Ship of Fools
Page 15
As we all know, mathematics has only flowered in the last few centuries, far too brief a time-span for natural selection to have had the least effect, and it has developed out of all recognition from the simple counting systems of tribal societies. While the relatively small number of those who excel at mathematics presumably have some genetic advantage over the rest of us, the historical development of mathematics must have depended on a number of more general and pre-existing mental functions that were put to use in the development of mathematics, itself reacting to the changing circumstances of the social milieu.
Evolutionary psychologists like Pinker would reply, of course, that there is indeed a module for mathematics, just as there is for most aspects of mental functioning. For example, Hauser in Moral Minds (2008) claims that we have an innate morality module, a “universal moral grammar”, basically similar to Chomsky’s generative grammar for language. Just as our innate generative grammar allows us to construct a limitless variety of correct sentences, so Hauser proposes that our universal moral grammar has “a capacity that enables each individual to unconsciously and automatically evaluate a limitless variety of actions in terms of principles that dictate what is permissible, obligatory, or forbidden” (ibid., 41). Moral thought, however, evolves in relation to social complexity, as I have shown in detail in Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies (2016) which is incompatible with modularity. How, in any case, did natural selection manage to endow us with a module that could foresee the moral dilemmas we would face in complex industrial societies thousands of years before these had developed?
In short, then, Wallace’s argument demonstrates a fatal weakness in all evolutionary psychology which is that natural selection can only improve adaptation to existing circumstances, never to those that might arise in the future (and see Hallpike 2011 for a number of other objections). Instead of the adaptationism of natural selection we therefore need to appeal to Stephen J. Gould’s notion of “exaptation”. Whereas “adaptations” are characteristics evolved under natural selection for the better performance of some task or function, there can also be characteristics that have proved to be useful, but which were not initially selected for such a use:
We suggest that such characters, evolved for other usages (or for no function at all) and later “coopted” for their current role, be called exaptations .… They are fit for their current role, hence aptus , but they were not designed for it, and are therefore not ad aptus , or pushed towards fitness. They owe their fitness to features present for other reasons, and are therefore fit (aptus) by reason of (ex) their form.… Adaptations have functions; exaptations have effects. (Gould and Vrba 1982: 6)
Most of what the brain now does to enhance our survival lies in the domain of exaptation—and does not allow us to make hypotheses about the selective paths of human history. How much of the evolutionary literature on human behaviour would collapse if we incorporated the principle of exaptation into the core of evolutionary thinking? This collapse would be constructive because it would vastly broaden our range of hypotheses, and focus attention on current function and development (all testable propositions) instead of leading us to unprovable reveries about primal fratricide on the African savanna or dispatching mammoths at the edge of great ice sheets—a valid subject, but one better treated in novels. (ibid., 13)
Or, one might add, reveries about Prometheus on the African savannah as well.
In the years since the inception of UG our knowledge of how the brain works has increased exponentially, and the whole idea of mental modules is now distinctly passé . For example “…there are many different system organizations that can produce the same kind of behaviour a strictly modular system does and … they may not be distinguishable from it by any conceivable experimental strategy…. Nonlinear, interconnected, dynamic systems [such as the brain] are fully capable of producing the kind of behaviour expected from modular systems” (Uttal 2001: 182-3).
Indeed, culture itself can modify the way in which the brain operates:
Neuroplastic research has shown us that every sustained activity ever mapped—including physical activities, sensory activities, learning, thinking, and imagining—changes the brain as well as the mind. Cultural ideas and activities are no exception. Our brains are modified by the cultural activities we do—be they reading, studying music, or learning new languages. We all have what might be called a culturally modified brain, and as cultures evolve, they continually lead to new changes in the brain. (Doidge 2007: 288)
While there is undoubtedly some cognitive specialisation in the brain, as in the different functions of the two hemispheres (see McGilchrist 2012), there must be a limit to this:
It would simply not be feasible to construct a brain that allocates a specific psychological module to every conceivable event an individual might encounter, as the costs in terms of neural circuitry and information processing would be huge. There is no intrinsic virtue to mental specificity: general solutions will be favoured when they can do a good enough job at with evolutionary theory than domain-specific processes (Laland and Brown 2002: 182-3).
