Becoming Respectable

There is a new book on speech origins due out this week. It’s Christine Kenneally’s The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language and is likely to be of interest to anybody who cares about this blog, with one caveat. The subtitle tells where the focus lies—not so much on the origin of language itself but the search for the origin. There is more on the dispute over what evolved than on what Homo habilis had to say. Since there is hardly anything in the story of speech evolution that can be classed as settled knowledge, the approach makes sense. But the reader should know going in that the book tells a story of modern science rather than the pathway to ourselves.

Probably every generation produces people who privately notice the paradox of language; we learned to talk from our elders who learned it from their elders who learned it from their elders. It is like the tortoise who’s back supports the earth. Ok, but what supports the tortoise? Another tortoise, and so on all the way down. The solution to the problem of infinite regress is to get rid of the first step. The earth does not rest on anything. Likewise, there must be something wrong with the notion that that we learn to talk from our elders.

But wait, thinks nearly everyone: I did learn to talk by listening to my parents and teachers. How else was I going to learn __(fill in the name of your mother tongue)__? So, goes this reasoning, originally somebody must have either (a) invented language, or (b) been divinely inspired. Until recently in human history, most people opted for b: language was given to us by the gods. It was only during the Enlightenment, when answer b became unsatisfactory to a few specialized tastes that anyone tried answer a.

The first person Kenneally cites who looks for human origins was Jean Jacques Rousseau. He spoke of a time "before it was necessary to persuade assembled men," a time when all we needed was a "cry of Nature" wrested from some early speaker, "only by a sort of instinct on urgent occasions, to implore for help." [p. 18] As is often the case when reading outmoded ideas, this one is more interesting for its assumptions than its assertions. It assumes a primary function (persuasion) and an instinct, without wondering where the instinct came from. Rousseau’s account has much in common with most of the language-is-an-invention ideas. Some instinct is turned into a noise that gives us the first word, and from there the rest comes with improvement over time.

That formula permits a near infinite variety of instincts-into-noises, each equally arbitrary. Through much of the early 19th century one instinct after another was proposed, and by the 1860s so many unprovable ideas had been published that the Société de Linguistique announced it would no longer accept material on the subject of language origins. The London Philological Society made the same pronouncement in 1872. The taboo lasted over a century. In the early 1960s, as an undergraduate, I asked about of language origins and was told I was not allowed to ask that question. Kenneally reports having the same experience in 1990, when she was an undergraduate.

A few years before the French linguists banned all consideration of language origins, Darwin had published his theory of evolution, thus providing us with an alternative kind of answer. Language has biological rather than divine or ingenious origins. But that idea was like a stage-play gun, shown to the audience in Act 1, scene one, but not fired until deep into Act 3.

We can skip ahead in the taboo decades until the 1950s. At that point American psychology was dominated by B.F. Skinner's behaviorist theories, also known as stimulus-response (or S-R) theory. Its central idea was that all behavior is a response to a stimulus. If I sit on a pin, you don’t need a theory of mind to explain why I jump up and yell. I am responding reflexively to a stimulus. S-R theory held that all learning consisted on developing reflexive responses to stimuli. When, at a dinner,  Skinner had first astounded the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead with this simple-minded idea, Whitehead challenged him by pointing to language. In the 1950s Skinner replied with his magnum opus purporting to explain how speech (verbal behavior) can be a set of reflexive responses to stimuli.

Two years later Noam Chomsky published his famous reply in which he argued, most importantly, about the "poverty" of the stimulus. One stimulus, a painting for example, might provoke so many different responses that it cannot possibly be the complete explanation for why it elicits, "Beautiful," from one speaker, "Ugly," from another respondent, and, "Remember our trip to Maine," from a third. Furthermore, grammatical sentences are so complicated they cannot be understood by analysis of their appearance alone. Syntax is more complicated than that.

Skinner complained that he was misrepresented, but he had no reply to the argument that S-R theory could not explain either the diversity of responses or the power of syntax.

This moment would seem a propitious one for pulling the stage-gun out, but we are still only in Act 2 of this story and it is still taboo to talk about speech origins. Chomsky might seem to be just the fellow to give that issue some respectability. After all, he insisted that because of the poverty of the stimulus, our knowledge of syntax must be innate. Snce any inborn ability must have an evolutionary history, it would seem natural to investigate this route, but Chomsky was, in this regard, a fierce conservative:

…whenever he mentioned evolutionary theory, it was mostly to discourage its value as a solution to the origins of language. … Such was his eminence that when Chomsky said things like it’s "hard to imagine," it was taken to be a truth about the intractable nature of the problem rather than the limits of [his?] imagination.[p. 39]

One investigator Kenneally does not mention is Eric Lenneberg whose 1967 book The Biological Foundations of Language left me utterly persuaded that human bodies have many special adaptations for speaking. I read that 35 years ago and have never understood why it took 20 more years for the idea that speech has an evolutionary history to gain any kind of respectability. Kenneally does look into the question of why the origins taboo persisted. She asks a variety of people, but finds no good answer.

Meanwhile a host of people, represented in this book by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, took up the investigation from the other end, looking to see if apes could be taught to use language. The answer: they aren’t Shakespeares, but some can learn to use words as well as toddlers. Again, it would seem to be evidence that something biological is going on, but perhaps many linguists were unfamiliar with the notion that all things biological evolved.

In 1990 a Chomskyan broke the taboo. Stephen Pinker, along with a graduate student Paul Bloom, published an article saying it was ridiculous to talk about innate linguistic abilities without admitting evolution into the discussion. And finally the dam broke. Many people who had been muttering to themselves cried at last.

One loud shouter was Philip Lieberman, a student of Chomsky’s first class in linguistics. "Lieberman argues that not only should you study language evolution, but you can’t even begin to understand language if you don’t start with evolution." [p. 69] Pinker wanted to reconcile Darwin and Chomsky, but Lieberman’s position is that Darwin and Chomsky cannot both be right.

According to Lieberman, the analogy between the computer and the brain prevents a true understanding of language. Even though formulas can describe a set of sentences, they don’t have much to do with how language is produced by the brain or how the brain and language evolved. "Syntax is not the touchstone of human language, and evolution is not logical," declared Lieberman [in 2000]. "Evolution doesn’t give a damn about formal elegance." [p. 74]

Back in the taboo days, that kind of observation was enough to prove evolution has nothing to do with language. At least now, however, it’s a discussable question. Are Chomsky and Darwin compatible? And if not, who was right?

(Kennally’s book opens with this survey of how the question that concerns this blog became scientifically respectable. Future posts will look at other parts of her book.)

Comments

[The Ridger]

Utterly fascinating. I only recently found this blog, but I'm reading it avidly.

[Tom Heehler]

Regarding the question's respectability: Could it be that before recent developments in the field of neuroscience, any discussion of the matter was often little more than an exercise in speculation, similar to the way some physicists still scoff at string theory?

[Ralf Heinritz]

The origin of language used to be very hot (Rousseau...), but it all came to more or less less than nothing. On the other hand with analytical philosophy now sometimes not much different from science fiction, why not give it a go again

[Ralf Heinritz]

The origin of language used to be very hot (Rousseau...), but it all came to more or less less than nothing. On the other hand with analytical philosophy now sometimes not much different from science fiction, why not give it a go again