Links to pages: 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174
Comments Welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii
December 17, 1982
I want to begin by introducing three concepts. The first is affordance , a term coined by James J. Gibson. Gibson writes ( 1979: 127) "The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes , either for good or ill... It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment." He notes further (1979: 134), "...what we perceive when we look at objects are their affordances, not their qualities." I find this concept particularly apt for any consideration of the nature of meaning in language because it seems to me that the affordances of something for a particular group of people pretty much define what that thing means to those people.
The second concept is equivalence. Actually, I do not propose to use this term in anything but its ordinary sense, but I do propose it as a key concept. I understand equivalence to mean alikeness according to some criteria. We say that things are equivalent to one another for some particular practical purpose if they are alike in what is relevant for that particular purpose. I would suggest further that the equivalences that we recognize and respond to are likely to be equivalences in terms of affordances.
The third concept is that of kinds. I will say that equivalent things (or for that matter, equivalent states, acts, etc.) are of the same kind (by definition). Further, I will say that if any two or more situations are equivalent in some respect the existence of that equivalence between the situations implies (entails the existence of) a kind. I should point out that this assumption has one corollary which is sharply at odds with the conventional view, the corollary that an individual entity which is capable of being present in different situations represents a kind on the same basis as do different individuals which are equivalent in some way.(1) With these notions established, I am ready to begin my sketch of the evolution of language. What I will do is attempt to characterize each of four different stages through which I imagine the evolutionary sequence to have passed. In describing the first two stages I will be making some suggestions about the evolutionary pre-adaptation for language. That is, I will talk about some of the characteristics which I imagine to have evolved in earlier stages of the evolutionary process which eventually resulted in language-- characteristics which I imagine to have been among the necessary conditions for language as we know it.
The first stage which I want to consider is that in which the first animal which was capable of learning from experience had just appeared on the scene. The crucial prerequisite for such an animal, I propose, is the ability to perceive equivalences in different situations. An animal which could not perceive such equivalences would necessarily experience each situation in which it found itself as entirely new, as unprecedented in all of its aspects. Since every situation would be perceived as having nothing at all in common with any preceding one, such an animal would be incapable of applying its experience in dealing with one situation to any subsequent one.
I would like to point out here that I assume equivalences to hold not only between physical objects, but also between acts (for example, there is an equivalence between different acts of eating, an equivalence which is recognized by the existence of the English verb "to eat"), states, and so on. I would also like to repeat something which I said before, that what makes two situations equivalent in a certain way might be either the presence in each of different individuals of the same kind (say, the presence of one tiger in one situation and a comparable but different tiger in the other) or, equivalently, the presence in both of the same individual (say, a particular tiger). In fact, I suppose that, for a perceiving animal such as I am depicting, it would be of little concern whether it was encountering one tiger or many, or even whether there existed only one tiger or many, as long as it or they contributed equivalent affordances to the situations in which it/they was/were encountered. Thus "tiger" would constitute one of the kinds of things which this animal recognized (although it would have had no name for it, of course) as being potentially recurring features of the world, and that would hold true no matter what that animal might believe about the number of tigers in existence.
The second stage which I would like to consider is that which immediately preceded the emergence of language. A particularly distinctive characteristic of our ancestral species, as I imagine them at that stage, was a much greater development of the ability to perceive equivalences, and therefore, to perceive in terms of "kinds". We can imagine these animals as living in a world which they conceive of as containing a large number of such recurrent elements--i.e., of kinds of individuals, objects, states, processes, acts, etc. which one may expect to encounter again and again. This set of elements amounts to a kind of ontology, a theory of reality. This theory of reality provides a means for processing and integrating the sensory information received by the animal throughout its life. I presume that some such theories of reality can be attributed to (at least) all mammals, but our pre-linguistic ancestors surely had exceptionally elaborate ones. Such theories of reality are what we speak of as "knowledge" of the world. However, that term is misleading since it implies the accuracy of such "knowledge". Still, I will for convenience refer to such theories of reality, which really consist of assumptions, as "knowledge" of reality. The knowledge of reality possessed by animals at this stage remained essentially private knowledge since they had no means of communicating it from one to another among themselves.
The next stage which I want to characterize is that in which language has already appeared. Certain characteristics which I assume to be crucial to the existence of fully-fledged language are the presence of what may be called the lexical principle and the syntactic principle . The lexical principle provides for the conventional assignment of signantia (in my terminology "lexifications") to elements of the (thitherto private) ontologies, thereby yielding conventional linguistic signs. This step marks the inception of public knowledge(2) --of shared ontologies. The syntactic principle provides for the combination of two or more conventional linguistic signs into larger structures capable of serving as the vehicles of speech acts.
