Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
CB: A demonstration is worth 10,000 words. But ten thousand words can get across the death barrier and a bodily demonstraton cannot .Most of what I'm saying, my premises are anthropology a,b,c. I'm just posing a little esoteric hypothesis for some basic anthropology. Alas, apparently 10,000 words didn't work for the Etruscans or the Egyptians or Ozymandias. I think the only thing necessary for language and culture to get across the 'death barrier' is simply that there is another living generation in existence who can accept them before the previous generation dies off. That is all you have hinted at here as well. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
CB: In other words, the fact that the signifier is _not_ the thing or processes that it signified is the characteristic that allows it to get across the death barrier that the body of the ancestor faces. So that which crosses the death barrier is not actually a thing? So what is it? Isn't there a danger here of the usual structuralist idealism? That somehow the social-symbolic defies our material world, subsisting in a 'third realm' that is crystalline and godless but still immaterial? Also, I think you have to separate that (1) language life and development transcends the 'death barrier' and (2) that language, in part, and only in part, conveys the information and knowledge we use to learn and to work with others to create, produce, change our world. Still, languages change over time, given enough time, because every act of decoding and encoding in the real world of social being brings about change, such that we would have a hard time communicating in 'English' with Geoffrey Chaucer (even if he didn't speak the way he wrote). And all it takes is one failed generation of knowledge transfer and transformation and cultures can break down, fail to reproduce into future generations. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
Charles, I don't understand the purpose of so many posts. Since reading them all is out of the question, and I have no principle of selection that would work, I end up not reading any of them, thogugh some of them must be important or at least inteesting. Carrol I'm not sure which Charles you are addressing, but I will point out I was attempting to consolidate the discussion somewhat by putting all the replies to replies into one post, under one related thread. Is the issue the number of posts or the total volume of text? I could try a summary if you want. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
Mostly in reply to CB. CB: Calling it bizarre is bizarre, with your grunts and snorts version of early human communication. You are out of your gourd. Were they cavemen , too. You read too many cartoons. Of course , the wheelwright uses stories to teach how to build a wheel. Duh. Actually these are early theories of how languages were developed. It's pretty standard stuff, typically cited in linguistics texts and dismissed in the same sentence. Carrol's vulgar materialist image of wheelwrights as only workers of the hand, and not of the brain, talking to their apprentices, showing them how to make wheels by dumb-speechless gestures and mime, silent imitation, leads to stupid versions of workers as mindless bodies performing like robots. The point is symboling can't transcend across generations unless real humans live in bodies and have in-body experiences, learning, working, working together. The hands-on experience that humans get is mediated by language. Language is interaction with dead ancestors. With language, there is always a third person ,an ancestor, involved in the conversation. First and foremost, it is interaction with living relatives and kin members. Also, languages change over time, your cross-generational process of symbolling apparently does not. The language is filled with symbols which are signs-symbols with an arbitrary relationship between the signifiers and the signified. The word for tuber in any of these languages has an arbitrary relationship to what it refers to. But that doesn't explain the origins of a language's vocabulary, which might well have started as a mix of the motivated and the arbitrary (with arbitrary always hemmed in by what is possible). CB: Are you saying when they first learned to do it, the Sgt. did not say a word to them in teaching them how to do it ? With manuals, you are talking about a period after _writing_ has been invented, not language. Could they _make_ from scratch a Browning automatic weapon without any language mediating ? Why try try to makeout that language doesn't mediate almost all of human processes since language began It's redundant and not illuminating to say language is symbolic or that language mediates language use. Could the current space program in the US, if given all the money in the world, reproduce the Apollow lunar missions? No. What has changed is the collective know-how and wherewithal of the living generations. The M2 is remarkable in that it is still being manufactured and/or re-built to spec. The US military never abandoned that design. Still, it only gets made or re-built because there is a group of living human beings who know how to make it. When we get to Moses, there is early writing in ...uh stone , on tablets. Actually most likely not, but are you really trying to refer to cuneiform incised in clay? CB: Here's a minimal pair : beige/base. the zh/ s binary opposition voiced/unvoiced distinguish the meaning between these two words. That would be a contrast of more than one feature. zh is voiced, continuous, fricative. It's closest voiceless counterpart is sh, as in rash, bash, etc. zh is typically an voiced, alveo-palatal fricative. The s of 'base' would be described as an unvoiced, alveolar fricative. Also, the internal vowel nucleus of 'base' would differ both qualitatively and quantitatively from the internal vowel nucleus of 'beige'. Or, in different terms of analysis, you could say that the nuclear diphthong transitions to voiceless in 'base' while the nuclear diphthong of 'beige' doesn't. At any rate, as I've said repeatedly before. It's circular to say that binary oppositions of units like 'phonemes' determine lexical meanings while using lexical meanings to determine what the binary units of opposition are. And UK's 'aeroplane' is a nice minimal pair with US 'airplane', but that doesn't mean the meaning contrasts. CB: Well, on this thread, I'm sort taking the opposite position. I say that language did play a critical role in original human productive and transformative activities, material culture. So, is your critique of structuralism here directed at Carrol 's comments ? I don't follow. I think what I'm saying here is saying something redundant and circular about language doesn't explain how language developed or how human culture developed. CB: We need something that totalizes and overlays the collective languagee community, otherwise people wouldn't be understanding what each other was saying. It's funny how for millenia people of this or that group have come into contact with this or that other group, couldn't speak each others languages, and subsequently, in three generations time developed into bilingual communities or communities with a new language. That didn't come from dead ancestors symboling. It came from living people interacting. CB; Sexual selection _is_ natural selection. Differential fertility is the main thingy in evolutionary biology, not differential mortality.
