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Hi, this would be Ryan's mom. Just wanted to
let you know that Ryan passed away, Saturday, July 19, due to complications of
Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Thank you for including him.
Sincerely Barb and Ross
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 6:32
AM
Subject: [percy-l] Percy triads vs.
Peirce triads, bibliography,and the origins of language
Below this e-mail is an article from last week's NYTimes on the origins
of language by Nicholas Wade. It's pretty interesting - refers to
Chomsky, Pinker, FOXP2, and the family in England that's missing the gene -
one of the main points is how little work has been done in the area. It
seems like a good overview. What would Percy think?
But I also have a burning question, well, many questions, but I'll
start with just one, specifically for Ken Ketner though anyone who might
know can offer an answer. I'm almost done with "A Thief of Peirce: The
Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy" (ed. by Patrick Samway) and
I have thoroughly enjoyed it - it's been fun to read about "language theory"
in the human context of two people writing letters, like a story; plus it's
been very helpful. And some of Percy's questions to Ken are
the same ones I have, so it's nice to have them answered without even
asking.
But what I cannot figure out is why Percy holds on to HIS triad, the
triangle (three lines joining to form a triangle) when Ken so nicely and
clearly explained Peirce's triad (three lines meeting in the center to form a
point) is more appropriate. In that explanation, Percy's triad is just
an illustration of three dyads forming a triangle, and not a true triad.
Each element in Percy's triad can be just a result of (mediated by or
mediator of) a cause-effect reaction. Perhaps I missed Percy's
rationale for why he kept a triangle?
Also, I think his (Percy's) retention of the triangle is one of the
reasons why he was so VERY concerned about what the interpretant was
(needing to find a name for it in "Thief" and ending "Message in the Bottle"
with: "The apex of the triangle, the coupler, is a complete
mystery. What it is, an 'I,' a 'self,' or some neurophysiological
correlate thereof, I could not begin to say" (327).) See, as long
as he retains the triangle, which is merely three dyads connected together, he
hasn't successfully defeated the cause-effect determinists - which Ken pointed
out. So, it seems to me he's now putting the weight of that
responsibility on the poor little interpretant -- the interpretant now must be
some special, different thing to pull it out of that realm (which is
Percy's whole goal - to defeat deterministic science). And I think
Percy really believes it is some special, different thing, and is trying to
find out what that thing is. But now he fails to successfully defeat
the Cartesian dualists (and he even says in the letters he's not sure
that Peirce does defeat the dualists, reflecting more Percy's view of
Peirce's accomplishment than Peirce's
real accomplishment) because now he must add some special
substance (spirit, soul) to the interpretant for the triangle not to be
deterministic. Of course Percy was always concerned with the self,
throughout all of his writings. But for him, the human self is something
different than the rest of the world (even from animals?). I don't think
Peirce would think that, would he?
What do you think?
Another question -- what has been written on this subject? Peirce
and Percy that is. Though anything pertinent would be helpful. Most of
the stuff on Percy that I've found (and I did send a abbreviated biblio.
y'all's way) doesn't have much to do with his language philosophy -- it's
more about his existentialism, etc.. This "Cenophythagoreanism"
is hard stuff for those of us who haven't started out as Peirce
scholars, since it is by definition interdisciplinary...
Karey
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 3:10 PM
Subject: origins of language
>From yesterday's New York Times:
Early
Voices: The Leap to Language
By NICHOLAS WADE
Bower birds are
artists, leaf-cutting ants practice agriculture, crows use tools, chimpanzees
form coalitions against rivals. The only major talent unique to humans is
language, the ability to transmit encoded thoughts from the mind of one
individual to another.
Because of language's central role in human
nature and sociality, its evolutionary origins have long been of interest to
almost everyone, with the curious exception of linguists.
As far back
as 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris famously declared that it wanted no
more speculative articles about the origin of language.
More recently,
many linguists have avoided the subject because of the influence of Noam
Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics and still its best-known
practitioner, who has been largely silent on the question.
Dr.
Chomsky's position has "only served to discourage interest in the topic among
theoretical linguists," writes Dr. Frederick J. Newmeyer, last year's
president of the Linguistic Society of America, in "Language Evolution," a
book of essays being published this month by Oxford University Press in
England.
In defense of the linguists' tepid interest, there have until
recently been few firm facts to go on. Experts offered conflicting views on
whether Neanderthals could speak. Sustained attempts to teach apes language
generated more controversy than illumination.
But new research is
eroding the idea that the origins of language are hopelessly lost in the mists
of time. New clues have started to emerge from archaeology, genetics and human
behavioral ecology, and even linguists have grudgingly begun to join in the
discussion before other specialists eat their lunch.
