As we have noted, human language is used in two quite different ways. Like other animals, we use language for immediate communication; that is, we make sounds for others to hear in the moment or soon thereafter (when they pick up their voicemail, say). We do a similar thing with our written messages, both on paper and electronically.
But we also use language in a second, more detached way: we broadcast sport scores and courtroom dramas, we write poetry and instruction manuals. Here, we have only the vaguest of ideas about who will be hearing or seeing the result, and when. Maybe the person who will read the poetry has not even been born yet. This is a very different form of language use that is unique to our species. Its cumulative effect over many generations is what we call (oral or written) culture.
Ask yourself this: what is it about humans that has made our impact on the planet so great, that has made the lives of animals everywhere depend on what we decide to do? You might say something like “nuclear power” or “pollution” or “genetic engineering” or maybe even “plastics” (the big life-changing secret Benjamin was told of in the movie The Graduate). But of course there is more to it than any one of these. We should just step back and say “advanced technology.”
But other animals have technology too. Crows and chimps use sticks to reach for things; otters use rocks to break open clams. Why do humans alone among animals have this more advanced technology? It is clear that we couldn’t have it without science. And we couldn’t have the science without mathematics. And we couldn’t have the science or the mathematics without human language. More specifically, we couldn’t have them without the sort of language use that goes beyond immediate communication.
Put it this way: if our use of language had remained as limited as the sort of communication we see in other animals, we would never have been able to accumulate enough science and mathematics over the generations to develop those advanced technologies. If all we could ever do is announce our presence, or signal something we had found, or point to something we wanted, our impact on the world would have been much smaller.
To take one example, we could not have our modern cities without human language. The large-scale coordination necessary to allow urban transportation and communication, the delivery of food, water, and electricity, the removal of garbage and sewage, the responses to fires and other calamities, and so on, would be inconceivable if language could ever be used only for immediate communication.
(It is interesting to speculate about what kind of creature we would have to be to live in large groups with only limited language. Ants, for example, do quite well in extremely large colonies with just a smidgen of communication. The trick, it appears, is a strong genetic programming that restricts variability in behavior and compels individuals to take care of colony business. Humans have been living in cities for only a few thousand years, roughly since the discovery of agriculture. Perhaps after a few million years, we too will evolve into creatures where doing what needs to be done in a city will feel as incontrovertible as breathing. We would no longer need written laws and bylaws, rules and regulations, of course, not to mention parents, teachers, and ministers exhorting us to obey those laws, nor a police force to seek out those who decide to opt out and do things their own way.)
Think for a moment of some of the things you can learn by apprenticeship, using language only for immediate communication: foraging for food, milking a cow, plowing a field. Now turn this around. Consider the kinds of things you cannot learn without language texts that go well beyond immediate communication: linear algebra, electrical engineering, urban planning.
The science, the mathematics, the engineering, all of these are learned mostly in school, listening to lectures, reading texts. Of course, direct experience and practice are necessary to master the skills needed to be proficient in these disciplines. But practice will never make perfect without background knowledge to begin with.
So learning through text, that is, learning by reading or by being told, is not only a feature that is unique to humans, it is what has enabled us—for better or for worse—to dominate the rest of the animal kingdom.
Given the importance of learning through text in our own personal lives and in our culture, it is perhaps surprising how utterly dismissive we tend to be of it. It is sometimes derided as being merely “book knowledge,” and having it is being “book smart.” In contrast, knowledge acquired through direct experience and apprenticeship is called “street knowledge,” and having it is being “street smart.” Then, as Scott Berkun succinctly puts it: “Street smarts kicks book smarts ass.” (I’m not sure I agree with this punctuation and grammar, but that’s just book knowledge talking!)