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
To be fair to Chomsky, one reason why his linguistics has had so much impact is he was there at the right time--some were trying to look beyond structuralism and behaviourism, and here was a guy who was arguing his approach to linguistics would prove more deeply 'explanatory'. Take a lot of fields in American academia that expanded after WW II and you see key figures emerge, with much of their influence and popularity based on what amounts to urban legends derived from an important paper or book published in the 1950s or 1960s. Chomsky is perhaps the best example. Most didn't read his books on linguistics but everyone cited him. I guess his egoism was that he thought if he could turn an entire generation off of Skinner, he could also convince them their empire was evil. Getting back to the linguistics and evolution aspect, I think C Cox was attempting to make anti-evolution arguments along the lines Chomsky might himself make (there was a major set of exchanges between Chomsky and Pinker--I think Pinker has to be one of the least original/most influential linguists of our times, while Chomsky consistently attempted to change the terms of how linguistics was discussed and that has to be called a form of originality). If you look back at the Haskins laboratory stuff I was citing at the beginning of the thread, it could be fit into Chomsky's view--that language ability emerges from the development of other abilities, which is why the gestural origins people are now deeply interested in mirror neuron research. Also, it's interesting that Chomsky should latch onto 'recursion' as the only thing unique about human language that separates it from other animal communication, since gestural approaches to the origin of language also agree with this. And recursion starts with the manual gesture capacities of humans. You could have a 'phonology' without phones; that is to say, you could have sub-lexical units of language that are not based on vocal gestures, but you still need some way to account for how recursion is built into language. So you might start with some sort of sub-lexical unit based on manual gestures converging on human vocal abilities (which surpass apes) but are, in turn, surpassed by mocking birds. In which case we need to look more than ever at the evolutionary development of the brain and things like mirror neurons. At any rate, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Noam_Chomsky#Criticisms_of_Chomsky_as_a_linguist Resistance to Modern Theories of Language Evolution Steven Pinker criticizes Chomsky as being militantly agnostic about how language might have evolved, and says that Chomsky has become increasingly hostile to the very idea that language evolved for communication.[6] Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form [W]e conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process. [Pinker and Bloom 1990, p. 707] Chomsky's alleged resistance to the idea of language being purely a product of natural selection is also criticized by Daniel Dennett: The language organ, Chomsky thought, was not an adaptation, but ... a mystery, or a hopeful monster. Dennett continues that Chomsky must consider language to be a spandrel, such as proposed by Stephen Jay Gould: who in return has avidly endorsed Chomsky's view that language didn't really evolve but just rather suddenly arrived, an inexplicable gift, at best a byproduct of the enlargement of the human brain. Dennett says that these two authorities (Chomsky and Gould) are supporting each other over an abyss. [7] John Maynard Smith, while expressing his deep admiration for Chomsky, shared Dennett's views on this matter in a review, saying, I [...] find Chomsky's views on evolution completely baffling. If the ability to learn a language is innate, it is genetically programmed, and must have evolved. But Chomsky refuses to think about how this might have happened.[8] Chomsky has countered that he doesn't deny that language could have evolved by natural selection for communication, merely that he doesn't believe that this is at all self-evident, and he doesn't believe that there is any convincing evidence that this must be so. In his paper on this subject with biologists Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch, Chomsky argued that other plausible scenarios (such as sexual selection) are equally capable of explaining the evolution of language, while hypothesizing that recursion is the only property of language unique to human beings: We submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and in the narrow sense (FLN). FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
OTOH, arguments have been forward that (1) there are human languages without recursion and (2) recursion can be found outside human thought and language. I have my doubts about (1). It is a mostly unexamined truism of linguistics that a language's phonology does not have recursion, but that is because of the received structuralist conception of phonology. Conceive phonology differently, and recursion seems quite possible and evidence for it can be found. As for (2) well just about everything that has been said to be unique about human language (other than that it is human) has been shot down. For example, categorical perception. All sorts of animals with well-developed phonetic capabilities display it. So what is unique about human language might simply be in the mix of common elements. Here is an anti-Chomsky piece on recursion (although he seems more intent on shooting down UG, which I'm not so sure is very interesting now because I don't think even Chomsky still sticks to it). What he is arguing here is Piraha language doesn't have syntactical recursion as Chomsky discussed it. No mention of phonological recursion. