Greetings Economists,
On Dec 10, 2007, at 1:57 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
I would rather view language as the pure expression
of certain human characteristics with meaning occuring as a side
effect of the expressive impulse.
This seems overwhelmingly obvious to me. I would assume the
capabilities
were spandrels, accidents attached to other traits.
Doyle;
I think communication came first before language. Further this
connection by communication is a work process that has definite
products with important results for animal well being.
Social animals develop ways to communicate attachments. So too
language is a social connecting process. To say it's mere 'babble'
recognizing humanity ignores the nature of social groups that require
the animals to know who is their friend, or family, and who is not.
Hence primates will have a theory of mind as the social group gets
more complex. A theory of mind refers to knowing another animal
thinks so one is trying to understand what the other animal is
communicating (of their mind) mainly by facial expression. The reason
why mirror neurons are thought to be important is the ability to copy
other behavior mentally in a cultural (the precursors of language)
sense so that one can internalize a social connection architecture
built by that group. Primitive accumulation. And language further
refines what those minds do by reflecting thoughts more directly than
facial expression can do.
Especially I would caution against thinking language emerges as a
spandrel (a Chomsky like claim). The chain of thinking processes that
are part of language do seem to go back toward our ancestors before
language emerged some millions of years ago. What I think is
confusing here in the current debates is the concept of cultural
explosion that happened some time ago 50 to 150 thousand BCE. The
sense that we can externally communicate (paint pictures) like what
language does, use a culture to speak (an external record of speech)
as it were about social meaning probably comes long after language
began possibly three millions BCE. The ability to understand language
externally recorded to speech acts is the part that culture production
adds value to groups over time that language cannot do without some
recording techniques.
To understand stone tools, and develop tools over the generations
probably provided a long stable foundation for language to be
developed from repeating how an object carries speech information
before the cultural externals of language separating language from
human vocal performance to symbolic representation in tools. This
late 'cultural' economy of information is language like up to writing
script which is obviously language like. We don't have good means to
analyze that information economy because the brain operations have
been more or less inaccessible up to recently.
One might now establish some aspects of that information economy,
first only language as connection (tool building and it's limits in
language needs), then culture as language like information, and so
on. To repeat my thesis, language emerges from mental guesses about
another animals thoughts of connection to the observing animal, to
language that directly reflects thoughts externally, to culture which
records language onto the world.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
