The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind, and Culture (Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication)

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto

Buffalo

London

P1·inted in Canada ISBN 978-0 8020-9303-5

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communications Editors: Marcel Danesis, Umberto Eco, Paul Perron, Peter Schultz, and Roland Posner

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Logan, Robert K., 1 939The extended mind: the emergence of language, the human mind and culture I Robert K. Logan. ( Toronto studies in semiotics and communication) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9303-5 1 . Language and languages - Origin. 3. Human evolution. P1 07.63 2007

40 1

I. Title.

2. Language and culture.

II. Se1·ies.

C2007-90 1 64 7-2

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial suppm·t for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ( BPIDP) . This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

I n troduction

3

Part 1: On the Origin and Evolution of Language

1 Th e History of th e Study of th e Origin of Language

15

Part 2: The Extended Mind Model

2 The Evolution of Notated Langu age 2 5 3 T h e Ex tended M i n d Model of th e Origin of Langu age 41 4 A Grand Unifi cation Theory of Human Though t and Cul ture

58

Part 3: Comparison and Synthesis of Other Approaches to the Origin of Language

5 How Universal Is Universal Gramm ar? Ch omsky 's Generative Grammar 73 6 Is th e Primary Function of Language Social Communication or th e Represen tation of Abstract Thought? 90 7 What Are the Mechanisms That Led to Spoken Language? 1 1 4 8 On togeny and Language 1 28 9 Phylogeny or the Evolu tionary History of Language 162 Part 4 : The Synthesis o f the Extended Mind Model with Other Approaches

10 The Syn th esis of Five Appro aches to the Origin of Language 2 0 7 1 1 Overlaps o f t h e Extended Mind Model with the Work of Clark, Jackendoff, and Schumann 223

vi

Contents

Part 5: The Co-evolution of Culture: Language and Altruism and the Emergence of Universal Culture

1 2 The Co-evolution of Cul ture and Language

241

1 3 Altruism and th e Origin of Langu age and Culture 2 5 2 1 4 Culture as an Organism and t h e Emergence of Un iversal Culture 264 Epilogue: The Propagati ng Organization of Language and Culture

References Index

313

293

287

T H E EXT EN D ED M I N D : T H E E M ER G E N C E O F LAN GUAGE, T H E H U MAN M I N D , AN D C U LT U R E

Introduction

And as imagination bodies forth. The form of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

The origin and evolu tion of human language is one of th e great mys­ teri es confron ting contemporary schol arship and sci ence. A problem­ cen tred rath er than a discipli ne-cen tred study, it is not a subject that can be addressed by one di scipli n e but rath er requires th e input from a host of fields i n cluding linguistics, computational linguistics, psycholinguis­ tics, evolu tionary biology, evolutionary psychology, primatol ogy, cultu ral anthropology, archaeology, physiol ogy, phonology, neurophysiology, cognitive science, and media ecology. I must confess to the reader that I am not an expert in any of th ese fi elds with the exception of the last one, through my study of the evolu tion of notated language, nam ely, wri ting, mathematics, science, computing, and the I n ternet ( Logan 1995, 2004a, 2004b ) . In some of my earlier works ( 1 995 and 2004b) , I showed that speech , wri ting, mathem atics, science, computing, and the Internet form an evolutionary chain of six languages. My thesis was that a n ew form of language emerged as a bifurcation from an older form of language each time an information overload was created th at the older form could not handle. The study i n which posited that the notated forms of langu age emerged from speech led naturally to the question of how speech , the first form of verbal language, emerged. So I must confess that I virtually

4

The Extended Mind

stumbled into the origin of language field as a result of my earlier research with notated language. However, I believe, that I h ave so me­ thing n ew to contribute to thi s field th rough my experience of working wi th the historical data associated with th e notated languages within the context of media ecology, a fi eld of stu dy pioneered by Marshall McLuhan and H arold Innis. Given the pauci ty of data available to the origin of language field, I believe there are things that can be learned fro m the historical data set associated with n o tated language. I hope that the reader will find my approach of val ue. I certainly come to the field with new eyes. My goals in this book are threefold. First, I wish to presen t the Extended Mind Model , which I developed to explain the emergence of language. I first presented this model to an academic audience in 1997 (Logan 1 997) at a conference on th e role of chaos theory in psychology and th e life sci ences an d published on it for the first time in an academ ic j ournal three years later ( Logan 2000 ) . Second, I wish to supplement my simpl e m odel, which only partially expl ai ns the emergence of language, with other models th at I feel are consistent with my approach . In achiev­ ing the second goal I will first review the extensive li terature that has emerged in the past fi fteen years, criti quing it from the perspective of my approach. I believe that the Ex ten ded Mind Model sheds some light on a number of controversies raging in th e evolution of language field, but I will leave that j udgment to th e reader. Fi nally, my third goal is to use the i nsigh ts in my work and that of others to draw parallels between language and culture and develop the notion of Universal Cul ture, which is to cul­ ture what Chom sky 's Universal Gram mar is to language. I have divided my book into five parts. In part 1 , I formul ate the objectives of my study and provide th e reader with a history of the study of the origin and evolution of language as well as the h istory of my entry i n to thi s field. I also provide the fram ework within which I will review the literature, namely, Tinbergen 's Four Why's, which are four ques­ tion s that need to be answered to understand a biological phenomenon such as the emergence and evolu tion of human l anguage. I n part 2 , I review my earlier work in the evolution of n o tated l anguage (chapter 2 ) , i n which language i s shown to b e both a communication medium and an informatics tool and develop the Extended Mind Model to explain the origin of verbal l anguage (chapters 3 and 4 ) .

Introduction

5

The o ngms of speech and the human mind are shown to h ave emerged si multaneously as th e bifurcation from percepts to concepts and a response to the chaos associated with the information overload that resul ted from the in creased complexity of hominid life . As our ancestors d eveloped toolmaking, controlled fire, lived i n larger social groups, and engaged in l arge-scale coordinated h u n ting, th eir brains could n o longer cope wi th the richness of life solely o n th e basis of i ts perceptual sensorium and as a result a n ew level of ord er em erged i n the form of conceptualization and speech . Speech arose si multaneously as a way to con trol information and as a medium for comm u n ication . Rather th an regarding th ough t a s silent speech, o n e m ay j u st a s well regard speech as vocal ized thought. The mechanism that allowed th e transition fro m percept to concept was the em ergen ce of speech . The words of spoken language are the actual medium or mechanism by which concepts are expressed or repre­ sented. Words are both metaphors and strange attrac tors u n i ting many perceptual experiences in terms of a single con cept. Spoken language and abstract con ceptual thinking emerged simultaneou sly, as the bifur­ cation from n on-verbal communication skills and th e concrete percept­ based thinking of prelingual hominids. The tran sition from percep t-based thi nking to concep t-based think­ ing represented a m ajor discontinuity in human though t and entailed three m ajor stages or breakthroughs in hominid cogni tion : 1 Manual praxic arti culation (or toolmaking a n d tool use) 2 Social organization ( or the language of social in teraction ) 3 Preverbal communicati o n , which entails the use of hand signals, mime, gesture, and prosodic vocalizati o n . I t i s shown tha t these cognitive breakthroughs represen t three distinct percept-based preverbal forms of proto-language. They were the cogni­ tive laboratory in which the skills of generativity, representati o n , and communication developed and, hence, were the source of the cognitive fram ework for speech . We use our dynamic systems model of the mind to understand the connections between technology, commerce, artistic expressio n , nar­ ratives, and science and to generate what we h ave playfully called the

6

The Extended Mind

Grand U nification Theory of H u m an Thought and Culture. The three percept-based preverbal forms of language represen t more than j ust the transi tion to spoken language and abstract conceptual thought. Trans­ formed by spoken language and th e abstract thought th at followed in i ts wake, they also served as th e prototypes of three fundamental ac tivi ties of modern h u m ans, nam ely, technology which emerged fro m toolm ak­ ing, commerce wh ich em erged fro m social organ iz ati o n , and the arts which emerged from mim etic communications. In th is way we link these activities to th ose associated with the verbal languages of speech , wri t­ ing, mathem atics, science, and computing. Language is the link that un ited all th e activi ties of human enterprise. A model to address the mind-body problem i s developed in which it is assumed that th e mind came into being with the adven t of verbal language and, hence, conceptual thought. Language is a tool that extended the brain and made it more effective , thus creating the human mind. In part 3 , I first critique Cho m sky 's notion of th e hard-wiring of the Universal Grammar and th e Langu age Acquisition D evice ( chapter 5 ) . I then revi ew the evolution of language l i terature within the framework of Tinbergen 's Four Why's, identifYing the con ten tious i ssues in the fi eld and suggesting ways in wh ich the Ex tended Mind Model might resolve som e of th em (chapters 6 to 9 ) , thereby identifying those models th at I believe are compatible with my own approach. In part 4, a synthesis of the Extended Mind Model is m ade wi th a n um­ ber of other compatible approaches ( chapters 1 0 and 1 1 ) . Al though the Extended Mind Model is li mited in its scope and does not account for all aspects of spoken language, it does complem en t a number of other m od­ els that m ore fully describe the emergen ce and evolution of language. I also show how the Extended Mind Model supports some of these model s a n d cri tiques others a n d vice versa show how certain m odels ( Chris­ tiansen 1 994 ; Chri stiansen and Devlin 1 99 7; Christiansen and Ellefson 2002; Christiansen and Kirby 2003; Clark 1 997, 2003; Donald 1 99 1 , 1 998; Deacon 1 99 7, 2003; Jacken doff 2002; Schumann 2003a, 2003b; and Tomasello 1 999) support and complement the Extended Mind Model. The synthesis th at emerges from this analysis provides a feasible model or narrative for the way i n which human language with all its complexi ties and many fun ctions m ay have emerged.

Introduction

7

I n part 5 , I explore th e rel a tionship of langu age and culture and the paral l el s that can be drawn between th ese two ph enomena. In chapter 12, I fo cus o n th e co-evol u tion of language a n d culture. I n chapter 1 3 , th e r o l e of altru i sm in th e emergen c e of language i s exam­ i n e d . By exten ding Ch ristiansen 's n otion that langu age m ay be trea ted or represen te d as an organism to culture, I show i n chap ter 14 th at culture, like language, should h ave un iversal fea tures and th erefore propose th e existence of Universal Culture as an analogue to the Uni­ versal Grammar. A survey of th e li terature on cul ture is made to sup­ port this hypoth esis . A History o f My Study o f the Emergence an d Evolution of Language

I am not a li nguist or a cogni tive sci entist but rather a physicist who mor­ phed i n to a media ecologist. I became interested in th e impact of science on society as the resul t of a course I taugh t beginning in 1 9 7 1 at th e Universi ty of Toron to called the ' Poetry of Physics. ' I was fascinated by the probl em posed by Joseph Needham, i n his book The Grand Titra­ tion ( 1 9 79 ) of why abstract sci ence began in the West even though so much of technology origi nated in Chi n a . I proposed th at since mono­ theism and codified law were u nique to the West and that together they give rise to a notion of universal law that thi s might explain the Needham paradox . I shared these thoughts with Marshall McLuhan , wh o i m mediately pointed out that the alph abet, whi ch served as a model for analysi s, cl assificati o n , coding, and decoding, was also unique to th e West. We combined our ideas and developed the hypothesis that the phoneti c alphabet, codified law, monotheism, abstract sci ence, and deductive logic were id eas unique to the West, and while they were not cau sally linked, they were self-supporting or au tocatalytic ( McLuhan and Logan 1 977) . I carried away from thi s work on the alphabet effect ( Logan 2004a) the understanding that the way in whi ch a langu age was n o tated could affect the way i ts users think and develop concepts. The next project that I began was to study the impact of computer use o n learning and work and, hence, cogniti o n . Once again I came to the conclusion that the way i n which language is n o tated affects the way in whi ch we think and that l anguage, like compu ting, i s both a medium of

8

The Extended Mind

communication and an informatics tool whi ch I ( Logan 1 995, 2004b) formulated in terms of the equation : language= communi cations + informatics. A collaboration with Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who investigated the origin of wri ti ng and num erical notation ( see Schman dt-Besserat 1 99 2 ) , led m e to th e conclusion th at speech , wri ti ng, mathem atics, sci ence, and computing were each individual languages wi th their own unique semantics and syn tax . A chance m eeting with Ilya Prigogine, while visi t­ ing Schmandt-Besserat at the Universi ty of Texas, led to another conclu­ sion - nam ely, th at these five languages form an evol u tionary chain and that each n ew language emerged as a new l evel of order in response to the chaos of an inform ation overload th at arose in conj u n c tion wi th the use of th e earl ier languages ( Logan 1 995; also see chapter 2 herein for more details) . I subsequen tly added th e Internet to th is evolutionary chain of languages as the sixth langu age ( Logan 2004b) . This line of research led me to wonder how the first language, speech , might have come i n to existence. I made use of Prigogin e 's ideas once again and concluded that the complexity of hominid life, as detailed by Merlin Donald ( 1 991 ) , became so great that speech em erged as a transi­ tion from percept-based though t to concept-based thought. I further hypoth esized th at th e first words were our first concepts and th at they acted as strange attractors u n i ting the various perceptu al experiences associated with that word. Bu t more of this later when I present my Extended Mind Model in chapters 3 and 4, which I hope will sti mulate discussion and dialogue wi th others i n thi s field . Because t h e origin of language took place ten s o f thousands o f years ago there is, of courses, a dearth of empirical data to shed light o n these events. My work with th e evolu tion of notated language can provide a source of empirical data, which to date has been l argely overlooked and perhaps provid e som e i nsigh ts into our understanding of the emer­ gence of l angu age . I welcome all comments and criticisms of thi s work, which by i ts n ature of trying to reconstruct events of our deepest past, is speculative. I invite readers to contact m e with their thoughts and com­ ments by email at [email protected] toronto .ca.

