Presently
we count with two main groups of contrary hypotheses about the origin of human
language in relation to animal communicative forms: the one represented by Chomsky
and the linguists of generative grammar, which sustains the discontinuity of
the origin of human language in relation to animal proto-languages, and the
hypothesis of the continuists, sustained by Bickerton, Pinker and others, who
from diverse anthropological, linguistic and neuroscientific points of view,
although all of them with a common evolutionary motivation, proposes the
gradual development of human language. The theory of emotions as the basic
semantics of human language that I have presented here is, clearly, continuist,
both in relation to the origin of language as well as with respect to the
general cognitive processes of the living beings. From this vantage point,
human language is the most evolved result of an animal progressive process of
communication which culminates in human symbolization but which shares its
fundamental elements with the rest of life: our way of symbolizing is
consistent with the rest of our vital actions. However, we could maintain
evolutionist and discontinuist theses at the same time, as in the case of
Chomsky, by simply emphasizing the insurmountable distance that our human
grammar supposes with respect to the language of other species. The discussion
seems to be, thus, fundamentally syntactic, and in particular, it seems to be
reduced to the adoption or rejection of an axiom about the existence of an
innate universal grammar in the human being,
therefore I would like to justify my rejection to such
an axiom as part of my exposition of the thesis of continuous rationality.
The
Chomskyan thesis maintains that our language presents a property which is
isolated from the rest of living beings, to which he calls discrete infinitude, the language’s ability to construct with
several dozen signs an infinite variety of expressions, which is especially
manifested in the intellectual ability for handling natural numbers, as well as
in the innate ability that children show to understand that sentences are
composed of a number n of words, but
not of n + 1/2, and that sentences can be indefinitely extended in a recursive
manner.[1]
These abilities, purportedly exclusive of human beings, are common to all
linguistic production and constitute an essential property of language which
provides the speaker with the creative ability to express an infinite number of
thoughts, as well as to adequately react to an unlimited number of situations.[2]
According to Chomsky, who in this matter follows the Enlightenment tradition,
the particular grammars of languages must be supplemented with a general or
universal grammar that may accommodate the creative aspects of language and
express the profound regularities which, by being universal, are omitted in the
particular grammar.[3]
However, the study of particular grammars shows that the universalization in
relation to languages takes place more in relation to the categorizations which
are made of experience (the grammatical categories) than in the sequential
order relations of such categories. Thus, for instance, out of the possible
combinations of order for the triple structures formed by verb, subject and
object, while a 45% of languages use the structure SOV, and a 42% that of SVO,
the structure OSV is practically non-existent.[4]
The use of five out of the six possible combinations, the combinatory variety,
would suffice as a counterexample for the thesis of a universal grammar,
something that seems to support the proposal of a semantico-pragmatic centrality
of linguistic communication. Would not an innate universal grammar precisely
imply that the order of grammatical categories should be the same? In the
syntax of formal languages, the question of the order of signs is in fact
fundamental to determine the well-formed expressions, but in natural languages
the order seems to be subordinated to the intelligibility of the linguistic
utterance, and this intelligibility happens with any of such combinations;
moreover, someone can speak and communicate in several of them without much
problem. What is common is the categorization into verbs (actions), subjects
and objects, but there is no reason to think such categorization as exclusively
human, as it is shown by the fact of the interactions that living beings have
in accordance with the spatio-temporal scales that they share. The order that
we call human grammar could perfectly
be just an evolutionary specialization of the general sequential perceptual
order, the need to use sequential structures in which the perceptual and
conceptual categorizations may maximize the capabilities of the blackboard
memory. The fundamental categorizations of grammatical actions and objects will
be related to the different survival scenarios, a selective[5]
neural categorization from which the emotional protocols would be derived, and
from them, at a human level, the valuations that are expressed in the
communicative actions. This would be compatible with the innate existence in
the brain of a specific area for the processing and decoding of speech, like
the one confirmed by neuroscientific experimentation,[6]
even though, not necessarily for this reason the functional structure of this
area in a particular grammar would cease to be a learned issue. Moreover, as
Philip Lieberman has argued, there could be specific inherited areas in the
brain for the processing and comprehension of speech and yet, the processes of
human grammaticalization would not necessarily need to be innate, for tasks as
complex as grammar involve many different brain areas, and complex multifocal
circuits of distributed neural nets are constituted in the brain linking the
activities of multiple different neuro-anatomic structures, in a cerebral
behavior which is at the same time localized in a specific area and distributed
along many areas as well, and these connections can only be produced through
the vital experience.[7]
Our grammar, then, like other actions in which many neocortical systems are
involved, and despite the fact that our brain has areas in which language is
processed, is a result of a synthesis of neural systems that have developed
once the human being has been exposed to complex vital scenarios. This would
explain not only the differences of order in the basic grammatical categories
of natural languages, but the emergence of the grammars of formal languages
from the demands of experience, as it occurred with the appearance of geometry
after the problematic posed for the control and measure of the territory, or
that of arithmetic after the commercial relations, or that of logic after the
Athenian public citizen argumentation, or the calculus of the 17th
Century after the problems of optics, astronomy, navigation and artillery.