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html So in the case of Pirahã, the language I've worked with the longest of the 24 languages I've worked with in the Amazon, for about 30 years, Pirahã doesn't have expressions like John's brother's house. You can say John's house, you can say John's brother, but if you want to say John's brother's house, you have to say John has a brother. This brother has a house. They have to say it in separate sentences. As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don't have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called 'the essential property of language', the essential building block—in fact they've gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems—then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language—Pirahã—means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions. One answer that's been given when I claim that Pirahã lacks recursion, is that recursion is a tool that's made available by the brain, but it doesn't have to be used. But then that's very difficult to reconcile with the idea that it's an essential property of human language—if it doesn't have to appear in a given language then, in principle, it doesn't have to appear in any language. If it doesn't have to appear in one part of a language, it doesn't have to appear in any part of a language. It's not clear what causes recursion; in fact, just two weeks ago, at Illinois State University, we held an international conference on recursion in human language, which was the first conference of its kind ever held, and we had researchers from all around the world come and talk about recursion. One interesting thing that emerged from this is that the linguists, mathematicians and computer scientists disagree on what recursion is, and how significant it is. Also, there are many examples of recursion lacking in a number of structures in languages where we otherwise would expect it. So recursion as the essential building block of human language, if Chomsky's correct, is difficult for me to apply as an intellectual trying to build a theory of human language, because it's not clear what it is, and it's not clear that it is in fact essential to different languages. So as an alternative, what might we say? Well, recursion could occur because human beings are just smarter than species without it. In fact, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Herbert Simon, who taught psychology for many years at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote an important article in 1962 called The Architecture of Complexity, and in effect, although he doesn't use this word, he argued that recursive structures are fundamental to information processing. He argued that these are just part of the human brain, and we use them not just in language, but in economy, and discussion of problem-solving, and the stories that we tell. If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories. So my idea is that recursion is absolutely essential to the human brain, and it's a part of the fact that humans have larger brains than other species. In fact, one of the papers at the recursion conference was on recursion in other species, and it talked about how when deer look for food in the forest, they often use recursive strategies to map their way across the forest and back, and take little side paths that can be analyzed as recursive paths. So it's not clear, first of all that
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
Some more recommended readings with indicative excerpts. CJ http://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/pubs/pdffiles/ferrari/Curr_Directions_Psy.pdf Recently we found (Fogassi et al., 2005) that mirror neurons belonging to the parieto-frontal motor system2 differentially code a motor act according to the final goal of the action sequence in which the act is embedded. For example, a certain mirror neuron activates when the monkey observes another individual grasping food for eating it (the action’s final goal) and not when that individual grasps it for placing it into a container. Based on these findings, we postulated that the motor system is organized into neuronal chains, each coding a specific goal and combining different elements (motor acts) of the action. Further preliminary data on the monkey parietal and premotor cortex have shown that this type of organization is valid also for longer action sequences in which the same element of a chain is recursively involved in different steps of the sequence. Although this organization is certainly very basic, in terms of hierarchical arrangement, combinatorial power, achievement of meaning, and predictive value (i.e., every neuron coding a specific motor act of an action sequence facilitates predicting the outcome of that sequence) it has much in common with the syntactic structure of language. At present it is not clear how and whether this sequential motor organization could have been exploited for linguistic construction, but we can assume that, over the course of evolution, the more the motor system became capable of flexibly combining motor acts in order to generate a greater number of actions, the more it approximated a linguistic-like syntactic system. Such a capability could have extended to a motor system dedicated not only to the generation of mouth, face, and larynx movements involved in eating and breathing, but also to the combination of such movements in phono-articulatory gestures for communicative purposes. Future Perspectives The data discussed above leave open many issues. One of the most important concerns the role the mirror-neuron system