> Greetings Economists, > On Jun 4, 2007, at 8:23 PM, Carrol Cox wrote: > >> There can be no proof, so anyone is free to speculate as he/she >> pleases. > > Doyle; > I think one could derive proof by knowing what is language like use of > information and what is not. For example self decoration to unite the > group is not language, but very useful information about who is who > visually. Self decoration is not making a weapon sort of work, but > storing information external to speech acts. Most of these early > storage acts we've found so far are about the group, therefore have non > language like ways of saying the group is united. In the history of > religions, writing supports a world inhabited by a spirit/spirits apart > from language knowing. Making stone tools shaped sharing knowledge by > language - I am speaking to the enormous time span of hand weapon > making. Language gave us the means to see minds at work in the world > symbolically, then storing non language information arose. Language > itself may have inhibited storing information externally. In practical > terms why waste energy on nebulous ideas of the spirit when you can > directly tell people what to do? That rigidity might be reflected in > the rigidity we see in people now who use language to hold things > together as in dogmatism > Doyle > >
Apologies for butting in, but have you folks considered George Herbert Mead's theory of language, which Habermas has been using so effectively to argue for his brand of "communicative" liberalism? In essence, there is a definite difference between mere interaction through signals (vocal or otherwise) and the actual use of language. The latter allows and develops through the development of concepts of the self and the other, and according to Durkheim are constitutive of (religious) social normativity. (See Habermas' "Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns", Vol. II.) What this means for this debate is that it is important to separate merely the kind of interaction that makes effective cooperation possible, which may well have existed a hundred thousand years ago, and actual use of language in organized communities with religious structures and self-imposed and expressed social norms, which is probably a much later development and really the birth of man as we know him. It seems to me this transformation 40.000 years ago might be the (culmination of) the shift from simple organizational signalling, for a hunt or something, to formation of language and concepts of the permanent self in culture. This same theory of language is interesting because Habermas uses it explicitly to argue against Marx and in favor of Kant; see http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Soci/SociFlem.htm. Just a thought. Matthijs Krul
