Not long ago I was lucky enough to spend the day with a little girl who I adore. She is all of fifteen months old but before anyone decides to attribute my strenuous sensation to the realm of the innocent, I would remind all how the young can teach us about our own nature of knowledge. The reason for this is because, though we are all born into the middle of a certain kind of knowledge without the benefit of a starting point, as it were, with small children we can at least get a glimpse of the very germination of it as it slowly sparks from a consciousness that is a sponge though it is unaware of it's true power to soak up a world which it really has no specific knowledge in understanding.
What I'm trying to get at here is just how we think a child learns words. It is tempting to think that a child learns through us, the adults, as we place a kind of hypothetical sign on words that the child merely recognizes and learns by rote. The child learns different words for different "things". This can extend to people even. A child might learn that a certain person is called "Johnny" and we then like to think that he differentiates Johnny from other people and things the way he might differentiate a chair (when she learns the word) from other objects not the chair. He might learn that "Johnny" is different than his brother "Jimmy" though there is a family resemblance. She will not mistake one from the other unless she is confused about who is who. If we think of Johnny and Jimmy as "objects", we also tend to think the child has learned a way of placing monikers on things that differentiate them from other things.
Yet when I spent my day with my "philosopher-child", I learned that there is world that is being perceived beyond the mere pointing to objects as a learning tool. I have hitherto mentioned the calling of names of two brothers as a way of pointing to things being named so as not to be mistaken for the other. Keeping this in mind, I was struck that when I held up a strand of her hair and I asked her what it was, she immediately called it, in her own way, "Hair!" It would seem that I have taught her a word for an object. But when I then lifted a strand of my own hair and asked her what that was, she also remarked "hair!" On the face of things, this may seem unremarkable but keeping in mind our analogy of the brothers, it is important to point out that I taught her the word for one object and she named the said object. How is it then that when I pointed, or rather, lifted my own hair, another object technically speaking, she was able to call it by the same name? Of course, the most tempting thing to say is that she "saw similarities". However, keeping in mind the simple act of teaching a child the word for hair as a simple sign of pointing and naming, the question occurs as to just how the child learned what the "similarities" are in the scheme of things.
Are we supposed to believe that a child must be taught through the simple naming of objects yet is somehow supposed to innately understand a more complex concept like "seeming the same". The answer might be yes. The problem here is just the idea that we point and the child mechanically learns as if by rote. But that would mean that when we point to a pencil and call it a pencil, a child might understand we mean we are saying this is "hard" or this is "wood" or this is "long". What are we doing when we teach a child a term for "hot"? I may turn on a stove and point to the fire and say "this is hot" but how might the child might mistake this for "fire" or "blue" or "triangular" as I've really only pointed to an object?
The fact is that a child, when learning a word, is also witnessing the world beyond just the placing of monikers on an object. "Hot" after all (like "similarity") is not an object but a feature of an object. The child learns the word, true, but she also observes through conscious and subconscious living, that people burn themselves on the fire, and another heats themselves with the fire, and another still may cook food on the fire. So that while we think we've taught them a word, they have in fact witnessed many uses for the word "fire" by a kind of self-knowledge through a kind of rhizomial learning through living, while still learning that an object itself is called "fire." I think this is where we might demarcate the concepts of 'meaning' and of 'use.' We give words meaning but we do this through their use.
What this tells us further is that it is a shared experience. To understand this collectively, we know there are rules to be followed and these rules can be explained. This is simple enough, but we also know we come to a point where our spade is turned and we can dig no more; there is a point in human language and meaning when the rules cannot be explained. I can explain the child learning the word "hair" by pointing to a strand of hair but I do not explain how the same word is to be used in pointing to anothers' hair, a "different" object. Again, saying she saw similarities still begs the question whether this child really knows exactly what the concept of "similarity" is. To my knowledge, she never used the word herself. She is, after all, struggling with the simple, ostensive definition of the word "hair" never mind the more ephemeral concepts of our language. Maybe there is an "a priori" sense that presupposes learning apart from the rules governed by the man-made world. Again, rules can be explained for things but there is a point where following rules becomes more ambiguous, especially when learning language.
One can ask a person, when they've read sentences on a piece of paper, how they knew to do it correctly and their answer might be that "I learned the rules of the ABC's" or "I learned the rules of grammar". But this still does not answer just what rules were necessary to learn the ABC's. What rules were grasped to learn that? What rules were followed for that? A simple answer might be just a general consensus but this only points to language as being innate no matter what rules we apply to it.
My little girl is not just mechanically learning words to put with an object. She is living and breathing these words and finding, within her little but potent mind, the many USES that all words have in our collective expressiveness. But how she computes these USES is the all too mysterious and all too human mystery shared by all.
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