[Marxism] human origins

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick Halliday

In reply to this from the digest >   1. Human origins/Marxism Digest,




For the purpose of 'philosophy of social science' though, I would say
they are both essentially structuralist, even if White isn't
Straussian.

^^^
CB: Care to elaborate.

White is also a cultural materialist, for purposes of "philosophy of social
science."  He's known for having revived the tradition of Lewis Henry Morgan
in anthropology. Morgan is the main basis for Engels' anthropological
theory.

^^^^^


>
> Psychomimes, phenomimes and phonomimes pervade some languages of the
> world, so don't let your anglo-centricity intrude here.
>
> ^^^^^^
> CB: So what ? All languages, including the ones you refer to, have fully
> symbolic items as well. That's linguistics 101. That's the issue.
"Pervade"
> doesn't mean they don't have fully symbolic semantic items.


But remember the title of the thread 'origins'. I was pointing out
that the origins of human language include linguistic use of gesture
and the development of language with 'motivated' as well as
'arbitrary' aspects.

^^^^^^^
CB: The 'arbitrary' aspects of language are adaptive. Symboling allows
messages to cross generations. This has adaptive advantages at human orgins.

^^^^^^

Perhaps both gesture and phonetic ability were originally highly
motivated and that gesture took on the systematic 'arbitrariness' and
'open-endedness' before the phonetic ability became fully linguistic.
That is one credible theory that can not be dismissed outright (see
Corballis).

^^^^^
CB: In this discussion, in what you describe here both the gesture and the
phonetic ability are SYMBOLIC.

^^^^^^


> ^^^^^
> CB: Yes, I went over this when I studied Mixtec picture writing amd Aztec
> codices. We covered the range of writing. Alphabetical writing is the most
> fully abstract.  The letters don't mimic anything. There is a range from
> heavily pictured writing through hieroglyphics ( the Kemetians had an
> alphabet system and pictoral system at the same time, I believe) through
> alphabetical.

English spelling takes abstractness to new limits; it's an alphabet
that upholds lexical principles over phonemic or phonetic
considerations .

^^^^
CB: I agree that English spelling "rules" are not accurate generalizations.
One has to memorize mainly to know how to spell correctly in English. It is
very arbitrary.

^^^^^^^

It isn't really very phonetic or phonemic (certainly
not simply so), so it most reliably refers to language at a word level
(this it overdoes, ignoring a lot of lexical phrases in the written
language). In this sense, it makes English look like a lexical cousin
of French (which it is), but the problem is, in part, the phonology
remains very Germanic.


>
> The basic point stands. A photograph or x-ray picture is at one pole and
an
> alphabet is at the other end. A photograph is fully mimical or imitative.
An
> alphabet is fully abstract-symbolic.

But a photography or an x-ray are not the same thing as human or
animal perception of them. So you seem to have conflated the object
outside of human or animal perception with any possibility of
understanding that perception (which you dismiss in apes as
'imitative').

^^^^^^^
CB: To recap, we are talking about human expressions that represent
"something".  The photograph or x-ray are one step from a drawing. The point
is they - photograph, x-ray, drawing - _do_ all clearly attempt to imitate
what they represent from a human standpoint of perception. When we compare a
drawing or photograph with what they represent, they look alike. In
alphabetical representation there is clearly no effort to imitate what is
represented in the thing representing. The letters d-o-g and what it
represent don't look alike, sound alike, smell alike, fell alike.

^^^^^^^


> ^^^^
> CB: Fine. Make your arguments. I am merely taking a generalization that
anthropology asserts: that a main distinction between humans and other
animals is that humans symbol much, much more. I don't know if it gets to
the essence of language, but symbolling is part of the defintion of
language.

But it isn't really a very interesting one in psychological or
psycholinguistic terms. Which is so typical of structuralist
approaches to social science.

CB: It very interesting to me, in anthropological and Marxist terms.  Speak
for yourself.

^^^^^^

> ^^^^^
>
>  The steps into arbitrariness and
> recursiveness are what enable the extension of symbolic and
> metaphorical thinking into language, though not all communication is
> based on this arbitrariness.
>
> NH
>
> ^^^^
> CB: Agree

However, bees communicate with a partly arbitrary system as do birds;
but let's take the case of bees, it's a limited repetoire to
communicate information about things like the location of flowers with
nectar to the rest of the hive. So in order to understand the
complexity and creativity (in a non-romantic non-humanist sense) and
open-endedness of human language, we need to go beyond arbitrariness.

^^^^
CB: The key is bees don't have symbols for dead bees. The symbols aren't
used to transcend the death of individuals for the species as
multigenerations.  Non-imitative representation, arbitrariness, is necessary
for this transgenerational communication, because dead individuals of the
species cannot, obviously , demonstrate something to be imitated. No monkey
see, monkey do of dead monkeys. Must use symbols to get the message of what
dead monkeys or bees did while alive. Bees and monkeys don't do that.

^^^^^^^

It seems to have a lot to do with a fairly small number of units
beneath a word level acting as a system of control (so even full blow
sign languages can be said to have a 'phonology', even though it is
gestural and articulatory and not so phonetic).

^^^^^^
CB: A sign language has _distinctive features_ , as phonology does. Any
language has distinctive features and something corresponding to phonemes,
like "gestureemes"

^^^^

 And in terms of
psycholinguistic control of the entire system, we might imagine an
upward cascade of phonology--->morphophonology--->morphology & lexicon
&lexical semantics--->syntax--->discourse semantics--->pragmatics

But we have to realize that human psychology works downward to create the
opposite cascade, starting with prior knowledge and memory of experience of
pragmatics and on down.

^^^^^
CB: However, it is not the individual experience or pragmatic experience of
living _individuals_ that generates the existing system of symbols. That
would be positivistic.

^^^^^^^

A sense of 'grammaticality', it could be argued, invades and controls most
elements up through syntax, while a sense of 'semanticity' seems to heavily
influence lexicon, syntactical interpretation, discourse
semantics and pragmatics.

But perhaps the true 'genius' (by accident or design) of human
language is the ability to use a fairly small, very limited number of
sub-lexical units to encode such an open-ended system (you remember the
catch phrase 'infinite use of finite means'). However, some research might
be interpreted to show that even phonology/sub-lexical manipulation of human
language is much more complex than the
structuralists thought (since they tried to boil it down to a set of
'phonemes' totalling less than 100, then moved onto the phonetic
feature to analyze it beneath that, usually into even smaller sets in
total). Divorced from semantic considerations (which actually seem to play a
part in categorical perception in phonology), we can see that phonology is
still rather much more complex than we would like it for simple
explanations. It seems to depend (in the case of spoken languages) on
visual, phonetic/auditory and articulatory/kinesthetic experience of speech,
happening from infancy.

^^^^^
CB: The main thing is infants can learn from dead ancestors with language.
The main thing is not infants' brains making inputs into language, but
receiving from it.

^^^^^^^

And if spoken language can't be easily broken down into sub-lexical
units of any explanatory power, then unit sets of things like
'syllable types' or 'spoken/articulated words' might mean that perhaps
the most remarkable thing about human language is how much memory and
processing power the human brain has in order to 'do' language with
such large unit sets. Which might be interpreted to support the
innatist arguments about 'dedicated' (though dual-use) hardware
(computer metaphors being something that a lot of people can grasp)
and 'language acquisition devices'--in one phase, the brain
learns/acquires a language, in the following phase, the brain uses the
acquired language to help function in the world.

NH

^^^^^^

CB: Yea, at humans origins acquired language made a big difference in
functioning in the world.


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