CB: On your comments below, notice I said language and culture. Material culture might be thought of as the products of "gestures". In my hypothesis , the nature of symbols as the use of something to represent something it is not is critical. The critical communication is not between living humans, except that between adults and children, but the communication between living and dead generations. More specifically I am thinking symbols allow the dead generation to teach the living generation ( or the living generation to teach the unborn generations) in a way that teaching through imitation cannot occur. Birds and monkeys and humans can learn by imitation - monkey see, monkey do. But only humans can through symbols, whether speech, gestures or material cultural items. Symbols can cross the boundary between the living and the dead ( in a non-mystical sense), in a way that imitations cannot. Why ? Because the dead are no longer present themselves to be imitated. But if the dead are represented, if the experineces of the dead are represented by something that is not the dead, by a symbol, then the something that is not the dead , that is not "dead", can get across the death barrier.
Language actually is the most efficient of these "death barrier crossers". However, language need not be _spoken_, it can be gestures, i.e. sign language. Or it could be a form of "written", but non- alphabetical language, as in abstract use of material objects as the symbolic elements, tokens. Anyway, my hypothesis suggest spoken or sign language had to be very early at the origin of our species, because, story tellikng would be the most effective death barrier crosser. This is why I think Rosa's opposition between representation and communication can be "happily" resolved at the origin of language and human thinking, because originally language was representational or symbolic in order to be communicative across generations, between dead and living. CeJ jannuzi >>Interesting that Rosa should mention Lamarckianism in this context, as I have argued that culture and language give humans a Lamarckian-like adaptive mechanism. Culture and language , symboling, allow inheritance of acquired, extra-somatic , characteristics.<< I think that would be a genetic mutation, except a genetic mutation really only seems to transcend soma, and doesn't actually (Lamarck and Lysenko weren't completely wrong). The ability to gesture complexly emerged from our biology and brain capacity, and this ability to systematize, embed meaning and communicate symbolically then colonized our well-developed phonetic abilities (we could chatter like the birds and then we learned to communicate). Instead of asking what separates us from the apes, we ought to ask what separates us from a mockingbird or parrot? Corballis's fascinating book could have been made better had he collaborated with an articulatory phonologist, like someone at Haskins Laboratory. Michael Corballis is a psychologist with a strong interest in lateralization, handedness, and the origins of language. In this book, he puts these interests together with a solid and comprehensive survey of other background material relevant to the origins of language. The book also pushes Corballis' own specific hypothesis, that human languages were implemented mainly in manual gestures until about 50,000 years ago, at which point largely vocal language took over as an invented cultural innovation. This is an argument about the medium in which linguistic messages were expressed. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