played in the evolutionary changes that led to the emergence of vocal communication. A suggestive hypothesis would be that the ventral premotor cortex, endowed with the control of both hand and mouth actions, could have played a pivotal role in associating gestures with vocalizations, thus producing new motor representations. At this stage, the mirror-neuron system, because of its capacity to match the seen/heard gesture or vocalization with internal motor representations, allowed the observer/listener to assign a meaning to these new vocal–gesture combinations. A second important issue that requires further investigations is the relation between mirror neurons and imitation. It is intuitive that a mechanism linking observed action with its reproduction is very useful for learning new motor skills. In fact, in the last few years it has been demonstrated that the human mirrorneuron system becomes active during imitation tasks (Rizzolatti Craighero, 2004). Furthermore it is known that, during child development, language acquisition profits very much from imitative processes (Arbib, 2005). However, whether the mirrorneuron system is recruited also in learning new material related to language (e.g., words, grammar, prosody) remains to be studied more in depth. http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/publications/languagespeech/Tincoff_Hauser.pdf Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch (2002) lay out a comparative research program for explaining the evolution of the language faculty, separating it into a broad and narrow sense. The faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) encompasses the sensory-motor (SM) system responsible for perceiving and producing the sound patterns of spoken language, the conceptual-intentional (CI) system involving conceptual representations and the capacity to refer, and the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN). FLN is the recursive system responsible for the computations involved in narrow syntax that generate internal representations and maps them into the systems of phonology [SM] and semantics [CI]; importantly, then, FLN entails recursion and its interfaces with phonology and semantics. The strict definition of FLN and its separation from FLB, along with the available comparative evidence, motivated the proposal that, …most if not all of FLB is based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals…[but]…FLN—the computational mechanism of recursion—is recently evolved and unique to our species (Hauser, et al., 2002, p. 1573). This proposal represents …a tentative, testable hypothesis in need of further empirical investigation. (p. 1578) Conclusions and open questions Although comparative studies related to the language faculty have a long history, most of the core issues associated with understanding the evolution of the language faculty have only recently been approached. One useful
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
CB: Are you kidding ? It is not very likely that the Bible has one billionth of the bits of information ( In 1960 Levi-Strauss' uses structural linguistic concepts to demonstrate the information in the binary opposition/base 2 computer sense, in primitive myths) of the oral messages in stories , being passed around for the hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering kin based human society. Well, the Bible is based first and foremost on an oral religion that had been passed on for some time--and continued to develop separate from and in interaction with written traditions. Look at most Americans today--they say they are Christians and most likely most of them have never read or understood their religious texts. I'm willing to bet what makes a culture function is a 'database' of about three generations of accumulated knowledge. For example, this is what it takes for a contact pidgin to turn into a full-blown language. Now what evidence do you actually offer up that demonstrates primitive societies operate on a collective storage of thousands of years of information? This is also why entire societies can collapse so quickly. All it takes is something to wipe out the connection across grandparents-parents-children, and we see with civil wars or natural disasters, it's often the children who die in the largest numbers. Take what is happening in Haiti right now as an example. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
In 1960 Levi-Strauss' uses structural linguistic concepts to demonstrate the information in the binary opposition/base 2 computer sense, in primitive myths It got Althusser going, but this analysis I suspect is largely nonsense. I won't let it got at that though. More later on why this sort of binary differential analysis just doesn't work to measure information. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
So I remember ancedotally speaking this discussion from grad school, applied linguistics, ELT, etc. We were discussing the importance or unimportance of the sound [zh] as in 'beige', 'rouge', 'garage', etc--if you say the sound as a 'continuous' one (not using technical language here because I don't think it would be appreciated anyway). Now the traditional structuralist argument (within applied linguistics, ELT, etc.) was this sound is not an important one to teach because of this structuralist idea of 'cognitive load' (the structuralists who for the most part were behaviorists get 'cognitive' on occasion if they think it suits their arguments). The argument went, this sound in English has little cognitive load and so is not an important one to teach. So I asked, why? How do you know it has little cognitive load. And the answer was: one, it appears in words that are not that common (indeed, fairly recent imports from French--see, it's a French sound even); two, we can not juxtaposition a lot of words to show 'minimal pairs' that contrast this [zh] with some other similar sibilant consonant. On the contrary, even if it doesn't appear frequently in the lexicon or even in a few frequently used words, it is all over the place in actual spoken English. If a word ends in a voiced [z] and is followed by a [j] as at the beginning of 'your', chances are co-articulation (assimilation, mutual assimilation) creates a [zh] sound in the liaison. Like: Please yourself. So much for structuralist sureties. Cognitive load my arse. Now I like structures and symbols, that's for sure. So why is the symbol of the hexagon the god of the bees? CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