"It is important
for linguists to participate in the conversation, if only to maintain a
position in this intellectual niche that is of such commanding interest to the
larger scientific public," writes Dr. Ray Jackendoff, Dr. Newmeyer's successor
at the linguistic society, in his book "Foundations of
Language."
Geneticists reported in March that the earliest known split
between any two human populations occurred between the !Kung of southern
Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. Since both of these very ancient populations
speak click languages, clicks may have been used in the language of the
ancestral human population. The clicks, made by sucking the tongue down from
the roof of the mouth (and denoted by an exclamation point), serve the same
role as consonants.
That possible hint of the first human tongue may be
echoed in the archaeological record. Humans whose skeletons look just like
those of today were widespread in Africa by 100,000 years ago. But they still
used the same set of crude stone tools as their forebears and their archaic
human contemporaries, the Neanderthals of Europe.
Then, some 50,000
years ago, some profound change took place. Settlements in Africa sprang to
life with sophisticated tools made from stone and bone, art objects and signs
of long distance trade.
Though some archaeologists dispute the
suddenness of the transition, Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford argues that the
suite of innovations reflects some specific neural change that occurred around
that time and, because of the advantage it conferred, spread rapidly through
the population.
That genetic change, he suggests, was of such a
magnitude that most likely it had to do with language, and was perhaps the
final step in its evolution. If some neural change explains the appearance of
fully modern human behavior some 50,000 years ago, "it is surely reasonable to
suppose that the change promoted the fully modern capacity for rapidly spoken
phonemic speech," Dr. Klein has written.
Listening to Primates
Apes'
Signals Fall Short of Language
At first glance, language seems to have
appeared from nowhere, since no other species speaks. But other animals do
communicate. Vervet monkeys have specific alarm calls for their principal
predators, like eagles, leopards, snakes and baboons.
Researchers have
played back recordings of these calls when no predators were around and found
that the vervets would scan the sky in response to the eagle call, leap into
trees at the leopard call and look for snakes in the ground cover at the snake
call.
Vervets can't be said to have words for these predators because
the calls are used only as alarms; a vervet can't use its baboon call to ask
if anyone noticed a baboon around yesterday. Still, their communication system
shows that they can both utter and perceive specific sounds.
Dr. Marc
Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard who studies animal communication, believes
that basic systems for both the perception and generation of sounds are
present in other animals. "That suggests those systems were used way before
language and therefore did not evolve for language, even though they are used
in language," he said.
Language, as linguists see it, is more than
input and output, the heard word and the spoken. It's not even dependent on
speech, since its output can be entirely in gestures, as in American Sign
Language. The essence of language is words and syntax, each generated by a
combinatorial system in the brain.
If there were a single sound for
each word, vocabulary would be limited to the number of sounds, probably fewer
than 1,000, that could be distinguished from one another. But by generating
combinations of arbitrary sound units, a copious number of distinguishable
sounds becomes available. Even the average high school student has a
vocabulary of 60,000 words.
The other combinatorial system is syntax,
the hierarchical ordering of words in a sentence to govern their
meaning.
Chimpanzees do not seem to possess either of these systems.
They can learn a certain number of symbols, up to 400 or so, and will string
them together, but rarely in a way that suggests any notion of syntax. This is
not because of any poverty of thought. Their conceptual world seems to overlap
to some extent with that of people: they can recognize other individuals in
their community and keep track of who is dominant to whom. But they lack the
system for encoding these thoughts in language.
How then did the
encoding system evolve in the human descendants of the common ancestor of
chimps and people?
Language Precursors
Babbling and Pidgins Hint at
First Tongue
One of the first linguists to tackle this question was
Dr. Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii. His specialty is the study of
pidgins, which are simple phrase languages made up from scratch by children or
adults who have no language in common, and of creoles, the successor languages
that acquire inflection and syntax.
Dr. Bickerton developed the idea
that a proto-language must have preceded the full-fledged syntax of today's
discourse. Echoes of this proto-language can be seen, he argued, in pidgins,
in the first words of infants, in the symbols used by trained chimpanzees and
in the syntax-free utterances of children who do not learn to speak at the
normal age.
In a series of articles, Dr. Bickerton has argued that
humans may have been speaking proto-language, essentially the use of words
without syntax, as long as two million years ago. Modern language developed
more recently, he suggests, perhaps with appearance of anatomically modern
humans some 120,000 years ago.
The impetus for the evolution of
language, he believes, occurred when human ancestors left the security of the
forest and started foraging on the savanna. "The need to pass on information
was the driving force," he said in an interview.
Foragers would have
had to report back to others what they had found. Once they had developed
symbols that could be used free of context — a general word for elephant,
not a vervet-style alarm call of "An elephant is attacking!" — early people
would have taken the first step toward proto-language. "Once you got it going,
there is no way of stopping it," Dr. Bickerton said.
But was the first
communicated symbol a word or a gesture? Though language and speech are
sometimes thought of as the same thing, language is a coding system and speech
just its main channel.