Introduction

9

The second aim of this study is to revi ew, juxtapose, com pare, and syn thesize the l arge body of work of the linguisti c community on the origi n of language, using the Extended Mind Model for the emergence of langu age (2000 ) , which is based on my theory of th e evol ution of n o tated langu age ( Logan 1 9 9 5 , 2 004 a, 2004b ) . These two bodies of work can i nform each other. The th esis that will be developed in th i s essay is t h a t historical d a t a relating to th e evolution of language after the adven t of speech and beginning with th e emergence of writing can sh ed ligh t on the origin and evolution of human language and resolve some of the con troversi es and differences of opinion that exist in this fiel d . At the same tim e , th e origin of speech body of work can enrich our un derstan ding of the evolution of notated language. There are two basic assumptions fro m my previous work on n o tated languages that I wo uld like to bring to thi s study of the origin of spoken language. One i s th e n o tion that language i s at the same ti me both a medium of communi cation and an informatics tool used to represent abstract thoughts and th at th ese two functions of language emerged simultaneously and co-evolved . As a result th e question as to which came first, communication or represen tati o n , becomes moot. The language of though t - mentalese, as defined by Gerry Fodor ( 1 975 ) - is nothing more than th e natural language used for everyday communications. As l anguage allowed h u m a n s to c o m m u n i c a te abstract concep ts to each o th er th ey were also able to use these c o n c ep ts for the i n ternal dialogue of conceptual thinking. The two activi ties em erged simul ta­ neou sly. The creation of verbal langu age represents a bifu rcation from perceptual men tal activi ty to o n e based o n abstract con cepts. For this reaso n , ideas from complexity or emerge n c e th eory will be used to suggest th at the em ergence of verbal l an gu age was a classical example of p u n c tu a ted evolu ti o n in which th e n o n-verbal, m i m eti c , percept-based preverbal for m s of t h e language of h o m i n i ds evolved i n to verbal concept-based speech and th e i n ner voice tha t we call conscious th inking. A second notion that I would like to bring to this study of the origin of language fro m my work on the evolution of n o tated language is the idea that n ew elements of l anguage (and, hence, l angu age itself) emerge fro m a response to an infor mation overload due to an i ncreased

10

The Extended Mind

complexity in human life . Thus, the origin of speech represen ts a bifur­ cation from perceptual thinking to con ceptual thinking brough t on by the in creased complexity of hominid life resul ti ng from toolmaking, the control of fire, and the i ncreased complexity of cooperative social structures th at arose to take advan tage of the hearth and l arge-scale coordinated h u n ting. I will go i n to th e details of my Ex tended Mind Mod el later in th is study ( chapter 3) . In pursuing this project and offering my ideas to th e reading public based on my work wi th th e evolution of notated language, I am com­ forted by the following words of Derek Bickerton 'The sooner we start building bridges between the stu dy of language, o n the one hand, and studies of human evolution and hu man neurology on the other, the better. To be sure , our earliest proposals on the subject will probably be naive and misguided. Thi s does not matter as long as we realize th at th ose proposals are first approximations th at will have to be revised countl ess ti mes' ( 1 995 , 76) . I also regard as a mandate for th e approach I have taken th e following comment by Michael Tomasello, whose model for the em ergence of lan­ guage entails th e process of sociogenesis, whereby something new is cre­ ated through th e social in teraction of two or m ore indivi duals: ' Ideally we should know much more than we do about the processes of sociogenesis in differen t domains of activi ty in h uman history. Cultural psych ologists, who should be concerned with this problem , have mostly not spen t great effort in empirical investigations of the historical processes by m eans of which particular cultural insti tu tions in particular cul tures have taken shape . . . Perhaps th e most enligh tening investigations of these processes are studies by intellectual historian s concerned with such things as the history of technology, the history of science and m a th em a tics, and langu age h i stor y ' ( 1 999, 2 09- 1 0 ) . My an alysi s of th e evol u ti o n of notated language and its application to th e origin of language problem is precisely the kind of knowledge that Tom asello is calling for here. I have already confessed to the reader that, as far as the field of lin­ guistics goes, I am autodidactic and not an expert. As a consequence, I have made l iberal use of direct quotation s and allowed the experts i n t h e fi eld to speak i n their own words s o as not t o misrepresent their posi­ tions. N everth eless, I wan t to apologiz e at the outset for any mi srepre­ sentations that many h ave occurred because of the context in which I

Introduction

ll

have quoted the m . I give all the authors full credit for their ideas th at I have woven into my narrative and take responsibili ty for any errors or misrepresen tations. Thi s manuscript is part report on origi nal research and part documen tary. One of the l essons of my work with th e evolution of n o tated lan­ guages i s that th e emergence of n ew media change the nature of older media ( Logan 2 004b) . Such i s the case with the impact of the pri n ting press, the airpl ane, and th e I n ternet on the book. The printing press all owed identification of the author of a book to emerge and th is led to correspondence between scienti sts who read each other's books. The airplane facili tated face-to-face meeti ngs of sci entists at conferences where ideas could be exchanged . The I n ternet allows th e instantaneous exchange of ideas between the author and the read er. I hereby invite readers to communicate with me at logan @physics. u toronto .ca wi th their comments and cri ticism s. Earli er versions of the Extended Mind Model, which i s presented chapters 3 and 4, were first presented at th e 7th Annual Conference of th e Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and th e Life Scien c es at Marquette Universi ty, Milwaukee, Wiscon sin , on 1 August, 1 99 7 ( Logan 1997) and at the 5 7th Annual Convention of the New York State Com­ muni cation Associ ation , Monticello, New York, 8-1 0 October, 1999, but first appeared in pri n t later ( Logan 2000) . I n closing, I wish to thank a n u m ber of experts in th e fi eld wh o have taken the time to comment o n my ideas or h ave shared their ideas with me in various academic venues. Th ese i n cl u d e Morten Christiansen , Ri ck Dale, Terry D eaco n , Robert Este, Randy Goebel , David Hobi l l , Stu art Kau ffm a n , P a u l Levin so n , Mark Lip to n , J o h n Locke, Maria lelen szky Logan , Gary Lupyan , Alex M a n u , Bruce Powe, Dwigh t Read , Dominique Scheffel Dunand, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, John Schumann , Ilya Shmulevich , Louis Stokes, Lance Strate, David Sloan Wilso n , and Frank Zingron e .

PART 1

On the Origin and Evolution of Language

1

The History of the Study of the Origin of Language

The study of the origin of language has a fascinating history. In th e nine­ teen th century, because of the dearth of data and a lack of a theoretical framework, all attempts to explain the origin of language were highly speculative and of li ttle scientific value. The work that was presented became so arbitrary that th e Linguistic Society of Paris, one of the m ost ren owned linguistic societies of its day, banned, in 1 866, the presen tation of any papers that dealt with th e origins of language. Lingui sts i n th e twen tieth cen tury, with the exception of a few n eo-Darwinians, were quite con tent to describe the structures of languages, the way in which they operate, how th ey are learned , how they change, and so forth , carefully avoiding the question of their origin or why they exist. Noam Chomsky, no doubt the most i n fluen tial linguist of the past fifty years, also avoided th e question of the origi ns of language and was particularly sceptical about the possibility of a Darwinian explanation, asserting at one point that ' D arwinian theory is so loose i t can incorporate everything' (in Horgan 1 99 5 , 1 54 ) . Not all linguists ( see Burl i ng 1 9 86; Calvin 1 983; H u r ford 1 9 89 ; Krebs and D awkin s 1 9 84 ; Li eberman 1 9 73 , 1 9 75 , 1 984; Pinker and Bloom 1 990) , despite their respect for Chomsky's work, were ready to give up on ' natural selection ' and accept that a universal gram­ mar was hard-wired into the human brain by some mysterious m echanism . Although m o s t scholars n ow bel i eve n atural selection has played a n important r o l e i n the emergence of language, opinions differ as to whether natural selection operated solely on the h u man genome has, as been suggested by Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom ( 1 99 0 ) , or whether it acted on both the human genome up to a certain point after which

16

Origin and Evolution of Language

language and/or culture evolved so as to be easily acquired, as I find to be th e case, and as has been suggested by Morten Christiansen ( 1 994) , Terrence Deacon ( 1 997) , Michael Tom asello ( 1 999 ) , An dy Cl ark ( 1 99 7, 2003) , as well as oth ers. In addition to this basic division, there are still a great m any different approach es and hypo theses to explain th e emergence of language . Each model seems to emphasize a different aspect of human language as the starting point for th e origi n of language. Some start wi th phonology, oth­ ers with social in teractions and /or social intelligen ce. There is debate as to whether th e pri mary fun ction of speech is as a medium of com muni­ cation or as a medium of thought. Some maintain that language evolved extremely gradually over millions of years, while others posit a sudden or catastroph ic appearance of speech . Some suggest th at language evolved from hand signals or other forms of mim etic commun icatio n ; others hold th at language began wi th vocalization. Furtherm ore , th ere i s debate as to wh ich came first: a lexicon or syn tacti c structure? Ib Ulbaek, commenting on his work and that of others who accept a Darwinian approach wrote, ' Each has put his own fingerpri n t on the gen eral outlook ' ( 1 998, 32 ) . All of these m any approaches draw upon a variety of data sets, but none examine the evolu tion of n o tated language for which there exi sts excellen t documentary and/or historical evidence which I m ake use of i n my approach . Al th ough I h ave d eveloped my own independen t m o d el for th e emergen ce of language based on my earlier work, I m u s t confess tha t as I r e a d t h e coge n t argu m e n ts presented by t h e proponen ts of o ther approaches to thi s problem I h ave come to th e conclusi o n th at there i s a great deal of m eri t i n their work. I n m any cases, I fin d the argu­ ments made by those with differe n t poi n ts of view very compelling, if perhaps a bit overstated or too singl e-m i nded . I have conclude tha t th eir conflicts a r e d u e i n p a r t to a difference of emphasi s o r perhaps a fam i l i arity or bias with th eir own field of specialty. This i s n o t to paper over som e of the real differences, b u t rath er to represent my view tha t a synthesis of th e different models i s i n ord er. I w a s reminded of the th ree blin d men who came to differen t conclusions as to the n ature of an elephant o n the basis of each separately exam i n i ng th e tru n k , a leg, and the tail, and they concluded respectively tha t the eleph ant was a snake, a tree, and a rope. So i t i s th at linguists have come to

History of the Study of the Origin of Language

l7

differen t conclusions as to the n a ture of langu age that range from th e idea th at i t i s (I) a social mech a n i sm of c o m m u n i c a ti on , (2) a m edium of th ough t, ( 3 ) a phonol ogi c al ph e n om e n o n , ( 4 ) a semantic tool, and (5) a generative gram mar. We shall see th at, l ike the ele­ phant, language is all of these th ings, i n d e e d , language is a m u l tidi­ m e n si o n al ph enomeno n . I t was extremely appropriate th at Tecumseh Fi tch opened the Fo urth Evolution of Language Conference at Harvard Universi ty in th e spri ng of 2 002 wi th th e following statement from Susanne K. Langer: 'The chance th at the key id eas of any professional scholar ' s work are pure nonsense is smal l ; much greater the chance th at a d evastating refu tation i s based on a superficial reading or even a di storted one, subconsciously twisted by a desire to refu te . ' Like the blind men i n specti ng th e ele­ pha n t we approach the questions of th e origin of language without a complete picture of the ph enomen o n . Our blindness stems from the fact that the em ergence of l anguage i s buri ed i n the very distant prehis­ toric past and th e empirical evidence at our disp osal is limited. If, h ow­ ever, we take a l esson from the three blind men and try to syn thesize th e views of scholars who have studied the origin and nature of language with the data and tools at their disposal , perhaps we can arrive at a pic­ ture th at in corporates the best of th e many models that have been pro­ posed in this fascinating field. Before proposing my own model I would l ike to clearly state my biases i n u n d ertaking this task . All biological pro cesses, including the origin of speech , are governed by both Darwinian natural selection and plectic processes. Plecticsis a word coined by Murray Cell Mann ( 1 996) , and it is the generi c term for chaotics, complexity theory, emergence theory, complex adaptive systems theory, or any of the other flavours of non­ linear dynamics theory. Examples of plectic processes i n clude Ilya Prigogi n e ' s ( 1 997) idea of order out of chaos for processes far fro m equilibriu m , Stuart Kauffman 's ( 1 99 5 ) notion of life emerging fro m autocatalytic sets of organic chemicals t h a t self-organized, and P e r Bak ' s ( 1996) idea of self-organizing criticali ty. Christianse n ' s ( 1 994 ) n o tion of l anguage as an organism , D eacon 's ( 1 997) model for the emergence of symboli c representati o n , Tomasello's n o tion of sociogenesis and j o i n t a tten tio n , and Clark ' s m odel of embedded cogni ti o n a l s o con tai n examples of emergence or plectic processes.