CB:This is probably wrong and falls into non-materialism. It is certain that language and culture gave the human species an adaptive advantage in the beginning of the species. After established, its development was no doubt influenced by material necessity at least in the sense of limiting impact. I don't think you mean CC is in any danger, but rather certain views and/or their critiques fall into some sort of idealism, etc.? Right? I would point out here that this is, in part, what I have against so much of structuralism and these sort of metaphors like 'an organ without a body'. So we are supposed to think that somehow this 'symbolic realm' transcends human bodies, their productive and transformative activities, their material culture. So we get totalizing concepts like the one attributed to Saussure, 'langue' (although he actually seems to be rather unoriginal, just very influential because so many of his students succeeded in life). So 'langue' then is some sort of subsistent entity that overlays the collective language community and any particular individual language user. Then we get concepts derived from this like the 'phoneme'--which is, depending on whose concept you use, some sort of abstract, subsistent entity that is not a speech sound but somehow categorically captures a set of speech sounds (but one problem being, this or that speech sound once set down in discourse is also an abstraction). Actually, if you go back to when European phoneticians were talking of 'phonemes' as some sort of sub-lexical unit of language, some conceived it as a psycholinguistic unit, and not some sort of transcendant socio-structural unit. Later various thinkers would latch on to the surety that linguists had with a concept like the 'phoneme' (which we now see was a foolish surety) and try to replicate it in their own little social scientific realm. Such as anthropology and psychology/psychiatry. So we get Levi-Strauss looking for a 'phoneme-like' socio-cultural reality, and Lacan trying to get past Freud using a 'phoneme-like' self (while also borrowing from Frege's concept of number). Next, picking this out of the germ thread and putting it under the origin of language thread: CB:Hey wouldn't be something if the genes we get from viruses are the ones that produce the language/symboling capacity in the brain ! Chomsky's language module. Hey, CJ what is your take on Chomsky's language theory ? I have to say that he's gotta be right at a certain level based on the unique ability of children to acquire grammar and all that. I guess the question is, which one? Like Levi-Strauss he has arrived at quite a few different positions over the years (Levi-Strauss seems to have realized very early on that the phonemic approach to culture was shit, and that any theory that gets in the way of your empirical data is worthless, only worth abandoning). First, the idea that human language is somehow unique because it displays this ability to take the discrete material units of existence and create something infinite goes back to philogists of the 19th century--something Chomsky was at pains to point out when he said things like Language is making infinit use of finite means. Second, once you say language is unique to humans, some will attempt very strict physicalist explanations of the idea, including brain-based concepts of mind and a genetic basis for a specified ability, even one as complex as language. Third, when we speak of language we have to look at at least three different processes (while understanding one might illuminate the others, or maybe not). 1. The development of human language. 2. The acquisition of human language in the individual. 3. The basis for language's transmission to the next generation. Chomsky is always cited with that term 'language acquisition device', but he never really specified , as far as I remember, a narrow genetic basis (like a particular set of genes). The controversy between Chomsky and Piaget is perhaps more illuminating than the ones with Skinner. Piaget put forward arguments more along the lines of: that language development is really a part of human 'general learning'. Chomsky argued it wasn't. But instead it had to be something more like acquiring bipedal mobility. So I think the LAD is a useful metaphor because it can be used to stress the unconscious (at least not meta-conscious) nature of language acquisition and the automaticity of it, barring brain-based impairments. The problem with the various lines and sub-lines of linguistics that Chomsky started or helped to start over the past 4 decades is that they tend towards formalistic approaches to language and cognition. This then is really a late phase of structuralism. Dominant 20th century structuralism tended most times towards social formalisms, simplistic, proliferating dichotomies, behaviorism and the age-old bugbear, determinism. Perhaps I'm being simplistic but for some reason this sort of thinking about the
