Geometry might be innate in the same way as language. There are many languages, each of which is an equally coherent and viable paradigm of thought, and the same can be said for Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries. As our native language is shaped by experience, so might our “native geometry” be. Yet substantive innate conceptions may be a precondition for any linguistic or spatial thought to be possible at all, as Chomsky said for language and Kant for geometry. Just as language learning requires singling out, from all the sounds in the environment, only the linguistic ones, so Poincaré articulated criteria for what parts of all sensory data should be regarded as pertaining to geometry.

Transcript

The discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in the early 19th century was quite a wake-up call. It showed that everybody had been a bit naive, you might say.

Here’s an analogy for this. Suppose we had all been speaking one language, let’s say English. And we were all convinced that English is the only natural language. In fact, that question didn’t even arise to us; we simply assumed that English and language is the same thing. We even had philosophers “explaining why” English is a priori necessary. These philosophers had “proved,” they thought, that without English the very notion of linguistic communication or thought is impossible.

And then we discovered that there are French speakers and Chinese speakers. Oops. Very embarrassing. English is not necessary after all. It is not innate, it is not synonymous with language itself. For thousands of years we made those embarrassing mistakes because we were not aware of the existence of other languages.
That’s how it was with geometry. What I said about English corresponds to Euclidean geometry. For thousands of years, nobody thought of Euclidean geometry as one kind of geometry. Everybody thought of it as THE geometry. Geometry and Euclidean geometry was the same thing. Just as an isolated linguistic community thinks their language is THE language.

And the philosophers I spoke of, Kant is an example of that. He argued that Euclidean geometry was a necessary precondition for having spatial experience or spatial perception at all, which is like saying that English is necessary for any kind of linguistic expression.

And already long before Kant, many people had been convinced by how intuitively natural and obvious the axioms of Euclidean geometry feel. Descartes for instance and many others made a lot of this fact. Remember how important it was to Descartes that our intuitions were truths implanted by God in our minds.

Well, we all think our native language is intuitive. And we think other people’s languages are not intuitive. This feeling is so strong that we think it must be objective. When we try to learn a foreign language, it feels impossible that anyone could think that was intuitive. And yet they do.

So apparently our intuitions can deceive us. We feel that our native grammar is much more natural than everyone else’s, but that’s a delusion. It felt like an objective fact, but it turned out to be subjective.

Could it be the same with geometry? Could the alleged naturalness and intuitiveness of Euclidean geometry turn out to be just an arbitrary cultural bias, like thinking English feels more natural than French?

So, ouch, we took quite a hit there with the discovery on non-Euclidean geometry. It exposed our insularity. It showed that things we had thought we had proven to be impossible were in fact perfectly possible and every bit as viable as what we had thought was the only way to do geometry.

And yet there is hope as well. The language analogy doesn’t just expose what an embarrassing mistake we made, or how non-Euclidean geometry hit us where it hurts. The language analogy also suggests a way out; a way to rise from the ashes.

We were wrong about the specific claim that Euclidean geometry is innate, because that’s like saying that English is innate. Nevertheless we were right too, one could argue.

Language is impossible without something innate. Everybody learns their native language with incredible fluency. Every child learns it somehow, with hardly any systematic teaching; they just pick it up naturally. And they do so at a very early age, when their general intelligence is still very limited.

Meanwhile, no animal comes anywhere near achieving the same feat. Nor any adult human for that matter. I’m better than a three-year-old child at any intellectual task, except learning French. Somehow the child is super good at that.

So clearly something about language is innate. The ability of language acquisition is innate. Some kind of general principles of language are innate.

Perhaps geometry is like language in this way. We have some innate geometry. Not specific Euclidean propositions or axioms maybe, but some kind of “geometryness” nonetheless. Some sort of more structural or general principles of geometry than specific propositions, just as our innate linguistic ability doesn’t contain anything specific to any one language but instead has to do with “languageness” in general.

In linguistics, this is called “universal grammar.” Every language has it own grammar, of course, but there are some more general or structural principles of language that are the same for all human languages. This common core is the universal grammar.

Here’s an example of such a principle that belongs to universal grammar. Consider the statement “the man is tall.” It is a declaration, an assertion. You could turn it into a question: “Is the man tall?” We turned the assertion into a question by moving the “is” to the front of the sentence. That’s how you make questions from statements: start with assertions—“the man is tall”—and move the “is” to the front—“is the man tall?” So that’s a recipe for making questions.

But consider now the statement “the man who is tall is in the room.” How do you form the corresponding question? There are two “is”’s in the sentence. So the rule “to form a question, move the is to the front” is ambiguous. Which of the is’s should we move?

It could become: “is the man who is tall in the room?” That works. But if we move the other is to the front we get nonsense: “is the man who tall is in the room?” Well, that didn’t work. It didn’t make a question, it just made gibberish. Even though we followed the same rule as before: move the “is” to the front.

If language was nothing but a social construction then it would be perfectly reasonable for children trying to form questions to come up with the gibberish one. If the child simply extracts general rules from a bunch of examples, it would have been perfectly reasonable for the child to have guessed that the general rule is: move the first “is” to the front of the sentence to form a question. Which would lead to the nonsense question “is the man who tall is in the room?”

In fact, however, “children make many mistakes in language learning, but never mistakes such as [this].” Apparently, “the child is employing a ‘structure-dependent rule’” rather than the much simpler rule to put the first “is” in front. Why? “There seems to be no explanation in terms of ‘communicative efficiency’ or similar considerations. It is certainly absurd to argue that children are trained to use the structure-dependent rule, in this case. The only reasonable conclusion is that Universal Grammar contains the principle that all such rules must be structure-dependent. That is, the child’s mind contains the instruction: Construct a structure-dependent rule, ignoring all structure-independent rules.” So although each language has its own grammar, there are some general principles like that that are universal: common to all languages. Those principles are hard-wired into the mind at birth.

This stuff about there being an innate “universal grammar” is the view Chomsky, the leading 20th-century linguist. The example and explanation I just quoted are from his book Reflections on Language. There are many debates about Chomskyan linguistics, but I’m going to assume Chomsky’s point of view for the purposes of this discussion, because its parallels with geometry are very interesting.

You might say that this view of language is Kantian in a way. We saw that Kant put a lot of emphasis on the necessary preconditions for certain kinds of knowledge. Geometry, for example, is not an external, free-standing theory that we can analyze with our general intellectual capacities. Rather, the fundamental concepts of geometry are bound up with the very cognitive structure of our mind itself.

Some things are purely learned through experience and convention, such as how to play chess or how to dance the tango. But some things are not like that. For instance, they way we experience color. The mind is made to see red and blue and to not see infrared and so on. That’s a fixed, domain-specific property of how our mind works. You can neither learn nor unlearn that through general intelligence. Color experience is just one of those basic things hardwired right into the brain.

From the Chomskyan point of view, language is like that as well. Language is not merely a social construct with man-made rules like chess or tango. Nor is it explicable in terms of general intelligence only.

Chess or tango you can learn by general intelligence. That is to say, if you spend enough time looking at people playing chess or dancing, you can eventually figure out what the rules are by general rational thinking such as pattern recognition, and forming preliminary hypotheses about how you think it works and then observing some more to check if you maybe need to revise the hypothesis to take into account some other possible circumstances or cases.

Color exper...

The “universal grammar” of space: what geometry is innate?