How Fascinating (yawn)!

I omitted an important fact from yesterday's post. I began a series of reports on Michael Tomasello's new book, The Origins of Human Communications, which is officially published today (Sept. 30). I managed to mention that the book does an excellent job of identifying the cognitive and emotional qualities that enable people to speak, but I wanted to save one detail for this second post about the book. For all its importance, Tomasello has given us an astoundingly boring book. It was a discipline for me to get through it.

Part of the problem is terrible writing. Tomasello reads like a first draft. He takes 25 words to say what could be said in ten. After a time, plodding through so many overstuffed pages becomes as tiring as making your way through an endless snow drift. But that drag is not the most serious problem.

Another aspect of the awful writing may owe its troubles to the book’s origins as a series of lectures given in Paris two and a half years ago. Lectures can provide the basis of classics like The Varieties of Religious Experience, but  William James lectured before the invention of PowerPoint. I don’t know what the lectures were like, but the book consists of 350 pages of pointed assertions. Eventually even interesting assertions take on the rhythm of a jack hammer. Bang! Bang! Anecdotes, never. Here are a couple of more bulleted points for you. Bang! Bang! Bang! Consideration of an alternate account? Forget about it. But even that changeless, pounding rhythm is not the book’s most tiresome problem.

Tomasello has made the most serious mistake a writer can make, mistaking a subplot for the main story. It is as though Shakespeare told us all about Horatio and relegated Hamlet to a couple of scenes.

I closed last week's account of the book's first chapter by saying, "The basic evolutionary question is how did our lineage acquire the psychological tools to make a shared sympathy and understanding the default condition of human communities." Regrettably, this topic is not the one the book tries to consider. Instead we get a technical account of the process by which the human lineage might have gotten from ape gestures to language.

Readers of this blog may be surprised by my objection since I said in the blog's first post that I hoped Babel's Dawn would "become the main source of news and information about the evolution of speech, from primate vocalizations to meaningful exchanges." So, isn't Tomasello simply answering my question? Not quite.

Notice those words technical and might have. Technical means that the account is without a larger context. Let me confess that I don't really care about the details of speech origins in themselves. I want to know what the details tell us about being human, what in involves, how it works, and how it is possible. So I want to know as many details as possible, but not stripped of that larger context. Instead we get the context in chapter one and then move on to details that add nothing to the exciting first chapter. It's like a bad action movie, all anticlimax after the opening scene.

Might have means that the account is not certain. It is logical, but might not be accurate. It is speculative. Again, however, regulars on this blog will shout Whoa! This blog speculates all the time. It is true. I consider speculation a great tool for getting at the larger picture. In moments of honesty I must admit we will never know the story of speech origins in the depth that I would like to know it, but speculation leads to new questions and increased knowledge. Typically the speculation will be knocked down, but knocking it down means I have learned more. It is as close as a storyteller can get to the scientific method of posing hypotheses. A good example, and one that taught me, comes from an old title (1961): African Genesis by Robert Ardrey. Just about everything proposed in that book has by now been proven either false or irrelevant, and its main thesis, that humans are descended from an unusually murderous line of apes, has been discredited for decades. Richard Leakey wrote a book, Origins, 30 years ago that included a great deal of evidence of the falsity of Ardrey's speculation. But we don't just know Ardrey was wrong; the evidence of falsity means we know more about the society that shaped the human lineage because Leakey went to the trouble of establishing that our ancestors were much more recognizable than Ardrey suggested. You only learn by wondering and arguing. If this blog could get readers wondering the way Ardrey's book did, I would be thrilled. And if it increases our body of knowledge … my what a success.

Tomasello, however, gives us technical speculations. Technical facts, ok. Technical speculations, what’s the point? As a splendid scientist, he does the scientific work of observing, hypothesizing, experimenting, and observing some more. He comes up with new information and has been invaluable to this blog. Thanks to his work I am very confident in the proposition that the speech triangle is peculiar to the human lineage and not found among apes. (See: Can This Blog Be Falsified?) As a thinking person, he is of course free to speculate as well. That’s the only way to really get at the larger, what-does-it-all-mean point, and plainly Tomasello has been thinking about this question. He wants to tell us what he thinks, and, frankly, I want to know his opinion. But speculation matters, if it matters at all, only because it points us to what the larger importance of these hard-won facts. He gives us that larger meaning in chapter one, and it is great (as I said in my previous post). Lots to wonder about there, and if he speculated on where all that came from there would be lots more to wonder about.

