Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
Origin of language
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
==== Ritual/speech coevolution ==== The ritual/speech coevolution theory was originally proposed by social anthropologist [[Roy Rappaport]]<ref>Rappaport, R. A. 1999. "Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity." Cambridge University Press.</ref> before being elaborated by anthropologists such as Chris Knight,<ref>Knight, C. 1998. Ritual/speech coevolution: a solution to the problem of deception. In J. R. Hurford, M. Studdert-Kennedy and C. Knight (eds), Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and cognitive bases. Cambridge University Press, pp. 68–91.</ref> Jerome Lewis,<ref>Lewis, J. 2009. "As well as words: Congo Pygmy hunting, mimicry, and play." In R. Botha and C. Knight (eds), The Cradle of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 236–256.</ref> Nick Enfield,<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Enfield |first=N. J. |year=2010 |title=Without social context? |url=http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:527132:11/component/escidoc:527220/Enfield_Science_Language%20Evolution_2010.pdf |journal=Science |volume=329 |issue=5999 |pages=1600–1601 |bibcode=2010Sci...329.1600E |doi=10.1126/science.1194229 |s2cid=143530707 |hdl-access=free |hdl=11858/00-001M-0000-0012-C777-5}}</ref> Camilla Power<ref>Power, C. 1998. "Old wives' tales: the gossip hypothesis and the reliability of cheap signals." In J. R. Hurford, M. Studdert Kennedy and C. Knight (eds), Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases. Cambridge University Press, pp. 111 29.</ref> and Ian Watts.<ref>Watts, I. 2009. Red ochre, body painting, and language: interpreting the Blombos ochre. In R. Botha and C. Knight (eds), The Cradle of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 62–92.</ref> Cognitive scientist and robotics engineer [[Luc Steels]]<ref>Steels, Luc. 2009. "Is sociality a crucial prerequisite for the emergence of language?" In Rudolf P. Botha and Chris Knight (eds), ''The prehistory of language''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-19-954587-2}}</ref> is another prominent supporter of this general approach, as is biological anthropologist and neuroscientist [[Terrence Deacon]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Deacon |first=Terrence William |url=https://archive.org/details/symbolicspeciesc00deac |title=The symbolic species: the co-evolution of language and the brain |publisher=W. W. Norton |year=1997 |isbn=978-0-393-03838-5 |location=New York}}</ref> A more recent champion of the approach is the Chomskyan specialist in [[linguistic syntax]], Cedric Boeckx.<ref name="Boeckx">Boeckx, C. (2023) What made us "hunter-gatherers of words". Front. Neurosci. 17:1080861. {{doi|10.3389/fnins.2023.1080861}}.</ref> These scholars argue that there can be no such thing as a "theory of the origins of language". This is because language is not a separate adaptation, but an internal aspect of something much wider—namely, the entire domain known to anthropologists as human [[symbolic culture]].<ref>Knight, C. 2010. The origins of symbolic culture. In Ulrich J. Frey, Charlotte Störmer and Kai P. Willfuhr (eds) 2010. ''Homo Novus'' – A Human Without Illusions. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 193–211.</ref> Attempts to explain language independently of this wider context have failed, say these scientists, because they are addressing a problem with no solution. Language would not work outside its necessary environment of confidence-building social mechanisms and institutions. For example, it would not work for a nonhuman ape communicating with others of its kind in the wild. Not even the cleverest nonhuman ape could make language work under such conditions. {{quotation|Lie and alternative, inherent in language ... pose problems to any society whose structure is founded on language, which is to say all human societies. I have therefore argued that if there are to be words at all it is necessary to establish ''The Word'', and that The Word is established by the invariance of liturgy.|Roy Rappaport<ref>{{Cite book |last=Rappaport |first=Roy A. |title=Ecology, Meaning, and Religion |publisher=North Atlantic |year=1979 |isbn=978-0-913028-54-4 |location=Richmond, CA |pages=201–211}}</ref>}} Advocates of this school of thought point out that words are cheap. Should an especially clever nonhuman ape, or even a group of articulate nonhuman apes, try to use words in the wild, they would carry no conviction. The primate vocalizations that do carry conviction—those they actually use—are unlike words, in that they are emotionally expressive, intrinsically meaningful, and reliable because they are relatively costly and hard to fake. Oral and gestural languages consist of pattern-making whose cost is essentially zero. As pure social conventions, signals of this kind cannot evolve in a Darwinian social world—they are a theoretical impossibility.