LikeLike

LikeLike

LikeLike

It did trigger a few thoughts:

It seems to me to be quite a stretch—though maybe it’s a helpful stretch in some regards—to draw such a sharp line between human communication as “intellectual” and based around distinct words, and animal communication as related to emotional states and one-to-one correspondences of concepts and sounds. Human language is far more than just the transmission of abstract information; it’s shot through with nuances and resonances of ’emotive’ tones and textures, onomatopoeias, and so-called non-linguistic factors—these things aren’t just the substrate of it either, but present at even the most frigid levels of abstraction. I get the urge not to anthropocentrise on the part of biologists, but swinging to the other side of the pendulum instantiates a kind of mirror-reversal of the same activity that prevents us from recognizing continuities (as well as the precise nature of real discontinuities). I do agree that looking for the kind of fully-formed, reflexive capacity that human language has in animal communication is a fool’s errand, but that doesn’t mean that that capacity or level of abstraction is fully discontinuous with, say, bird communication.

The “usefulness” question is interesting, but I think it’s very misleading and a rather un-thought-through prejudice of—everyday language! Can we ever even talk about “need” in an evolutionary sense without a kind of backwards projection that takes contingency—that a population of such and such organism happened to end up with a ‘viable’ trait—for necessity, as an artifact of (all too human, as would Nietzsche would say) thought and pattern recognition? Did proto-humans “need” language? In the language (here we go again) of our evolutionary sciences, no organism has ever “needed” to become anything; they’re caught in the ceaseless flux and drift of genetic and behavioural alteration—to some greater or lesser degree of arbitrariness—and some of those changes have allowed-for propagation, while others haven’t. It’s a curiously empty statement to remark that animals don’t need human-like language—we may as well say slime moulds have no need for heads! If something has ‘worked’ for in one case, for one kind of organism, we can at speculate that it would have some viability for another. Given the time and circumstances, we can imagine a slime mould population cephalizing… and there’s nothing in principle to suggest that they couldn’t even become the kind of thing that can speak—a murmuring slime mould is possible! Perhaps it would make them as wildly, catastrophically ‘successful’ as us, or perhaps their mutual co-shaping of this hypothetical world would look quite different.

Looking forward to the next review!

LikeLike

LikeLike