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
On 5/19/10, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: CB: No it is dead generations interacting with living generations. It is not the quantity but the quality of the interaction. This allows way beyond three generations interacting. Ancestor worship. Kinship family trees with legendary ancestors being traced to with relationships. Kinship symboling would be a fuller statement. Names are the critical human central characteristic. In the beginning was the Name. Until the advent of literacy, I have my doubts. If you could give some evidence and closely reasoned arguments, I might be otherwise persuaded. ^ CB: Maybe I should say Proper Names, to be clear. The evidence is in hundreds of ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of pre-literate societies. If I might call on my university study, I majored and mastered in ethnology. The principle can be found in any anthropology basic text, like Conrad Kottak. Kinship is the organizing and big deal principle for all of primitive societies. Names are obviously central in kinship charts, family trees so to speak. Family names. Tracing relationships through common dead ancestors is definitively to use names critically. The meaning of Name. Kinship organizes all of hunting and gathering societies very centrally. The conclusory statement by an expert can be found in Marshall Sahlins' , particularly late chapters of _Culture and Practical Reason_. Kin relations organize marriage, economy , ceremony, there is no polity in pre-state society, etc. So, kinship , tracing relations through dead ancestors , organizes relations between living people. Any elementary anthro book will say this. It is a law of the stages of development of human society. I think Engels recognized it in _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_. I puts a footnote in the first sentence of the _Manifesto of the Commnist Party_ on a related point. If you think about what I say above, it is both evidence and a very tight argument. Ask me a question if you don't see it. ^^^ Instead I think what you get beyond 3 generations is degenerated information, myths, legends, stories of Abraham and Noah, etc. etc. CB: No reason for all the information to be degenerated at all. The details on how to make a ship or whatever can be in the story. Also, in the case of Noah or Abraham, most of the stories and myths would have been orallly passed on. Most of the people in that period were uhh illiterate (smile). But notice even all the tracing of kin relations in the Bible. So and so begot so and so begot so and so, this is a literary trace of the importance of kinship in the pre-literate societies. And stories are exactly it. In a story can be passed on to unborn generations how to make a wheel, how to make a stone axe, or the habits of predators and prey , how to organize a hunt or gathering socially ( brothers relate based on kinship in the hunt or in the defense against a predator, say). Chimps don't have stories like that. Having a wheel or a stone axe is a big adaptive advantage over whomever you might be competing with. The wheel or how to make a stone axe may be invented by some chimp genius, but if there is no way to pass it on Most of it imparting little real-world information. CB: Are you kidding ? It is not very likely that the Bible has one billionth of the bits of information ( In 1960 Levi-Strauss' uses structural linguistic concepts to demonstrate the information in the binary opposition/base 2 computer sense, in primitive myths) of the oral messages in stories , being passed around for the hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering kin based human society. You should take a look at Levi-Strauss' _ Les Pensees Sauvage_ and _Mythologique_ . Preliterate people living in the capitalist era have expert biology and botany , i.e. science, based on stories and myths as there main form of library. These peoples are a shadow of what probably existed over tens of thousands of years and going back to the origin of the human species. It was not by luck, but accumulated real world information that we surivived those tens of thousands of years. Australian Aborigines are famous for having extremely complex kinship systems, which they discuss abstractly , sort of like intellectual institutions of a pre-literate society. It is _accumulation_ of real world information, materialism, that differentiates humans from other species. Culture or tradition is the accumulation of information across many, many more than three generations. Kinship is the central organizing principle of pre-literate culture Symboling, Proper Names in the first place , is what allows passing the informatino across the death barrier. ^^^ Getting back to the herd-following humans, we can see how it would work across 3 living generations (with the eldest in most 'immediate' touch with the previous one that has passed on). In the case of more culturally and
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
