Excerpts from Terrence Deacon `The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain' (Norton, 1997). Some quotes to give the flavor of his argument. There are many other issues discussed in the book that are ignored here. For my notes on icon, index and symbol according to Deacon, see my Notes on Deacon page.

Robert Port, Oct, 1999
www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/q500/deacon.quotes.html

ON THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

1. (p. 23) Biologically we are just another ape, but mentally we are a new phylum of organisms.

2. (p. 35-36) The lack of precedent makes language a problem for biologists. Evolutionary explanations are about biogical continuity, so a lack of continuity limits the use of the comparative method in several important ways. (a) We can't ask `What ecological variable correlates with increasing language use in a sample of species?' Nor can we investigate the neurological correlates of increased language complexity..... It is tempting turn to some other feature of human anatomy that can be more easily compared... Humans can be ranked along with other species with respect to brain size, group size, social-sexual organization, foraging strategy, etc....[but] their linkage to language is dubious.

Interpreting the discontinuity between linguistic and nonlinguistic communication ....has led to an...exaggerated and untenable interpretation of language origins: the claim that language is the product of a unique one-of-a-kind piece of neural circuitry that provides all the essential features that make language unique (eg, grammar). But this does not just assume there is a unique neurological feature that correlates with this unique behavior, it also assumes an essential biological discontinuity. In other words, that language is somehow separate from the rest of our biology and neurology. It is as though we are apes plus language -- as though one handed a language computer to a chimpanzee.

For the sake of the story we suspend critical analysis and allow this miraculous accident to stand in place of an otherwise inexplicable transformation.....The single most influential ``hopeful monster'' theory of human language evolution was offered by the linguist Noam Chomsky....

3. A full evolutionary account cannot stop with a formal description of what is missing or a scenario of how selection might have favored the evolution of innate grammatical knowledge. It must also provide a functional account of

why its particular organization was favored,

how incremental and partial versions were also functional and

how structures present in nonhuman versions were modified to provide this ability.

The language instinct theory provides an end point...it rephrases the problem by giving it a new name. But this offers little more than the ``miraculous accident'' theory provided: a formal redescription of what remains unexplained.....I don't think that children's grammatical abilities are the crucial mystery of language.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ON `SIMPLE LANGUAGES'

4. (40-42) Clearly language is complicated in all these ways [eg, vocabulary, grammar, motor control of production, speech perception, etc]....The question is whether this complexity is the source of the difficulty that essentially limits the use of language to our species alone.

Imagine a greatly simplified language, not a child's language that is a fragment of a more complicated adult language, but a language that is logically complete in itself, but with a very limited vocabulary and syntax, perhaps sufficient for only a very narrow range of activities. I do not mean ``language'' in a metaphoric sense, the way that all communication systems are sometimes glossed as languages. But I also do not restrict my meaning to speech, or to a system whose organization principles are limited to the sorts of grammatical rules found in modern languages. I mean language in the following very generic sense: a mode of communication based on symbolic reference (the way words refer to things) and involving combinatorial rules that comprise a system for representing synthetic logical relationship among these symbols. Under this definition, manual signing, mathematics, computer `languages', musical compositions, religious ceremonies, systems of etiquette, and many rule-governed games might qualify as having the core attributes of language. ... A five or ten-word vocabulary and a syntax as simple as toddler's two and three-word combinations would suffice.

So this is the real mystery: Even under these loosened criteria there are no simple languages used among other species, though there are many other equally or more complicated modes of communication. Why not? .... This is an apples and oranges problem, not a complicated-vs-simple one.

5. (51) To be blunt we do not really understand one of our most commonplace experiences. We know how to use a word to mean something and to refer to something. ...Yet we do not know how we know how to do this, nor what we are doing when we do.

ICON, INDEX and SYMBOL

6. INDEXICAL RELATION between meaning and sound.

The common-sense idea is that a symbolic association is formed when we learn to pair a sound or typed string with something else in the world. But in the terms we have been developing, this is what we mean by an indexical association. The word (iconically associated with past occurrences of similar utterances) and the object (iconically associated with similar objects from past experiences) and their past correlations enable the word to bring the object to mind. In this view, the association between a word and what it represents is not essentially distinguished from the kind of association that is made by an animal in a Skinner box. We might, for example train a rat to recognize a correlation between hearing the sound of the `food' and food being dropped into a tray. The conditioned stimulus takes on referential power in this process: it represents something about the state of the apparatus for the animal. It is an index of the availability of food in the Skinner box; a symptom of the state of the box. Words can serve indexical functions as well, and are sometimes uses for this purpose almost exclusively, with minimal symbolic content. Consider, for example, the use of ...words like [`here, there, you', etc]. ... These derive reference by being uniquely linked to individual context, objects, occasions, people, places, and so on, and they defy our efforts to define them as we would typical nouns or verbs. (79-80)

7. SYMBOLIC RELATION between meaning and sound.

For an indexical relationship to hold, there must be a correlation in time and place of the word and its object. If the correlation breaks down... then the association is eventually forgotten (`extinguished'). [But] symbolic reference remains stable nearly independently of any such correlations. In fact, the physical association between a word and an appropriate object of reference can be quite rare or even an impossibility (eg, with angels, unicorns and quarks). (79-80).... If an animal subject is trained to associate a number of words with different foods or states of the box, each of these associations will have little effect upon the others. They are essentially independent. ...

