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By Root 2270 0

for some reason, if they wanted me to quit throwing a fit, to quit flailing or biting or screaming and shut up and behave for once—every time I was being unruly or obstinate, they would offer me one of the chips. They’d usually start the bidding with a 5¢ chip, and if it didn’t work—if I couldn’t be bought that cheaply—they would increase the denomination of their offer. In such instances I usually wouldn’t settle for less than a shiny silver 25¢ chip. Some of the lab workers began to grumble that the introduction of this system had been a terrible idea, that it had the unintended effect of perversely rewarding negative behavior. Then I suppose Norm would remind them that the little wooden chips were actually effectively worthless, so they might as well use them as bribes, or put them toward whatever end necessary. (Here I would like to remind Norm that the very same could be said for human money.) Paying me off was simply the easiest way to calm me down when I was upset. So naturally I began to deliberately throw fits in order to incite their bribery. I suppose they spoiled me.

Thus the experiments continued, month after month and season after season, teaching me the mores of human society while simultaneously twisting up and corrupting my soul. Was my corruption merely a by-product of my enculturation?—or was it in fact an essential part of the process?

While this economic system eliminated the ticklish problem of the food-rewards’ value fluctuating with the state of my appetite, it failed to fix the bigger problem. It alleviated the symptom but did not cure the disease. This disease of Norm’s was a fundamental failure of understanding. It was his unshakable faith in the usefulness of behavioristic training. Yes, I realize that behaviorism works perfectly well for training pigeons in boxes to peck at discs. But I am not a pigeon. Language is not a disc in a box. The idea that one can teach language to a rational creature by using essentially Skinnerian methodology is patently absurd. That would be like giving food to a baby only if he says a word correctly, and punitively starving him if he babbles incoherently. Try that at home. I doubt it will make your baby learn to talk any more efficiently. Second languages we may learn through deliberate instruction—badly. Nobody ever really learns anything they do not want to learn. We learn our first language through immersion, through our fascination, through love. Mere vocabulary is not language, Norm. Syntax is not language. Grammar is not language. To define these things as necessary properties of capital-L Language (whatever that is) is like defining eating exclusively as eating at a table with a fork and a knife—that’s not a holistic definition of eating; that’s just good manners.

But when an infant gazes into his mother’s eyes and speaks a first word—even if he has no clue what it “means”—that is language. The child’s first word is not a symbol. It is not a representation, it is not a sign impregnated with abstract meaning, it is not a signifier and not a semiote. It is not a thin coating of signification painted over the surface of an a priori extant concept, suddenly revealing its definition like the act of throwing a sheet over something invisible. It is not a representation. Before a word becomes any of these things, it is simply an act. It is not a naming of the world, but rather the world’s creation.

Norm’s insistence on deliberate instruction, all his treat dangling and clever byways of circumventing the deeply problematic and frankly inhuman aspects of behaviorism, this cynical system of trapping a creature between pleasure and pain, of bribing and withholding—all this points to his original sin of misunderstanding. His misunderstanding was to underestimate language’s connections to love, to beauty, to pure awe of the universe. A being does not acquire language because scientists give it treats if it learns words. A being acquires language because it is curious, because it yearns to participate in the perpetual reincarnation of the world. It is not just a trick