excerpts from Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)
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In many cases it is behavioural change that comes first, subsequently determing genetic change.
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, "Introduction"
The
gene-centred approach to language’s evolutionary emergence relies on an
outdated conception of evolution. Current research in
evolutionary biology highlights the fact that major changes in
behaviour and cognition can take place without any changes in the
genes. In many cases it is behavioural change that comes first,
subsequently determing genetic change (Dor and Jablonka, Chapter
2). This understanding opens up the possibility that linguistic
capacities may have preceded genetic accommodation for language.
This, together with the indisputable fact that much of our behaviour
and cognition is socially constructed implies that social and cultural
dynamics need to be positioned centre-stage in any explanation for the
emergence of Homo sapiens. p. 2
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language’s
evolutionary emergence would have required profound social and
political change, [and] more trusting, stable relationships
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, "Introduction"
In
language, we formulate our thoughts for others and hence for
ourselves. It’s a system for publicly expressing our thoughts to
help others imaginatively reconstruct them. This communication
technology is used by all human socities despite manifesting remarkable
variability in technical design. It resides and develops at the
level of community, and is acquired by individuals as part of their
socialization. Investigating the evolution of our individual
cognitive and linguistic abilities as if they operated in social
isolation ignores the central component of language. As we
attempt to show throughout this volume, focusing on language in context
allows for a new understanding of its origins, since it places social
and cultural relationships centre-stage. It suggests that our
pre-linguistic ancestors may have already had significant linguistic
potential, but remained blocked from collaboratively constructing
actual languages owing to conflict-ridden, mistrustful social
conditions. If this was the problem, language’s evolutionary
emergence would have required profound social and political change,
more trusting, stable relationships enhancing the chances of cultural
innovations being preserved and transmitted, leading eventually to the
cumulative construction, grammaticalization, and historical
divesification of stable linguistic traditions as we know them today.
p. 3
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. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . . .
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, "Introduction"
Needless
to say, humans are capable of violence, just apes and monkeys
are. But in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance aserted
through violence or threat is the internal principle of social
organization, a situation which humans would find psychologically
intolerable. Within a human speech community, physical
violence or threat between speaker and listener can easily destroy
mutual trust. Where public trust collapses, people cease to be
‘on speaking terms’. Such conditions are not conducive to
linguistic creativity. Since there are good theoretical reasons
for this, several of our contributors infer that, for as long as this
type of primate-style social dynamics prevailed, evolving humans would
have been unable to realize their lingusitic potential in the delicate
joint enterprise of contracting, preserving, innovating, and
transmitting actual languages historically across generations.
On one point we are all agreed: languages began evolving as a
conssequence not of one social fact but of multiple interacting ones. .
. . Unprecedented levels of collective co-operation
favoured genetic capacities for interesubjetive sensitivity and
understanding. Pre-linguistic innovations mot probably
included shared childcare, the control of fire and cooking, projectile
weapons, big game hunting, increasingly equal power relations between
the sexes, emotional bonding through music, dance and other forms of
ritual—and, as a consquence of increased trust within relatively
stable coalitions, steadily increasing chances for cultural innovations
to be preserved and transmitted to future generations. All this
drove selection pressures favouring novel capacities for mimetic,
gestural, and vocal communication, culminating finally in levels of
trust sufficient for linguistic innovations to be preserved and for
self-organized grammatical structures to emerge. p. 4
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. . . primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, "Introduction"
. . . Power focuses
on the trend towards counter-dominance and egalitarianism highlighted
by the co-operative eye hypothesis and deep social mind.
Counter-dominance in Power’s view culminates in reverse dominance
established through a uniquely human social revolution—inaugurating a
hunter-gather tradition of ritual action in which primate-style
dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be
overthrown and restored again and again. p. 5
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Language consitutes a ‘biocultural niche’, embedded within the entire
human semiosphere—everything in human culture, material and
non-material, that is symbolic in nature.
