VISUALIZING SPEECH

The basic debate over folk psychology is whether or not our common sense psychological terms like ‘intentions’ refer to actual entities in the brain. I generally side with the eliminativists on these issues, but the token eliminiativists like Churchland often come across as if the (primitive, ignorant) ‘folk’ are making a huge mistake by continuing to use words like ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ and (especially) ‘intention’ in describing the mind.

To make the view a little more appealing, I usually compare folk-psychological terms to speech and thought bubbles in comic books. We all know what speech and thought bubbles mean, and how to read them in order to understand the illustration. But none of us think that speech actually occurs in bubble form, or that the comics are trying to accurately represent the mechanics of speech in depicting them as bubbles. They are just convenient ways to depict behavior in a simple, static way.

Well, we all understand thought bubbles, but they didn’t always have the form they currently have. BoingBoing recently linked to an interesting study in the evolution of speech bubbles. I’ll just point out some examples I found interesting after the break.

Speech ‘balloons’ started out as scrolls, which is somewhat understandable. Interestingly, however, they often came out of the speaker’s hands, and not their mouths.

The srolls were very ornate and elaborate.

It looks like speech bubbles evolved for the most part due to the laziness of the artist, and the fact that extremely ornate scrolls weren’t necessary (or appropriate) for a quick political cartoon. You start seeing a more balloon-like shape in the mid-18th century.

Eventually, this appears to have evolved in to a method not only for keeping track of speakers and what they said, but also the order in which they say it. This is a particularly good example:

In any case, I thought this was interesting. More examples can be found here. None of these pages say anything about the origin of the disconnected dots to represent thought instead of speech, and I’d be interested in learning more about that too.