Continuous Rationality

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 17^th 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… a_m}

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 a_i ∈ W, the probability of a_i 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, ∃ a_j ∈ 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 m_i ∈ 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 a_i  like for example: the sentence that says m_i  is ill-formed. Although a_i  is well-formed, there is a fragment of it that is not, m_i, which is a complete sequence of signs arbitrarily long and defective which cannot be in W, but insofar as it is within a_i, it is well-formed, and it would belong to W. Moreover, the sentence that says m_i…, is a_i 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 m_i. 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

Forgetting the hamlets’ moss.[10]

We could find many more examples of semantically ill-formed sentences in the poetry of the 20^th and 21^st 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.    

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[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.