<ref>Zahavi, A. 1993. "The fallacy of conventional signalling." ''Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences'' 340: 227–230, published by Royal Society.</ref> Being intrinsically unreliable, language works only if one can build up a reputation for trustworthiness within a certain kind of society—namely, one where symbolic cultural facts (sometimes called "institutional facts") can be established and maintained through collective social endorsement.<ref>Searle, J. R. 1996. ''The Construction of Social Reality''. London: Penguin.</ref> In any hunter-gatherer society, the basic mechanism for establishing trust in symbolic cultural facts is collective ''ritual''.<ref>Durkheim, E. 1947 [1915]. "Origins of these beliefs". Chapter VII. In É. Durkheim, ''The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A study in religious sociology''. Trans. J. W. Swain. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, pp. 205–239.</ref> Therefore, the task facing researchers into the origins of language is more multidisciplinary than is usually supposed. It involves addressing the evolutionary emergence of human ritual, kinship, religion and symbolic culture taken as a whole, with language an important but subsidiary component. In a 2023 article, Cedric Boeckx<ref name="Boeckx" /> endorses the Rappaport/Searle/Knight way of capturing the "special" nature of human words. Words are symbols. This means that, from a standpoint in Darwinian signal evolution theory, they are "patently false signals." Words are facts, but "facts whose existence depends entirely on subjective belief".<ref>Knight, C. 2010. The origins of symbolic culture. In Ulrich J. Frey, Charlotte Störmer and Kai P. Willfuhr (eds) 2010. Homo Novus – A Human Without Illusions. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 193–211.</ref> In philosophical terms, they are "institutional facts": fictions that are granted factual status within human social institutions<ref>Searle, J. R. 1996. "The Construction of Social Reality." London: Penguin.</ref> From this standpoint, according to Boeckx, linguistic utterances are symbolic to the extent that they are patent falsehoods serving as guides to communicative intentions. "They are communicatively useful untruths, as it were."<ref name="Boeckx" /> The reason why words can survive among humans despite being false is largely down to a matter of trust. The corresponding origins theory is that language can only have begun to evolve from the moment humans started reciprocally faking in communicatively helpful ways, i.e., when they became capable of upholding the levels of trust necessary for linguistic communication to work. The point here is that an ape or other nonhuman must always carry at least some of the burden of generating the trust necessary for communication to work. That is, in order to be taken seriously, each signal it emits must be a patently reliable one, trusted because it is rooted in some way in the real world. But now imagine what might happen under social conditions where trust could be taken for granted. The signaller could stop worrying about reliability and concentrate instead on perceptual discriminability. Carried to its conclusion, this should permit digital signaling—the cheapest and most efficient kind of communication. From this philosophical standpoint, animal communication cannot be digital because it does not have the luxury of being patently false. Costly signals of any kind can only be evaluated on an analog scale. Put differently, truly symbolic, digital signals become socially acceptable only under highly unusual conditions—such as those internal to a ritually bonded community whose members are not tempted to lie.{{citation needed|date=November 2024}} Critics of the speech/ritual co-evolution idea theory include Noam Chomsky, who terms it the "non-existence" hypothesis—a denial of the very existence of language as an object of study for natural science.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Chomsky |first=Noam |year=2011 |title=Language and Other Cognitive Systems. What is Special About Language? |journal=Language Learning and Development |volume=7 |issue=4 |pages=263–278 |doi=10.1080/15475441.2011.584041 |s2cid=122866773}}</ref> Chomsky's own theory is that language emerged in an instant and in perfect form,<ref>Chomsky, N. 2005. 'Three factors in language design.' ''Linguistic Inquiry'' 36(1): 1–22.</ref> prompting his critics in turn, to retort that only something that does not exist—a theoretical construct or convenient scientific fiction—could possibly emerge in such a miraculous way.<ref name="Knight2008" /> The controversy remains unresolved.
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)