Regarding
the ability of language to produce arbitrarily long structures, it is obvious
that, in the sense in which we are dealing with language here, as a structure,
is a human property, even though the underlying argument for this postulate is
tautological and circular, for it comes to say that we are different and unique
because we are humans, that is, because we are us, we are unique and different.
The theory has a few problems. Let us examine for a moment the
logico-mathematical formulation of the thesis of the discrete infinitude as
presented by Andrew Carnie.[8]
The argument is as follows:
Premise 1:
There is at least one well-formed sentence that has more than zero words in it.
∃x
(F(x) ∧
μ(x) > 0)
Premise 2:
There is an operation in the PSRs (Phrase Structure Rules) such that any
sentence may be embedded in another with more words in it, which is equivalent
to say that there is an operation of linguistic recursivity.
∀n
(∃x
(F(x) ∧
μ(x) = n)) → (∃y (F(y) ∧
μ(y) > n))
Conclusion:
Therefore for every positive integer n, there
are well-formed sentences with a length longer than n. In other words: according to the generative argument, the set of
well-formed sentences in English (Spanish, or any other natural language) is,
at least, countably infinite.
∴
∀n
(∃y
(F(y) ∧
μ(y) > n))
The
argument is a Modus Ponens in which we move from a μ(x) > 0 to μ(x) = n, where n is a positive integer number, by which we are affirming that the
cardinality of F, the set of the
well-formed sentences, is at least the cardinality of the natural numbers, ℵ0. The well-formed sentences
are the ones that a native speaker recognizes as such, and these will be the
ones that do not present non-allowed orders in the sequential disposition of
the words, or absurd meanings: there will be ill-formed sentences due to
syntactic issues and others badly constructed in relation to their semantics.[9]
This set is problematic in several aspects with respect to its definition.
In the
first place, we can remove a finite number, or even an infinite one, of
sentences of the set W of well-formed
sentences in English and we would still have another infinite number of
well-formed sentences:
W
= {a0, a1, a2, a3…}
S
= {a1, a3, a5… am}
W-S=
{a0, a2, a4…}
Let
us suppose that S is the set of all
well-formed sentences in English which are used in speech. This number is very
high, but finite, which results in that if I take by chance an ai ∈ W, the probability of ai belonging to S, i.e. to the well-formed expressions
which are actually used in speech, will be zero. On the other hand, what is the
meaning of talking about a set such as W-S
which contains an infinite number of well-formed expressions according to a
pre-established set of properties (universal grammar) which are not used in
speech? What is the explanatory benefit of the concept of well-formed formula
with respect to a natural language? The effectiveness of the set W that defines a universal grammar is,
in fact, null. The grammar works with S, and
not with S ⊂ W, in fact, ∃
aj ∈
S which is undecidable with respect to W, that is, there is a well-formed
expression of S about which we cannot
decide if it belongs to W. In fact,
by definition, there cannot be any ill-formed formula within W, still, let us suppose a sentence mi ∈ M, which is the set of the ill-formed sentences (such
as they would be recognized in isolation by the native speaker), which is
within a well-formed sentence ai like for example: the sentence that says mi is ill-formed. Although ai
is well-formed, there is a fragment of it that is not, mi, which is a complete
sequence of signs arbitrarily long and defective which cannot be in W, but insofar as it is within ai, it is well-formed, and it
would belong to W. Moreover, the sentence that says mi…, is ai itself, to which we are declaring as well-formed and
ill-formed at the same time. We find that we can construct well-formed
sentences with ill-formed fragments, that is, that there are sentences that
present incorrect sequences and that belong to W, and furthermore, that they would be intelligible for the native
speaker as part of a communicative scenario. The meaning of the sentence does
not need to be self-referential, for the context suffices to transform an
ill-formed sentence which occurs within a well-formed one into an intelligible
expression from the part of the speaker: the
foreigner said mi. In fact, if we observe the sentences of literary
works that belong to a culture’s heritage, recognized by a native speaker as
well-formed sentences merely for being part of that heritage, we will find
examples that, if we take them out of context, will be recognized by the same
speaker as semantically ill-formed sentences in Carnie’s sense. Let us take a
stanza of Lorca as an example:
All time blaze in flints slept
With anise the beetles drunk
We could
find many more examples of semantically ill-formed sentences in the poetry of