Here is what he says in a blog:
Book smarts, as I’ve framed it, means someone who is good at following the rules. These are people who get straight A’s, sit in the front, and perhaps enjoy crossword puzzles. They like things that have singular right answers. They like to believe the volume, and precision, of their knowledge can somehow compensate for their lack of experience applying it in the real world. Thinking about things has value, but imagining how you will handle a tough situation is a world away from actually being in one (As Tyler Durden says in Fight Club—“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”) (From http://scottberkun.com/2010/book-smarts-vs-street-smarts)
Although we may not agree with everything here, most people accept the basic thrust of the argument. In fact, we might be hard pressed to find anyone to argue seriously against it, despite what was said above regarding science and cities. Concerning cities, we might even be tempted to think along these lines:
If it is true that we cannot live in big cities without considerable book knowledge, then so much the worse for living in big cities!
Indeed, it was not so long ago that people lived in much smaller communities and relied much less on the urban technology that depends on book knowledge. It is certainly quite possible for small groups to live with a minimum of book knowledge, where most of what is learned is through apprenticeship. (Even in large cities, individuals do not need to know the technology their lives depend on, so long as there are enough other individuals there to know it for them.)
But what about the opposite? Is it possible to live mostly by book knowledge, with a minimum of direct experience in the world? This seems much less likely. There are some possible counterexamples, but they are rare enough to be noteworthy.
Consider the famous case of Helen Keller (1880–1968). At the age of eighteen months, she developed a disease that left her blind and deaf. At that point, she had acquired only a rudimentary baby talk (by direct experience), but then was cut off from learning English the usual way.
However, Helen Keller’s family was able to hire a personal tutor for her when she was six, Anne Sullivan. Anne began teaching Helen words for the things around her by drawing the words, one letter at a time, on her hand. She acquired about twenty-five nouns and four verbs this way.
Then one day, something happened, wonderfully depicted in the movie The Miracle Worker. Here it is in the words of Anne Sullivan:
This morning, while she [Helen] was washing, she wanted to know the name for “water.” … I spelled “w-a-t-e-r” … We went out to the pump-house, and I made Helen hold her mug under the spout while I pumped. As the cold water gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled “w-a-t-e-r” in Helen’s free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled “water” several times. Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my name. I spelled “Teacher.” Just then the nurse brought Helen’s little sister into the pump-house, and Helen spelled “baby” and pointed to the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she had added thirty new words to her vocabulary. … Helen got up this morning like a radiant fairy. She has flitted from object to object, asking the name of everything and kissing me for very gladness. Last night when I got in bed, she stole into my arms of her own accord and kissed me for the first time, and I thought my heart would burst, so full was it of joy. (From a letter dated April 5, 1887)
It is not clear how to describe what happened at this moment in Keller’s life, but one way is to say that she realized for the first time that there were names for things. Although she had been naming things for a while, she now realized that in addition to all the physical things, qualities, and actions around her—things she could feel—there were also some abstract things called words that could be used to name the others.
This is not unlike what we see in human infants. At a very early stage, we learn words like water, hungry, and walk, say. A child will use words to ask questions such as what her mother is chewing on, what her father is doing, where her favorite doll is. The answers will be things, qualities, and actions in the world. But at some point in a child’s development, something new happens. In addition to those things in the world, there will be some new things to talk about: the words themselves. A child will now use words to ask questions about words: what the name of a certain object is, what a certain word means.
(Arguably, this is the crucial step that allows language to be learned through language rather than just through direct experience. It is not the use of symbols—in this case, words—to talk about things in the world; it is the fact that the symbols themselves can be things to talk about. The reason this is so significant is that it separates symbols from what is observed or desired. The symbols get a life of their own and can be used for more than merely referring to things in the world. In philosophical terminology: the symbols can be mentioned, not merely used. As we will see in chapter 8, this is just what is needed for symbol processing.)
Having gone through this miracle, Helen Keller then made astounding progress, learning braille and some languages other than English, writing books, and eventually earning a university degree. (She was the first deaf-blind person to do so.) Because of her condition, the knowledge she acquired was mostly as a result of reading and conversing with others, what we are calling book knowledge. In terms of book smarts, she was a phenomenal achiever.