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, "Introduction"
As Chris Sinha argues in
chapter 3, none of this implies that the social and biological
explanations ‘are fated to eternal opposition’. On the contrary,
the new paradigm highlights the ‘dual ontology’ of language—the fact
that it exists both in socity and in the mind. Language
consitutes a ‘biocultural niche’, embedded within the entire human
semiosphere—everything in human culture, material and non-material,
that is symbolic in nature. Sinha identifies the origins of
language in the transityion from signals of the kind used by other
animals to influence one another’s behaviour—what might be termed body
language—to something entirely new. Humans began to interact
‘intersubjectively’, each viewing their own mental states and
intentions as if through th other’s eyes. Against this
background,our ancestors accomplished the momentous transition to
mutually agreed symbols, used by humans to influence not the world, but
how others understand the world. p. 5
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. . . the cultural technologies of reading and writing seem to have extended
human memory, enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided new ways
of scanning visual items, thus making human[s] even more cognitively
plastic.
Daniel Dor and Eva Jablonka, “Why we need to move from gene-culture co-evolution to culturally driven co-evolution"
The range and boundaries of plasticity are not fixed, however, and in
some cases plasticity itself can be plastic. This is especially
clear in the case of complex behaviors. For example, the cultural
technologies of reading and writing seem to have extended human memory,
enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided new ways of scanning
visual items, thus making human[s] even more cognitively plastic. 23
. . . it is important to realize that language itself, once it
was there, immediately enhanced the group’s capacity for further
collective exploration, because it provided a revolutionary new tool
for the construction of the common representational space. As
Tylen et. al. (2010: 3) indicates in a comprehensive review article,
experimental evidence clearly shows that language facilitates social
interaction in four ways, all of which are crucial for collaborative
exploration: “Language dramatically extends the possibility-space for
interaction, facilitates the profiling and navigation of joint
attentional scenes, enables the sharing of situation models and action
plans, and mediates the cultural shaping of interactive minds. .
. . Language, then, may have been entanged from the very
beginning in a co-evolutionary spiral with the human capacity for
collaborative creativity—first as a product, within the common
representational space, then (immediately) as a tool for the further
construction of the common space. 26
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Language . . . is a quasi-artefactual biocultural niche, and the
capacity to acquire and use it involves the evolution and replication
of a phenogenotypic biocultural complex.
Chris Sinha, "Niche construction and semiosis: biocultural and social dynamics"
. . . some biologists
are increasingly acknowledging the role of culture in shaping the
evolutionary process at the genetic level, by the construction of new
selective environments. Current developments in theoretical
biology, among which niche construction theory is particularly salient,
significantly depart from the neo-Darrwinian synthesis that dominated
20th-century biology, by incorporating an ecological dimension that, I
shall argue, proves to be particularly important for understanding
human linguistic and cognitive evolution. 32-3
Language . . . is a quasi-artefactual biocultural niche, and the
capacity to acquire and use it involves the evolution and replication
of a phenogenotypic biocultural complex. 37
. . . what makes humans unique is not an innate language
acquisition device plus a variety of other species-specific innate
cognitive modules, but a generalized semiotic or symbolic capacity,
epigenetically developed from a suite of cognitive capacities largely
shared with other species, but attaining higher levels of organization
in humans. This capacity is not inscribed in the human genome,
but distributed across the practices and systems co-constituing (with
the epigenetically developed human organism) the human
phenogenotype. 39
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intersubjectivity and shared intentionality
Camilla Powers, "Signal evolution and the social brain"
The nine-month ontogenetic
‘revolution’ enabling the human infant to participiate in
intersubjectivity and shared intention (Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003)
must be based in a phylogenetic revolution of certain species of
of Homo where Machiavellian strategies of counter-dominance (Redal and
Whiten 1994, 1996) and reverse dominance (Boehm 1999) became more
successful than primate dominance. Whiten and Erdal (2012)
emphasize the socio-cognitive complex of cooperation, egalitarianism,
and mindreading alongside language and cultural transmission in the
evolution of humans as successful hunter-gatherers. On the basis
of similar life history variables (Robson and Wood 2008)—length of
lifespan, inter-birth intervals, onset of childhood, and late
maturation—candidate species for sharing in this overthrow of primate
dominance leading to cooperative cultural cognition are H.
neanaderthaensis and possibly H. heidelbergensis, ancestors of
ourselves and the Neanderthals from half a million years ago (Opie and
Power 2008; Stringer 2012). 51
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All languages are socially constructed technologies for the instruction
of imagination, but the actual dynamics of exploration and
stabilization in each and every language could be as variable as their
communities, their histories, their particular communicative needs,
their collective capacities, and the private experiential worlds of
their speakers.