It has often been suggested that language originated either from music or from gesture, and whatever truth there may be in either of these evolutionary theories, there is no doubt that as the brain operates today there are close, and very unmodular, links between these areas and those of speech and language:
The location of grasp in the left hemisphere, close to speech, is not accidental and tells us something. We know from experience that there are many connections between the hand and language. For example, there is clearly a close relationship between spoken language and the wealth of gesture language that often accompanies it. In normal subjects, restricting hand movement produces an adverse effect on the content and fluency of speech…. At the neurophysiological level, too, it turns out that there are similarities between the skills required for hand movement, specifically movement of the right hand…. Manipulospatial abilities may have provided the basis of primitive language, and such abilities and referential language require similar neural mechanisms. The syntactic elements of language may well derive from gesture. (McGilchrist 2012: 111)
Music, too, far from being some trivial side-effect of brain activity, also has fundamental links with language:
In the first place, the “syntax” of music is simpler, less highly evolved than that of language, suggesting an earlier origin. More importantly, observation of the development of language in children confirms that the musical aspects of language do indeed come first. Intonation, phrasing and rhythm develop first; syntax and vocabulary come only later. (ibid., 103)
McGilchrist also points out that music, like gesture, has a profoundly social dimension:
If language began in music, it began in (right hemisphere) functions which are related to empathy and common life, not competition and division; promoting togetherness, or, as I would prefer, “betweenness”. By its nature as a means of communication, language is inevitably a shared activity, like music, which begins in the transmission of emotion and promotes cohesion. Human singing is unique: no other creature begins to synchronise the rhythm, or blend the pitch, of its utterances with that of its fellows, in the way that human singing instinctively does. It is not, like birdsong, individualistic in intention and competitive in nature (remember that birdsong, like other instrumental utterances, is grounded in the left hemisphere, not, like human music, in the right). (ibid., 123)
Again, metaphor, and analogy which is its extension, are basic aspects of human thought. “Only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor.… Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the systems of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life” (ibid., 115).
But metaphor and analogy are not computational exercises, nor are the writing of poems, plays, and novels, music, painting or sculpture. Religion, politics, and social life in
general are not computational exercises either, because, as in the arts, there are no problems or clearly defined set of problems that any of these activities has evolved to solve during the Pleistocene; there are no set of rules for doing so; and no agreed criteria for deciding if the output is right or wrong. Fodor himself, who originally popularized the idea of mental modules, emphasizes that analogical thinking in general cannot be modular and has to be global:
It is strange that, while everybody thinks that analogical reasoning is an important ingredient in all sorts of cognitive achievements that we prize, nobody knows anything about how it works; not even in the dim, in-a-glass-darkly sort of way in which there are some ideas about how confirmation works. I don’t think this is an accident either. In fact, I should like to propose a generalization…. It goes like this: the more global … a cognitive process is, the less anybody understands it. Very global processes, like analogical reasoning, aren’t understood at all. (Fodor 1983: 107)
Finally, while UG was able to give an explanation of linguistic diversity by the principles and parameters theory, that to the non-linguist at least appears very impressive, it is much harder to see how such a module could possibly account for the developmental aspects of language other than, of course by simply denying that they can exist—ALEC. The point here is that if there is a genetically based faculty like language, an “organ of the mind”, one would expect it to operate in a unitary fashion with all the parameters set, and not for some aspects of it to take many millennia to emerge when circumstances are right. This is especially true of recursion, supposedly the very heart of the language instinct, yet which as we shall see may be very weakly developed or even non-existent in the simpler languages. If, on the other hand, we find that linguistic complexity does develop in relation to social and cultural complexity, particularly in relation to writing and literacy, then how is it to be distinguished from other aspects of learned behaviour, that are derived from the rest of human culture that has been collectively constructed over a very long period by individuals with the unique general capacities of the human brain? What empirical test would there be, in other words, to distinguish an innate language organ from the product of a constructive and developmental process of the kind proposed by Piaget?
Fifty years of experience have taught us that knowledge does not result from a mere recording of observations without a structuring activity on the part of the subject. Nor do any a priori or innate cognitive structures exist in man; the functioning of intelligence alone is hereditary and creates structures only through an organization of successive actions performed on objects ⁵ . Consequently, an epistemology conforming to the data of psychogenesis could be neither empiricist nor preformationist, but could consist only of a constructivism, with a continual elaboration of new operations and structures. The central problem, then, is to understand how such operations come about, and why, even though they result from non-predetermined constructions, they eventually become logically necessary. (Piaget 1980: 23)
It is mental activities, not structures, then, that will be innate, and since language is a linear, one-dimensional mode of communication, we can also expect to find that it will obey certain simple constraints on conveying meaning, that as Greenberg proposed, certain sequences of syntactic elements will give optimal cues for parsing (conveying and extracting meaning). Rather than proposing the unverifiable theory that structures like embedding are “latent” in the language organ, as UG theorists would have it, one would therefore suggest instead a set of functional arguments to account for universal trends in language development that will also be limited in number (Prof. J. Colarusso, personal communication).