18

Origin and Evolution of Language

Perhaps m aking a distinction between D arwi nian natu ral selection and plectics is unn ecessary. I believe, as do many others, th at th e ulti­ mate explanation of Darwinian natural selection will be in terms of plec­ ti cs. In th is stage of our understanding of biological processes, natural selection and complexity or em ergence theory seem to some like two independent approaches, but with time they will even tually converge and be shown to be equival ent. When speaking of Darwinian n atural selection, we usually th ink of th e genetic evolution of a biological syste m . But, as poin ted out by Linnda Caporael (200 1 , 6 1 2 ) : ' Natural selection is a powerful general prin ciple in th e world of living thi ngs. What m akes a theory ' evolution­ ary' or ' Darwin ian ' is not th at i t is based in biology, but rath er the in te­ gration of three in teracting principles of change: variati o n , selecti o n , and retenti o n . Wh at varies, what a r e th e conditions for selection, a n d wh at are th e m echanisms for retention may differ: neuronal selecti o n , sel e ction i n th e i m m u n e sys te m , and l e a r n i n g a r e a l l examples o f selection ( Cziko 1 9 95 ) . Cultural artifacts, practices, and even sci e n ti fi c theories may b e selected ( Campbell 1 99 7 ) . ' Deacon poin ted out human speech ' i s a n evolutionary anom aly, not merely an evol u tionary extreme ' ( 1 997, 34) and therefore human speech represen ts a d isco n tinuity, a quantum leap, i n the beh aviour of animal life . The communication beh aviours of n on-human animals are not langu ages but, because we are so used to thinking of communica­ tion in terms of language , some make the m istake of identifYing animal communication as language despite i ts lack of generativity and i ts extremely small n umber of i ndependent sign als. Generalization is one of the pri m ary goals of sci e n c e and a key com­ ponent of the scientific meth o d . This does n o t mean th at all n a tural p h e n o m e n a are n ecessarily the same or u n ifi e d . The first a ttemp ts to explain the n u clear force were in terms of electromagnetic forces. Mter m any failures i t was realized th at the n u clear force was not a n extrem e of th e electrom agn etic forces but a n ew phen o m e n o n . Sim i­ l arly h u m a n c o m m u n i c a ti o n through verbal l an gu age is n o t an ' evolu­ tion ary extre m e ' of a n i m al c o m m u n icatio n ; i t i s a n ew phenom enon . The sam e is tr ue of n o n-li n ear dyn amics; i t is n o t an ex trem e form of l i n ear dyn amics but th e n ew ph enomenon of chaoti cs or emerge n c e . The disconti n u i ty i n c o m m u n ication i n th e transition from a n i m al

Histmy of the Study of the Origin of Language

19

t o h u m a n c o m m u n i cation is i n part a pro d u c t o f th e disconti n u i ty be tween l i n e a r and n o n-l i n ear dyn amics. N on-li near systems and l i n ear systems both bel ong to th e class of dynamic systems, but as soon as one i n troduces a singl e non-l i n ear ele­ ment one moves through a di scon tin u i ty in behaviour i n to the dom ain of chaotic systems. The non-l i n ear system is not an extreme (or a more complicated form ) of a lin ear system , as was once clai med by physicists. Non-linear systems exhibits emergent beh avi our. The butterfly effect is anomalous. The same is true of animal commun ication; as soon as one introduces a singl e concep tual or symbolic element one moves through a discon ti n u i ty i n behaviour i n to the domain of language system s as opposed to comm u n i cation systems. A n o n-li n e ar system is still a dynamic system , but its beh aviour is anomalous when compared wi th a linear system . By the same token , a human li nguisti c system is still a commun ication syste m , but it is an anomalous systems compared wi th an animal communication system. This analysis leads naturally to the questi o n : Was the emergence of language a Darwinian process or a process dominated by complexity or plectics? I am of the opinion th at self-organization pl ays an important role in the emergence of langu age and i s certai nly a product of non­ lin ear dyn amic processes, but this does not precl ude th e po ssibility th at neo-Darwinian m echanisms operated on bo th th e human gen o m e and on l anguage itself. I t i s also certainly th e case that the origin of language cannot be explained by a single cau sal factor. The n ature of language is ex trem ely complex, and l anguage is the produ c t of m any different mechanism s all of which had to be i n place for i t to have emerged. These i n clude phonemic articulati o n , phonemic generativi ty, lexical creati o n , conceptu al representati o n , comprehensio n , a th eory of the mind, syn tax , and generativi ty of propositions. Speech serves two func­ tions: social communication and as represen tation of and a medium for abstract thought. As to the order i n whi ch these functions and m echanisms em erged, it is n either prudent nor practi cal to assum e that they emerged i n a linear sequenti al manner like a string of beads on a n ecklace. There is cer­ tainly good evidence fro m ecology and genetics to conclude that the Darwi n i an process of the evolution of species is one of co-evolu ti o n . There i s no reason t o beli eve that the biological processes that l e d t o the

20

Origin and Evolution of Language

emergen ce of human language sh ould be any different and, therefore, I believe, th at the functions and mechan ics cited above c o-evolved . In devel­ oping my model for the emergence of l anguage, and in attempting to syn­ thesize it with th e others models of th e origin of speech, I will take the tack that the communicative and cogni tive functions of human language and the multiple mechanisms that m ade speech possibl e co-evolved together as an au tocatalytic system of communication and though t. Tinbergen's Four Why's

After th e publi cation of the article by Pinker and Bloom ( 1 990) , which reconciled the conflict between Ch omsky 's approach and th at of the neo-Darwinians, many other articles began to appear, each proposing a different m odel for the origin of speech . Although each model was based on natural selection each focused on a different aspect of human language. An in teresting way to an alyse the strength and weaknesses of these different sch emes i s to m ake use of Nikolaas Tin bergen 's ( 1 963) identi fication of four kinds of questions (known as the Fou r Why 's) th at n eed to be addressed to u n d erstand any biol ogical phenomen o n , in thi s case, human langu age . They a r e questions about: ( 1 ) function (or purpose ) , ( 2 ) mechanisms (or m achinery) , ( 3 ) on togeny (or develop­ ment) , and (4) phylogeny (or evolution ary history) . Most models for th e origin of speech address o nly one or two of these categories, but rarely do they consider all four at once which is n ecessary, I believe, to understand a phenomenon as complex as speech . Some phonologists, for example, assert that langu age began as th e ability to enunciate phonemes which led to the fun ctionali ty of language as a social and cognitive tool, whereas the social th eorists put it the oth er way around - that fun ctions related to social n eeds motivated the use of lan­ guage which then created a selective pressure to be able to expand the phonol ogy. Experts often see the phenomena that they study as the start­ ing point of l anguage and the other factors as consequences: ' D epend­ ing on which aspects of langu age are deemed to be most complex, different prior adaptations are i nvoked to explain how l anguage became possibl e ' (Deacon 1 99 7, 25) . N o doubt I am guilty of a similar bias as a physicist, who makes use of complexity or emergence theory and the notion that speech and conceptu alization emerged simultaneously as a

History of the Study of the Origin of Language

21

result of the com plexity of hominid life. This bias also motivates my assumption that language is both a medium of social commun ication and an informatics tool used for th e represen tati on of abstract concepts. The Extended Mind Model , which will be developed in chapters 3 and 4, simultaneously considers all four of Tin bergen 's Four Why's and incorpo­ rates the notion that the functions and mechanisms of language co­ evolved. In other words, mechanisms emerge to serve functions and functions emerge from mechanism s that perhaps served as pre-adaptations for those fu nctions. The on togen etic and phyl ogen etic relationship of functions and mechanisms is th at of elements of a non-linear dynamic biol ogical system. An other advan tage of this position is that it reconciles a number of conflicts between competing models, each of which have much merit, and allows them to be syn thesized. Rather than taking an eith er/or position on competing models I prefer a both /and approach . Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy sh ares a similar sen timent vis-a-vis the debate as to whe ther grammar is adaptive. He finds th at 'what both si des in this debate have generally had in common , so far, i s an all-or-nothing attitu de: either grammar is adaptive or it is not. But from the point of vi ew of evolutionary biology, th at attitu de seems oversimple ' ( 2000, 249 ) . For language to have emerged, there must have been an important function that i t served and, hence, was selected for. There had to be mechanisms to allow language to be realized . To understand the rela­ tionship between th e fun ctions and the m echanisms of language, it i s u seful t o consider Marshall McLuhan 's aphorism : ' Th e medium i s the m essage. ' I t incorporates the n otion that independent of i ts con ten t or m essages, a medium has its own in trinsic effects on our way of thinking which are i ts unique m essage: 'The medium i s the m essage because i t i s t h e m e d i u m that shapes and controls the scale and form of human asso­ ciation and action ' ( 1 964, 9 ) . The effects o f a m ediu m i mpose a n ew environment and set o f sensi­ bilities upon its users. It is helpfu l to consider the function of language as i ts message and the mechanisms of speech as i ts m edium . McLuhan observed that not only i s the medium the message, but the medium is also an extension of the psyche . One cannot consider the m essage, or the function of langu age as separate from i ts mechanisms or mediu m . The medium ( o r m echanisms) n o t only makes it possible for messages to exist, but it also influences the n ature of the m essage or th e function

22

Origin and Evolution of Language

of language. Conversely, th e need for the message or function creates the medium or the mechanisms. Necessi ty i s the mother of inventio n , b u t each n ew inven tion or machinery, in tur n , creates new needs a n d , hence, more i nven tions. T h e process a n d t h e relationship between the two is non-lin ear, continuous, and n ever ending. In addition to considering the fun ction and the mechanisms of language, as well as their rel ationship, we must also consider th e on tog­ eny (or developm ent) and th e phylogeny (or evol u tionary hi story) of speech because we are dealing with a biological system and not with a tech n ology th at can be d esigned and built by a sentient being. Not only must the mechanisms we iden tify be able to achieve th e function of language, they must satisfy two o ther con d i tions: ( 1 ) they must be so me­ thing that can be easily l earned by a child and ( 2 ) they must h ave evolved from some of the features of a simpler biologi cal system , nam ely, those of our hominid an cestors. Most of the models we encoun ter in the literature start with either a fun ction of speech or with a mechanism . The two i n i tial functions of language th at are exclusively cited are social communication and conceptu al or represen tational thinking. Those who hold that the devel­ opm e n t of a mechanism led to speech often c i te phonology ( a n d phonemic generativi ty) or syn tax ( a n d syn tactical generativi ty) . Other model s start with some form of n on-human prim ate or prehuman hom­ inid behaviour such as hand sign alling, vocalizing, socializing, throwing, or toolmaking. The only m odel that takes on togeny as its starting point is Chomsky's, where i t is assumed that the h u m an brain is hard-wired wi th the Universal Grammar (UG) and a Language Acqu isition D evice ( LAD ) a n d , h en c e , actu ally avoi d s dealing with the phylogeny of language and assumes that the ontogeny is automatic. I n the n ex t chapter I will su m marize my previous work with th e evol u­ tion of notated language and i ts emergence from speech to set the stage for my model for the emergence of speech i tself.

PART2

The Extended Mind Model

2 The Evolution of Notated Language

Eve1·y particula1· notation stresses some particular point of view. Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Six Modes of Language

The computer and th e I n ternet are th e m ost recent techniques for organ izing human th ough t in a long series of techniques and technolo­ gies, beginning wi th speech , for communicating, storing, retrieving, organ izing, and processing informati o n . The seri es includes spoken language, pictures, tallies, clay tokens, picture writing, logographi c (pic­ tographic or ideographi c ) wri ting, syllabaries, the alphabet, abstract numbers, numeral s, m ath emati cal signs ( + , -, x , =) , the concept of zero, geometry, mathem atics, logi c, abstract sci ence, maps, graphs, charts, libraries, the printing press, encycl opedia , dictionari es, bookkeeping techniques, the scientific method, photography, the telegraph , the tele­ pho n e , cinema, radio, audio recording, television , video recording, optical disks, computers, con trol th eory, cybern etics, and th e I n ternet. Computing and th e I n ternet, h owever, are more than j u st n ew tech­ nologies. They represen t n ew forms of language, if we accept th at lan­ guage i s defined as a system for both communi cations and informatics. Com puting and the I n ternet, which encompasses the World Wide Web , a r e p a r t of an evolu tionary chain of langu ages, which also includes speech , writing, m athematics, and sci ence. To establish my hypothesis, I will show that these six modes of language are distinct, each with i ts own

26

The Extended Mind Model

sem an tics a n d syn tax. Through h istorical an alysis, I will demon strate th a t each new mode of langu age evolved fro m the previ ous for m s as n ew i n formatio n-processing needs arose and th at each n ew language subsu med th e str u ctures and elem e n ts of th e e arl ier languages ( Logan 2004b ) . A New Concept of Language

Traditionally, the sole focus of linguists in defining language has been on communicati o n . One example i s Edward Sapir's ( 1 92 1 ) definition of language: 'a purely human and n on-i n sti nctive method of communicat­ ing ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of vol un tarily produced symbol s. ' While it is true that the main function of language has been communicati o n , thi s is n o t i ts only functio n ; language also plays a key role in th e processi ng of informati o n , including i ts storage, retrieval , and organizati o n . Language is a tool for developing n ew con­ cepts and ideas; i t is an open-ended system . Since wri ti ng, m athematics, science, compu ting, and th e In ternet permit th e developmen t of ideas th at could never have arisen through the use of speech al one, we must consider these oth er modes as disti nct, albeit rel ated, languages. General izing and extending Sapir's definiti o n , I define language as a purely human and n on-i n stinctive m ethod of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires, as well as processing, storing, retri eving, and organizing information by means of a system of volun tarily produced symbols. Given thi s definition of language, it i s necessary to recognize th at speech i s not the only form of language. My suggestion that speech and wri ting, for instance, are two distinct but related forms or modes of language differs from the beliefs of tradi tional linguists who consider speech as th e primary form of language and writing as merely a system for transcribing or recording it. Th is tradition d ates back to Aristotle, wh o postulated that ' th e sounds . . . are symbols of ideas evoked i n the soul and writing is a symbol of the sou nds' ( Bandle et a!. 1 958, 95) . Ferdinand de Saussure ( 1 9 67) , one of the fou nders of the fi eld of lingu istics, formul ated the modern attitude of linguistics towards wri t­ ing when he wrote i n 1 9 1 6: ' Language and wri ting are two different systems of signs; the latter only exists for the purpose of representing the former . . . The subject matter of l inguistics i s not the connection

Evolution of Notated Language

27

between th e written and spoken word, but only the latter, the spoken word i s i ts subj ect. ' D e Saussure's posi tion was reinforced later by another immensely i n fluential li nguist, Leonard Bloomfiel d , wh o stated that 'writing is not language, bu t merely a way of recording language by means of visible m arks' ( 1 993, 2 1 ) . The relationship between writing and language, as posi ted by de Saussure and Bl oomfield, is far too confining for un derstanding the implications of microcomputers and th e Internet for th e fu ture of com­ municati o n , work, and education. Their definitions are restricted to a model in which the sole purpose of l anguage is communicati o n ; th ey d o not take into accoun t the information-processing capabilities of lan­ guage. The definitions of Bloomfield and de Saussure have been re­ evaluated by a modern generation of li nguists, who view language from th e perspective of informatics a n d , hence, understand th e multi tasking nature of language. Michael Stubbs critiques Bloomfiel d ' s definiti o n , m aking the observa­ tion that 'writing is not m erely a record . . . I know from personal experi­ ence that formulating ideas in wri tten l angu age changes th ose ideas and produ ces n ew ones' ( 1 9 8 0 , 53 ) . Joyce H ertzler con curs, n o ting th at ' people often fi n d that their th ough ts are clarified and systematized , and th at necessary qualifications and ex tensi ons appear, when th ey sub­ ject th em to the m ore rigorous test of exactness and completen ess demanded by the written form ' ( 1 96 5 , 444 ) . Frank Smi th , too , agrees stating that ' ideas develop from in teraction and dial ogue . . . especially with one's own wri ting' ( 1 982, 204) . Wallace Chafe suggests that ' lan­ guage i s used i n a variety of ways, each of which a ffects the shape that language takes. Since the 1 9 70s, ever-in creasing attention has been paid to differences between spoken language and written language, and it has become clear th at each of these two broad categories allows for d iverse uses and forms' ( 1 99 8 , 9 6 ) . While it is true that written language is derived from spoken lan­ guage, i t is useful to regard writing and speaking as two separate language modes because they process information so differen tly. Argum ents that support the n o tion that writing is a separate mode of language can also be made for mathematics, science, computing, and the I n ternet. Th ese five additional modes of langu age each have u nique strategies for c o m m u n icati ng, storing, retrieving, organ izing, and

28

The Extended Mind Model

processing informati o n . I have , therefore, extended the notion of those linguists who consider speech and wri ti ng as separate modes of lan­ guage to claim th at speech , wri ting, math em atics, science, computing, and the I n ternet are six separate modes of l anguage, wh ich are distinct but i n terdependent. They form an evolu tionary sequence in which the later modes are derived fro m and incorporate elements of the earlier modes of l anguage . Th ey form a nested set of languages i n which th e later forms contain all of the elements of the earlier forms. Speech , th e first form of human langu age, is th e basis of all other lin­ guistic modes of communi cation and information processing. We can define spoken language as the sum of information u ttered by human speakers. Written language, wh ich is derived from speech , i s defi n ed as the sum of information that has been notated wi th visual signs. Wri ting differs from speech in that i t i nvolves a perm anent record , whereas speech disappears i m m ediately after it is u ttered. We shall di sti nguish five different modes or forms of written langu age : writing (or li tera­ ture) , mathematics, abstract science, computi ng, and the Internet. Wri ting and mathematical n otations were the first forms of written language; bo th grew out of th e system of recording payments of agricul­ tural tribu tes using clay accoun ting tokens in Sumer, just over five thou­ sand years ago. Th e langu age of science and its m ethodology emerged fro m writing and m athematics in ancient Greece some twen ty-five h un­ dred years ago. The m ethods and findi ngs of sci ence are expressed in th e languages of wri ting and mathematics, but science may be regarded as a separate form of language because i t has a unique way of system­ atically processing, storing, retrieving, and organizing informati o n , which is quite different from either literature or math ematics. A little more than sixty years ago , the n ext system for processing information emerged fro m science and mathem atics i n the form of computing, wi th its own unique cyberneti cally based and automated m ethods for pro­ cessing and organizing information. Fin ally, the latest form of language em erged from compu ting and telecommunications in the form of the Internet and the World Wide Web . Whether these s i x m o d e s of information processing and communica­ tion should be regarded as separate languages or whether they are merely six different aspects of the human capacity for l anguaging are questions I will not attempt to answer. For the purposes of thi s analysis, I

Evolution of Notated Language

29

will consider speech , wri ting, mathematics, science, compu ting, and th e In tern et as six distinct modes of l anguage, which form an evolu tionary chain of development. Wh at these modes of language share i s a distinct method for th e communi cation and processing of informati o n , each of whi ch changes our world-view. Just as Sapir argues that cultures d issect nature along th e lines dictated by th eir native languages, so th e six lan­ guages of information processing each provid e a unique framework for viewing th e world. A Model for the Evolution o f Thought from Language

In Thought and Language, Lev Vygotsky ( 1962) sh ows th at language plays both a communication and an inform ation-processing role . In his attempt to demonstrate the relationship between th ough t and lan­ guage, Vygotsky posits three phases in a child ' s developm ent of verbal thought: social speech, egocen tric speech , and inner speech. Vygotsky's first form of speech - ' social speech ' - i s purely for th e pur­ pose of communi cation and is non-i n tellectual . After using language as a tool for communi cation and social in tercourse, th e child di scovers that language i s also u seful for facilitating her th ough t processes. The ch ild then begi n s to display a phenomenon known as ' egocen tric speec h , ' in which h e i s basically talking to himself. The child vocalizes but i s not addressing anyone i n particul ar. This form of speech , which comm ences at abou t age three, continues to abou t age seven , when it suddenly disappears and i s replaced by ' inner speech ' - or thought. At first, egocen tric speech does not differ greatly from social speech , but as the child matures, the speech takes on more and more of the aspects of inner speech . Vygotsky's observations of children ages three to seven reveal that human beings resort to egocentric speech wh en ever they are confron ted with a puzzling situation they need to think through . Vygotsky concludes that egocentric speech is basically the child thinking out loud and th at i t n aturally evolves into i n n er speech once the child realizes that the vo calization is not necessary for the main function of this form of speech , namely, problem-solving or thinking: 'We came to the conclusion that i n n er speech develops through a slow accumulation of fun ction al and structural changes, that i t branches off from the chil d ' s external speech simultaneously wi th the differen tiation of the

30

The Extended Mind Model

social and the egocen tric functions of speec h , and fi n ally th at the speech structures m astered by th e child become the basic structures of his thinking' (Vygotsky 1 962, 5 1 ) . Vygo tsky 's model i s based o n th e notion that speech or language has two components: communication and informatics. Langu age i n the form of social speech i n children younger th an age three is pure com­ munication and social in terac tion. Wi th egocentric and i n n er speech , language becomes a tool for processi ng information or assisting the child to th ink. The only difference between egocen tri c and inner speech i s that the former, which appears first, i s vocalized, and the latter is not. But both serve the sam e functi o n . Once inner speech emerges and is used sol ely for the purposes of tho ught, egocentric speech disap­ pears, and vocalized speech is used exclusively for communication pur­ poses except in times of stress, wh en even ad ults sometimes th ink out loud by talking to themselves. The Evolution of the Six Modes of Language

Th e two principle uses of speech are for communication and abstract­ ing experience through conceptu alization. In preli terate socie ties speech was th e medium for social in teractions and a tool for the coordi­ nation of activities that require cooperation , such as h u n ting or food gathering. Spoken langu age evolved more complex fun cti ons and was used i n the cultural apparatus of a society to tell stories and sing songs. Eventually, speech was used as a medium to record (or store ) and retrieve cul tural information in the form of poems, folk tales, and folk songs. As stories became m ore complex , speech was used to organize the information stored i n these formats. Organizational forms such as rhyme , rhythm , meter, and plot, in turn, became information tools, which permitted l arger amounts of data to be stored and successfully retrieved ( H avelock 1 963) . Even tually, however, speech and the human capaci ty for memoriza­ tion encountered limits as to h ow m u ch data could be recorded i n this manner. Wri ting systems and numerical notations emerged, which allowed the amount and type of data being stored to expand enor­ mou sly. The i nven tion of writing and m athematical n o tations had a tremendous impact o n the informatics capacity of human language and

Evolution of Notated Language

31

though t. Wri tten records gave rise to n ew forms of classificati o n , analy­ sis, and o ther forms of information processing. The increase in the information-processing capaci ty th at mathematical n o tations make pos­ sibl e is easily confirmed by comparing the complexity of mathemati cal calcu lations that can be done with pencil and paper with calculations done solely in one's head. The i ncrease in th e amount and soph istication of data th a t writing and mathematics m ake possible even tually gave rise to a new form of language and information processi ng - the language of science. Scien­ tific activity, whether it is con crete or abstract, is confined to literate societies. Science is not j ust th e gathering of new knowledge about nature; i t also consists of givi ng a shape to that kn owl edge by organizing it systematically. Science is a form of knowledge management. The effective storage and information processi ng that wri ti ng and mathe­ matics make possible allowed scholars to gather and collect so much data that the only way to deal with the ensuing complexity and the infor­ mation overload was to develop a n ew mode of organization known as th e scien tific m ethod. Science and the sci entific method, however, also became a tool for generating still more informati on-gathering activiti es. The information overload th at modern science and the scientific method h elped to generate became so great in the twen tieth cen tury that it led to the developm ent of computers as a way to help sci enti sts cope with the enormous amounts of d ata they accumul ated and the complex calculations th ey needed to execu te. Vygotsky ' s work shows how chil dren discover that language, a medium of communi cation , can also be u sed as a tool to process infor­ mation and solve problems. O n e can easily extend thi s notion back­ wards in tim e and assum e that, at some point, humans discovered that their system of vocalized verbal signals could be used i n ternally, as a tool for thinking. I t m ight even be the case that speech arose to make con­ ceptual thinking possible and was then used for communication pur­ poses. And a third possibility i s that langu age emerged simultaneously as both a tool for thinking and a m ediu m for communication . The extension o f speech and its concretization in the form o f writing, mathemati cs, science, computing, an d the Internet l everaged language as a tool for thinking and amplified its informatics capacity while preserving its communication function . The motivation for the emergence of n ew