You can see the problem with Tomasello’s technical speculative approach by looking at his starting point. He supposes that human communication began with gesture (pointing and pantomime) and later came to include vocalization (speech). It is certainly a reasonable proposition, and I have become convinced that expressive gesture is as old as speech. (See: Speech Includes Gesture) Tomasello says it is older. Ok. I’m willing to believe that proposition if you’ve got the evidence or decisive argument. Tomasello has an argument. Apes vocalize, but their vocalizations are neither voluntary nor flexible. They show no promise of becoming the voluntary, flexible sounds that characterize speech. Apes also make gestures, and although these gestures are not used in a triangular interchange (“speaker,” “listener,” and "topic") they can be voluntary and flexible. So gesture looks like a more promising route to cooperative communication than vocalization.

It is an argument, and a reasonable one. But is it decisive? By chance, I have a report on the back burner right now concerning some new observations about vocalization and the ape brain that suggests other arguments could be made. I’ll get to that news in a couple of posts. For now, let’s just say that other arguments are still imaginable. In particular, Tomasello says absolutely nothing about babbling—the repetitive sound making that emerges around the six month of life. All babies babble, even if they are deaf, even if they are destined for autism. So babbling does not begin as a voluntary activity, but it is flexible and by the 9th or 10th month reflects cultural biases. Where does that come from? How does it fit into the story? Since Tomasello does not acknowledge the phenomenon, I can only shrug. But babbling nags at the back of my mind and makes me hesitate before greeting Tomasello’s technical speculations as revelation.

More important: even if Tomasello’s thesis proves completely false and one day we know for sure that speech came before expressive gesture (something I don’t expect to ever learn) it will not disturb the meaning-of-it-all speculations of chapter one. They stand or fall on the investigations they inspire. So in some way the technical speculations of the rest of the book are a non sequitur.

I plan to post at least one more report on Tomasello’s book because the chapter on grammar stands on its own and shows how far the generative tradition is slipping into the rear-view mirror. It merits a respectful discussion. I will probably post a fifth report summarizing the process by which Tomasello believes the human lineage got to language. That’s what this blog is about, after all, but I have to steel myself a bit to go back over the book’s endless PowerPoint prose.

Comments

[watercat]

Babbling is far more than repetitive sound making, and the sounds deaf babies make are unrelated to their babbling, which is manual not vocal. Deaf babies' prelinguistic vocal productions are qualitatively different from the babbling of hearing children exposed to aural language. Babies produce actual babbling in the same medium in which they are exposed to language: Children--deaf or hearing--exposed to sign language babble manually; Children--deaf or hearing--not exposed to language make sounds but don't babble.
As distinguished from repetitive sound making, actual babbling develops in three roughly sequential stages, all intentional, voluntarily controlled articulatory movements;
4-7 mo) a restricted set of phonetic forms taken from the set of possible aural or visual elements of language; (reflects cultural bias towards language medium)
7-9 mo) prosodically and phonologically lawful syllabic productions within the medium
9-12 mo) language-specific syllables
12 mo)actual words, beyond babbling

[Jesús Sanchis]

It's funny how the author of this blog first praises a book and then says it is boring, speculative, etc. I cannot say much more about this, because I haven't read the book (by the way, you seem to have read it before its publication; how did you manage to do so? Or did I get it wrong?). It is obvious that in the field of language origins and evolution there are some authors with brilliant writing skills, e.g. Steven Pinker, a real best-selling author, and others with more limited writing skills, like Tomasello. In any case, I read Tomasello's article "On the Different Origins of Symbols and grammar" (in Christiansen-Kirby, eds. 2003) and I think it was written in a reasonably clear, understandable way, and it included some interesting ideas, similar to the ones he's written about in his new book. It must be said, however, that the articles published in that book (2003) were read by students before publishing, and their comments and suggestions were taken into account.
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BLOGGER: It's a paradox for sure. I think the book is important, clear, and informative, but a very hard slog. My posts on this book have very few quotations, especially longish ones. That's because I would want to quote a passage, but find it so clumsy that paraphrase seemed the better course.