the 20th and 21st Centuries, from which we can infer,
unless we leave poetry outside the realm of grammar and the order of the city
(in a Platonic fashion), that ill-formed sentences, like this one of Lorca, are
also part of the grammar, given an adequate context. The validity of the
concept of well-formed sentence of a
natural language seems, then, to be restricted to contexts of formalization,
therefore it would not have a pragmatic sense to speak of a universal grammar which depends on a
definition of such a concept, but of a grammatical relativity with respect to a
pragmatic context. The problematic of the rules of formation that provide the
properties of W is not limited to
natural languages, as meta-theory after Gödel has studied. In order to make
explicit the rules that determine if an expression is a well-formed formula of
a calculus, such rules cannot be formulated from the calculus itself, nor from
a different formal calculus. In the second case, because we would enter into an
infinite regress. In the first case, because the rules of formation precede
those of transformation (and provide the symbolic practical conditions of
possibility for these) and we could not employ the principles of the calculus
to organize and describe that without which it does not even make sense to
speak about principles. With these limitations any theory is forced to proceed
in its constructions using an informal language in order to formalize the
system of propositions that constitutes it. It has been normally described in
terms of imprecise concepts, like that of intuition,
and thus we speak about procedures of intuitive
inference[11] for the meta-theoretical constructions in which to
define objects and relations of our formal calculi. My thesis is that such
intuitive inferences are actuations of emotional protocols with which we have
conformed our Lebenswelt, with
respect to which the formal languages are an Überlebenswelt. According to this, in relation to W, the determinations will be made based
on the Lebenswelt, which in turn is
conditioned by the determinations that the basic emotional system imposes,
which constitutes a pre-valuative Unterlebenswelt
that plunges its roots beyond our species:[12] W depends on the emotional semanticity, and any grammar as well, and
makes sense to think of it as S, and
not like a process of infinite iteration.
On the
other hand, also from the vantage point of communicative praxis, the concept of
an infinite well-formed sentence does not make any sense: what does it mean a
process of validation (to test if a formula is well constructed) which is
infinite? By the time we were finished validating there would not be language
nor humans anymore. It is not valid the appellation to the testing that a
machine could undertake, for as we have said, W cannot be specified by applying formalizing rules (ergo,
machinable), but from an inferential intuition such as that of the Lebenswelt, for this reason the checking
would have to be undertaken by a human being, and be ratified by others, in a
process in which intervene both the conventions and the basic formulae of the
world’s intuition, the emotions, but never principles of universality in the
Chomskyan sense. A sentence is well-formed with respect to a pragmatic referent,
namely, according to its ability to transmit a semantic content in a particular
environment. The generality of environments and rules is due to the common
emotional referent that makes communication possible, and not to a specific
syntactic extra-emotional structure. Additionally, according to what
neuroscientific experimentation seems to show, recursive structures and
induction in general seem to be basic processes of the system of
self-stimulation. Interspecies communication in the animal world is ubiquitous,
and it is possible insofar as they share an emotional referent. Obviously, animals
do not understand our art, nor our intellectual constructions, but we
understand each other perfectly at the intersections of our basic emotions. The
theories of the discontinuity do not have any consistency outside the
onto-theologies in which they are proposed, either natural beings, or ideal
structures that do not correspond to our experience. Chomskyan theory, although
it postulates the genetic conditioning of language in our brain, does not
accept that such conditioning may have been attained progressively in a very
long evolutionary process of the hominids, instead, language was reached in a
sudden mutation which has produced a neural organ (an structure) that is not
found in other animals, which implies that such an organ has functioned
basically in an analogous manner since its beginnings up to now, according to a
universal programming that is expressed in the different languages of the
planet, something that the research of Roland Friedrich also appears to refute.