32

The Extended Mind Model

forms of language , however, seems to h ave been strictly the n eed for a greater informatics capacity, not a need for increased communi cation . Writing was first used n o t for communication b u t for th e keeping of accoun ting records. For the period just after the emergence of writing, ' few l i terary d ocuments [have been ] excavated, although the same period has yielded tens of thousands of economic and admin istrative tabl ets and hundreds of vo tive inscriptions' ( Kramer 1 959 ) . The very first words to be assigned a wri tten form in th e Sumerian langu age were the words for agricultural commodities that were collected as tribute by the pri esthood who admini stered the irrigation system. They used wri t­ ing to record who paid their taxes to th e state. Written num erals were i nvented at the same time as writing to keep track of th e amounts of each commodity th at were given in tribu te. The invention of writing and abstract num erals illustrates cyberneti­ cist Ross Ashby's ( 1 957) Law of Requisi te Variety, as well as the n oti on that necessi ty i s the m other of inven tion . According to Ashby, managers can only control a system if th ey can create a model of it that contains the requisi te varie ty or complexity to accurately describe it. The priests running th e irrigation system in Sumer n eeded to collect tribute from farmers in order to feed the irrigati on workers. They, therefore, n eeded to store and keep track of a complex set of data. Given th at human memory has difficulty coping wi th more th an seven , plu s or minus two, elements at a time , the only way the priests could remember wh o had paid their tribute and who had n o t was to create permanen t records of th e tribu tes. I t was only after th e invention of wri ting for the purposes of economic control that writing was also used for th e purposes of commu­ nicatio n , and even tually, for o ther informatics applications such as the composi tion of stories or wri tten poems. The development of science was also mo tivated by purely inform atics consid erations. Abstract science permitted greater control of nature through better organization of information and the ability to m ake pre­ dictions. The scien tific method provided sci enti sts wi th the requisite variety to control a body of knowledge that the languages of wri ting and mathematics had not been able to manage. The invention of computing is still another example of informatics driving the developmen t of language. Without compu ting, natural and social scienti sts would not h ave been able to manage the information

Evolution of Notated Language

33

overload created by their disciplines. I t was only after its initi al application as an informatics device that computing was also used for communica­ tions, and hence, its name in English is ' computer' ( as in calculator) and not 'word processor, ' even th ough by now far more users process words with computers than compute or calcul ate numbers with th em. The I n ternet i s another example of a n ew form of language that emerged from an information overl oad. Computing i n creased the sheer num ber of messages that n eeded to be communi cated as well as the num ber of people that needed to be communi cated with . As the world sh runk to th e dim ensions of a global vill age, the number of people in the village with who m one wan ted to communicate in creased dramati­ cally. Th is information overl oad or traffic jam of messaging gave rise to networking, clien t-server systems, and fi n ally, th e I n ternet. The In ter­ net, as opposed to cli ent-servers systems, was able to encompass the entire global commun ity in a singl e electronic embrace. As is so often th e case, a quantitative change created a quali tative change, and as a result a new language emerged : the I n ternet, or th e six th language. Starting with the ability to record ideas through writing and m athem at­ ical notation, human though t has become i ncreasingly more complex. The n eed to m odel more complex phenomena has driven the develop­ ment of th e six modes of language. Consequen tly, each new mode of lan­ guage is informatically more powerful than i ts predecessors, bu t at the same time a little l ess poetic, with th e exception of th e Net, which because of its visual and audio elem ents is able to incorporate th e arts and an artis­ tic mode of expression . Our model of the evolution of l anguage is one in which the information-processi ng capacity of language becomes more and more important as the complexity of human thought in creases. It is essen tial to remember, however, th at all forms of language possess a dual capacity for communication and information processing. Compu ters and the Internet are also communication devices and the spoken word has an informatics capacity. Both of these features of language must be addressed wh en we consider the origin of language. The Semantics and Syntax of the Six Modes of Language

The claim made here that writing, m athematics, science, computing, and the I n ternet are distinctive modes of hu man l anguage is based o n

34

The Extended Mind Model

the notion th at a l anguage is defined by both i ts information-processing powers and i ts capacity for communicati o n . To strengthen the claim that these five modes of language m ay be regarded as languages in their own righ t, and not just d erivatives of speech , I will demon strate th at they qualify for this disti nction solely on the basis of the cri teria established by trad itional lingui sts. According to Allan Paivio and Ian Begg, ' sem an­ tics and syn tax - meaning and gram matical patterning - are th e indispensable core attribu tes of any human language' ( 1 981 , 25 ) . Seman­ tics is th e rel ationship between li nguistic signals and th eir meaning or, in other word s, a lexicon : ' Naming is undoubtedly th e most straight­ forward and dramati c example of such seman tic beh avior' ( ibid . ) . Syn tax is th e structure or relationship among linguistic signals. New modes of langu age evolved to model in creasi ngly m ore com plex phenomena and, hence, according to Ashby 's Law of Requ isi te Vari ety, they required more complex structures to function . We, therefore, expect the semantics and th e syn tax of the n ew forms of language to retain the older structures and add their own new unique elements to th ose structures. If wri ting, mathematics, sci ence, compu ting, and th e I n ternet are dis­ tinct modes of human language, which deserve to be differentiated from speec h , then th ey must have distinct sem antic and syn tactical fea­ tures above and beyond those of speech . In the case of wri ti ng, the sem antics of the written word are quite similar to th ose of the spoken word , although there are examples where a construction that is accept­ abl e in oral language is not valid in prose and vi ce versa. Oral contrac­ tions such as ' d o n ' t ' or ' ca n ' t ' are not widely used in formal prose wri ting. As a rule, o n e ' s wri tten vocabulary i s considerably greater than one's oral vocabulary. We often use words in our written communica­ ti ons that we would n ever u se in our oral discourse. Written signs, how­ ever, have an additional semanti c feature above and beyond the spoken words they represent in that they denote at the same time spoken sounds (phonemes) , spoken syllables, and spoken words, and hence, carry a double l evel of abstracti on: a written sign denotes a spoken word which, in turn , denotes a concept from the real worl d . In logographic systems such as hieroglyphics, visual signs denote whole word s. In syllabic systems, the visual signs represent syllables, and i n phonetic alphabets, the l etters represen t phonemes ( Logan 2 004a ) . Words i n the

Evolution of Notated Language

35

latter two systems are represe n ted respectively by some combination of ei ther syllables or letters, depen ding on the system. I t is at th e syn tactical l evel that written l angu age begi ns to more radi­ cally di sti ngu ish itself from speech. Punctuation serves a fun ction beyon d seman tically reproducing th e n a tural pauses and refl ections of speech ; mainly, it provides a syn tactical structure to language that is quite different from that of speech . Wri ting encourages a formal struc­ turing of langu age consisting of sentences, paragraphs, sections, and chapters largely absen t in spoken l anguage. Analysi s of the transcription of m ost oral discourse reveals that spoken language is not gen erally organ ized i n to gramm atically correct sentences. In fact, th e very term grammar betrays its association with wri ti ng through i ts e tymology. The Greek term for letter; as in letters of the alphabet, is gramma. There are similar associations in other languages - gra m atas in the Latvian lan­ guage means books. In sh ort, gram mar was not formalized before wri t­ ing, j ust as there was no such thing as spelling before writing, and n o un iform spelling before th e printing press. Grammars are not exact sets of r u les: 'Were a language ever completely "grammati cal " i t would be a perfect engi ne of conceptual expressi on. Unfortunately, or rather luckily, n o language is tyrannically consisten t. All grammars leak' ( Stubbs 1 980, 39 ) . Before wri ting, rigor­ ous grammati cal conventions were not necessary because any ambigu­ i ties could be resolved either by tone , facial expressi on, or dialogu e . Listen ers could always ask for an explanation if they d i d not un derstand what was sai d . This i s not the case with writing, where readers are, basi­ cally, on th eir own . In addi tion to the formal disti n ctions between written and spoken language, there i s also the empiri cal change of sem antics and syn tax that th e storage features of writing encourage. Wi thin the semantic domain , one observes a m arked i n crease i n abstrac t words and termi­ nology as a langu age acquires a written for m . A comparison of the lexi­ con of Homer ( as found i n the transcriptions of his orally composed poems) and that of the ancient Greek philosophers and playwrights of the fifth and fou rth centuries B C E reveals the d evelopment of a n ew wri t­ ten vocabulary. The n ew lexicon of written words is rich i n abstrac t ter­ minol ogy appearing in the language for the first tim e , and old word s take on additional n ew abstract m eanings ( H avelock 1 963) .

36

The Extended Mind Model

M .A.K. H alliday regards written and spoken languages as quite dis­ ti nct: ' Wri tten language n ever was, and never has been , conversation written down ' ( 1 989, 4 1 ) . H e distingu ishes conte n t word s from fun ction or grammatical words such as the, and, then, to ( ibi d . , 6 1 ) . H e next poi n ts out that the ratio of content words to fun ction words is much higher for wri tten langu age as compared wi th spoken language, and as a result the information density of written language is much greater th an th at of speech . Another i n teresting distinction th at Halliday has identified i s t h a t 'wri tten language represen ts ph enomena as products. Spoken lan­ guage represents phenomena as processes . . . A piece of wri ti ng is an obj ect; so what i s represented by wri tten l angu age i s also given th e form of an object . . . But when you talk, you are doing; so when you represent by talking you say that something happened or something was don e ' ( ibid . , 8 1 ) . To contrast the two forms o f l anguage Halliday considers the wri tten and oral expression of th e same basic proposition . One migh t write, ' Opinion in the colony g;reeted the promised change with enthusiasm, ' i nstead of sayi ng, 'The people in the colony rejoiced when it was promised that things would change in this wa)•. ' The written sen tence contains o n e verb and has a content word-to-gramm ati cal word ratio of six to four, whereas the spoken sentence contains three verbs and has a con ten t word­ to-grammatical word ratio of seven to ten . Tom asell o , too, believes th ere are significan t differences between written and oral expressio n : ' O n e finds th at SSS [ spontaneous spoken speech ] and written langu age are very different gram matically ( Miller and Wei n ert 1 998) . Many constru ctions occur only or mainly i n speec h , for example, i mperatives and i n terrogatives, or only in wri ting, for ex ample, some types of complex n o minals, but not in bo th ' ( 2003a, 4) . Within the syntactical domain , th e maj or structural change with wri ting i s the appearance of the prose system, which incorporates many more an alytical features th an the oral tradition. With writing, not only do visual syn tactical elemen ts appear, such as the spaces between words and the separations of senten ces, paragraphs, and chapters, but the creation of permanent records through writing also gave rise to n ew syntactical elements such as charts, tabulations, tables of contents, and indexes: Givo' n ( 1 979) . . . and many others have suggested that the use of subordi­ nate clauses increases dramatically with literacy. The major study along

Evolution of Notated Language

37

these lines is Kalma'r ( 1 985) , which maintains that Samoyed, Bushman, Seneca and various Australian languages rarely employ subordination. According to Kalma'r: ' It is quite likely that the number of subordinate clause types grew as narrative developed and accelerated with the advent of writing. Typical is the development of subordination in Greek, which hardly existed in Homer but was well developed in the classics ( Goodwin 1 9 1 2) . ' Mithun ( 1 984) has made the same point in a Berkeley Linguistic Society paper. She undertook text counts on a number of languages with respect to the amount of subordination that one finds in discourses carried out in those languages. All languages manifest some subordination but there is a strong correlation between its rare use and the pre-literate status of their speakers. ( Newmeyer 2002, 369 )

I n th e lan guage of m a them atics, the sem a n tic domain or lexicon consists prim arily of precisely defined n o ta ti o n s for n umbers such as 0, 1, 2 , 1 00 , 1 /2 , 0.4, and the square root of 2; m a th ematical operati o n s s u c h as +, -, x , and -:- ; and logi c al rel a ti o n sh ips su ch as > , < , and =. Th e other seman tic elements unique to m athematics are i ts defi n i tions and axioms, su ch as th ose fou n d i n geome try, nu mber theory, and o ther logical system s . The language of m athem a tics differs from natural langu age such as spoken English i n that the sem a n ti c relationship between the signal - i n this case, a visual sign like a numeral - and the phenomenon bein g represented, as an abstract number i s to tally unambigu ous. In written languages, th ere are often ambigu i ties between the wri tten signal and the spoken word being denoted . With the exception of totally phonetic langu ages such as Spanish and Fi nn­ ish, there are also ambigu i ties of pro n u n ciati o n . George Bern ard Sh aw ' s famous example ( Stubbs 1 9 80, 5 1 ) of u sing ' gh o ti ' to ren d er the spoken word ' fi sh ' - taking ' gh ' from enough , ' o ' from women , and ' ti ' from n a ti o n - dram ati cally demonstrates th e pro n u nciation ambigu i ties of th e English alphabet. The precision of the seman tic conven tions of m a th e m a tics exten d s to t h e syn tactical d o m ai n . The basic syn tax of th e language of m ath e­ matics is th at of logi c. M ath em atical syn tax , u n l ike th at of spoken or written langu age , aga i n , is totally u n a mbigu o u s . The rules of gram­ mar that gover n speech and wri ting are subj e c t to con fl i cting i n ter­ pretati o n s , while those of mathematics are not. The language of

