and predicate.
     
The verb-phrase in its turn splits immediately into the doing and its
object. Lastly, the noun, and the article which previously was somehow
implied in the noun, are spelt out separately. Deciding at which point
of the rapid, predominantly unconscious working of the machinery the
actual words pop up and fall into their places on the moving conveyor
belt of speech -- along the bottom line of the diagram -- is a delicate
problem for the introspectionist. We all are familiar with the frustrating
experience -- shared by semi-illiterates and professional writers alike
-- of knowing what we want to say, but not knowing how to express it,
searching for the right words that will exactly fit the empty spaces on
the conveyor belt. The opposite phenomenon occurs when the message to be
conveyed is very simple and can be put into a ready-made turn of phrase
like 'How do you do?' or 'Don't mention it'. The living tree of language
is weighed down heavily by these clichés, which hang from its branches
like clusters of bananas that can be picked a whole bunch at a time. They
are the Behaviourist's delight. In a famous speech, from which I have
just quoted, Lashley said: 'A Behaviourist colleague once remarked to
me that he had reached a stage where he could rise before an audience,
turn his mouth loose, and go to sleep. He believed in the chain theory
of language.' This, Lashley concluded ironically, 'clearly demonstrates
the superiority of Behaviourist over introspective psychology'.
     
     
But classical introspectionism did not fare much better. Lashley went
on to quote Titchener (the grand old man of introspective psychology
at the turn of the century) who, describing the role of imagery (which
might be visual or verbal), had written: 'When there is any difficulty
in exposition, a point to be argued pro and con, I hear my own words
just ahead of me.' [10] This may be a boon to the timid lecturer, but
from the theoretical point of view it is not much help -- because the
question how words arise in consciousness is merely pushed one step back,
and thus becomes the question how world-images arise in consciousness.
     
     
Both answers -- the Behaviourist's and the introspectionist's -- avoid
the bask issue of how thought is parcelled out into language, how the
shapeless rocks of ideas are cunningly split into crystalline fragments
of distinctive form, and put on the moving belt to be carried from
left to right along the single dimension of time. The reverse operation
is performed by the listener, who takes the string as his baseline to
reconstruct the tree, converting sounds into patterns, words into phrases,
and so on. When one listens to a speaker, the string of syllables itself
hardly ever reaches consciousness; the words of the previous sentence,
too, are rapidly effaced and only their meaning remains; the actual
sentences suffer the same fate, and by the next day the twigs and branches
of the tree have wilted away so that only the trunk survives -- a shadowy
generalised schema. We can represent both processes diagrammatically,
indicating how 'imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown',
and how the pen 'turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings a
local habitation and a name'; and we can also go through the operation in
reverse gear to show how the traces left by the pen lose their shape and
revert to airy nothings. But while these diagrams yield reliable formulae
and rules, they provide only a superficial kind of understanding of how a
child attains mastery of language, and how adults convert thoughts into
airwaves, and back.A complete understanding of these phenomena will probably always elude our
grasp because the operations which generate language include processes
which cannot be