Je parle, donc ...

Here’s a new book that says too many thinkers take language for granted. They look on it as the inevitable extension of ape communication skills, or the natural result of enlarging the primate brain, or perhaps the sure outcome of bipedalism. And as for its function, we get only generalities like exchanging information or social bonding.

Fifty years ago Noam Chomsky sank B.F. Skinner for making the same kind of mistake. Skinner supposed that grammar could be picked up easily while Chomsky showed that it was hard. Skinner also imagined that the function of language was to make it easier for parents to control their children. Chomsky laughed that off, but the studies he inspired have been content with his formal definition of language as a set of sentences. The notion that language serves some purpose—speakers, writers, or signers have some reason for generating those sentences—has been taken for granted rather than explored. 

One of the pleasures of writing this blog has been finding people who are scattered around the globe who are trying to understand why we have a language faculty, and now comes this newly published book by Jean-Louis Dessalles devoted to discovering why people speak.

This latest addition to the Oxford University Press’s series “Studies in the Evolution of Language” is Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language, a translation of Dessalles’ Les Origines du Langage.

The French origin gives the book a slightly Cartesian flavor. It moves from theory to observations rather than vice-versa and there are passing references to philosophers like Henri Bergson who even at their peak were not widely known in the English-speaking world. But that foreignness is part of the book’s charm, reminding us that the issues and ideas considered here are natural to serious thinkers in many parts of the world. It asks, in words different from mine, a central question of this blog:

Does the advent of communication through speech constitute an unlikely innovation or should it be seen as only a quantitative improvement on existing systems? (p. 3)

Theories that speech is an evolutionary innovation must take care to avoid underestimating the animal world. Fortunately Dessalles begins his analysis by saying:

If ever there was a prejudice that has hindered the advancement of knowledge, it is the idea that the human race is separate from the rest of the natural world, ruled by different laws, and seen as a culmination. (p. 3)

He then looks at the biology of communication and finds all kinds of things that one person or another has said was peculiarly human. Experiments have established, for example, that vervet monkeys appear to have mental representations of what their alarm cries signify. That would make them more complicated than Skinner thought even people were. Between the stimulus (alarm) and the reaction is some kind of intermediate procedure that enables the monkey to take its context into account. By using some kind of critical response instead of a reflexive one, Dessalles notes, the vervet “can resist being manipulated by the animal uttering the signal.” (p. 9) Thus, vervets can avoid the very thing Skinner proposed as the function of parents “teaching” their children language.

Dessalles explores animal-human relationship in two ways. First, showing that many proposed special properties of language can be found somewhere in the non-human world. He then turns that around and shows that many weaknesses said to be exclusively animal are observed in human speech as well. He concludes his exploration by insisting:

if there is a difference of kind between animal communication and human communication, we will not find it in any supposed [human] detachment from our environment, from our emotions, or from our reflexes. (p. 23)

So, is there anything innovative behind our ability to speak? Dessalles begins his answer by acknowledging the Chomsky point that language is an open system able to generate a seemingly infinite number of sentences:

In that respect, our system of communication really is unique among living things. Animals utter repetitive signals drawn from limited repertories, whereas humans invent new messages every time they say anything. (p. 23)

So he is building on the work begun by Chomsky, not overthrowing it, and in that spirit he proceeds to ask why:

We may have a notion of the reasons why animals repeat their utterances; but it is harder to explain why humans never (or hardly ever) repeat themselves when using language in ordinary conversation. (p. 23)

Dessalles seems to know more original and clever people than I do. I hear the same stuff all the time, but I get his point. Why should humans have developed a system that lets them say anything at all? And after some examination of the question, Dessalles finds something unique in human communications:

Animals can communicate their emotional and physiological states, their intentions, their presence, their identity, events both concrete (food) and negative (predators), but they have never been described as drawing attention to events whose sole property is that they are unusual or unexpected. (p. 27)

In our body language and gestures we communicate the same sorts of things other animals do. For some reason we spend a lot of time drawing one another's attention to things “that are often quite trivial.” (p. 29) Why?

In short, Dessalle's book is very much in the spirit of the revolution being reported on this blog. Therefore, his work is too important for the usual one-day book review. That’s why I’ve posted this on a Wednesday rather than the usual book day of Friday. My plan is to devote a series of Wednesdays going through Dessalle’s book, looking at its ideas and where they fit in the rest of what’s been reported on this blog.