Dr. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the
University of Auckland in New Zealand, believes the gesture came first, in
fact as soon as our ancestors started to walk on two legs and freed the hands
for making signs.
Chimpanzees have at least 30 different gestures,
mostly used to refer to other individuals.
Hand gestures are still an
expressive part of human communication, Dr. Corballis notes, so much so that
people even gesticulate while on the telephone.
He believes that
spoken words did not predominate over signed ones until the last 100,000 years
or so, when a genetic change may have perfected human speech and led to its
becoming a separate system, not just a grunted accompaniment for
gestures.
Critics of Dr. Corballis's idea say gestures are too limited;
they don't work in the dark, for one thing. But many concede the two systems
may both have played some role in the emergence of language.
Search for
Incentives
As Societies Grew the Glue Was Gossip
Dr. Bickerton's
idea that language must have had an evolutionary history prompted other
specialists to wonder about the selective pressure, or evolutionary driving
force, behind the rapid emergence of language.
In the mere six million
years since chimps and humans shared a common ancestor, this highly complex
faculty has suddenly emerged in the hominid line alone, along with all the
brain circuits necessary to map an extremely rapid stream of sound into
meaning, meaning into words and syntax, and intended sentence into expressed
utterance.
It is easy to see in a general way that each genetic
innovation, whether in understanding or in expressing language, might create
such an advantage for its owners as to spread rapidly through a small
population.
"No one will take any notice of the guy who says
`Gu-gu-gu'; the one with the quick tongue will get the mates," Dr. Bickerton
said. But what initiated this self-sustaining process?
Besides Dr.
Bickerton's suggestion of the transition to a foraging lifestyle, another idea
is that of social grooming, which has been carefully worked out by Dr. Robin
Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool in
England.
Dr. Dunbar notes that social animals like monkeys spend an
inordinate amount of time grooming one another. The purpose is not just to
remove fleas but also to cement social relationships. But as the size of a
group increases, there is not time for an individual to groom
everyone.
Language evolved, Dr. Dunbar believes, as a better way of
gluing a larger community together.
Some 63 percent of human
conversation, according to his measurements, is indeed devoted to matters of
social interaction, largely gossip, not to the exchange of technical
information, Dr. Bickerton's proposed incentive for language.
Dr.
Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the first
linguists to acknowledge that language may be subject to natural selection,
disputes Dr. Dunbar's emphasis on social bonding; a fixed set of greetings
would suffice, in his view.
Dr. Pinker said it was just as likely that
language drove sociality: it was because people could exchange information
that it became more worthwhile to hang out together.
"Three key
features of the distinctively human lifestyle — know-how, sociality and
language — co-evolved, each constituting a selection pressure for the
others," Dr. Pinker writes in "Language Evolution," the new book of
essays.
But sociality, from Dr. Dunbar's perspective, helps explain
another feature of language: its extreme corruptibility. To convey
information, a stable system might seem most efficient, and surely not beyond
nature's ability to devise. But dialects change from one village to another,
and languages shift each generation.
The reason, Dr. Dunbar suggests,
is that language also operates as a badge to differentiate the in group from
outsiders; thus the Gileadites could pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite
asked to say "shibboleth" because, so the writer of Judges reports, "He said
sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right."
Language in
the Genome
From Family Failing First Gene Emerges
A new approach to
the evolution of language seems to have been opened with studies of a
three-generation London family known as KE. Of its 29 members old enough to be
tested, 14 have a distinctive difficulty with communication. They have trouble
pronouncing words properly, speaking grammatically and making certain fine
movements of the lips and tongue.
Asked to repeat a nonsense phrase
like "pataca pataca pataca," they trip over each component as if there were
three different words.
Some linguists have argued that the KE family's
disorder has nothing specific to do with language and is some problem that
affects the whole brain. But the I.Q. scores of affected and unaffected
members overlap, suggesting the language systems are specifically at fault.
Other linguists have said the problem is just to do with control of speech.
But affected members have problems writing as well as speaking.
The
pattern of inheritance suggested that a single defective gene was at work,
even though it seemed strange that a single gene could have such a broad
effect. Two years ago, Dr. Simon Fisher and Prof. Tony Monaco, geneticists at
the University of Oxford in England, discovered the specific gene that is
changed in the KE family. Called FOXP2, its role is to switch on other genes,
explaining at once how it may have a range of effects. FOXP2 is active in
specific regions of the brain during fetal development.
The gene's
importance in human evolution was underlined by Dr. Svante Paabo and
colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany. In a study last year they reported that FOXP2 is highly
conserved in evolution — in other words, that the precise sequence of units
in FOXP2's protein product is so important that any change is likely to lead
to its owner's death.