But this is not the case with words. Words also represent other words. In fact, they are incorporated into quite specific individual relationships to all other words of a language. .... We do not lose the indexical associations of words, despite a lack of correlation with physical referents, because the possibility of this link is maintained implicitly in the stable associations between words. It is by virtue of this sort of dual reference, to objects and to other words (or at least to other semantic alternatives), that a word conveys information necessary to pick out objects of reference. This duality of reference is captured in the classic distinction between Sense and Reference. Words point to objects (Reference) and words point to other words (Sense), but we use the sense to pick out the reference, not vice versa. (82-83)

8. What I am suggesting is that a shift from associative predictions to symbolic predictions is initially a change in mnemonic strategy, a recoding. It's is a way of offloading redundant details from working memory by recognizing a higher-order regularity in the mess of associations, a trick that can accomplish the same task without having to hold all the details in mind. ...The crucial point is that when such a systematic set of tokens becomes available, it allows a shift in mnemonic strategy that results in a radical transformation in the mode of representation. What one knows in one way gets recoded into another way. It gets re-represented. (89)

SYMBOL-SYMBOL RELATIONSHIPS

9. Symbols don't just represent things in the world, they also represent each other. Because symbols do not directly refer to things in the world, but indirectly refer to them by virtue of referring to other symbols, they are implictly combinatorial entities whose referential powers are derived by virtue of occupying determinate positions in an organized system of other symbols. ... The structure of the whole system has a definite semantic topology that determines the ways symbols modify each other's referential functions in different combinations. Because of this systematic relational basis of symbolic reference, no collection of signs can function symbolically unless the entire collection conforms to certain overall principles of organization.... There is a kind of tangled hierarchic network of nodes and connections that defines a vast and constantly changing semantic space. Though semanticists and semiotic theorists have proposed various analogies to explain these underlying topological principles of semantic organization (such as +/- feature list, dictionary analogies, encyclopedia analogies), we are far from a satisfactory account. (99-100)

EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLIC REFERENCE

10. (323) I suggest that the first use of symbolic reference by some distant ancestors changed how natural selection processes have affected hominid brain evolution ever since.

11. (377) Looking for the adaptive benefits of language is like picking only one dessert in your favorite bakery: there are too many compelling options to choose from. What aspects of human social organization and adaptation wouldn't benefit from the evolution of language?

12. (384). Is there anything in the social context of hominid reproductive choices as unusual, compared to other species, as our distinctive model of communicating?.. [Yes, our reproductive arrangements.] To see how unusual we are..., we need to look into that favorite distinction of anthropologists, the difference between mating and marriage. Consider three of the most consistent facts about human reproductive patterns:

1. Both males and females usually contribute effort toward the rearing of their offspring, though often to different extents and in very different ways.

2. In all societies, the great majority of the adult males and females are bound by longterm, exclusive sexual access rights and prohibitions to particular individuals of the opposite sex.

3. They maintain these exclusive sexual relationships while living in modest to large-sized multi-male, multifemale, cooperative social groups.

13. (386) The appearance of the first stone tools nearly 2.5 milliion years ago almost certainly correlates with a radical shift in foraging behavior in order to gain access to meat. And this marks the beginnings of the shift in selection pressures associate with changes in the brain relevant for symbolic communication....What is important about this shift to a novel food source is the unprecedented demands it placed on the whole fabric of social group organization.....

A mother carrying a dependent infant makes a comparatively poor scavenger and an even poorer hunter. She suffers from reduced mobility and the difficulty of employing stealth ... Consequently men can provide access to a resource that is otherwise unavailable to women and children.

14. (387) A female who can't count on at least one male will have a high probability of losing her children to starvation and disease and a male who can't rely on exclusive sexual access to at least some female will have a high probablility of supporting the genetic fitness of other males.

15. (400) As anthropologists have recognized for generations, marriage is not the same as mating and not the same as a pair bond. Unlike what is found in the animal world, it is a symbolic relationship. ...It is the establishment of alliances: promises and obligations that link a reproductive pair to the social groups of which they are part, and often a set of promises and obligations between the kin groups from which they arise. Marriage contracts establish both vertical lineal symbolic relationships [parent, child, niece, Godchild] and horizontal affinal symbolic relationships [sister, cousin, age-group member, co-wife].

16. (401) Establishing such social-sexual relationships cannot be accomplished by indexical communication alone, that is, by systems of animal calls, postures, and display behaviors.....And yet, even extremely crude symbolic communication can serve this need.... But without symbols that refer publically and unambiguously to certain abstract social relationships and their future extension, including reciprocal obligations and prohibitions, hominids could not have taken advantage of a critical resource available to habitual hunters ....Symbolic culture was a response to a reproductive problem that only symbols could solve: the imperative of representing a social contract.

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Robert Port, 1999.