At least two quite different functions would have been required of the syntactic principle even at this primitive stage (otherwise, I suggest, what we were dealing with would not qualify as language). The first such function is the characterization of situations in terms of the ontological elements (the "kinds") made available in the conventional signs of the language. I call such linguistically characterized situations "emic situations". Such an emic situation is a model of some segment of reality or of some imagined situation analogous to a segment of reality. Such a model consists of a predicate and its argument or arguments. It constitutes the core of the meaning of a sentence. I have chosen to call this aspect of the meaning of a sentence a "situation" even though for some sentences some other term--e.g., "event"-- might seem more appropriate. In any case, what I mean by "emic situation" is not necessarily a static situation, but possibly one with some extension--either definite or indefinite--in time.
The second function is the specification of the condition of instantiation which makes saying something in a human language so different from the indicating or hinting which is all that other mammals are capable of (and which humans can also do, of course).(3) One consequence of the specification of the condition of instantiation is a kind of assumption of responsibility--an explicit commitment--by the speaker.
At this stage (as I imagine it) the private ontologies tend to merge into a shared community ontology. To begin with, these private ontologies, or the elements thereof, are put on display whenever one talks because talking involves interpreting whatever one is talking about in terms of the elements of one's ontology. However, in order to understand what another person says, one must be able to interpret with some degree of accuracy the elements which that person uses. Therefore, the requirements of communication surely lead individuals to gain familiarity with one another's elements and gradually to develop a shared inventory--a shared ontology. This shared community inventory of elements itself becomes the first public knowledge (cf. note 2). At this point in the sequence cultural evolution begins.
I would speculate that language at this early stage would already have become different in different communities in that lexifications would differ from one to the other and the syntactic devices and the inventories of elements would also differ somewhat. In short, there would have been different languages. [It is to be noted that these differences are on a very primitive level, but that it is also a highly internalized one, and such differences of course continue to exist today--often being confused with other kinds of linguistic differences.]
How did such languages work? To begin with, I imagine that the inventories of elements would have been quite small and that the elements would generally have been of the sort which is now called core or non-cultural vocabulary. I imagine also that the syntactic constructions would have been comparatively simple. However, they were sufficient to permit their speakers to characterize a real or other imaginable situation in terms of the elements provided by the language in relationships characterizable by its syntactic resources. That is, they characterized it as an emic situation and made some specification of the condition of instantiation of that emic situation (for example, asserting that such an emic situation existed at a certain time and place).
With the limited resources which I have proposed for these primitive languages, it would undoubtedly have been easier to talk about some things than others. It might, for example, have been easy to talk about weather conditions, but it surely would have been difficult to talk about plate tectonics or sociobiology or the well-foundedness of the point spread on some ball game. Still, what it was possible to talk about could not have been limited to some closed set of subjects or the system would not have qualified as language in the human sense. With some ingenuity it must always have been possible to extend the range of what could be talked about--to talk about new and untried subjects. I will say something more about how this is done in discussing the next stage.
The last stage which I want to discuss consists of the entire period subsequent to the appearance of language. I propose that the most significant kind of development throughout this period was the invention of new ways of talking. Of particular interest from the point of view taken here were ways of talking about new things-- things for which there was previously no way of talking. And of particular interest among these are ways of talking about cultural things--i.e., about things which themselves did not exist until humans invented them.
It is harmfully misleading, by the way, to suggest that the principal semantic differences that exist among human languages are attributable to different languages' dividing up the world in different ways. Most of the ways of talking which are of the greatest interest in this respect are designed to talk about culturally created things, not about things existing in some universally shared world. To the extent that such subject matters are concerned there is no shared world to divide up.
Moreover, while it is true that each individual has his/her own repertoire of ways of talking and that the repertoires of some individuals are more alike than those of others, it is misleading to suggest that these differences in repertoires of ways of talking are simply attributable to different languages. It is very common for what is essentially the same way of talking about something to be available in more than one language, and it is very common for one speaker of a language to have a particular way of talking in his/her repertoire while another speaker does not.
I said above that it is always possible, with enough ingenuity, to extend the range of what it is possible to talk about in a language. But how is that possible; how do we talk about new things? The answer is that we talk about them in terms of familiar things. We speak of them as if they were these old things, or at least as if they were characterizable in terms of them. However, as a new subject comes to be an established part of the inventory of things which get talked about, a way of talking about it tends to become conventionalized. The basis for a new way of talking is metaphor, speaking of one thing in terms of another. When someone undertakes to talk about something new for the first time, that person must apply his/her ingenuity to find a metaphoric basis for talking about it. He/she must consider what analogies with old things can be exploited in order to present the new thing in a suitable light (suitable to the purposes of the speaker). However, as a subject matter becomes conventional, as a new way of talking begins to crystallize, the metaphoric base also becomes largely fixed and conventional. In due time, some of the terms used in the new way of talking will be thought of as being used "literally".
