The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

If an emotion is defined by behavior, then emotions certainly do differ across cultures. The Ifaluk react emotionally to a woman working in the taro gardens while menstruating or to a man entering a birthing house, and we do not. We react emotionally to someone shouting a racial epithet or raising the middle finger, but
as far as we know, the Ifaluk do not. But if an emotion is defined by mental mechanisms—what psychologists like Paul Ekman and Richard Lazarus call “affect programs” or “if-then formulas” (note the computational vocabulary)—we and the Ifaluk are not so different after all.

The philosophers Ron Mallon and Stephen Stich, inspired by Chomsky and other cognitive scientists, point out that the issue of whether to call Ifaluk song and Western anger the same emotion or different emotions is a quibble about the meaning of emotion words: whether they should be defined in terms of surface behavior or underlying mental computation.

For example, Catherine Lutz wrote that the Ifaluk (a Micronesian people) do not experience our “anger” but instead undergo an experience they call song. Song is a state of dudgeon triggered by a moral infraction such as breaking a taboo or acting in a cocky manner. It licenses one to shun, frown at, threaten, or gossip about the offender, though not to attack him physically. The target of song experiences another emotion allegedly unknown to Westerners: metagu, a state of dread that impels him to appease the song-ful one by apologizing, paying a fine, or offering a gift.

the baby listens for heads and complements, pays attention to how they are ordered, and builds a grammatical system consistent with that ordering.

If the universal part of a rule is embodied in the neural circuitry that guides babies when they first learn language, it could explain how children learn language so easily and uniformly and without the benefit of instruction.

A simple way to capture this uniformity is to say that all languages have the same grammar except for a parameter or switch that can be flipped to either the “head-first” or “head-last” setting. The linguist Mark Baker has recently summarized about a dozen of these parameters, which succinctly capture most of the known variation among the languages of the world.

In English the head comes first; in Japanese the head comes last. But everything else about the structure of phrases in the two languages is pretty much the same. And so it goes with phrase after phrase and language after language. The common kinds of heads and complements can be ordered in 128 logically possible ways, but 95 percent of the world’s languages use one of two: either the English ordering or its mirror image the Japanese ordering.

And it is even more significant that unrelated languages build their phrases by assembling a head (such as a verb or preposition) and a complement (such as a noun
phrase) and assigning a consistent order to the two.

For example, in English the verb comes before the object (drink beer) and the preposition comes before the noun phrase (from the bottle). In Japanese the object comes before the verb (beer drink) and the noun phrase comes before the preposition, or, more accurately, the postposition (the bottle from). But it is a significant discovery that both languages have verbs, objects, and pre- or postpositions to start with, as opposed to having the countless other conceivable kinds of apparatus that could power a communication system.

Chomsky proposed that the generative grammars of individual languages are variations on a single pattern, which he called Universal Grammar.