In the 70 million years since people and mice
shared a common ancestor, there have been just three changes in the FOXP2
protein's 715 units, Dr. Paabo reported. But two of those changes occurred in
the last six million years, the time since humans and chimps parted company,
suggesting that changes in FOXP2 have played some important role in human
evolution.
Sampling the DNA of people around the world, Dr. Paabo found
signs of what geneticists call a selective sweep, meaning that the changed
version of FOXP2 had spread through the human population, presumably because
of some enormous advantage it conferred.
That advantage may have been
the perfection of speech and language, from a barely comprehensible form like
that spoken by the affected KE family members to the rapid articulation of
ordinary discourse. It seems to have taken place about 100,000 years ago, Dr.
Paabo wrote, before modern humans spread out of Africa, and is "compatible
with a model in which the expansion of modern humans was driven by the
appearance of a more proficient spoken language."
FOXP2 gives
geneticists what seems to be a powerful entry point into the genetic and
neural basis for language. By working out what other genes it interacts with,
and the neural systems that these genes control, researchers hope to map much
of the circuitry involved in language systems.
Ending the
Silence
Linguists Return to Ideas of Origins
The crescendo of work
by other specialists on language evolution has at last provoked linguists'
attention, including that of Dr. Chomsky. Having posited in the early 1970's
that the ability to learn the rules of grammar is innate, a proposition
fiercely contested by other linguists, Dr. Chomsky might be expected to have
shown keen interest in how that innateness evolved. But he has said very
little on the subject, a silence that others have interpreted as disdain.
As Dr. Jackendoff, the president of the Linguistic Society of America,
writes: "Opponents of Universal Grammar argue that there couldn't be such a
thing as Universal Grammar because there is no evolutionary route to arrive at
it. Chomsky, in reply, has tended to deny the value of evolutionary
argumentation."
But Dr. Chomsky has recently taken a keen interest in
the work by Dr. Hauser and his colleague Dr. W. Tecumseh Fitch on
communication in animals. Last year the three wrote an article in Science
putting forward a set of propositions about the way that language evolved.
Based on experimental work by Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch, they argue that sound
perception and production can be seen in other animals, though they may have
been tweaked a little in hominids.
A central element in language is
what linguists call recursion, the mind's ability to bud one phrase off
another into the syntax of an elaborate sentence. Though recursion is not seen
in animals, it could have developed, the authors say, from some other brain
system, like the one animals use for navigation.
Constructing a
sentence, and going from A to Z through a series of landmarks, could involve a
similar series of neural computations. If by some mutation a spare navigation
module developed in the brain, it would have been free to take on other
functions, like the generation of syntax. "If that piece got integrated with
the rest of the cognitive machinery, you are done, you get music, morality,
language," Dr. Hauser said.
The researchers contend that many
components of the language faculty exist in other animals and evolved for
other reasons, and that it was only in humans that they all were linked. This
idea suggests that animals may have more to teach about language than many
researchers believe, but it also sounds like a criticism of evolutionary
psychologists like Dr. Pinker and Dr. Dunbar, who seek to explain language as
a faculty forced into being by specifics of the human lifestyle.
Dr.
Chomsky rejects the notion that he has discouraged study of the evolution of
language, saying his views on the subject have been widely
misinterpreted.
"I have never expressed the slightest objection to work
on the evolution of language," he said in an e-mail message. He outlined his
views briefly in lectures 25 years ago but left the subject hanging, he said,
because not enough was understood. He still believes that it is easy to make
up all sorts of situations to explain the evolution of language but hard to
determine which ones, if any, make sense.
But because of the importance
he attaches to the subject, he returned to it recently in the article with Dr.
Hauser and Dr. Fitch. By combining work on speech perception and speech
production with a study of the recursive procedure that links them, "the
speculations can be turned into a substantive research program," Dr. Chomsky
said.
Others see Dr. Chomsky's long silence on evolution as more
consequential than he does. "The fact is that Chomsky has had, and continues
to have, an outsize influence in linguistics," Dr. Pinker said in an e-mail
message. Calling Dr. Chomsky both "undeniably, a brilliant thinker" and "a
brilliant debating tactician, who can twist anything to his advantage," Dr.
Pinker noted that Dr. Chomsky "has rabid devotees, who hang on his every
footnote, and sworn enemies, who say black whenever he says
white."
"That doesn't leave much space," Dr. Pinker went on, "for
linguists who accept some of his ideas (language as a mental, combinatorial,
complex, partly innate system) but not others, like his hostility to evolution
or any other explanation of language in terms of its
function."
Biologists and linguists have long inhabited different
worlds, with linguists taking little interest in evolution, the guiding theory
of all biology. But the faculty for language, along with the evidence of how
it evolved, is written somewhere in the now decoded human genome, waiting for
biologists and linguists to identify the genetic program that generates words
and syntax.
--
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