I am particularly concerned with ways of talking in regard to their epistemological and ontological relevance. However, I should point out that new subject matter (and I should also add, in case it is different, new approaches to the same subject matter) is not the only motivation for developing new ways of talking. Ways of talking play an important role in the human adaptations of the display system. Differences in ways of talking can be used to display different interpretations by the speaker of the social relationships involved in the speech event. He/she can, by choosing to talk in a particular way, display an attitude toward persons or circumstances involved in the speech event or in the situation spoken of. I largely ignore such phenomena here, not because I think they are necessarily less important in accounting for language systems and speech, but because I am particularly interested in the epistemological problem (which I regard as by far the greatest mystery of all of this, and that which has been most shrouded in mystification).(4)
I said that this note would be about the evolution of language as I imagine it to have been. Although obviously I have left many yawning gaps, the foregoing is the best account that I am able to give at present. I said also that it would be about the foundations of epistemology. If epistemology is taken to be about the acquisition of public knowledge, then I believe it is obvious why I say this note deals with its foundations. Finally, I said that it would be about the nature of language (although I warned that I would skimp on its sociolinguistic aspects).
What, then, have I said about the nature of language? In my conception of language its central function is to permit the characterization of situations in terms of recurring elements. The means for doing so are inventories of conventional signs representing the elements recognized within the particular community of speakers (i.e., their ontology) and syntactic devices permitting them to be combined in such a way as to indicate their interrelationships in the particular characterization (the "emic situation"). However, if that were all that was involved, human utterances would still have the character of display (although their subject matter would not be limited to relationships). What is surely a significant innovation in human language (although I feel sure that I still do not fully understand the nature of its significance) is the peculiar involvement of the speaker--the overt recognition of the role of "sayer"--which is present in saying rather than in indicating (or whatever we choose to call this other kind of communication).
An important corollary of all of this is that linguistic relativity is very real. People differ widely in what their linguistic repertoires enable them to talk about (at least without extraordinary ingenuity) and how--that is, in how those subjects are characterized when they talk about them. Therefore, it seems quite reasonable to assert that there is a strong relationship between a person's linguistic repertoire and his/her manner of thought. What has been misleading in our approach to the question so far is that we have usually assumed that the individual languages are the units that correlate with manners of thought. I have tried to show that the criteria by which we define individual languages consist of very primitive features, not generally the features that are in the closest and most apparent relationship to manners of thought. Different individuals who are by definition speakers of the same language may have very different repertoires of ways of talking. In addition, there are many individuals whose repertoires draw upon more than one language. And in any case, a way of talking which exists in one language can fairly easily be adapted for use in another; the process is essentially a kind of calquing.
In conclusion, then, I propose that language can be thought of as having evolved as a device for representing theories of reality- -ontologies--and that it is possible to discern in a rough way what some of the stages in this evolution must have been. Before the advent of language, these reality theories--which we are accustomed to thinking of as knowledge of the world--differed in some degree from individual to individual even though the experience of individuals of the same species in the same territory must have been similar enough to lead to marked similarities in the knowledge which they acquired (invented). The advent of language changed that and made possible public knowledge--i.e., knowledge which can be given overt representation and therefore can be communicated and shared. The code (i.e., language) in which the knowledge is represented therefore becomes a critical part of the epistemological process; if there are any limitations on what can be represented by the code, they are limitations on what can be known, or at least on what can become public knowledge.(5)
1. What I take to be the conventional view is that individuals are immediately given to the senses--they are directly perceived-- while kinds require the intervention of the mind, which must perform an act of abstraction. Thus, the identification of individuals is supposed to be a matter of perception, the identification of kinds a matter of concept formation. I think that that view is quite mistaken and harmfully misleading. Back up
2. J. M. Ziman has defined science as public knowledge (Ziman 1968: 8 and passim). I would say that all public knowledge is a matter of language, but that science is just one particular kind of language game. Science, therefore, is logically subject to linguistic criticism. Back up
3. I have discussed this in several places. To give an example, "the shooting of the hunters" does not specify a condition of instantiation and therefore does not say anything, whereas "The hunters were shot" does. Back up
4. Some linguists would probably say that what I am interested in is "referential meaning". I think, however, that that is a term which is harmfully misleading. I think it suggests a quite impossible relationship between words and things. That, again, would not be harmful if no one took that relationship seriously. Unfortunately, people do take it seriously or at least they proceed as if they did. I am interested in the meaning corresponding to what is said as opposed to that ("social meaning") corresponding to what is displayed. What should I call it? Right now I am trying "representational" meaning, but really it is nothing more than what I understand most people to mean by "meaning" tout court . Back up
5. The concern with what are seen as the shortcomings of ordinary language as a code for representing public knowledge has occupied a very prominent place in the literature of the philosophy of science. The desiderata against which ordinary natural language is so evaluated in these studies would itself make an interesting object of study. Such a study should bring out interesting facts about the metaphysical assumptions underlying modern science. Back up
Gibson, James J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, etc.: Houghton Mifflin Co. Back up
Ziman, J. M. 1968. Public Knowledge: An essay concerning the social dimension of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Back up
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