[Marxism] human origins

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick Halliday :
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.


NH: No.

CB: I'll put on hold your critique of Leslie White's focus on symbolling as
a main unique human characteristic.

^^^^^

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

DH: So are all forms of successful communication, including imitating the
roar of an approaching lion so we all know to flee.

CB: But a dead person can't demonstrate this by roaring. A dead person can
pass on the practice of roaring through symbols.

Even to the extent it is passed on through , say a drawing on the wall, it
is the symbolic aspect , the abstract or symbolic aspect of the drawing that
allows it to "go on" to the next and future generations.

Basically, any representation is symbolic in that something is being used to
represent something that it is not. Symboling is the fundamental dialectic
or unity and struggle of opposites where something is equated or identified
with something it is not. A side effect of this is allowing it to pass
through generations.

^^^^^^^^

 I sometimes wonder
if you aren't exaggerating just how much adaptively useful information is
making it across all those generations.

^^^^^
CB: That's my main point. That's like sometimes wondering whether what I'm
saying is true or not.

^^^^

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

That was the point, to show that some symbols can be quite motivated
and not that arbitrary.

^^^^^
CB: To the extent that they are "emes" , they have arbitrariness. The "eme"
emphasizes the arbitrary aspect of the gesture, even to the extent that the
gesture is "mostly"  "motivated".

^^^^^^^

>>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.>>

Yet it is not completely arbitrary. English spelling shows an
alternation of vowel and consonant sounds, and once you speak the
language it can enable counting syllables. Also, there are a few
motivated elements to spelling, such as the letters <l> and <r>
indicating point of articulation.
Also, it's possible to say all alphabets are motivated to the extent
that they say there is this naturally occuring object called a phoneme
(a sound category) that letters can represent. So even if the
relationships across the spelling <d-o-g> and the human concept of
'dog' and any dogs living or pictorially represented coming into our
perception is arbitrary, the facts that the spelling alternates
consonant-vowel-consonant, has only three letters to represent 3
categorical sounds, etc. isn't.

^^^^^^
CB: Yea, this is "arbitrary" at a slightly different level than the
arbitrary of basic symboling. This the fact that English spelling so
frequently breaks the "rules" that grammarian give us, that they lose the
status of "rules" . They are partially true generalizations, for which you
have to memorize the overlapping generalization. Like hard "c" versus soft
"c", and "k" and "s". There is a rule to the extent that you would not use a
"p" in any of the cases where you'd use these, but you have to memorize as
between "c", "s", "c" and "k"
^^^^^^^^^

>> 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.>>


I can't follow. If anything, a drawing is further removed from a
photograph because in making it the human must interpret and create,
not simply represent non-symbolically.

^^^^^^
CB: I think you mean, you don't want to follow. Which ever is closer to the
other, the point is that the picture is _in between_ the photo and the
completely arbitrary symbol, on the continuum of fully symbolic to fully
imitative.

Again, even the photo is symbolic to the extent that the photo is not the
thing it is a photo of and that the photo is used to represent that thing
that it is not.

So , of course pictures can go across generations too. A drawing of a dead
ancestor can be part of a system of the type I speak. But evidently as it
turns out though they say a picture is worth a thousand words, words can be
produced so much more rapidly than pictures, people can get out ten thousand
words in the time it takes to draw a good picture.

So, words may be more efficient than pictures in getting things across the
death barrier between generations.

^^^^^^^^


Again, I would go with a range
of purely arbitary to purely motivated and then see what you come up
with. As I said, a written word like 'dog' is mostly arbitrary, though its
phonemic aspects are not completely. Where as 'bow-wow' and 'woof woof' are
more motivated but still contain a lot of arbitrariness and
culture-boundedness.

^^^^^
CB: I can go with this.




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.>>

NH: Wow, human language is a symbol for all those dead humans?

CB: More like all human culture, including most of language.

Here I am saying that _at human origins_, the key symbols _for making human
society unique and distinct from chimps and bees and spiders, the symbols
that were founded or discovered or whatever, were symbols for dead ancestors
which were the bases for the kinship systems by which the living humans
organized themselves.

In this way , the experiences of dead ancestors are preserved and passed on
to succeeding generations on a scale that cannot be matched by imitative
methods of communication.

The aspect of symbolling that allows this is that symboling minimizes the
extent to which the dead ancestor being represented must be present, because
symboling substitutes something for something it is not, and so the dead
ancestor can be substituted for by something that is not the dead ancestor,
which is the only way future generations can have access to much of the dead
ancestors' experiences.

Do Bees and Monkeys have these types of symbols ?

^^^^^^

NH:
Truly, I can't see your point about transgenerational communication in the
case of oral language. All it takes is a continuous passing down of
information from generation to generation.

^^^^
CB: Symboling, language, representing something by something it is not
allows the passage of greater amounts of information by orders of magnitude.

^^^^^

No doubt spoken languages
augment this, with, for example, huge taxonomic vocabularies used to
linguistically map the environment and food sources. But until the
creation of written language, it still took face-to-face encounters,
despite the use of full-blown language and such elements as
complexity, large lexicons, grammatical encoding, multiple layers of
encoding (redundancy), etc.


^^^^
CB: Yes, spoken language is a big leap in amount of info storable over lack
of language. But , thought is contained in not only direct language. It is
in actions , in tools , geography , sacred spots.etc. This is a famous Hegel
point. It is the essence of Levi-Straussian structuralism. There is
symbolling in material culture as well as spoken language. Rituals,structure
of daily life. See Geertz and Sahlins. Culture is thick with multiple layers
of meaning. All that meaning is potential packing of information.

The way aboriginal peoples relate to their land, their geographic cosmology,
their sacred spots, the land is one giant mnemonic device, holding and
remembering values and meanings from time in memorial.  Their ideas about
the Earth itself are a big message from the ancestors.

Their whole culture is symbolic and an imformation passing system.

We can extrapolate from this to human origins, and the role of symbolling
not only in spoken language, but in the logic of the concrete, the concrete
of the stones of the stone age, you know what I mean, cosmological monoliths
and the like. Before writing on paper , there was carving meaning in stone,
as with the Ten Commandments.

^^^^^^^^


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

NH: And my point was the full blown human languages still have an element of
gesture, and gesture is more motivated than, for example, a system based on
only sound-encoding (which doesn't really characterize any
spoken human language I know). OTOH, sign language becomes much more
stylized and arbitrary than many non-users or non-linguistics think.
In other words, what makes human sign languages language is much the
same as what makes spoken languages language.

Also, I was trying to discuss getting beyond static structuralist
units like phonemes and features and seeing human language for the
actual units it displays--what articulatory phonologists call 'the
articulatory gesture'.

>> 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.>>

No, that would be individual romantic psychologization, which I didn't
see anyone arguing here.

>>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.>>

I can't see how this is exclusively the realm of language. Look at how
so many other aspects of culture are passed down from generation to
generation, though cross-cultural contact and assimilation can put an
end to it. I think post-modern sociolinguistics doesn't agree with
your drift here, CB.

^^^^^
CB: Why am I not surprised ?

^^^^^^

 In the case of pidgins turning into creoles, it
really does take the creative element of a full population of young
speakers grammaticalizing the lexis. Then subsequent generations turn
the language into a literary creole, if the culture is highly oral and
then highly literate. You could argue the language we are now using
shows this. Anglo-Saxon met Danish and creolized into an early form of
something we call 'English', and this got re-lexicalized with Norman
French (and then lots of Latin and Greek a half a century later), and
we got to the stage of literary creole about the time of Chaucer.

NH



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