The argument so far

Initial pages on this site have tried to outline, as clearly possible, the central ideas and the reasons for proposing them. This has probably resulted in a breadth of topic that is somewhat overwhelming. I think this is inevitable as we are concerned with almost everything contributing to human nature. Having established the main props of the argument we can then return and discuss the major issues in more detail, and assess the worth, or validity, of each. If a summary is possible it would go something like the following.

Language is an instinct unique to the human race. In fact, it could be its distinguishing feature. It enables us to escape from being held captive in the present by giving us the means to talk about the past and the future. Other species undoubtedly communicate but never with the sort of sophistication that we can employ. We talk endlessly about the validity of political and economic policy, or the merits of picture or a play, we feel and convey intense emotional feeling, we can just sit and think about past joys and regrets, together with future hopes and expectations. We exchange views on abstract ideas like love, art, faith, patriotism by invoking a set of values the origins of which are often uncertain. It is also possible for us to design a device like the Hadron collider, and - hopefully - interpret the results of the experiments conducted.

Musical ability appears to be another instinct but without the almost universal generality of language. Some of us are more musical than others and in extreme cases can make music intuitively on demand. Others are dismally tuneless.The human brain is unique in its complexity and versatility. If one holds rigidly to evolutionary principles, as we must, this can only have occurred by chance. Fortunate variations, genetic and physiological, must have provided the means for language to develop, and also in some related ways, to confer a sense of number and quantity, and graphical pattern, and other abstract ideas. The fact that the ability to excel in music, in memory, or in arithmetic, varies widely, raises the question of why such apparently valuable assets are not more common, as they are clearly possible within the human brain. Perhaps it is also an evolutionary fact that it does not pay, generally speaking, to be too smart, for the price paid by savants for such ability is usually obvious.

From all this variety of intellectual activity there has developed an interesting fact that we talk quite happily about 'science' and 'art', and only rarely define what we mean by the words themselves. Broadly speaking we have only been 'doing' science for 300 or 400 years, but it is so obvious, that whatever this activity actually involves, it has been phenomenally successful, changing the face of our culture more than any other factor. Aboriginal societies have not experienced this division of thought, but interestingly often develop abstract concepts which, for us today, have no significance whatsoever, despite being central to particular cultures - 'dreamtime' and 'song-lines', for example. But these are probably no different, in principle, to esoteric concepts developed in other more universal religions such as  nirvana, heaven and hell,  still surviving In our western cultures. The science-free era which, because of its extreme antiquity, still colours nearly everything we think about. Repeating the question posed earlier; how have we created what appears to be two quite distinct ways of thinking when we only have a single brain, and most of us a single language? Electronic computers, the very recent tool we have produced to aid our thinking, achieve an obviously wide range of activity, and do so, in general terms, only by using the simplest of 'languages' - binary arithmetic. We appear to use our single language in two different ways; one which welcomes and encourages ambiguity, and the other which eschews it? Finally, how does this duality in the use of language affect what we like to call 'reality'? There is fierce debate about this question still.  It is only with language that we carve out our own personal worlds. If the human race vanished from the earth, so would all art and science, for even if artifacts  survived, there would be no minds to appreciate them.

It can therefore be proposed that the 'Two Culture' problem resides purely in the way we use language, and not just in what the subject under discussion happens to be.

So far we have been concerned with the instinctive aspects of language - those aspects with which we appear to be naturally endowed. Certainly in the western world, but probably not exclusively however, in the recent past there have been specific attempts to change the way we might use language. It has become an academic subject. This we discuss in the next section.

 Frank Evans 2009