Chomsky’s
theses are a contemporary variation of old theories about reason. Logos, or
speech, was proposed as the specific difference of humans with respect to the
animal genre, no just as our ability for deduction according to an apodictic
discourse, but mainly as our general faculty to think verbally, to establish
symbolic communications. Greek philosophy, and scholasticism later, defined man
by its rationality, a concept which seems to be always linked to the ability to
speak and symbolize, but which appears to connote likewise a universal mode of
divine order.[13]
Descartes understood the difficulty in defining human being as a rational
animal, a delimitation which simply diverted the problem towards the concepts
of animality and rationality, equally problematic, and conducive towards other
concepts not exempt from difficulties.[14]
However, the fundamental problem is the impredicativity produced when we
include ourselves in conceptual systems which at the same time contain other
living beings as elements. When we define an object O from a property P which
is only definable after O, we are
giving an impredicative or circular definition, form which paradoxes are
derived, and which does not tell us anything that we have not placed there
already. This is the case of the human object
and the rational property. Man is the
rational animal, and rational is the faculty to handle a symbolic human
language. We create the conceptual class of animal,
and at the same time we include ourselves as element of the class, and
provide our specific difference from the specific difference itself. When the
categorizations of class have only human referents, like in the arts, politics,
etc., there is no impredicativity, but laws of internal composition,
endomorphisms, but when we choose the animal
category and we differentiate ourselves by the rationality, we are creating
a whole system and pretend that it has an objective and non-paradoxical sense
outside ourselves. If we say: the human
is the animal that does not characterize himself as irrational, it does not
hold as specific difference, because the rest of animals do not categorize
themselves as irrational either (they do not make any categorization at all).
If on the contrary we say: the human is
the animal that does characterize himself as irrational, here we are giving
a specific difference, for none other animal is capable of such a categorization,
but the result is paradoxical, because that which would make us different from
other animals would be to characterize ourselves as irrational. In fact the
difference is given by the ability to categorize, both according to the
property of rationality and that of irrationality, that is, the distinction is
prior to the property in question.
The
solution proposed above about the basic semantics of emotions, which
understands our language as a change of degree in the communicative symbolic
ability initiated by our animal ancestors (not only hominids, or mammals), and
which continues developing progressively even today, is a non-impredicative
alternative to define rationality. In this case, the notion of rationality is replaceable for that of neural activity of communicative
symbolization that is differed and mediated by objects. By differed I understand any communication
in which the coding and decoding of objects belong to different spatio-temporal
environments, without adding to the term the metaphysical load that
deconstruction has placed on it. The difference
that I refer to would not be limited to human symbolization, but the concept
would cover a more general field. Thus, for instance, the categorizations that
insects make of different chemical substances which indicate them if another
insect belongs or not to the community, and which are associated to a specific
behavior in relation to such an individual, a violent response for example, as
in the case of ants, belong to the genetic programming, but are a type of differed decoding, in which the
information was codified in a spatio-temporal scenario different from that of
the decoding. Whether the information is codified by means of DNA sequences, or
by means of the synthesis of proteins in the nucleus (which are the long-term
memories), does not entail but variations of molecular processes, directly
interrelated, through which the live organism processes the information
according to its different levels of complexity. The general definition offered
does not have other intention than to be a minimum conceptual basis common to
the different types of progressive rationality which will be seen promptly.
The most
surprising thing about languages is not the recursive ability that grammar
shows, an ability that we find ubiquitously in the processes of reentry and
categorization of the living organisms with a nervous system, nor the aesthetic
sensations of sublimity that produce in us the aesthetico-mathematical
speculations with an infinite number of possibilities, but quite the opposite,
that in such an ocean we may be able to understand each other, or that a child
of less than two years of age may be able to make himself/herself understood
speaking as badly as he/she does. The surprise is none other than the fact of
understanding that we communicate because we have emotions, and that we
communicate more complex things not because of a general recursivity, but due
precisely to the limitation of the recursivity by way of primitive recursive
functions which give us the exomorphisms or limits for the world. The limitless
is noise, anomy and entropy, the liminal, and to live is to reduce it to
protocols, simplifying, semanticizing it in specific contexts. Semantization is
the assignation of a primitive recursive function to an ordinary recursive
function, the establishment of certain exomorphic representations in which the
endomorphic chains are stopped. Within formal languages, the primitive
recursive functions are the functions that exhaust their computation, which
have a terminus that detains the process of calculus, and in terms of the human
language, are the functions by which a linguistic formula, whether well-formed
or not, makes sense within a given context of experience and not in another. By
this I do not mean to say that any sentence refers back to an exomorphism. The
majority of the communicative sequences are endomorphic, but for these to make
sense within a given context, there should be possible to trace a literal
referent (almost always emotional in the scenarios of natural reasoning) from
them.