So is Helen Keller a counterexample to the claim that book smarts with only a modicum of street smarts is never enough? Here is what John McRone says:
But the reality was that Helen was so cut off from the world that she found it hard to tell the difference between her memories and her imagination. She had learnt to juggle words, but it is questionable how much understanding lay behind the fine sentiments that so pleased her audiences. … Helen appeared to end up almost top-heavy with the software of culture. Blind and deaf, her brain was starved of the normal traffic of sensations, images and memories. Yet through language, she could furnish these spare surroundings with all the varied richness of human culture. In the end, the combination may have been unbalanced; where most saw a heroic triumph against the odds, others saw too heavy a weight of ideas sitting uncomfortably on an emaciated awareness. (From a blog at dichotomistic.com)
I do not agree at all with this. (And I find it condescending.) But it does say something quite interesting about the point I believe Turing was trying to make. It suggests that even someone like Keller who can write books and earn university degrees might be considered by some to be just juggling words without a real understanding of what is being said. This “juggling words” critique of Keller is precisely what is said of ELIZA and other AI programs (as first noted by William Rapaport). But do these critics think that Helen Keller would have failed a Winograd Schema Test? Or would they be forced to claim that it was possible to pass the test using cheap tricks without understanding? (And if so, which ones?)
We can all be impressed by what Helen Keller was able to accomplish despite her enormous handicap. But evidently many people still harbor doubts regarding how far even a human mind can go without a healthy dose of street smarts.
What is perhaps even more interesting in all this, however, is that there is rarely a corresponding skepticism about how far we can go without a healthy dose of book smarts. For whatever reason, we do tend to downplay the significance of those parts of our mental life that are uniquely human. When we see something remarkable in ourselves (such as our language, planning, tool-building, culture), we try hard to find something like it in other animals too. We make much less of a fuss these days about the differences between us and the other animals. And those differences to a very large extent are grounded in our book learning, how we use language not for immediate communication, but to enhance and further extend our language, planning, tool-building, and culture.
As for book and street smarts, let us reconsider the example about hibernating bears and yellow lemons. We observed that we typically learn about the bears through language, but about the lemons through experience. In the terminology of this chapter, we have what amounts to book knowledge about bears, but street knowledge about lemons.
Looking at things this way, we can see that there is not much reason to denigrate one or the other form of knowledge. Is the knowledge that bears hibernate only for bookish types who sit at the front and enjoy crossword puzzles? Does the knowledge that lemons are yellow really kick ass because it was acquired through direct experience on the street?
It seems more plausible to say that to the extent that “street smarts kicks book smarts ass,” it is because of the subject matter more than how it is acquired. In other words, all other things being equal, we have very good reason to value practical knowledge that has direct bearing on the immediate decisions we need to make, over more abstract knowledge that may or may not ever find application.
Suppose you are traveling in Rome by taxi and you want to make a good impression on your fellow travelers. You are going to value more highly information about whether to tip a cab driver in Rome than one in Edinburgh. It does not matter whether you learn the local tipping custom by trial and error, by observing what the locals do, by being told what to do, or by reading about it in a travel guide. What makes you street smart here is that you know the local custom and behave accordingly on the street, even if that knowledge is the result of reading a book. (For the record, one does not normally tip a cab driver in Rome, but one does in Edinburgh.)
Of course there are things we know that we never expect to learn through language. If we have never seen a lemon before, language is not much help in conveying the shade of a typical lemon, except by reference to other objects of similar color. While Helen Keller may have known that lemons were yellow and so similar in color to straw and to school buses, she probably did not know what those differences in color were. Words fail us. (Interestingly, books can show us the shades—and one sample is enough!—they just cannot tell them to us in words.) It is not clear how crucial this extra bit of street knowledge is, but we do appear to have it.
On the other hand, as we have seen, there are very many things we know that we never expect to learn by direct experience. Only a small number of humans deal first hand with the hibernation of bears. The rest of us learn what we know through them. Much of our science, our mathematics, our technology is the same. For these crucial topics, we are in much the same position as Helen Keller.