38

The Extended Mind Model

m athem atics i n troduces u n i q u e syn tacti c al str u c tu res n o t fo u n d i n n atural langu ages, s u c h a s proofs , th eorems, and lemm as. The language of science includes th e semantic elements of speech , writing, and math ematics, but it also introduces n ew seman tic units unique unto itself. These include quantitative concepts like m ass, force, velocity, mole; quali ta tive concepts like organic/inorganic, animate/inan­ imate, solid/liquid/gas, and intelligen ce; and theoretical concepts like i nertia, en tropy, valence, and natural selection. As is the case with th e lan­ guage of mathematics, the semantics of science is characterized by precise and unambiguous definitions even th ough much of the termin ology th at is employed corresponds to words th at appear in everyday spoken lan­ guage. In spoken English, m ass can refer to either volume or weigh t. In physics mass is precisely defined in terms of its gravi tational and inertial properties and a careful distinction i s made between m ass and weight. An obj ect's m ass is universal , but its weight depends upon wh at planet or in what gravi tati onal fi eld it finds itself. A traveller in outer space m igh t experience weigh tlessness but never m assl essness. As was the case wi th semantics, the syn tax of science i n cludes the structure of speech , writing, and mathem atics. Science also i n troduces its own syn tactical elements, however. The three most important ones, the elem ents, which in a sense define the natu re of sci en ce, are ( 1 ) the scien tific method, (2) the cl assification of information or data ( taxon­ omy) , and (3) th e organization of knowl edge such as th e grouping of scientific laws to form a scien tific theory. The centrality of the classifica­ tory and organizational structures is due to the fact th at science is d efined as organized knowledge. The scientific method , wi th i ts ele­ ments of observati o n , generalizati o n , hypothesizing, experimen tal test­ ing, and verifi cation , is the key element that defines the character of science. It is the scien tific m ethod that qualifies science as a distinctive language rather than a carefully organized scholarly activity like history, which also makes use of organizational principles and other modes of language, namely, speech , wri ting, and m athematics. The language of computing i n cludes all of the semantic and syntac ti­ cal elements of the earlier four m odes of language. It also possesses its own semantic and syn tactical elements by virtue of the activities of both its programmers and its end users. The semantics of the programming languages and end-user software programs specifY compu ter inputs and

Evolution of Notated Language

39

outputs. The syn tactical structures of programming languages and end­ users' software formalize the procedures for transforming inputs i n to outputs. These syn tactical structures are basically un ambiguous algo­ ri thms for ensuring the accuracy and the rel i ability of th e computer 's output. The syn tactical stru ctures th a t arise i n a programming language or a rel ational database differ from the other language modes so that the user can take advan tage of the computer's rapid information­ processing speeds. Although th e I n ternet and th e World Wide Web in corporate all of the semantic and syn tactical elem ents of computing, they also i n clude th eir own unique elements in both categories. Perhaps we sh ould clarify the relationship between the Web and th e N et. The Worl d Wide Web is o n e of many differen t elements of t h e I n ternet, which include i ts e m a i l facil­ i ties, listservs, chat rooms, ftp facili ties, Tel net facilities, Web pages, Web sites, i n tranets, ex tran ets, portal sites, and e-commerce si tes. Each of these facili ties represents the sem antic el ements of th e sixth language of the I n ternet. Listservs are a way of distributing emails to a group of u sers who share an in terest in a common topic , which allows an asyn­ chronous email dialogue to take place. A chat room is a place on the In tern et where people can meet online to discuss a topic in real tim e . T h e ft p facility allows fi l e s t o b e transferred from one computer to another through the medium of the Internet. The Telnet facility allows a u ser to access their server or home compu ter from anywhere in the world as long as they can fi n d access to the I n ternet. Web pages are com­ ponents of Web si tes or i n tranets, which in tegrate tex t, graphics, video, and audio. Web sites are publicly accessible collection s of Web pages that can be found using a URL or I n ternet address. I n tranets are private Web pages th at can only be accessed by qualified users. Extranets are a collection of Web sites that can be ac cessed from a singl e I n ternet address. An e-commerce si te i s a Web site that allows commercial trans­ actions to take place using credit cards or digi tal money. The I nternet has a number of unique syn tactical elem e n ts. One of the unique syn tactical elements of the sixth l anguage i s hypertex t, which makes it possible to link all of the Web sites and Web pages in cyberspace to form one huge global d ocument. Another unique syn tac­ tical element is the I n ternet protocol, which allows all of the computers connected to the I n ternet to form one huge global n e twork and makes

40

The Extended Mind Model

the Web, ftp, and Tel net all possible. McLuhan ' s prediction of a global vill age has been realized. Still another unique syn tactical element of the Internet are the search engines, wh ich in crease access to kn owl edge and information and, hence, provide an extra level of communication th at the other forms of verbal language cannot match . The search engin e also facilitates people fi n d i n g each other and, h e n c e , con tribu tes to the creation of a global knowledge com m u n i ty. This completes our description of how the five modes of n o tated lan­ guage evolved from speech . Readers desiring more details are referred to Logan ( 2 004b) .

3 The Extended Mind Model of the Origin of Language

The Emergence of Language

as

the Bifurcation

from Percepts to Concepts

All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

The model of the evolu tion of notated langu age presented in chapter 2 started with spoken language as a given and showed how wri ting, mathe­ matics, sci ence, computing, and th e I n ternet emerged in turn from speech . Thi s approach gives rise to th e qu estion: How did the first form of langu age, speech , from whi ch th e other languages evolved, arise in the first place? I t i s from thi s consi deration that I became i n terested in the origin of language problem and l i terature. My earlier work with the evolution of notated language was based on the premise that a n ew form of language evolved i n resp onse to the chaos resulting form the information overload associated with the previ ous forms of language. In light of this, we should an ticipate that the origin of speech was a response to chaos and inform ation overload. As a starting point I assume that before the advent of speech hominid though t processes, as inherited from our earliest ancestors, were percept­ based . Merlin Donald ( 1 99 1 , 226) makes a similar assumption about the perceptual basis of mimetic culture, the culture of hominids that existed just before the emergence of verbal language: ' Th e principle of similarity

42

The Extended Mind Model

that links m imetic actions and their referents is perceptu al , and the basic communicative device is best described as implemen table action metaphor ' (Don ald 1998, 6 1 ) . O u r earl iest h u m anlike a n c estors, whom we will refer to as homi­ nids, emerged i n the savannas of Africa, where th ey were an easy target for vari o u s pred ators. To d efend themselves fro m thi s threat, as well as to i ncrease their food supply, th ey acquired th e n ew ski lls of tool­ making, the con trol of fire, group foragi ng, and coordinated h u n ting. These ac tivi ti es resul ted i n a more complex form of social organ iza­ tio n , wh ich also i ncreased th e complexity of th eir lives. At first, this could be handled through m ore sophisticated percept-based responses, but at some poi n t i t became too great. Percept-based th ought alo n e did n o t provi d e sufficient abstraction t o deal wi th t h e in creased com­ plex i ty of h o minid existence. The hominid mind could n o longer cope with th e rich ness of i ts life based solely o n its perceptual sen­ sori u m . In the i n formation overload and chaos th at ensu e d , a n ew abstract l evel of order em erged in the form of verbal language and con ceptual thi n king. This idea can be expressed i n a sligh tly different way by making use of Ross Ashby ' s ( 1 95 7 ) Law of Requi si te Variety (LRV) , which has been for­ mulated in a number of differen t ways. I h ave chosen two th at, in my opin i o n , are more appropriate for understanding language as a system th at we u se to represent or m odel th e environment in which we live. One formulation of Ashby's LRV i s 'a model system or controller can only m odel or control something to the ex ten t th at it has sufficient i n ternal variety to represent it' ( H eylighen and Jo slyn 2001 , n . p. ) . Another formulation of Ashby's LRV is ' for appropriate regulation the variety in the regul ator must be equal to or greater than th e variety i n t h e system being regulated ' ( ibid . ) . B y m aking u s e o f these formulation s of Ashby 's LRV we a r e assuming that langu age is u sed by h u m a n s t o reg­ ulate or con trol their social and physical environment. When the complexity of hominid life becam e so great that perception and learned reactions to perceptions alone could not provide enough requisite variety to model or regulate the challenges of day-to-day life a n ew level of order emerged based on concepts. Percepts are the direct impressions of the external world that we apprehend with our senses. Con­ cepts are abstract ideas that result from the generalization of particular

Extended Mind Model of the Origin of Language

43

examples. Concepts allow one to deal wi th thi ngs that are remote i n both the space and time dimensions. If our first words were concepts, then lan­ guage allowed us to represen t th ings that are remote in both space and tim e and, hence, provided language wi th what Charles Hockett ( 1 960) terms displacement. Concepts also increase the variety with which the brain can m odel the external world. Percepts are specialized , concrete, and tied to a single con crete even t, but concepts are abstract and generative. They can be applied to m any differen t situations or even ts. They can be com­ bi ned with oth er concepts and percepts to increase variety in ways that percepts cannot. Wh at, we m ay ask, was th e mechanism that allowed thi s transition to take place? Assuming th at language is both a form of communication and an i nformation-processing system , I came to the conclusion that th e emergence of speech represented th e actual transition from percept­ based th ough t to concept-based th ought. The spoken word , as we shall see, i s the actual medium or mechanism by which concepts are expressed or represented . We must be very careful at this j u ncture to m ake sure that we d o not form ulate the relationship of spoken language and con ceptual th ough t as a lin ear causal one. Language did not give rise to concep ts, nor did con cepts give rise to language, rather human speech and conceptualization em erged at exactly the same point in ti m e creating th e conditions for their m u tu al emergence. My ideas regard ing th e relati onship of word s and concep ts h ave been influenced by th e work of Lev Vygotsky, i n his seminal book Thought and Language, i n which h e reports on his i nvestigation of the relationship between words and concepts i n the following manner: Our investigation has shown that a concept is formed, not through the interplay of associations, but thmugh an intellectual operation in which all elementary mental functions participate in a specific combination. This operation is guided by the use of words as the means of actively centering attention, of abstracting certain traits, synthesizing them, and symbolizing them by means of a sign. The process leading to concept formation develops along two main lines. The first is complex formation: The child unites diverse objects in groups under common 'family names' ; this process passes through various stages. The second line of development is the formation of 'potential

44

The Extended Mind Model concepts, ' based on singling out certain common attributes. In both, the use of words is an integral part of the developing processes, and the word maintains its guiding function in the formation of genuine concepts, to which these processes lead. ( 1 962, 8 1 )

Concepts are absolu tely essenti al for plan ning because they allow for abstraction and, in particul ar, for displacement in time. This explains why humans are the only animals capabl e of both con ceptual language and planning: 'The available ethological evidence so far indicates that man is the only species with the ability to imagine fu ture wishes and to plan and act accordingly' ( Gardenfors 2004 ) . Vygotsky makes a si milar point: In addition to reorganizing the visual-spatial field, the child with the help of speech, creates a time field that is just as perceptible and real to him as the real one. The speaking child has the abili ty to di1·ect his attention in a dynamic way. He can view changes in his immediate situation from the point of view of past activities, and he can act in the present from the view­ point of the future. For the ape, the task is unsolvable unless the goal and the object needed to reach it are both simultaneously in view. For the child, this gap is easily overcome by verbally contmlling her attention and thereby reorganizing her perceptual field. The ape will perceive a stick one moment, but cease to pay attention to it after its visual field has changed and the goal comes into view. ( 1 978 , 36)

Language and conceptual though t are autocatalytic and the dynamically linked parts of a dynamic cognitive system, nam ely, the h u man m i n d . Autocatal)•sis i s th e m echanism t h a t Stuart Kauffman u s e s t o explain the emergence of life: 'A living organism is a system of chemicals that has the capacity to catalyz e i ts own reproductio n ' ( 1 99 5 , 49) . An autocata­ lytic set of chemicals is a group of organic m olecules where the catalyst for the production (or really reproducti on ) of each m ember of the set is contained within the set i tself. As a result of thi s the system can become a ' self-maintaining and self-repro ducing m etabolism , ' that is, a living organism, i n the presence of a source of energy and the basic atoms needed to build organic compounds. A key idea i n Kauffman ' s approach i s that the members of the autocatalytic s e t self-organize a n d ,