The
hypotheses about the origin of human language that have the greatest acceptance
today, such as the gestural, that of grammaticalization, the neural, and that
of the interaction mother-child, among others, are all continuists and address
the issue in an evolutionary manner. Especially relevant in relation to the
theory of emotions that I have expounded are the theories that center on the
communicative social aspect of our language, grounded on the social emotions,
and especially on the one with the longest duration, the maternal. In a complex
system, like that of human culture, any attempt to reduce its dynamics to a
single cause, cannot but produce partial results in the best of cases, and
severe paradoxes and nonsense in all the rest. The processes of recursivity,
ubiquitous in the biological action, point, as a better strategy, towards a
non-linear and open[15]
understanding of the phenomenon of language and of rationality. We can imagine
evolutionary scenarios in which conjointly operate the factors of a size and
specific brain complexity in conjunction with a basic semanticity given by the
emotions, in which the praxis produces a progressive grammaticalization, from
the concrete to the abstract, a process of increasing selection of objects and
relations relevant to the ever more ample scenarios of symbolization. One of
the possibilities for language development and rationality -now in the Homo
sapiens- is the modular theory that Steven Mithen proposes, according to which,
human language is first developed within the social sphere with a greater
complexity than in other spheres of life, and that later, from this core, it
extends towards the rest of environments.[16]
Modular theory is consistent with the theory of emotions that I maintain here,
and in an evolutionary plane it would imply that the development of the
different neural systems has supposed different types of intelligence, each of
them recursively defined, in relation to what had come previously, but with the
added quality of a modification through adaptive reentry of the elements that
existed in the previous state. The unification of these processes is feasible
insofar as there may be a referent in the homeostasis of the collective
organism which expresses itself in relation to the environment in emotional protocols.
It seems
that the development of a language like ours has been a long process of small
steps that began in the animal world. It spanned from the first attempts at
communicating the presence of predators, the mutual attractions and rejections,
the social actions and hierarchies inside the group, and in general, all the
relevant information for survival (so effectively encoded in the emotional
protocols), to the first human protolanguages, crossing over the slow gradation
of the hominid limbo. This postulate stands upon the theories of Neural
Darwinism and affective neuroscience as well as upon Pinker’s proposal of
language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche, i.e. as the result of a
biological evolution.[17]
It is obvious that human syntax allows a precision in the transfer of
information that we cannot find in any other mammal, but if we examine human
mythology and history, it is also obvious that the content of our
communications belongs basically to the emotional realm, and that such
communications have relevance in relation to very specific survival scenarios. The
thesis that I present here, of an emotional origin of language, is but a
variation of the basic assumptions of some contemporary theories of
socio-biological and anthropological evolutionism whose roots can be traced
back to Democritus -who sustained that human language was developed in a
process of communication of emotions-, Epicenus, Lucretius, and later, in the
modern world, to Vico and Rousseau in the 18th Century and Charles Darwin in
the 19th Century.