5. Linguistic simplicity and linguistic complexity
Pinker gives a useful description of the essential features of human language:
The discrete combinatorial system called ‘grammar’ makes human language infinite (there is no limit to the number of complex words or sentences in a language), digital (this infinity is achieved by rearranging discrete elements in particular orders and combinations, not by varying some signal along a continuum like the mercury in a thermometer), and compositional (each of the infinite combinations has a different meaning predictable from the meanings of its parts and the rules and principles arranging them). (Pinker 2015: 332)
But within this definition, language forms a spectrum from the simple to the complex that is related to the level of sociocultural complexity. There has been a great deal of debate about what we mean by “linguistic complexity”, and how it is to be measured, if at all (see in particular Newmayer and Preston 2014). But it is nevertheless possible to observe an important difference between those aspects of grammar that have developmental significance and those that do not. In the second category are, for example: phonology ⁶ ; differences of word order; the presence or absence of case and gender, so that in German there are 16 possible ways of saying the single English word “the”; the distinctions between isolating and synthetic languages (English and Latin), and between these languages and polysynthetic languages such as Mohawk; head-initial and head-final languages (English and Japanese); ergative/absolutive or nominative/ accusative languages (Basque and German), the null-subject parameter (English and Italian), and many others, which can be found all over the world regardless of the social and cultural complexity of their speakers.
On the other hand, there are a number of linguistic features that have strong developmental correlations. First of all we should be clear that, despite the strange claims of some linguists to the contrary, the lexicons of primitive societies, and pre-modern societies for that matter, will be considerably smaller than those typical of modern industrial societies. For example, we can say anything that Chaucer could have said, but Chaucerian English would be woefully inadequate in the modern world. Grammatical differences are also obvious. The first and most important of these concerns recursion itself, the lack of subordinate clauses or embedding, which is very weak or even absent in the simpler languages, and instead we find strings of short phrases strung together paratactically with very simple SOV/SVO syntax and minimal use of pre/postpositions. In fact Progovac provides examples of “root small clauses” also lacking the “Tense Phrase” layer of the verb, and these can be used in complex languages as well as simpler ones. Examples in English speech are “Problem solved”, “Case closed”, “Point taken”, or in Serbian “Stigla pošta”, “arrived [past participle] mail”; “Pala karta”, “Fell [past participle] card”, “Card played”. Progovac suggests that “some languages make predominant or sole use of small clause grammars” such as Riau Indonesian, Piraha, and Proto-Indo-European” (ibid., 88). Apart from these root small clauses with no finite verb form, in simpler languages there may be no recursion or embedding, and the interpretation is typically confined to the here-and-now (Progovac 2014: 86). We also find a lack of relative pronouns; the repetitive use of conjunctions; no passive voice; no conditionals; a weak tense and mood system; no case markers; very limited use of prepositions; no comparatives or superlatives; no numbers; little in the way of logical quantifiers (some, all, each, every); or little or nothing in the way of intensional verbs—assume, want, think, believe—that might require embedding.
I shall argue that these features of the simple languages are closely related to small homogeneous communities where strangers are relatively few, where there is low division of labour, where technology is of a simple subsistence type, and where there is no literacy or schooling. In other words, where utterances are heavily context-dependent . Literacy, on the other hand, is a crucial factor in the development of linguistic complexity, together with social size and cultural differentiation and heterogeneity. If, then we dismiss the belief in a language organ or module our only alternative is to propose a dialectical, constructive relationship between the properties of the human mind and the social relations between the individuals concerned. I therefore agree entirely that:
…grammar is the product of history (the processes
that shape how languages are passed from one generation to the next) and human psychology (the set of social and cognitive capacities that allow generations to learn a language in the first place). More important, this theory proposes that language recruits brain systems that may not have evolved specifically for that purpose and so is a different idea to Chomsky’s single-gene mutation for recursion. (Ibbotson & Tomasello 2016: 74)
In order to pursue this line of enquiry we must begin with the acquisition of language in ontogeny. It seems clear that a fundamental and unique characteristic of the human mind that is a necessary condition for language acquisition is what Tomasello has called “joint attention”. Joint attentional skills emerge together at around nine to twelve months. Before this point infants typically interact either with objects or with people, dyadically, without coordination. But at this point: