creation myths and numbers
Recursion is the first cognitive step in the process of abstraction. It helps us overcome the restrictions imposed by our innately empiricist view of the world. Number systems emerge when one asks the question "What comes right after number N?" Creation myths arise when one asks the question "What comes right before year N?"
One prediction that this makes in Pirahã follows from the suggestions of people who worked on number theory and the nature of number in human speech: that counting systems—numerical systems—are based on recursion, and that this recursion follows from recursion in the language. This predicts in turn that if a language lacked recursion, then that language would also lack a number system and a counting system. I've claimed for years that the Pirahã don't have numbers or accounting, and this has been verified in two recent sets of experiments, one of which was published in Science three years ago by Peter Gordon, arguing that the Pirahã don't count, and then a new set of experiments which was just carried out in January by people from Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, which establishes pretty clearly that the Pirahã have no numbers, and, again, that they don't count at all.
...Peter Gordon and I were colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, and Peter did his Ph.D. at MIT in psychology, with a strong concern for numerosity. We were talking, and I said, there's a group that doesn't count—I work with a group that doesn't count—and he found that very difficult to believe, so he wanted to go do experiments. He went, and I helped him get going; he did the experiments, but his explanation for the reason that the Pirahã don't count is that they don't have words for numbers. They only have one to many. I claim that in fact they don't have any numbers. His idea is that the absence of counting in Pirahã has a Whorfian explanation—that there's a linguistic determinism: if you lack numbers, you lack counting—that is, that the absence of the words causes the absence of the concepts. But this really doesn't explain a lot of things. There are a lot of groups that have been known not to have more than one to many—as soon as they got into a relationship where they needed it for trade, they borrowed the numbers from Portuguese or Spanish or English or whatever other language.
The crucial thing is that the Pirahã have not borrowed any numbers—and they want to learn to count. They asked me to give them classes in Brazilian numbers, so for eight months I spent an hour every night trying to teach them how to count. And it never got anywhere, except for a few of the children. Some of the children learned to do reasonably well, but as soon as anybody started to perform well, they were sent away from the classes. It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board. So I don't think that the fact that they lack numbers is attributable to the linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, i.e. that language determines our thought—I don't really think that goes very far. It also doesn't explain their lack of color words, the simplest kinship system that's ever been documented, the lack of recursion, and the lack of quantifiers, and all of these other properties. Gordon has no explanation for the lack of these things, and he will just say, "I have no explanation, that's all a coincidence".
...When I began to tell them the stories from the Bible, they didn't have much of an impact. I wondered, was I telling the story incorrectly? Finally one Pirahã asked me one day, well, what color is Jesus? How tall is he? When did he tell you these things? And I said, well, you know, I've never seen him, I don't know what color he was, I don't know how tall he was. Well, if you have never seen him, why are you telling us this?
...The Pirahã, who in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need evidence for every claim you make—helped me realize that I hadn't been thinking very scientifically about my own beliefs.
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Because of their culture's ingrained emphasis on referring only to immediate, personal experiences, the tribesmen do not have words for any abstract concept, from colour to memory and even to numbers. There is no past tense, he says, because everything exists for them in the present. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, to all intents, to exist. "In many ways, the Pirahã are the ultimate empiricists," Professor Everett says. "They demand evidence for everything."
Life, for the Pirahã, is about seizing the moment and taking pleasure here and now. "I suddenly noticed how excited they were whenever planes crossed the sky then disappeared. They just love sitting around watching people coming around the bend in the jungle. Whenever I came into the village then left, they were amazed."
The linguistic limitations of this "carpe diem" culture explain why the Pirahã have no desire to remember where they come from and why they tell no stories.
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Over the course of three weeks, Everett wrote what would become his Cultural Anthropology article, twenty-five thousand words in which he advanced a novel explanation for the many mysteries that had bedevilled him. Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”
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Living the moment... Demanding evidence for every claim... Don't these sound like familiar aspirations? I feel like these people are light years ahead of us when it comes to cultural advancement.
Some languages predispose their speakers to leave the present. Although our minds are innately capable of going back and forth in time, our tendency to do so increases immensely once the capability becomes institutionalized through language acquisition.
Here is an interview about a man who learned his first language when he was 27 years old. SS refers to the person who taught him English.
RW: Was Ildefonso able to tell you anything about his life before? I take it he did become ordinarily competent in language.
SS: He did. I'm going to guess that at about six or seven years old he was herding sheep and goats and begging. Think about that. His brain was kept alive with problem solving. He had to be taught somehow that you go to this street and put your hand out, or your cup out, and try to get money even though he didn't know what money was.
Back to your question. Of course, you and I are interested in learning what was it like? It's another frustration that Ildefonso doesn't want to talk about it. For him, that was the dark time. Whenever I ask him, and I've asked him many, many times over the years, he always starts out with the visual representation of an imbecile: his mouth drops, his lower lip drops, and he looks stupid. He does something nonsensical with his hands like, "I don't know what's going on." He always goes back to "I was stupid."
It doesn't matter how many times I tell him, no, you weren't exposed to language and... The closest I've ever gotten is he'll say, "Why does anyone want to know about this? This is the bad time." What he wants to talk about is learning language.
RW: What does he say about that?
SS: He uses "dark" and "light." That's when everything "became light." That's when he understood that he could ask questions and get answers. He learned that there were explanations. Before, he'd had to figure out everything on his own. He could get macho behavior. You could see that. But if he couldn't see it, like history... He had no clue why he was picked up by people wearing green and put back in brown-skin land. So he wanted to talk about what you could do with language. Did you know that you could talk to anyone in the world! Did you know that you could read!
The only thing he said, which I think is fascinating and raises more questions than answers, is that he used to be able to talk to his other languageless friends. They found each other over the years. He said to me, "I think differently. I can't remember how I thought." I think that's phenomenal!
RW: It is. It's quite... well, I don't know what it is.
SS: As far as the critical language learning period goes, of course, his adult brain couldn't learn language as well as a child's brain. But he's got a lot of language! Where he gets lost is especially with too many references to time in one sentence. He can't handle too many tenses in one sentence. But he can handle more than one reference and he can handle any amount of information. He did learn language. The few problems he has are nothing compared to not having language.
But the second thing is the psychological slash philosophical things with language. He says he thinks differently. However, there are a few things he doesn't think differently about. I try to meet him once a year and I always ask him, "When was the last time we saw each other?" I ask him a "when" question because it tickles me. Time was the hardest thing for him to learn. And he always prefers to say "the winter season" or "the Christmas time." He wants to point to a season or to a holiday. It's not a cognitive problem. To this day, he thinks it's weird that we count time the way we do. He can do it, but he doesn't like it. Think about it. For twenty-seven years, he followed the sun. He followed cows. He followed the seasons. It's that rain-time of the year.
RW: And this is how people have done it in more traditional societies.
SS: There's some sanity in it. We care too much about counting time. Every single religion and spiritual practice that I've ever seen has something in it about living in the present. So there's some sanity in it.
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