We have
considered the valuative character of the processes of primary consciousness,
the ordering of homeostatic processes following survival criteria, and yet, the
action of valuation occurs even in simpler processes than those associated with
primary consciousness. Affective neuroscience is showing that the valuation
systems for a particular species, those that control the inner homeostasis of
the organism (pulse, breathing, endocrine functions, the autonomous system) and
the relations to the environment, are determined by evolutionary selection. Valuation
systems operate by constraining the categorization domains to the organic
functions that have been reaffirmed by evolution. The biological value is the result
of the biochemical punishments and rewards that are given to the cells by the
neurotransmitters, a fact which implies that the valuation process follows the
conditions established by biological efficiency, for the primitive function of
the valuation processes is to make sure that the organism remains within the
homeostatic interval of survival, an action which is performed by the
continuous monitoring of the appropriate parameters, balancing any possible
deviation from homeostasis.[18]
The simplest valuations are linked to pleasure and pain, providing a basic
semantics for the categorization processes, although the final referent for
pleasure and pain is still survival. Therefore, the basic emotions use the
circuits of pleasure and pain as their own elements, furthermore, the
socio-emotional systems (especially, mother care and sociability) seem to be
evolutionary developments of general systems of pain. We could speak of a
general recursive process of semantic ascension which coincides with the
process of increasing complexity that we call organic evolution. Here I
understand the term semantics in a broader sense than linguistics or psychology
give to the concept. While linguistics uses it in relation to the
connotative-denotative sense of human languages, and psychology in relation to
the domain of explicit factual memory (knowledge of the world),[19]
I understand by semantics the interpretation of a system, any mapping or
assignment of identities between the elements of two sets. Such an assignment
of identities follows a self-poetic principle of economy by which the processes
of a system form new synthetic units of properties which in turn produce new
interactions, in an ascending scale. The protein system of the organism is
interpreted in terms of cellular workings, which, although conditioned by
molecular laws, produce the synthesis of new processes of emergent complexity
with a syntax of their own. And so it happens, in ascension, with other organic
systems until we reach the semantics of our ordinary language, and we
interpret, for instance, a little discomfort as thirst, acting accordingly to
solve our want. When I take a glass with the intention of drinking water I do
not think my action in terms of biochemical unbalances or homeostasis (unless I
find myself in an emergency situation), but from a social point of view, as
another vital action in an specific social milieu, and I will look for water or
any other thirst quenching liquid in accordance to my environment, guiding my
actions with some concrete social semantics which do not take molecules into
account. Every semantic scenario functions with its own relations of
self-identity and self-diversity. A semantically higher scenario, like my
interpretation of thirst in social terms, is conditioned by the lower scenario,
but those conditions are met following the syntactic workings of the symbolic elements
of the higher semantic order.
Can we
define a zero term for semantic recursion? It is difficult to answer this
mythological question. Obviously we could define it and adopt it by convention,
but, what would be the epistemological value of such a definition? A first determination
for semantic recursion, consistent with the present state of our sciences,
could be the first forms of life, the predecessor of the eukaryote and
prokaryote cells that lived 3.900 million years ago. Although it might seem absurd
to propose any form of rationality for the bacteria, we can think of them as
ordered systems which meet the conditionings of their genetic code, adapting
interactively with their environment, and being, in a way, very simple
expressions of intelligence. For our purpose of understanding the origin of emotions
and rational thinking, it is enough to place the beginning of recursion in the
global mappings as defined by Neural Darwinism, i.e. in organisms with neurons.
The
ability to use symbolic languages has been usually mistaken with rationality,
as it was the case of Cassirer. Several difficulties appeared when trying to
fit an ethical definition of rationality with the specific cultural
developments of the turbulent human history, so a distinction between a rational
language, which operates with concepts, and a fuzzier emotional one had to be
made.[20]
Such a distinction does not take into account the outlined theory of the
evolution of the neural systems, but it merely calls emotional the content of
the communication of n-ary emotions, as expressed for instance in the arts,
without considering their link to basic emotional systems. The fundamental
content of our linguistic communications is emotionally n-ary, but this does
not mean that our complex emotions are a mere chaos, for their origin and link
to basic emotions give them not only a strict order, but in a sense, an
inexorable one. Living beings follow clear homeostatic principles of order, and
the emotional organization that still leads our lives today, and will continue
to do so as long as our human systems of survival and reproduction follow the
general principles of life on Earth, can only be described as irrational only
from the transcendentalist point of view, whose definition of reason denies, point
by point, the physiological drives of living beings, with the exception of a
divinized maternity and paternity.