CB: Exactly ! Symbols allow communication with people whose bodies are no longer imitatable directly. The living generation and dead generation are abstacted from each other and so their communication must be in an abstract form. The unique characteristic of human culture and language is abstractness relative to the social orders of other species. That's a god's-eye view, however, and we shouldn't get too caught up in it. Equally important, if not more so, is the fact that you need living generations to process, use and transform the knowledge and apply it to real-world tasks, and in the process, also, change the language (which is why languages change, they go where the youngest of the population take their languages). Also much language use and communication is caught up in asserting one's right to procreate and live within a group and greater society. I don't think it is right to say we shouldn't look at how other species communicate. We could learn a lot about what is necessary for communication. And we can learn a lot about what are the characteristics of speech, of using a speech 'organ' to communicate. Humans seem to have evolved and/or developed 'uniqueness' by combining the same sort of capacities and needs that other species have. They seem to have done this twice--in the move from purely gestural based systems to gestural speech, and then from gestural speech to written language. Perhaps a third revolution is found in our multimedia and subsequent digitalization of both written and spoken language. My own conclusion is the third wave makes people overwhelmed, misinformed, stupid and apathetic (myself included). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
Until the advent of literacy, I have my doubts. If you could give some evidence and closely reasoned arguments, I might be otherwise persuaded. On the other hand, getting together in family and clan groups and telling and listening to story cycles might serve a practical purpose. It replaces removing lice or licking each other as bonding rituals? Still I really enjoy it when a dog licks my hands. My cat, his tongue is a bit rough, and he also enjoys 'feeling' me through his teeth, biting hard but knowing how not to break my skin when he does it. Cats are very kinesthetic in ways we humans have to understand by observation, since we don't use our teeth so much to take in the value of something, and we don't have whiskers with which to kinesthetically map our immediate environment. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
http://confs.infres.enst.fr//evolang/actes/_actes82.html Culture vs. propositional thought as 'missing link' in the evolution of language Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki Overview This paper examines the relative merits of two competing paradigms for explaining the evolution of natural language. According to the standard account, competence in natural language evolved when a grammar, capable of mapping propositional thought structures onto a serial medium of communication, was selected for in human pre-history.(Pinker Bloom 1990) According to the 'neo-Vygotskyan' alternative, competence in natural language co-evolved with a capacity for propositional thought, as the result of cumulative cultural evolution (Boyd and Richerson 1996) in populations capable of a non-propositional form of cultural learning.(see especially Tomasello et. al. 1993; Tomasello Call 1997) The discussion proceeds in two parts. In the first part, I summarize the standard account, and motivate the neo-Vygotskyan alternative by discussing two problems with it. In the second part, I attempt to make the neo-Vygotskyan alternative palatable by defusing some obvious objections to it. The neo-Vygotskyan alternative According to the neo-Vygotskyan alternative, the evolution of language should be understood in the context of cultural evolution. For example, Tomasello, et. al. (1993), and Tomasello Call (1997), suggest that the key cognitive divergence between the evolutionary precursors of hominids and the ancestor we share with chimpanzees, consisted in a capacity to create, transmit, and elaborate cultural practices. This led to a kind of 'cultural evolution,' among the products of which was natural language. By learning to use this product, humans learn to wield a propositional cognitive system. I want to address two obvious problems with this alternative. First, on some understandings of what 'culture' and 'cultural learning' consist in, this is not really an alternative to the standard account. Many theorists would argue that the capacity to create, transmit, and elaborate cultural practices requires the kind of propositional thought that Pinker and Bloom claim natural language was selected to communicate. Therefore, in order to constitute a credible alternative to the standard account, the neo-Vygotskyan account must provide a definition of 'culture' and 'cultural learning' that does not presuppose the kind of propositional thought presupposed by the standard account. Second, even if an acceptable definition of 'culture' and 'cultural learning' that did not presuppose propositional thought were provided, the connection between such phenomena and natural language would still appear mysterious. The great advantage of the standard account is that it explains why natural language has precisely the structure that it does: its main function is to communicate thought with analogous structure. Why would culture and cultural learning based on non-propositional forms of thought lead to the evolution of a system of communication with the structure of natural language? In the long version of this paper, I suggest some strategies for defusing these two serious problems. With regard to the first problem, I turn to the animal culture literature, in search of definitions of 'culture' and 'cultural learning' that do not presuppose a capacity for propositional thought. Following Tomasello, et. al. (1993), I suggest that any population that displays the ratchet-effect (495), or what Boyd Richerson (1996) call cumulative cultural evolution (79), should count as displaying culture and cultural learning. Such phenomena do not require propositional thought. They merely require mechanisms of social canalization (Boesch 1996, 257), like fairly rudimentary capacities to imitate models. There is ethological evidence that certain chimpanzee populations display such phenomena.