Today is my 1000-Wordiversary for German since I started learning it 50 days ago. For the first time in my life, the effect of my language study habits is rapid, repeatable, and holistic. The fact that I had no sense whatever for the German language 50 days ago, and now am reading somewhat effectively in the language, is a headspinner for me. I have spent 10 years on this hobby of self-teaching language, and experienced countless failures for methods applied to Spanish, French, Japanese, and Mandarin. These failures each taught me something about my mind — and presumably yours too. Suddenly, a couple of months ago, the right theory settled into place with regard to language learning, and now I can see the way forward.
If you’d like to know more about the specifics of language learning, don’t hesitate to reach out to me, but that is not exactly what I sat down to write about today. Today, I would actually like to start laying out a new natural philosophy of language that goes far beyond the details that get airtime in scientific society. The fact is, the complexity of interaction and change in the universe goes far beyond what our imaginations have yet derived. It is neither as discrete as we would like our theories to dictate (A + B = C), nor as chaotic as the cracks in our theories would suggest (i.e. chaos theory). There is, in essence, currently-underivable intelligence in the way things work.
Language has been poked and prodded from the very smallest of linguistic details to the very broadest, from phonology to philosophy. Yet the “generative” (discrete parts) architecture used to describe it is so short-sighted as to leave out the natural elements and fuzzy boundaries that muddy it all up. A great leap forward in this generative approach, yet also in many ways a great leap backward, was caused by Noam Chomsky. We have somewhat broken from his atomic, universalist approach of slicing language into its component parts, but we’re still getting lost in the mire. Something like Optimality Theory (OT) or Dependency Grammar opens up the Pandora’s Box quite a bit, and although there is truth and utility in them, the outpouring of possibility is too chaotic. Overall, what this shows is that the very natural philosophy of language needs to undergo a paradigmatic shift.
How can I describe this shift? And do I even know what it is? Well, I do have some ideas. Like I said, this is a question of natural philosophy, so it must be integrated on many layers. And in fact, “integration” is the key word here. There is a developing phenomenological current that I’ve seen only in a few publications, namely in the work of Ken Stanley, Stephen Wolfram, and Michael Levin. These thinkers and scientists introduce ways to model and interpret integrative phenomena, and generate a new “intelligent glue” that holds together the atomic components we’ve derived throughout our sciences over the past century or two. I will explain what these thinkers have introduced in further detail in a future blog post, but if you would like to get a head start, try the links here:
Ken Stanley: https://youtu.be/5zg_5hg8Ydo
Stephen Wolfram: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/05/why-does-biological-evolution-work-a-minimal-model-for-biological-evolution-and-other-adaptive-processes/
Michael Levin: https://youtu.be/OD5TOsPZIQY
AND REMEMBER, this is all burgeoning work. Don’t just take it at face value. Look inside to your own wisdom and see where it may apply and where does not.