Language is an internal feature of culture, and not the other way around. In other words, culture yielded language; language did not yield culture. That was the central idea presented in a meeting by social anthropologists Chris Knight and Camilla Power at the Evolang conference this morning (Friday, March 14, 2008) in Barcelona. Their presentation would have been called revolutionary, except that the outline of their ideas have been around for a few years and have yet to persuade modelers and linguists to return to square one and think again. Even so their attack on the linguistic and informational fundamentals is serious and deserves serious consideration.
Noam Chomsky has said and Steven Pinker has proselytized for the claim, that we have digital minds in an analog world, but Knight disagrees. The world is analog, true, our brains are analog as well, but language (and symbolism in general) is digital. Humans are unique, not just in having language, but in living in a world of digital symbols (i.e., something is either A or not A) and the real question is how we came to be analog creatures who live in an artificial world of digital symbols.
The question is intriguing, but has not yielded answers that tell us much about speech. So far it looks as though the two sides are just talking past one another. Knight and Powers are insisting that digital things are human artifices and cannot have a place in the biological or psychological world of brute facts, while linguists and modelers take as their starting point that the brain is a digital processor.
As an example of the linguists’ digital assumptions, I found myself this morning in conversation with a bright, energetic post-doc student who began his argument by asserting that the DNA molecule carries 6 billion bits of information. I asked where that number came from, he was vague. He then went on to tell me that the innate component of language mastery rests on some unknown X number of bits and the learned component rests on an equally unknown Y number of bits. Is that true? I wondered. The young man brushed aside such doubts on the grounds of presenting a formal theory. A student of Knight’s might see the humor in this. The bright believer trusts in his digital fictions even though they are fictions.
The crisis comes, Knight said, when the fictions that support the artificial world suddenly fail. For example, money is a fact of our digital world. A $10 bill is real, until the day there is a run on the bank and the false trust in money is exposed. The crisis has not yet come in the linguist’s trust in their digits and Knight’s years of shouting has had no effect.
On the other hand, Knight seems to be ignoring a few brute facts himself. These other people at the conference are not merely dreamy bankers dancing the charleston the night before Wall Street collapses. Language does rest on many evolutionary adaptations, or perhaps exaptations, that have a long biological history. We do have an innate tendency to babble, and the FoxP2 gene is really part of the human genome.
What this conference needs, and so far has not seen, is a great synthesizer: somebody who takes seriously Knight’s insistence that the digital world as a whole is a human artifice and who can combine that insight with the biology that supports speech.
In the meanwhile, until the prophet arrives, perhaps everybody should be a little postmodern: we’ve got some competing truths that need to be respected and remembered while we look for ways to use their strengths and overcome their weaknesses.
The use, in American cultural rhetoric, of the machine metaphor has a marked history that sets it apart from most other nations. It is not unusual therefore to see it being used in the way it is today and by whom. Mark Seltzer's book "Bodies and Machines", traces America's long love affair with its unique take on technology and the impact it has had on all levels of the American cultural experience, especially as it effects the means of communication, language and media. It is not out of the question that an unintended bias may actually reside within this one particular perspective. Although the analogy of digital computers to brain structure and function is a relatively new construct, its idea may be anachronistic and artifical , just as Knight and Powers suggest.
Posted by: Stew | March 14, 2008 at 01:57 PM
The problem, obviously is that digital and analogue are words not "things." The persistent notion expressed above that one must have either-or, be one or the other, the brain must be an either-or gadget sinks the discussion into an abyss. Furthermore cognitive science has long ago established that the brain can do more than one thing at a time -- it is not an adding machine! I can smell a rose and think of my lover as a rose, and regret that I allergic to roses all at the same instant. So, please, let us dispense with such I am, and You're not! schoolyard arguments.
Posted by: Lee Nichols | March 31, 2008 at 12:02 PM