Recognizing patterns and applying them in
new situations may be two key features of
language and thought, but what happens when
the pattern's wrong?
Last time I pulled out a critter you'd never
seen before, a shwuff, and I think we agreed
that we'd immediately know what to say if
I had 5 or 6 of them.
But that's not thanks to the shwuff so much
as it is to our understanding of plurals.
There's a paradigm for plurals in English,
and it works for words big and small, short
and long.
So we have reason to be pretty confident that
this is just how plurals work in English.
Then, eventually, we run into some word that
doesn't fit the paradigm.
We've abstracted and analogized this general
idea about plurals, but its inadequacy is
staring us in the face.
This roadblock is not just a problem for the
grammar of English plurals.
If you ever had to fight your way through
some basic logic before, you noticed that
we use general statements about "all this"
or "every that" to draw conclusions.
But just like with "mice" and "alumni", we're
always at risk of running smack into something
that doesn't fit with the general statement
we've worked so hard to abstract and apply
by analogy.
If you were living in the 1700s and your name
were David Hume, you would've pushed this
point very hard, wondering "why from this
experience we form any conclusion beyond those
past instances, of which we have had experience".
This gets called the "problem of induction",
and it asks us frankly why we should have
predicted that the plural of "mouse" would
be "mouses" just because the plurals of other
words ended in -s.
Of course, if I'm learning English, this seems
like a fairly trivial event.
I note the exception, I hope that I remember
it next time and I move on.
But not all failed applications of paradigms
are this mundane.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the metaphor of
the "black swan" - swans are white, not black,
or so Europeans thought until British ornithologist
John Latham stumbled across real life black
swans in Australia.
The black swan has since become a mascot for
rare events that have a surprisingly huge
impact, yet aren't accounted for in the "normal"
paradigm.
These abnormalities strike us as obvious AFTER
the fact, just as obvious as it is to an English
speaker that "mice" is the plural of "mouse"
and to modern avian enthusiasts that not all
swans are white.
We can of course incorporate this new information,
and maybe even be a little smarter with our
paradigm by hedging against big unknowns.
But... can we go the other way?
Let's turn to plurals just one more time.
A child might get corrected for saying "mouses",
sure, and they might step in line.
But at some point English-speaking children
applied this same paradigm incorrectly, and
instead of incorporating the correction, they
grew up to overturn the old norms.
Sometimes we simplify, other times we preserve
the irregularity.
And there's even room for creativity as brand
new patterns emerge.
As we learn about language and thought, and
use thought and language to learn, exceptions
to the rule give us very useful feedback about
the patterns we think we see.