There is
a general agreement about the differences in rationality between human and
animals among practically all philosophical points of view. If we substitute
the terms animal and human for vital action and symbolic
action, we could clarify their difference without emphasizing their
oppositions, which are basically metaphysical beliefs. Obviously, this distinction
is grounded on symbolic action, it is a human linguistic difference, but we can
talk about life because we are life, and the conceptual structures that we
build are nothing but ways in which life organizes itself and not something
alien to it. We started out from symbolization, from our humanity, and it is
within the symbolization process that we have built our Weltanschauung. The question of what specific Weltanschauung did the first homo sapiens have, can be nothing but
an object of our speculation, although, if we observe the archaic myths that
still have a social function today, we can notice that such tales contain
elements that are both near and far from our present conception of life and the
universe. They are near in the sense that we can observe in them some of our
own symbolic elements related to the basic emotions, sometimes using different
objects, other times with the same old fears and anxieties about our lives and
the welfare of our children and community, as it could not be otherwise. But
they are also far away due to the huge cultural mediation of n-ary emotions and
the sophisticated ways in which we process information, the metasymbolization
that unnoticeably leads our lives. The gap between cultures with and without
writing is no longer just a matter of the objectification of memory, that great
achievement of preserving the information about the group independently of
individual abilities, but a process of axiological relativization that started
only a century ago in which the memories of the species were metasymbolized
from the point of view of the scientific hypertext and the mature monetary
metaphysics developed after the second industrial revolution. Metasymbolization
is as much a question of defining texts of order n for the treatment of texts of order n-1 (texts of order n
used in the regulation of social activities of increasing complexity which
integrate different mythological frames), as it is a question of the
development of a metatheoretical rationality which could be used in such a
treatment of formal systems. Both the hypertext and the monetary metaphysics
work with cognitive procedures which go beyond the abilities of the isolated
human brain, with calculations that can only be carried out by supercomputers,
and which define a new epistemological space. The world of human symbolization
is not homogeneous anymore. The homogeneity was first broken with the invention
of writing, and the gap became wider with the development of metamathematics
that ended up in the construction of symbolic machines which changed the
information flux in social systems. Neither is homogeneous the animal world
that we believe it lays at the other side of an imaginary abyss. Even though
big apes, our present ancestors, do not communicate with the fluidity and
complexity of human speech, they show intelligent behavior, they learn quickly
from new situations and have a rather sophisticated social life compared to
that of fishes and reptiles. Their emotional system, integrated around the
group’s protocols and maternity, allows them a flexible behavior, anticipating
or differing organic states and processes according to hierarchies of vital
goals, id est, they have a kind of minimal buffer for the modulation of
emotional protocols not present in animals without primary consciousness. We
could outline seven nodes within the continuum of neuronal evolution based on
certain semantic scenarios that, from our human point of view, are useful to
the synthetic understanding of language evolution at life’s bosom. Besides the
three already mentioned of neural categorization (initiated about 540 million
years ago), primary consciousness (between 250-200 million years ago) and n-ary
consciousness[21]
(about 30 million years ago), we find the scenarios of human symbolization
which constitute the process of mythologization that we will be studying in the
rest of this work, and that, in a very general manner, can be divided into the
proto-linguistic scenarios (200.000-50.000 B.C.), the oral (until the invention
of writing, around 3200 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and 600 B.C. in Mesoamerica),[22] the grammatologic (up until the 20th Century)
and the metalogic or metasymbolic (since the beginning of the 20th Century).
An
emotional origin of language implies that grammaticalization is a subsequent
development to that of semantics, a modulatory tool which improved
communication allowing social synergy and a higher control of the environment,
as well as (in opposition to Chomskian and mythological traditional theories)
the continuity of the animal world into the human, of the vital world into the
symbolic. Our most abstract developments have their basis on specific vital
processes of survival, and language thus understood is a tool which allows us
to understand life, and think synthetically the different semantic scenarios of
evolution. The development of grammar from semantics is the development of the
narrative capability, the ability to transmit complex information about non
present space-time scenarios, something that allowed a development of cultural
memory and the collective identity linked with it. In the same way as
proto-languages led the emotional integrated (n-ary) tapestry into a new degree
of complexity, the narratives of identity or myths generated a new reality,
specifically human, in which the old life’s valuations were configured into
supernatural worlds. The later process of writing entailed a conscious and
ordered symbolization that allowed, on the one hand, the development of
previously unknown epistemological modulators, those of mathematics (by the
control of magnitude) and logic (which allowed the formal control of language
itself), and on the other, an objectification of memory without the limits of
the capacity of an individual organism, which implied a new transformation of
the collective identity.
[1] Cf. Noam Chomsky. Nuestro
Conocimiento del Lenguaje Humano: Perspectivas Actuales. Universidad de
Concepción y Bravo y Allende Editores. Santiago de Chile. 1998. p.p.13-15.
[2] Cf. Noam Chomsky. Aspects
of the Theory of Syntax. The M.I.T. Press. Cambridge (Mass.) 1982. p.6.
[3] Cf. Chomsky. Ibid. p.6. The thesis is from the
Enlightenment, as Chomsky shows in his references to texts by James Beattie
–who already speaks about universal or philosophical grammar- or Du Marsais.
Cited in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
Ed. Cit. p.5.