Daniel Dor, "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology"
Current discourse on human
experiencing tends to ignore the privacy of experience for a very good
theoretical reason: much of the discourse has emerged as a
counter-reaction to the solipsistic view of human experiences based on
Cartesian philosophy, and has thus sytematically highlighted the
intersubjective nature of human experiencing—the primacy of the
interpersonal over the intrapersonal. p. 108
In order to understand language, then, I suggest that we have to
abandon both the Kantian dictum, the foundational presupposition of the
cognitive sciences, that all human experiences comply with a universal
interpretive scheme, and the neo-Kantian conviction, the foundational
presupposition of most of the social sciences, that the members of
every culture and sub-culture experience the world in the same
ways. We have to begin with the acknowldgement that each human
individual lives in a private, experienctial world which is different
from that of the others, and is inaccessible to them. p.
109 Roper, Lacan
All languages are socially constructed technologies for the instruction
of imagination, but the actual dynamics of exploration and
stabilization in each and every language could be as variable as their
communities, their histories, their particular communicative needs,
their collective capacities, and the private experiential worlds of
their speakers. 124
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‘conventional knowledge sits in a kind of “middle ground” between
objective and subjective knowledge about the world . . . it is neither
strictly objective, nor subjective—it is ‘intersubjective’
Emily Wyman, "Language and Collective Fiction"
However,
a curious type of speech act know as ‘performative’ niether describes
nor brings about change in the world, but creates altogether new
institutional states of affairs, or ‘istitutional facts’, within it.
(171)
As succinctly put by Kalish and Sabbagh, ‘conventional knowledge sits
in a kind of “middle ground” between objective and subjective knowledge
about the world . . . it is neither strictly objective, nor
subjective—it is ‘intersubjective’. (173)
. . . the categories that humans recruit in making sense of the
world are, in general, not restricted to the traditional ontological
dichotomy of objective vs. subjective. They also include
categories of fact that may be termed ‘ontologially intersubjective’,
in that they exist in virtue of group consensus. Indeed, it may
be precisely becau such facts elude objective and subjective
categorization tht we recognize their intersubjective foundations, and
with no reduction in their normative force. As Plotkin incixely
observes, it is simply that for many human affairs, ‘the law is
grounded in the group’. (181)
More generally, that humans use language and symbolic action to
coordinate their private imaginings into shared, public fictions that
have normative force is profoundly revealing with regard to our social
evolution. In addition to sophisticated behavioural coordination
strategies (shared with many other species of the animal kingdom)
humans have, in addition, evolved modes of coordinating
cognitively. The ability to jointly imagine and subscribe to a
set of fictional statuses that we subsequently use to guide our
interactions in normative terms is qualitatelvely different from
anything observed outside our own species. Indeed, the whole
framework of collective intentionality, in which we share attention to
aspects of the environment, share goals and plans for collaborating
together, and subscribe to shared fictions that then further govern our
interactions, indicates an evolutionary environment in which the
threats ofcompetition and social exploration became outweighted by the
necessisties of cooperation and trust.
It thus seems highly relevant that significant phases of human
evolution appear to have been characterized by distinctly egalitarian
socio-political organization. These centrally involve anti- or
reverse-dominance mechanisms that punish individuals who who try to
establish superior social status over others, continually blocking the
development of social hierarchy. A socio-political climate such
as this may have been pivotal in attenuating competition levels in
hominin communities, such that collective imagination, status functions
and institutions, and the performative devices that enable us to
negotiate these could emerge in human evolution. (183)
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