Mind and Language

Reflecting yesterday on the wonderful nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and this in the context of two public events, caused an old conviction of mine to come to the fore again. The two public events were Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the Executive Branch would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Supreme Court’s opinion yesterday on the privacy rights of corporations. For more on these see my post today on Ghulf Genes here. Both of these cases are intimately concerned with language, with definitions, in the first case of “marriage” and in the second of “personal privacy.” And in the case of Alice, we have a nonsense tale in which the intended meaning is as much hidden by the language of the book as it is revealed in an aura that surrounds it. Humor, generally but not alone, illustrates my conviction that mind uses language but isn’t created by it.

Exactly the opposite is claimed by evolutionary linguists, of whom a representative figure is Derek Bickerton, and his book, Language and Human Behavior, is a classical example.

My endless fascination with language arises precisely because we are forever judging, weighing, and choosing words, thus that we stand over them like sovereigns, that they serve us and not we them. This is vividly obvious in all manner of contexts. The letter of the law stands in contrast to its spirit, for example, and we see endless instances where some insist on the letter, others on the spirit. Language does not compel—people do. The two legal cases I mention above are telling examples as well.

The application of the word “person” to a legal entity, a corporation, is a kind of attempt to compel behavior by expanding the meaning of a word. A corporation is never a person in the sense in which I am. The mind knows that perfectly well. In DOMA Congress attempts to limit the meaning of marriage to a male and a female, but the words of the law do not compel—unless the sovereign mind that hears those words agrees. In both of these cases the spirit behind the definitions is the interesting aspect. In commercial law the spirit that turns corporations into persons is a spirit claiming rights it does not naturally have. In the case of DOMA, the spirit is similarly reactive, at minimum, and makes me cringe just a little. Do I think that breathing is the intake of air and its release again? Yes, I do. But do we need a Congressional act to know that? Do I think that marriage means the union of a man and woman? Yes, I do. But have we exhausted that meaning? “Let me not,” said Shakespeare in Sonnet 116, “to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” Belay, belay. The thoughts are free—and unless real harm is done, let them use whatever words they choose to voice them. We don’t have to agree. You respirate, I breathe.