[Marxism-Thaxis] Babel's dawn
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[Marxism-Thaxis] Babel's dawn note
http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/ The Group and the Individual are mutually dependent. Is there a way to talk about the whole as a unit, or must we choose between them whenever we talk about social change? This blog’s long-time emphasis on the role of cooperation and community in human evolution got some extra attention this week. My alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, sponsored a conference on “Man the Hunted” which presented evidence that human evolution owes much more to the lineage’s role as prey than as predator. I thought about covering the event, but did not because its focus was too far from speech. However, I have also read a provocative essay in the latest issue of Group Analysis by a psychotherapist, Claire S. Bacha, on “Becoming Conscious of the Human Group” (abstract here). The paper is much too speculative to be received as the solution to any puzzles, but it is still important. I don’t believe I have ever read a more radical understanding of the nature of the “Human Group.” The paper’s most radical assertion comes from S.H. Foulkes, founder of group psychoanalytic therapy: individual grow from groups; groups do not grow out of individuals. [65] Having just lived through thirty years of Republicanism and its counter-assertion that the individual creates society, I sat up. Bacha immediately interprets the statement in terms of interest to group therapists, but the remark is provocative enough to offer food for thought on this blog’s subject as well. After all, language too emerges from a group and the great mystery of language origins is that our ancestral group never spoke, but now all people do. How do you get from a silent group to a speaking one? The conservative temptation is to think of the transition from non-linguistic to linguistic groups entirely in terms of individuals. There was a mutation that led to mutant individuals who were selected and became a mutant group. Even with the introduction of multi-level selection (see: A Vote for Group Selection) the reason for the selection tends to be the benefit the individual brings to the group rather than what the group brings to the individual; e.g., the law-abiding individual benefits the group and therefore group survival favors law-abiding individuals. But after all those years of Republican catastrophe, the radical reversal doesn’t seem so ridiculous: the law-giving group makes the law-abiding individual possible. When groups don’t form laws, it is impossible for group members to follow them or benefit from them. Similarly it is the language-speaking group that makes the individual poet or story-teller possible. Both the conservative and the radical propositions seem to make sense. Bacha sums up this relationship between group and individual nicely. She reports that according to Foulkes individuals and groups exist in a Gestalt where they are both always present but difficult to see at the same time. Sometimes the group is in the foreground and sometimes the individual [65] The speaker and the language, for example, are always together, but we can only pay attention to on one or the other at a time. Since language echoes perception (see: What I’ve Learned About Language) it is very hard to understand the two as a unit. It is like like the yin and the yang. We can visualize their mutual dependence and yet we look at one part or the other. Yet both are there. Thus, we may always have intellectual reversals in which we go from attending to the evolution of the speaker to focusing on the evolution of the speaking group without ever grasping the whole, the nut and its shell together. Bacha approvingly quotes Ralph Stacey who says in his book Complexity and Group Process: A Radically Social Understanding of Individuals who refers to … the paradox of individual minds forming and being formed by the social at the same time. [Stacey p. 327] Bacha refers several times to this paradox as “irresolvable,” which is alright for her because she is a clinician and can work with a paradox, even an irresolvable one, but is alarming for this blog whose ultimate hope is to understand how we came to be speakers. If the explanation rests on an irresolvable paradox, that ambition is foredoomed. The best we can hope for is the mess physics has gotten into, where we have a series of extremely accurate equations that people can use, but not understand. Fortunately, I don’t have to despair because the paradox may not be irresolvable. First, a sentence like, “At church the individual and the group sing hymns,” draws attention to the whole gestalt and its effect. It sounds a little funny and we may have to work out the meaning, but that may be because simultaneous attention to individual and group is novel. With practice we might work it out and find it easy to think this way. Second, contrary to Chomsky’s suggestion, the ultimate form of language is not the sentence.
[Marxism-Thaxis] Babel's dawn
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