(Ibid., 255-265) Furthermore, there is neurobiological evidence that many primates have neural mechanisms capable of implementing imitative learning.(Arbib Rizzolatti 1996) Given this understanding of 'culture' and 'cultural learning', the neo-Vygotskyan alternative seems threatened by the same sorts of objections as the standard account. If some chimpanzee populations display evidence of culture and cultural learning, and if many primates have neural mechanisms capable of implementing cognitive capacities necessary for culture and cultural learning, then why is there no evidence for the cultural evolution of natural language in non-human, primate species? In response to this worry, I draw on Boyd Richerson's (1996) formal, evolutionary argument for the claim that, while culture may be common, cumulative cultural evolution is inevitably rare.(82-88) Finally, I conclude the paper by offering some speculative suggestions for defusing the second serious problem with the neo-Vygotskyan alternative: if language is the product of cumulative cultural evolution based on non-propositional
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity
This is an interesting discussion. In the section below, I think the definition differentiating culture and culture vs cumulative cultural evoluton is problematic, as the longstanding ethnological definition of culture makes accumulation a necessary part of the definition. In other words, whatever they are calling culture that doesn't have accumulation across generations is not culture. Of course , other species learn and imitate. Learning and imitation are not sufficient to constitute human tradition or culture. The distinctive characteristic of culture, as I've said dozens of times, is symboling and learning from symboling, and _not_ learning by imitating. Humans do learn by imitating, but that is not their cultural learning. The cultural learning is through symbols, and symbols do not imitate what they represent. Thus, with symbols and culture, humans can learn from dead generations , from dead people who are not present to imitate. If my parent tells me a story about how my now dead great-great grandfather learned to swim, the words don't imitate the act of swimming. They convey it through words which don't directly imitate the act of swimming. My great great grand father doesn't have to be physically present to demonstrate for me to imitate. Of course, I do learn somethings by their being demonstrated by someone in my physical presence, but humans learn that way _and_ in the symbolic way. Humans learn both ways. Other species only learn through imitation of direct demonstration, not through symbols. By the symbolic learning it is possible to accumulate across generations much , much, muchmuch more cultural knowledge. It is only the accumulated across generations knowledge that is worthy of the name culture, all the efforts to attribute to other species the capacity for culture, notwithstanding. Charles In the long version of this paper, I suggest some strategies for defusing these two serious problems. With regard to the first problem, I turn to the animal culture literature, in search of definitions of 'culture' and 'cultural learning' that do not presuppose a capacity for propositional thought. Following Tomasello, et. al. (1993), I suggest that any population that displays the ratchet-effect (495), or what Boyd Richerson (1996) call cumulative cultural evolution (79), should count as displaying culture and cultural learning. Such phenomena do not require propositional thought. They merely require mechanisms of social canalization (Boesch 1996, 257), like fairly rudimentary capacities to imitate models. There is ethological evidence that certain chimpanzee populations display such phenomena.(Ibid., 255-265) Furthermore, there is neurobiological evidence that many primates have neural mechanisms capable of implementing imitative learning.(Arbib Rizzolatti 1996) Given this understanding of 'culture' and 'cultural learning', the neo-Vygotskyan alternative seems threatened by the same sorts of objections as the standard account. If some chimpanzee populations display evidence of culture and cultural learning, and if many primates have neural mechanisms capable of implementing cognitive capacities necessary for culture and cultural learning, then why is there no evidence for the cultural evolution of natural language in non-human, primate species? In response to this worry, I draw on Boyd Richerson's (1996) formal, evolutionary argument for the claim that, while culture may be common, cumulative cultural evolution is inevitably rare.(82-88) Finally, I conclude the paper by offering some speculative suggestions for defusing the second serious problem with the neo-Vygotskyan alternative: if language is the product of cumulative cultural evolution based on non-propositional forms of cultural cognition, then why does it have the structure that it has? I suggest that the phylogenetically earliest function of language-like systems of communication consisted in supplementing imitation, in the transmission of ecologically crucial, cultural practices from parents to offspring. Proto-language may have consisted in a gestural form with a mimetic function: by miming hierarchically organized sequences of gestures involved in tool use, parents could enhance the transmission of ecologically crucial, tool-using practices to offspring. Such communicative behaviors would inherit the combinatorial structure of the tool use that they mimicked, and would thereby constitute an early form of a combinatorial, communicative system, like natural language. - ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
