http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/
A Tale Without Episodes Radio transmitters provide a misleading metaphor for speech. They encourage the notion of a signal that must be encoded and then decoded rather than an active tool whose meaning comes from where it directs one's attention. The pieces have fallen together in a position I did not anticipate when I began this blog. None the less, last week’s post has left me feeling that I now understand the basic outline of the story of speech origins. “Basic outline” means I don’t have dates, but I do know the outline of what evolved and even how it happened. What Evolved When I began this blog, I thought of language as a means of expressing ideas and emotions, but I now see that definition as too abstract to help think clearly about how speech works or how it evolved. Talk about ideas and emotions encourages mystical thinking in which words somehow contain a “meaning” that carry an idea from speaker to listener. The technical analogy is a radio that transmits a signal to specific receivers. The evolution of a linguistic species requires the appearance of individuals able to pack meaning into words, transmit them as sentences, and then retrieve the meaning from the received signal. A great deal of philosophical and critical confusion has come from taking these abstractions literally. Put more mundanely, but concretely, speech is a tool for directing attention. Instead of transmitting meanings it directs the joint attention of speaker and listener. In this view, understanding speech requires a perceiving, aware listener capable of joining in on the attention of another. The story of the evolution of language is not a tale of increasingly complex capacity to transmit and deconstruct meanings; it tells instead of an increasingly rich ability to share perceptions and to know what is on each other’s minds. Last week’s post focused on episodic thinking (see Episodes on the Highway of Life) and suggested complex syntax might have evolved to describe episodes. The description of an episode can require more than one sentence. So you see the use of full paragraphs in speech. It is a very late development in the story of speech origins. How it Evolved Episodic thinking can lead to mistakes, For one thing, it makes us expect a story to occur in episodes instead of along a continuum. The story of speech evolution is a handy example. Episodic thinking encourages people to expect a series of episodes, or milestones, that went something like: first came words, then phrases, then simple sentences, and then rich sentences. Trust Noam Chomsky to show the logical limitations of that approach without finding the solution. Words alone, phrases alone, get you no closer to syntactically rich sentences, so why suppose there were such stages? But instead of getting rid of episodes this argument just reduces the number of milestones to one: thinking in syntactically rich (recursive) sentences. Episodic thinking encourages before-and-after thinking. Before the episode things were one way and after they were another way. Thus we expect genes to introduce novelties so that we can say before the episode of the mutant gene our lineage talked this way; after the episode it talked this other way. We also expect a series of milestone to produce a series of distinct differences. Thus, it is not enough for speech itself to be unique to humans. It must have resulted from a series of distinct milestones, each of which introduced a novelty, such as recursive syntax, into the picture. I am very much an episodic thinker myself, but the evidence does not support a story of evolution via milestones. For example, the one gene found so far that seems assuredly part of our tale, FOXP2, is not at all like one would expect as milestone.FOXP2 is indirect, it controls other genes, and its effects are not limited to speech. Speech does break down in cases without a normal FOXP2 gene, although cognitively there seems to be little damage. In FOXP2 mutants, the ability to coordinate muscular movements for proper speech seems deficient and there are problems in comprehension as well. Finding the gene has tangled the story instead of bringing the clarity you should expect from finding a milestone. Also contrary to expectations is the issue of differences. It is clear that we talk and apes do not, but that very great difference seems to rest on a series of small similarities. Apes in some small degree have many of the traits that humans find useful for speech, and yet they don’t speak at all. It is difficult to account for this tangle of similarity and difference by referring to episodes that introduce unprecedented novelties. The chief solution has been to attempt to keep the episodes to a minimum. Instead, I believe the story is very different. It is one of co-evolutions, the increasing dependence of traits on one another so that something novel emerges from the tangle of all those familiar traits. The outline of speech origins is probably not a story of milestones, but an increase of mutual dependencies on traits that have long evolutionary histories behind them. The Outline When we say that apes do not talk at all, we mean they do not have the capacity for using words to establish, maintain, or direct joint attention. Yet they do have the ability to pay attention, to perceive, to remember perceptions, and to attract attention to themselves. Michael Tomasello points out that chimpanzees sometimes make a sound to draw somebody’s attention. (See his book, The Origins of Human Communication.) The co-evolution of I and we. So was ahem the first word? I’m joking, but a random sound is enough to direct attention to an individual. A slap on the ground or vocalized mmm can be sufficient to insert oneself into another’s attention. Infants are able to call attention to themselves by crying. Ape infants sometimes cry as well, I understand. Apes have a well evolved sense of themselves. Apes have a much weaker sense of we, although it is not fully absent. Speakers can draw attention to themselves as members of a group. Starting with infants and who babble and get others to join them to toddlers who repeat what others say, to older speakers who sing, or chant, or shout as part of a group, humans use speech to draw attention to themselves as members of a group. Without this process we could not have developed the trust necessary before people dare share their thoughts, but once begun the process continued so that increasing numbers of ways of expressing group identity developed. The co-evolution of words and interests: The babbling sounds that promote a sense of we inevitably become names like mama. Apes are not much interested in neutral topics, but they do sometimes show a little curiosity about things. It’s a toe-hold for evolution to build on. Words point to the world and spark a curiosity that can be fed by further looking. Plainly this process continues to go on all around us today. The co-evolution of perception and imagination: Presumably the first words had to do with present perceptions like mama, but very quickly people were probably talking about absent things. Even toddlers can say up as a request to be picked up. To speak, the child has to imagine being picked up, and the responder has to imagine that too. Attention can be directed inwardly, to imagination, as well as outwardly. The story works this way. Traits build on one another and strengthen capacities by supporting one another. Instead of looking for milestones that break the after from the before, look for arches that support themselves and grow stronger through their mutual dependence. _______________________________________________ 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