Extended Mind Model of the Origin of Language

45

hence, bootstrap themselves i n to existence as a set wi th an iden ti ty dif­ feren t from th e individual members that m ake up the set, and hence, represen ts an em erge n t phen omenon . The autocatalytic process catalyz es i tself i n to a posi tive feedback loop, so that once th e process starts, even as a fluctuati o n , i t begi ns to acceler­ ate and build so that a n ew phenomenon emerges. The em ergence of language and conceptual though t is an example of an autocatalytic pro­ cess. A set of word s work together to create a structure of meaning and though t. Each word shades th e meaning of th e next th ought and the next words. Words and th ough ts are both catalysts for and products of words and th ough ts. Language and conceptual though t represent emer­ gen t phenomena, which bootstrap th emselves into exi sten ce. We will make use of a more gen eralized form of autocatalysis and sug­ gest th at any set of mechanisms or ideas that catalyze each other's exist­ ence is an autocatalytic set - an au tocatalytic set of mechanisms or ideas. Language and conceptual though t form an autocatalyti c set because language catalyzes conceptual though t and con ceptual though t catalyzes language. We encountered anoth er set of autocatalytic ideas when we examined the alphabet effect in chapter 2, where we postulated that the phoneti c alphabet, codified law, monotheism, abstract science, and deductive logic are a set of ideas th at are self-supporting. Later in our study we will return to Kauffman's idea of autocatalysis and its application to the origin of language and the notion of language as an organism. The Relationship of Percepts and Concepts

The use of a word transforms the brain from o n e state to another and replaces a set of percepts with a con cept. A word is a strange attractor for all the percepts associated with th e concept represented by that word. A word, therefore, packs a great deal of experience into a single u tterance or sign . Millions of percepts of a linguistic community are boiled d own by the language to a single word acting as a concept and a strange attractor for all those percepts. I developed the n o tion that a concept and a word are equivalent when I first presented the Extended Mind Model back i n 1 99 7 . Word s represent con cepts and concepts are represented by words. It is my belief that they emerged together so that words provided a medium by

46

The Extended Mind Model

whi ch con cepts could be represen ted , manipulated , spoken abo u t, and though t about. Thi s differs dramatically from the position of m any lin­ guists, like Steven Pinker ( 2 003 ) , who claim that words em erged for the purpose of th e communication of con cepts that already existed before language emerged. There is no conflict with my view and Pinker 's th at words and concepts are connected. H e suggested th at a word is an arbi­ trary sign that is a connection between a signal and a concept. Wh ere we differ is on the question of which came first th e chicken (word ) or th e egg ( the concept) . For Pinker first comes the concept and th en th e word , whereas I believe that they co-em erged . The word gave substance to th e concept and the concept was represented by the word. The word is more than a symbol or a sign that represen ts a th ing or a concept. To my way of th inking, the word i s the concep t and th e concept is wrapped in a word en cased in a phonological u tterance. To understan d the origin of language and words, we have to understand th e origin of con cepts and why they emerged. A concept i n the form of a word links many percepts of an i ndividual and, hence, extend s th e brain 's capacity to remember. Words as con­ cep ts are a form of ' artificial memory' whi ch creates ' artifi cial connec­ tions. ' Words bri ng order to a chaotic m i n d filled with th e memories of a myriad of experiences. Language is an emergent order. Concepts are ' artifi cial or virtual percepts ' - instead of bri nging the mou n tain or the percept of the moun tain directly to the m i n d , th e word brings the mind to the moun tain th rough the con cept of the mountai n . Th e concept of the m o u n tain triggers i n stantaneously a l l o f t h e mind 's direct experiences of moun tains, as well as i n stances where the word mountain was used in any discourses i n which that mind participated ei ther as a speaker or a l istener. The word mountain acting as a concept and an attractor not only brings to mind all ' mountai n ' transactions, but its also provides a name or a handle for that attractor-concept, which makes i t easier to access m emories and share them wi th others. They speed up reaction time and, hence, confer a selective advan tage for their users. And at the same tim e , those languages and those words with i n a language which m ost easily capture memories enj oy a selective advantage over alternative l anguages and words respectively. At thi s point in my narrative I would like to i n troduce a personal n o te and acknowledge the debt I owe to Marshall McLuhan, who through

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the many co nversations we had together i n troduced me to the idea th at our men tal life can be divided i n to percept-based and concept-based thinking. Long after d eveloping my model based on l anguage repre­ sen ting the transition from percept-based to concept-based thought I re­ encoun tered the following passage while rereading Understanding Media: All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environ­ ment and experience at high speed. Words a1·e complex systems of meta­ phors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant. ( McLuhan 1 964, 56)

Thi s passage , which I h ad read m a ny years ago , before em barki n g on th i s proj e c t of tryi n g to u n d erstand th e origi n of l anguage, obvi ously stuck wi th me in th e recesses of my m i n d . I am h appy to ackn owl edge th e role i t must h ave played i n the d evelo p m e n t of the i deas th a t I presen t here. I t was stri king to m e th at my i d e a th at l an guage speeds up th ought processes was actu ally for m u l a ted by McLuhan m a ny years ago . In suggesting that the first words were th e strange attractors of per­ cepts, I did not m ean to imply that all words arose in this fashi o n . I cer­ tainly believe that th e first words to appear were th e strange attractors of percepts, but once a simple lexicon of words and a prim itive gramm ar came i n to being a n ew m e n tal dynamic was established. The human mind was n ow capable of abstract though t and abstract con cepts, which would need to be represen ted by new words. These n ew words would not have emerged as attractors of percepts, but rather as representations of abstract concepts i n the form of grammatical relationships among words. The first words of this nature would h ave been , i n all likelihood, associated wi th grammar and categorization . Examples of the former would be function words such as he, she, th is, that, and, or, but, if, and examples of the words for categorization would be words such as ani­ mals, people, birds, fish, insects, plants, and fruits.

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In proposing that h u m an language began wi th the emergence of words acting as concep ts, I am following a tradition known as the lexical hypothesis, which posi ts th at ' th e lexicon is at the center of th e language system ' ( D o n ald 1 99 1 , 250) . Language began with a lexicon, wh ich then gave rise to phon ological and syn tactical structures. We will encounter advocates of this hypothesis as we travel through the narrative of this book and encoun ter the ideas of Merlin Donald ( 1 99 1 , 1 998) , Derek Bickerton ( 1 990, 1 995, 1998, 2000, 2003) , Ray Jackendoff ( 2 002) , John Locke ( 1 998) , Willem Levelt ( 1 989) , and Richard Hudson ( 1 9 84 ) . Syn tactical structures are also concepts. They are concepts tha t encompass relatio n ships between words, j u st a s w o r d s a r e con cepts tha t e n co m p ass relati o n ships between percepts. The Complexity of Hominid Existence

We are still left with th e questi o n , however, of what devel opments in hominid evol ution gave rise to th e complexity, the information over­ load, and, hence, th e chaos that led to th e bifurcation from perception to conception - and the em ergence of speech. N o singl e devel opment or breakthrough triggered this even t, but rather th e accumulation of d evelopments that i n cluded the use of tools, the con trol of fire, the larger social settings that fire engendered , the social organization required for large group living, food sh aring, group foragi ng, and coor­ din ated large-scale h u n ting that resulted fro m the larger living groups, and the emergence of n on-verbal mim etic communicati o n , as has been d escribed by Donald in The Origin of the Modern Mind ( 1 9 9 1 ) . Terrence Deacon ( 1 997) cites a similar set of hominid d evelopments associated wi th th e advent of speech . Th ey i n clude the provision of meat through hun ting or scavenging, th e use of ston e tools for h u n ting and butchery, and social i nsti tu tions or organizations such as marriage and ritual . Morten Christiansen ( 1 994 ) and his co-workers ( Christi ansen and D evli n 1 99 7; Christiansen, Dale, Ellefson , and Conway 200 1 ; Christiansen and Ellefson 2002 ) cite another set of skills associated with the advent of speech , namely, sequential learning and processing. But since toolmaking and tooluse, social organiz ati o n , and mim etic commu­ nication all i nvolve sequential learning and processing, the hyp otheses of D onald , Deacon , and Christiansen to my mind are similar. The

Extended Mind Model of the Origin of Language

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aspects of hominid life that they allude to create new l evels of complexi ty and result in n ew skill sets, which they assert served as pre-adaptations of language. In my model, language arises fro m th is complexity, while for Donald, Deacon, and Christiansen th e new skill sets act as pre-adaptations for language. There is nothing con tradictory between my approach and theirs. Indeed, they reinforce each other. Both th e skill sets acting as pre-adaptations and the bifurcation to a new l evel of order due to the increase to complexity complem ent each o ther, and each in its own way con tributed to th e emergence of language. One thing is clear, however, percepts no longer had the richness or the variety with whi ch to represent and model hominid experience once the new skills of hominids like toolmaking and social organization were acquired. It was i n thi s climate th at speech em erged and the transition or bifurcation from perceptual th inking to conceptual th inking occurred . The in itial concepts were , in fact, the very first words of spoken lan­ guage. Each word served as a metaphor and strange attractor u n i ting all of the pre-existing percepts associated with th at word in terms of a sin­ gle word and, hence, a singl e con cept. All of one's experiences and per­ ceptions of water, the water we drink, bathe with , cook wi th , swim i n , t h a t falls as rai n , th at m el ts from sn ow, were captured with a single word , water, which also represen ts th e simple concept of water. In my m odel , I assu m e th at th e human brain in terac ting with i ts envi­ ronment, i ts memories of i ts past experiences in th e form of percepts, i ts intention to communicate, and i ts social community i s a n o n-li near dynamic system . A word operating as a concept acts as an attractor for all of th e percepts associated with th at word. An attractor is a traj ectory i n phase space towards which all of the traj ectories of a non-linear dynamic system are attracted. The meaning of the word being u ttered does n o t bel ong simply to the individual but to the community to which that i ndividual belongs. Furth ermore, th e meaning of the word at any given i nstance emerges fro m the con text in which it i s being used . The attractor is a strange attractor because the meaning of a word n ever exactly repeats i tself. The trajectories of a strange attractor n ever meet, even though they come i n fi n i tesimally close to each other. I t i s the same with a word . The m ean­ ing of a word fluctuates about the strange attractor, but it i s n ever exactly the same because the context in which the word i s being u sed is

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always different. The context includes the o ther words in the utterance, who made th e utterance, the social contex t i n which the u tteranc e was made, and th e medium in which th e u tterance was made. Given th at the medium is the message (as was explained above ) the meaning of the word will be subtly affected according to whether the word was spoken, whispered, wri tten, telephoned, telegraphed, emailed, or appeared on a Web site. Our use of the word utterance in the above paragraph is an example of how con text sh ifts meaning. Utterance usually refers to th e oral produc­ tion of langu age, but in the con text we just used it u tterance took on the meaning of th e general construction of a sentence independent of the medium u sed to express i t. Al though in most cases a word moves arou n d an attractor i n the phase space of meaning, from ti me to time a word can bifurcate into two meani ngs. An example of th is is th e appro­ priation of th e words hot and cool to refer to two differen t styl es of j azz , nam ely, Dixiel and and bebop respectively. The word cool used in jazz further bifurcated to add the meaning avant-garde, 'wi th , ' or hip. Hip is ano ther example of a word that bifurcated. That we chose to identifY words as strange attrac tors refl ects the fac t that words in th e contexts of u tterance have multiple, even ambiguous meanings or multiple sim ultaneous perspectives, to use th e langu age of Michael Tom asello ( 1 999, 8-9 ) . Within the context of spoken language, the ambiguity is reduced because th e prosody and accompanying ges­ tures and hand m ovements add additional m eanings to th e words being spoken . Within th e con text of written langu age , without th ese extra­ verbal signals, th e ambigui ty of a word is at its greatest. Within the con­ text of mathematics and science, in which terminology i s given precise definitions, the ambiguity of words i s at a minimum. The attractors th at represent m a th e matical and scien tifi c ter m s approach fixed-poi n t attractors, b u t they are n o t totally fixed-point attractors. There is always a bit of fuzziness about even mathematical and scien tifi c terms, which can be attributed to the differences of opinions of m athematicians and scientists, and to Godel 's Theorem in the realm of mathemati cs, and Heisenberg 's u ncertain ty principle in the realm of quantu m physics. Spoken language and abstract conceptual thinking emerged at exactly the same time as the bifurcation from the concrete percept­ based thinking of prelingual hominids to conceptu al-based spoken

