I’m the kind of person who likes to dig himself into holes when abroad. I take public transport over taxis and private cars, even when I’m only half sure I know where I’m going. I also seek out local eateries that have menus I only half understand (or, even better, those that have no menus at all). And I try to speak with locals in their native tongue, even if it’s just a phrase or two that I get half right half of the time.
Last month, I flew to Lisbon. I was there to participate in a day of workshops with senior technical consultants at Guidewire’s Elevate conference. The conference brings together consultants from around the world to share stories and experiences and to collaborate on making work better for themselves, for their organization, and for the customers they serve.
It wasn’t all work, though, and between workshops I had time to explore the city and practice my “pretend-I’m-a-local” routine.
I speak fluent Spanish and, while Portuguese is not Spanish, I hide my anglophone accent when I greet a bus driver with “boa dia” or when I ask a waiter to bring “a conta.” Lisbon is an unpretentious city. The bus drivers, waiters, and other service sector employees who keep the city going have little interest in belittling a tourist posing as a local. Addressed in Portuguese, they reply in Portuguese. But when they do, the inevitable happens: I catch a word or two; I think for too long about what to say next; they realize their mistake; and, if I’m fortunate, they restate in English; otherwise, I conclude my business with them in hand gestures and exaggerated facial expressions.
One doesn’t have to be abroad playing local to encounter difficulty when communicating. I was reminded of this fact in one of the workshops I attended. The workshop explored collaboration in teams and began with an icebreaker. Workshop participants were split into teams of five. The first person from each team was shown a picture, which was hidden from everyone else. They were given 30 seconds to memorize it. No talking allowed.
I was the first person in my team. Here’s the picture I saw:
After 30 seconds, the picture was hidden, and I was asked to reproduce it with pen on paper. I was given just 30 seconds. This is what I drew:
Next, the first person from each team showed their reproduction to the second person. The second person had 30 seconds to memorize the reproduction, which again was hidden from the rest of the team. No talking allowed.
When 30 seconds had passed, the first person hid their reproduction and the second person had 30 seconds to reproduce the reproduction.
The game went on like this until the fifth person one each team had drawn their reproduction. The fifth person on my team was Muthu. Here’s what Muthu drew:
The winners were the team whose fifth reproduction most closely resembled the original image. We did not win.
More important than winning, however, was the lesson the workshop organizers wished to impart: We must take care to be clear when we communicate, whether by visual or verbal messages, lest we cripple collaboration. This is an important lesson, one worth reflecting on, but I left the workshop thinking less about collaboration and more about the icebreaker and the fundamental nature of communication itself.
The icebreaker game we played assumes what might be termed the “commonsense” view of language. According to this view, the primary purpose of language is communication, and communication happens when a sender encodes a thought in a message, the message is transmitted to a receiver via some medium — such as air or paper — and the receiver decodes the message to recover the original thought.
In the commonsense view, then, a language is a set of rules for reliably encoding and decoding thoughts. These rules are laid down by the language community but exist external to the minds of its speakers. Speakers must internalize these rules if they wish to communicate with other speakers in the community.
In his book New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, Noam Chomksy criticizes the commonsense view of language. For Chomsky, no science of language is possible with an external conception of language “so dispersed in space and time.” A scientific study of language, he argues, must focus on the core linguistic knowledge of any individual speaker, and that knowledge supervenes on the internal states of the speaker’s mind/brain.
While it makes the study of language a branch of the mind/brain sciences, Chomsky’s internalist perspective also makes communication forever fallible. It implies that no two speakers have identical languages. Instead, there are only individual languages, or idiolects, and communication between speakers — which might be better understood as parasitic on language rather than the reason for it — necessarily becomes a “more or less” affair. For Chomsky, the messages we communicate — visual, written, or verbal — do not faithfully represent our thoughts and are always apt to be misunderstood to some degree.
Communication is, however, still possible, but instead of relying on shared rules it now relies on individual inferences. For example, speakers can only include limited clues about their thoughts in the messages they send, so they must infer what other speakers know about the language to decide which clues to include. Similarly, speakers who receive messages from other speakers must make inferences about what those other speakers know to (more or less) recover their thoughts from those messages.
Of course, speakers might make incorrect inferences. My Lisboan bus driver and waiter, for example, inferred that I had more knowledge of the Portuguese language than I actually had (way more!) So, communication is never guaranteed. But inferences are mostly correct, and incorrect inferences are, in general, quickly corrected, which means communication is mostly successful most of the time.
On an internalist view of language, then, the icebreaker game at the beginning of that workshop was incomplete. A sixth person was needed on each team, someone who got 30 seconds to look at the reproduction of the fifth person. If this sixth person identified the original picture from the clues in the fifth reproduction, his or her team would win the game. Many teams might win, but this is true of communication in the real world too.
For an internalist, the winners at the game of communication are those who minimize misunderstandings by making sound inferences about their audience so that they include the right clues in their messages, which in turn enable the audience to more reliably recover their thoughts.
Did Mathu on my team include the right clues in his reproduction to enable a hypothetical sixth person to recover the badge for Guidewire’s fifth cloud release? That depends on who’s looking.
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Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
