Actually, I already saw one of the advanced screenings for the book.

Darn it, don't they understand the risk of over-exposure?

It may be a funny put-down, but it's not an argument at all, let alone a good one.

I feel that the review is so flippant that it loses a lot of its usefulness as a discussion of the book.

Hmm. I can see how it would be easy to make the case that it’s full of holes, but it’s less clear to me why it’s not an argument at all. Certainly it is one in the sense of a Schopenhauerian dialectical stratagem (which, I admit, is not exactly fair play).

I got a lot out of the piece, but then I’m probably not as read-up on the subject as you are.

Do you really think "If our thinking was determined by language, we'd all be completely batshit" constitutes an argument? Can you explain it for me? I can see how it might be an effective rhetorical opening for an argument, but there's no follow-up. What's the connection between the first half of the sentence and the second? It seems like the first half could just as easily be replaced with "If our thinking was nothing more than computation," or "If liberal arguments were actually correct," or any other position the speaker wanted to glibly dismiss.

As for the review as a whole: I'm not terribly up-to-date on the evolution of speech, but I get the strong impression that the review is giving short shrift to the individual articles in order to make room for jokes. I just found the first article mentioned (the Fitch) online as a PDF, and reading it only reinforces my initial impression. The biggest advantage for humans having a lowered larynx is not increased volume, but a wider phonetic repertoire (which is something I do remember from college). Fitch's main point is that a lowered larynx is not unique to humans, but the other animals that have it use it just for volume, and not phonetic repertoire. He suggests that the ability to produce loud and lower-pitched sounds might have been useful for hominids before they gained a wider phonetic repertoire.

When Davis says in his review "That would explain why chicks dig lead singers. It fails to explain why chicks particularly dig tenors, or why chicks can talk," he is just going for the laugh. Fitch says nothing about sexual selection. Fitch does specifically criticize an earlier theory that was too narrowly focused on males.

I realize that reviews are a form of performance, and every performance is directed at a certain audience. But I think that in a good review, the audience that the review is directed at should be the potential readership of the book being reviewed. I fear that the potential audience of The Transition to Language is not well served by Davis's review.

I should add that I'm not a believer in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I just don't see how the quote constitutes an argument against it.

I thought it was an amusing line; at first glance, I took it to mean "language is crazy and doesn't make logical sense, so if our thinking were determined by language, we too would be nuts." To which my similarly glib response was "Wait, you mean we're not?"

But I could be entirely wrong in my interpretation. In the context of the review, I'm not really sure what the reviewer means: "Still, not a bad resource when you're bored by the usual arguments against Sapir-Whorf: If our thinking was determined by language, we'd all be completely batshit." Is he saying that the "If our thinking..." line is one of the usual arguments against S-W? Or is he saying that S-W is so obviously wrong that arguments against it are boring? Or am I analyzing humor too much again?

On an unrelated note, I like the name "W. Tecumseh Fitch."

I really don't want to rule S-W out so easily and thoroughly. I didn't give much thought to it until I came to Japan and started to learn Japanese. In the past year and three months, I've actually had experiences of perceiving particular kinds of emotions that I had not previously perceived in myself that seem, to me at least, directly related to some of the vocabulary available to me in Japanese that don't really have an equivalent in English, as well as the arrangement of certain kinds of grammar. This isn't exactly the same thing, but I think it is sort of a step in that direction. I'm not a linguist by any means, though I often think about language and have had a few linguistic courses in college. I would think that the S-W theory isn't completely off the map either. I think it's probably a conjunction of various factors, though, that determine our thinking, not just language.

Chris, Most people use "Sapir-Whorf" to refer to linguistic determinism, which is the claim that you are unable to think thoughts if there is no word in your language for them. This is generally regarded to be false. By contrast, linguistic relativism is the claim that your thoughts are influenced by the language you speak. This is generally regarded to be true to some degree.

I'm aware of the distinction between the two, but I'm still hesitant to throw S-W out with the bath water altogether, even if it's generally regarded to be false. I think when people acquire new language, and not just the languages of other cultures, but the language of religion, the language of literature, the language of computers, the language of communism, of labor unions etc., they are able to perceive and think in different ways than they were previously, and then take new action and directions based on this sometimes. To me, it's like saying the sky is blue. The sky isn't blue, I know that, but it also is undeniably so sometimes.

Thank you for the comments, particularly Ted's.

My essay was an experiment which I posted not so much because I thought it was successful as because I thought it was done. Some experiments work out better than others. I had two goals for this one:

1) In the context of a particular set of literary scholars and critics, to attempt to balance what seemed to me an over-focus of "cross-disciplinary" conversation on a few twentieth century philosophers -- Wittgenstein, most recently. Language evolution seemed an apropos candidate, given its own cross-disciplinary nature and the Valve's recent post on "language games".

2) In an even wider context, to attempt to balance the tendency among humanities scholars (and the population at large) to rely on illusions of authority and certainty (followed by reversal and disgrace) rather than ongoing engagement -- a tendency, encouraged by "science journalists" and authors aiming at the interview and lecture circuits, to shortchange the full possibility and skepticism of scientific research. Given its energetic eclecticism and the inherent interest of the topic, Wray's collection seemed a good hook.

Conveying a sense of exuberant-yet-exhausting excess is an old aesthetic problem. After sketching out a couple of other approaches, I resolved on the by-no-means original tactic of making the piece itself exhaustingly excessive. At first, I tried taking a more straight-faced approach to the summaries, but that failed in a couple of ways. First, since I'm just an interested layperson, an air of sober authority would have been mendacious and my summaries likely mistaken. Second, an excess of dryness tends to be offputting, and I needed to draw the reader into this party before I could have a chance of leaving them hungover and wishing they'd never gotten started.

The fairness of the resulting treatments varied, to put it politely. In one case (Christiansen and Ellefson), the authors' argument was easy and enticing enough (and my invention flagged enough), that I came close to a formal abstract; in another (Crow), I found myself with a choice between a self-evidently ridiculous one-liner or four unamusing but still inaccurate paragraphs of nuance about a promising but by no means clear new line of research, and I'm afraid the needs of the essayist won out.

And, as always, sometimes my skills just weren't sharp enough. Jed, you caught my intent with the "completely batshit" remark -- Hurford's piece ridicules any notion that language exclusively developed to model our internal representation of the universe (i.e., "consciousness"), and his collection of linguistic absurdities works just as well in the other direction, to ridicule any notion that language exclusively determines our internal representation -- but you and Ted are correct that my clipped reference to the exaggerated journalistic/humanities version of "Sapir-Whorf" (and the tedious arguments surrounding that caricature) relies too much on an assumed shared readerly context to be viable. If I get around to a revision, I'll try to fix that up.

Ted, Fitch's one example of a permanently lowered larynx in another species is the deer, where it's sex-linked but related to sexual competition rather than sexual selection. And so you're right that a more accurate joke would've been "That explains why the singer leads the band". Still, it would remain just a transitional joke to get from the deer to Fitch's conclusion, and in its more inaccurate form it does a better of job of setting up Okanoya, so I may decide to let the inaccuracy stay on my conscience. Otherwise, I have no quarrel with your quarrels.