[4] Out of the six possible structures, five are used.
According to Russell S. Tomlin, besides the percentages indicated for SOV and
SVO, there is a 9% of languages that use the structure VSO, a 3% that use the
OVS and 0% that use the OSV, although there are some examples of OSV in the
Amazon basin, like the Jammadi, the Warao and the Xavante. See Appendix A from the Basic Word Order: Functional Principles. Croom Helm. London, Sydney,
Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. 1986. p.155 and s.q.
[5] In the terms exposed of Neural Darwinism.
[6] The areas activated by the mother language are not
confined to the auditory primary cortexes. See Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine;
Dehaene, Stanislas; Hertz-Pannier Lucie. Functional
Neuroimaging of Speech Perception in Infants. Science. 6 December. 2002.
Volume 298. Web. See also Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine et al., Neural Correlates of Switching from Auditory
to Speech Perception. Neuroimage. 24(2005). p.p.21-33. Web.
[7] Cf. Philip Lieberman. Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain. Perspectives in Biology and
Medicine. Volume 44, number 1. (Winter 2001). P.p.32-51. The John Hopkins
University Press. 2001. p.34. Web.
[8] Andrew Carnie. Syntax:
A Generative Introduction. Blackwell Publishing. Malden (Mass.), Oxford
(U.K.) and Victoria (Australia). 2007. p.p.32-33.
[9] Cf. Ibid.
p.p.13-14.
[10] Federico García
Lorca. Poeta en Nueva York. Obras
Completas I. (Poesía Completa) Edición de Galaxia Gutenberg y Círculo de
Lectores. Barcelona. 1996. p.518.
[11] See Kleene, Introduction
to Metamathematics. Ed. Cit. p.p.59-65.
[12][12] See what I have said about this topic in Óscar E.
Muñoz, Mythopoetics. The Symbolic
Construction of Human Identity. Volume I: Mythic Domain. 2.2. Trans. Nur
Ferrante. Mandala Ediciones. Madrid. 2013.
[13] Plato in Menexenus
declares that man is superior to the rest of animals because of his logos
and also because he is the only one which possesses justice and religion. For
his part, Aristotle distinguishes the double irrational and rational principle
of the human soul, being the latter his difference with respect to animals,
subject only to passions (Nicomachean
Ethics. 1102.a.27; Eudemian Ethics. 1220.b
and s.q.)
[14] Cf. René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy. Second Meditation. In The Nature of Mind. P.22.
[15] Human language is comprehensible as an open and
non-monotonic system, in which information enters (semantico-pragmatic) capable
of changing the former structures of information of the system. By non-linear I mean that the actions and
their effects do not necessarily maintain a constant proportion. Linguistic
actions do not have linearity with respect to the merely physical ones.
[16] His theses are based in those that Jerry Fodor
expounded in The Modularity of Mind. See
Stephen Mithen. Arqueología de la mente. Crítica.
Barcelona. 1998.
[17] Steven Pinker, Language as an adaptation to the
cognitive niche. In Language
Evolution. Christiansen, Morten H; Kirby, Simon. Editors. Oxford University
Press. Oxford, New York. 2003. p.p. 22-37.
[18] Cf. Antonio
Damasio. Y el cerebro creó al hombre
(Self comes to mind). Trans. Ferrán Meler Ortí. Editorial Destino. Barcelona
2010. p.85.
[19] As opposed to knowledge about events in our personal
life.
[20] Cf. Cassirer. Philosophycal
Anthropology. Cited Spanish Edition. p.p.48-49.
[21] Or integration of the emotional system into a complex
of restrictive regulation among the different systems, from the control of the
social emotions in which the group’s life, organized out of offspring caring,
operates as an axis of fundamental value.
[22] According to the information of Larkin Mitchell,
Earliest Egyptian Glyphs (Archaeology Magazine. Archeological Institute of
America. February-29-2012. Web.), it seems that there are Egyptian glyphs a
couple of centuries earlier. The use of abstract symbols in caves has a minimal
antiquity of 35.000 years as shows the study of Genevieve von Petzinger of
twenty two geometric symbols found in caves all over the world and which seem
to be an iconic language of Shamanistic origin. See Bradsahwfoundation.com.
Web. The use of the term oral scenarios does not provide a specific difference
of this scenario in relation to the rest from the property of orality, common
to all the others, it simply serves to distinguish it from the previous phase,
proto-linguistic, as a phase of non-written full communication.
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