What Motivated the First Speakers?

An early (Oldowan) chopping tool.

I have received a letter from a reader who goes by the handle jgkess. Under the title the origin of communicative intent in the use of hominem proto-language he (or maybe she) writes: “The idea was to get another to Do something, (or not do something) either proximally or distally (in a temporal sense), by way of getting him to think or feel in an intended way. There was no "generic" intent just to "inform" another---that would be insufficiently motivating, and communicative behaviour is, after all, motivated behaviour. In the pragmatics of hominem proto-linguistic communication, I think, lie the seeds of the evolution of our kind of general intelligence---this is a kind of take on Dan Sperber's work.”

Seventy years ago, Norbert Wiener published a book entitled Cybernetics or Control and Communication in  the Animal and the Machine. It publicized secret wartime achievements in getting machines to control one-another by communicating (i.e., by exchanging information). Back in the early 1970s I finally read the book, which describes communication entirely in terms of making something separate from the communicator act in certain way. Cells within an organism control one another, ants control one another, computers in a network control one another, Employees in a military organization control one another. So there seems to be much in favor of this idea of control, but while the book was eye-opening and powerful it did not persuade me that control is the main function of language.

As an English major, I immediately protested that humans also can recite Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, or talk about what they did the previous weekend, or argue over politics, report a piece of news, or teach a course in advanced calculus. None of these tasks have a cybernetic function. The difference becomes obvious when you compare a high-level computer language like C++ with any natural language. C++ tells a machine what to do. It cannot be used for any of the purposes I listed at the top of this paragraph. Meanwhile, telling people what to do (writing procedures) is a special skill  that earns technical writers a livelihood. One of the guiding principles of this blog is that natural languages and computer languages are different things and it is a category error to refer to one and draw conclusions about the other (e.g., it is a mistake to argue that computer languages are not ambiguous, therefore natural languages should not have to be ambiguous either).

A natural question for this blog is why don’t apes talk? They seem smart enough and probably have a higher IQ than some people who do talk.  Forty years ago  there were a series of experiments in which apes were taught sign languages, proving they were smart enough to use some language. The problem was that apes could not get  beyond cybernetic motives. They used signs to signal their wants to humans and also answered questions creatively (e.g., Human: what’s that (pointing to a swan), Ape: water bird.) So apes are smart and creatuve, but they only volunteered one kind of statement: requests. They told humans they wanted a hug, or an apple, or even that  their tooth needed fixing. So they could signal their wants. Intriguingly, apes that knew how to sign did not start chatting with one another. I assume that was because apes already had ways of making requests of one another and found no advantage in signalling to their fellows they wanted an apple. Get it yourself, one can imagine Ape¹ telling Ape².

 

In his book, Origins of Communication, Michael Tomasello notes that among wild chimpanzees it is common for a youngster to lose sight of its mother and to begin to howl in anxiety. Other chimpanzees probably know what  the fuss is about and could point mama out to the upset toddler, but they never do that. They never use language or signaling to share their knowledge with others. They do not have the motivation to come to the youngster’s rescue.

But humans pitch in to inform others, even strangers, all the time. It is common for strangers in an area to ask for directions and receive them. jgkess denies that originally there was a  “‘generic’ intent just to ‘inform’ another---that would be insufficiently motivating” but it seems that the motivation has come along somehow since informing others is a routine part of daily, human existence,

It is common for two-year-olds to shout out the names of things they see. A toddler shouts doggie and a mother glances toward a TV screen and says, Yes, that’s a big dog. That is a fairly clear example of a human using language to inform another human for no good  reason beyond the drive to express what the human knows. Human communication is distinctive in function as well as structure from other known communication systems. Babies get adults to do things for them by using a communication system older than language: they cry.

On  this blog, I have insisted for years that the sine qua non of language is the speech triangle: speaker and listener paying joint attention to a topic. Not every utterance is defined by the speech triangle (e.g., Stop in the name of the law) but a communication system that cannot form a speech triangle is not a language.

If you want to imagine hominems first using speech to tell each other what to do, I cannot stop you or prove you wrong, but only when the hominems started using a speech triangle did they begin to use even a proto-language. We can see that almost 2 million years ago, the Homo lineage was passing along knowledge -- specifically, they taught new generations how to make Oldowan tools, We cannot prove they used language to  teach the tool making. They may have just shown students how to smash rocks together to get a cutting edge. The knowledge was passed along for a million years or more and spread over a  wide area. Nor did passing along knowledge stop. The tools eventually became more complex and required more teaching, This steady tradition of passing along knowledge is possible because of humanity’s unusual communal nature.

We depend on one another to become who we are. We become members of whatever community raises us, speaking its language, sharing its  tastes and customs, assuming its assumptions. About the only instinct we have left is the instinct to be like those around us (especially,  those who are raising us). Presumably, Homo habilis was not so dependent on its culture to make its members who  they were, but we have been heading in our current direction for a very long time. At some hazy patch along the way, we introduced language as an especially powerful tool for getting us to share information and thoughts, organizing human communities so that anybody’s genius could be shared. Sharing information, not controlling others, is and has been  the secret of the Homo lineage’s success.