Let’s go right back to the start and talk about Clover some more. As I said, he’s really very intelligent: he knows exactly how to wake me up in the morning, exactly which shelf in which cupboard his food is kept on, where his bowl is, how to get let out, and lots of other things. You won’t catch the average ant, starfish or parsnip doing any of that. By the standards of nearly everything in the known universe, he really is smart. But of course we’re much smarter. There are plenty of things in the world, especially in our mental world, that poor Clover has absolutely no inkling of: the moon, the stars, numbers and of course language. These things are every bit as much beyond Clover as waking me up to get me to feed it would be for a parsnip or starfish. Obviously the fact that we have language has a lot to do with this cognitive gulf between us and our pets, although that may not be the whole story.
But a natural question to ask is: is there a similar cognitive gulf between us and other forms of intelligence? We seem to be smartest creatures on our planet, so this is where the extra-terrestrials come in. Here I’m not interested in various forms of slime that might be around on Mars or elsewhere, but intelligent extra-terrestrials, the sort that might build spaceships. Could there be extra-terrestrials so much smarter than us that they would keep us as pets? Or (cue the creepy sci-fi music), are we already pets but we just don’t know it? After all, Clover doesn’t know he’s my pet. Are there, in other words, concepts as impossible for us as the concepts three, noun or syllable are for Clover?
Most people would probably say yes to this question. But the answer doesn’t have to be yes. It is also quite possible that we, as a species, have crossed a cognitive threshold. Our capacity to express anything, through the recursive syntax and compositional semantics of natural language, might have taken us into a cognitive realm where anything, everything, is possible. Effectively, having language has made us the equal of any extra-terrestrial (who would in any case have to have something like language in order to build their spaceships). We can make this thought a little more precise: there might have been a crucial mutation in human evolution which led, in almost no time from an evolutionary perspective, from caves to spaceships. It’s a plausible speculation that the mutation in question was whatever it is that makes our brains capable of computing recursive syntax, since it’s the recursive syntax that really gives language – and thought – their unlimited expressive power. It’s one small step from syntax to spaceships, but a great leap for humans.
Anyway, something (God, natural selection, a random mutation, an alien monolith) has given us our extraordinary minds with our extraordinary capacity for generating, storing and transmitting knowledge. Language really must be central to these abilities. So understanding language means understanding a very big part of what it is to be human, what it is to be you. And that is perhaps the greatest wonder of language of all.