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language a n d thi nking. Thi s transi tion , an example o f punctuated equi­ libriu m , I believe, was the defining moment for the em ergence of the fully human species Homo sapiens. Thi s discon tin uous transi tion illus­ trates Prigogine's theory of far from equilibrium processes and the n o tion that a n ew l evel of order can suddenly emerge as a bifurcation fro m a chaotic non-l i n ear dynami c system ( Prigogi ne and Stengers 1 984; Prigogine 1 99 7 ) . Robin Dunbar has also made a link between th e advent of l anguage and the complexity of hominid existence, as measured by th e size of the social group. He suggested that language repl aced groo ming as a way of creating social cohesion as th e size and complexity of the social group i ncreased: 'The principle fun c tion of language was ( and is! ) to enable the exchange of social information ( "gossip ") in order to facilitate bonding in l arger, more di spersed social groups' ( 1 998, 98 ) . Three Preverbal Forms of Proto-language: Toolmaking, Social Intelligence, and Mimesis

The transition from percept-based thinking to concept-based thinking represen ted a m aj or di scon tin u i ty i n human thought. During th is period, hominids developed th e set of survival skill s associated with tool­ m aking and tool use, the con trol of fire, cooperative social structures and organization , large-scale coordinated h u n ting and gathering, and mim etic com m u n i cation ( D onald 1 9 9 1 ) . Based on Donald's work I would i n terpret these maj or breakthroughs in hominid cogn i tion as the emergence of three distinct percept-based preverbal proto-languages: 1 Manual praxi c articulation ( or toolmaking and use) 2 Social organization or the language of social i n teraction (which is sometimes characterized as social or emotional in telligence) 3 Preverbal communicati o n , whi ch e n tails the use of hand signals, mime, gesture , and prosodic vocalization, which Donald ( 1 99 1 ) defines as m i m etic communication . Before proceeding with m y analysis I h ave t o comment o n m y use of the term proto-language, which D erek Bickerton ( 1 99 0 ) coined, although without a hyph en, to describe a stage i n the developme n t of h u man

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language in which a l exicon of a small number of words existed without syn tax , and u tterances were confined to fewer than five words. I actually quite independently used the term proto-language, with a hyph en, before becoming acquainted wi th Bickerton 's work ( see Logan 1 997) to describe wh at I am now referring to as the three percept-based preverbal proto­ languages (listed above ) . I believe that th ese three forms of preverbal ac tivi ti es, identified by Donald as elements of mimetic cul ture, are actually proto-languages, although Donald never spoke of them in th ese terms. As Bi ckerton has already co-opted th e term protolanguage to describe the first stage of ver­ bal language, I have al tered my use of the term proto-language and will describe toolmaking, social organization , and mim etic communi cation as three percept-based preverbal proto-language forms. In a certain sense I regard th ese three forms of preverbal proto-language as more proto th an Bickerton 's pro tolangu age because they are earlier. To sum up I see an evol u tion from preverbal proto-language as identified by Donald to verbal Bickerton ian protolangu age to full verbal language as the following time sequence indi cates: 1 Tool m aking 2 Social intelligence 3 Mimetic communi cation (hand signal , gesture, body language, and vocalizati on ) 4 Protolanguage ( a limited verbal l exicon wi thout syn tax , a s d efined by Bickerton ) 5 Full verbal language (with a lexicon and syn tax ) . I suggest that th e first three breakth rough s i n h o m i n i d cogm tJVe developmen t can be u n d erstood as three for m s of percept-based preverbal proto-l a nguages because th ey each represen ted a primi tive for m of c o m m u n ication and i n formati o n processing, th e two basic fu n cti o n s tha t I have u sed to defi n e a language. Mimesis, according to D o n a l d , ' e stablishes th e fu n d am e n tals of i n tentional expression i n h o m i n i d s , w i th o u t w h i c h language would n o t h ave h ad an opportu­ n i ty to evolve such a sophisticated, h igh-speed c o m m u nication system as m o d ern l a n gu age u n l e ss there was alre ady a simpler slower one in pl a c e ' ( 1 99 8 , 6 1 ) .

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The three preverbal proto-l angu ages listed above were, according to Donald, th e cognitive laboratory in which the skills of generativi ty, representation, and communication developed and, hence, were the source of th e cognitive framework for speech. They also entail sequen­ tial learning and processing and, hence, following th e ideas of Chris­ tiansen ( 1 994) , could h ave served as pre-adaptations for speech . Justification for regarding the mimetic skill set that Donald ( 1 998) identifies as preverbal pro to-languages is that each one possesses its own unique primi tive form of sem antics and syntax - protosemantics and pro­ tosyn tax, if you will . The protoseman tics of m anual praxis or toolmaking and tool use are the various components tha t go i n to m aking the tool, tha t is th e materials and th e procedures n eeded to create and use th e tool. The tools themselves becom e protosem an tic elemen ts in the pre­ verbal proto-language of tool use. The protosyntax of toolmaking and tool use is th e order or sequence in which the procedures for making and using the tools are carried out. If the correct order or sequence is not adhered to , then the task to be completed will not be accomplish ed . If, as postul ated in The Sixth Language ( Logan 2 004b ) , a new language emerges wh en there i s some form of inform ation overl oad, then we should be able to identifY the chaos or information overload that led to th e em ergence of the preverbal pro to-language of toolm aking and tool use. Perhaps it was th e flood of ex tra information th at th e earliest homi­ nids had to deal with i n order to survive as bipeds in th e sava nna where the protection of living i n the tree top s was n o longer available. Tools were created to deal wi th the new challenges of living at groun d level where there were far m ore dangers th an i n the tree tops. The skills associated with toolmaking presumably led to the con trol of fire and to transporting it from one site to another. The con trol of fire, in turn, contributed to n ew and more complex social structures, as nuclear families banded together to form clans to take advantage of the many benefits that fire offered such as warmth , protecti on from predators, tool sharpening, and cooking, which in creased the number of plants that could be made edible, killed bacteria, and h elped to preserve raw foods such as meat. These l arger social structures bred a new form of informa­ tion overload because of the increased complexities of social interactions and organization . In this environment, a new preverbal proto-language of social interactions emerged wi th its protosemanti cs of social transactions,

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which included greetings, grooming, mating, food sharing, and other forms of cooperation appropriate for clan living. The protosyn tax of the social organization or in telligence incl uded the proper ordering or sequencing of these transactions in such a way as to prom ote social h armony and avoid in terpersonal conflict, and, hence, con tribu te to the survival and development of hominid culture . The overload of in teract­ ing wi th m any people and carrying out more sophisticated activities led to the need for better com munications to better coordinate social transac­ tions and cooperative activities such as the sharing of fire, the main te­ nance of the hearth, food sharing, and large-scale coordi nated hunting and foraging. From the chaos of th is complexity emerged th e preverbal proto-language of mimeti c communication . The protosem antics of mim etic communicati o n , the th ird preverbal pro to-language, consisted of the followi ng elements: the vari ety of to nes of non-verbal vocalizatio n , facial gestures, hand signals, and miming actions ( or body language ) . The protosyn tax of this form of communi­ cation is th e sequencing and coordination of these elements. Combin­ ing a gesture and a vocal ton e would h ave a different meaning than th e same tone followed by th e gesture after some delay or th e gesture fol­ lowed by the ton e. As the syn tactical complexity of mimeti c communica­ tion grew and became more sophisticated , it set the stage for the next d evelopment i n hominid communicati o n , namely, verbal language in th e form of speech , whi ch vestigially i ncorporates th e elements of mimetic communicati o n . It is not the literal meaning of words alone th at convey the message of spoken language, bu t th e tone of the words, the way th ey are infl ected , as well as the facial gestures, hand motions, and body language that accompany them . Embedded in th e syn tax of each of the three preverbal proto­ langu ages of toolmaking, social in telligence, and mimetic communica­ tion are generative grammars that allow: 1 Differen t ways of arti cul ating tools and manual praxi s to carry out a variety of n ew tasks as new challenges arise 2 The creation of n ew forms of c oordination and social cohesion to meet the infinite variety of challenges life presents i n cluding the navi­ gation through different forms of social conflict, the variety of which i s endless

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3 The expression of a l arge number and shades of meaning and feel­ i ngs through m i m e tic communication . Starting wi th the manufacture a n d u se o f tools, hominids began to d evelop the capability of generativi ty that is essential for verbal lan­ guage. Employi ng the correct syn tax of the preverbal proto-languages, that is, doing th ings in the proper order or sequence served as th e pre­ adaptation for th e generative grammar of verbal language. This model supports Chomsky's theory th at humans possess a generative gram mar th at makes the rapid and u n iversal acquisition of speech by young chil­ dren possibl e . I t also provi des an al ternative expl an ation to Chomsky ' s n o tion t h a t t h e generative gram mar i s somehow m agically h ard-wired i n to the human brai n . Donal d ' s work suggests that th e generative gram m ars for th e prever­ bal pro to-languages of toolmaking (or manual articulation ) , social orga­ nization (or social i n telligence ) , and mimetic commun ications served as a pre-adaptation for th e gen erative gram mar of spoken language: Mimetic skill represented a new level of cultural development, because it led to a variety of important new social structures, including a collectively held model of the society itself. It provided a new vehicle for social control and coordination, as well as the cognitive underpinnings of pedagogical skill and cultural innovation. In the brain of the individual, mimesis was partly the product of a new system of self-representation and mostly the product of a supramodular mimetic controller in which self-action may be employed to 'model' perceptual event representations. Many of the cog­ nitive features usually identified exclusively with language were already present in mimesis: for instance, intentional communication, recursion, and differentiation of reference. ( 1 99 1 , 1 99-200)

My model for th e emergence of language is based on Donal d 's work with the added twist th at I believe that speech i s concept-based and th at it emerged as a bifurcation from the percept-based preverbal proto­ languages j u st identified. My model for the origin of verbal l anguage , whi ch I have j ust outlin e d , was developed in 1 99 7 and, for the most part, grew ou t of my previous work ( 1 99 5 , 2000) with the evolu tion of n o tated language plus my reading of Donald's The Origin of the Modem Mind.

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I have since then become acquai n ted with Deacon 's The Symbolic Species, in which he also suggests an asso ciation of the emergence of speech wi th toolmaking: 'The appearance of the first stone tools nearly 2 .5 mil­ lion years ago almost certainly correlates with a radical shift in foraging behaviour i n order to gain access to meat. An d thi s clearly m arks the beginnings of the sh ift in selection pressures associated with changes in th e brain relevant for symboli c communication ' ( 1 99 7 , 386 ) . While Deacon does n o t m ake u se of the concept of social organiza­ tion or i n telligence, he does i n tro duce th e notion th at changes in the social dyn amics of hominids led directly to symbolic communication and that m arriage itself was one of th e first forms of symboli c communi­ cation in which the parties to the m arri age were th em selves symbols: The near synchrony in human prehistm·y of the first increase in brain size, the first appearance of stone tools for hunting and butchery, and a con­ siderable reduction in sexual dimorphism is not a coincidence. These changes are interdependent. All are symptoms of a fundamental restruc­ turing of hominid adaptation, which resulted in a significant change in feeding ecology, a radical change in social structure, and an unprece­ dented ( indeed, revolutionary) change in representational abilities. The very first symbol ever thought, or acted out, or uttered on the face of the earth grew out of this socio-economic dilemma, and so they might not have been very much like speech . . . Marriage is not the same as mating, and not the same as a pair bond. Unlike what is found in the animal world, it is a symbolic relationship . . . Symbolic culture was a response to a reproductive problem that only symbols could solve: the imperative of representing a social contract . . . The symbol construction that occurs in these ceremonies is not just a matter of demonstrating certain symbolic relationships, but actually involves the use of the individuals and actions as symbol tokens. ( 1 997, 400-1 , 406)

While Donald speaks of speech emerging from mimetic commu mca­ tion , D eacon i n a slightly different tack sees speech as assim il ating these features and co-evolving with them: ' Wi th the final achievement of fully articulate speech , possibly as recently as the appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens j u st 1 00, 000 to 200,000 years ago , m any early adaptations that once were essential to successful vocal communicati o n

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would h ave lost their urgen cy. Vestiges of these once-critical supports likely n ow constitute the m any near-universal gestural and prosodic companions to normal conversation ' ( 1 99 7, 364 ) . As to determining whe ther Deacon or Donald provide th e most accu­ rate model of th e rel ationship between toolmaking, social organization , and mimetic communication a n d speech, there are n o scien tific cri teria for making a choice. It is difficult if not impossible to falsify th eir prop­ ositio ns because data from the events they describe are so scarce. We must resort to the Kuhnian ( 1 9 72 ) n o tion th at the choice of rival descriptions will have to be based on what th e reader finds most com pel­ ling. We shall return to th is i ssue of the scien tific basis of modelling the origin of speech in chapter 9.