Transcript The Past, Present and Future of Language: Powerpoint slides for a

THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF LANGUAGE
DOUG COCKS
(Talk to Independent Scholars Association June 2012)
[No geolinguistics, no comparative linguistics, no neurolinguistics, no FoxP2 etc.]
What is language?
• A family of technologies used by a group of
people
(a) for exchanging information (thought
messages) between people, and
(b) for helping people think (e.g. premises>
conclusions; perceptions > narratives;)
• Mutually understood signals = indicative
signs & arbitrary symbols= a shared model
of reality
Scope of talk
• The evolution of language
• The role of language in contemporary
society
• Language’s prospects under three
scenarios for global society
Stages in the evolution of language
• Averbal language
• Talking and listening
• Reading and writing
• Conscious (critical) thinking
• Use of electro-mechanical technologies
Averbal language
• Gestures, postures, movements
• 1.8 mya to 100 kya
• ‘Voluntary pausing’ around 500 kya?
• Transmitted by imitation of observed
behaviour
• Selection for brain size and complexity
Talking and listening (1)
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5 mya --- down from the trees bringing
(a) fine motor skills
(b) group living skills (esp. info exchange)
(c) mimetic skills
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BIPEDALISM became platform for
‘pulse’ breathing
dropped voice box (vowels)
expressive hands
brain growth, driven by limb differentiation
accessible memory, driven by lifestyle
Talking and listening (2)
• 1.Selection to tag things with vocal
signals (Why? Out-of-sight and night
time communication)
• 2. Selection to use fast vocal signals
alone
• 3. Breakthrough to syntax = separate
‘words,’ for components of a
compound event, e.g. near lion
• (How did vocabulary expand?)
Reading and writing
• 1st = pictographic (3500 BCE)
• 2nd = alphabetic (1200-800 BCE)---one
sign per sound
• Last millennium BCE
---time of authoritative sacred texts
and texts of foundation myths
---time of the Greek awakening
Conscious (critical) thinking
• Classical Greeks pioneered use of language
for self-conscious choice-based thinking
(What’s happening? What to do?)
• Truth is something to be discovered
• Had vocabulary and cognitive skills to
debate nature, society & mental life
• What was conscious thinking replacing?
• One contentious answer = bicameral mind
(hallucinations, belief = knowledge, external
agency)
Self-conscious choice
• Self-consciousness = ascribing
thoughts being experienced to oneself
• Choice-making is dialectical = generate
tailored verbalised solutions till one is
judged plausible (true enough) and
emotionally OK (? Quality control?)
• Since Greeks, changes in (a) content
but not cognitive skills (b) message
construction and transfer technologies
Use of electro-mechanical
technologies
• Technologies which remove/ loosen
constraints on construction and
transfer of messages
• Starts with printing
• Telegraphy, telephony, radio and
television
• Massively enhanced by computers
What has become possible?
• Shifting message delivery in time and
space
• Translating between media
• Mass media = mass exposure
• Electronically stored material (= humanity’s
virtual memory)
• Rapid text construction
The role of language in
contemporary society
• Private language use (inc. self-deception)
• Public language use
---The struggle to shape public opinion
---Global trends
---Interest groups
---Culpable bullshit
• Other problems with contemporary language
specialisation and democracy
loss of truth and God
post-modernism, relativism
censorship, free speech
failure to cope with complexity and conflict
fragility of the species virtual memory
Future of language under three
scenarios
• Economic Growth
• Cultural Transformation
• New Dark Age
(Note co-evolution between language & social organisation)
Economic Growth
• Economic growth via competitive markets =
primary path to the public good
• Many new technologies and products
• Loss of vocabulary & freedom of speech in
authoritarian societies
• Vocational education displaces language of
the humanities & arts
• Caveat emptor; Mistrust = norm
• Information gap follows income gap
Cultural transformation
• Shift in attitude towards scope of markets
• ‘Marketism’ replaced by ‘ecologism’ as
society’s ‘root metaphor’
• Extensive investment in
--education (e.g. art of dialogue),
--research (e.g. extending short-term
memory) and
--public policy (e.g. improve accountability
New Dark Age
•
Under the combined effects of natural disasters, famine, war, mass migration,
poverty, disease, resource exhaustion, debt and economic disruption, the
world’s population will start falling well before current estimates of a peak in
2070. Many indicators of quality of life, including life expectancy, will slump.
•
In all countries, especially failed and war-torn states, it will become much
harder for most people to meet their everyday needs. Women and children, the
old and the sick will be most affected. Jobs will be few. Supply chains for
basic commodities (eg food, fuel, medicines) will break. Barter will become
normal. Prices will escalate. Health, education, transport and police services
will degrade. Power and water supplies will become unreliable or worse.
Roads and other infrastructure will be poorly maintained. Crime and group
violence will escalate. Violent protest and looting will be commonplace.
Ordinary people will live in fear. Mental illness will be endemic. People will turn
to authoritarian regimes for respite.
•
In brief, cities everywhere will struggle to avoid becoming giant lawless slums.
Rural populations will be vulnerable to marauders and incursions from
displaced persons. Life will be an exhausting wretched struggle.
Language in a New Dark Age
• Specialist languages lost as society
simplifies
• Mainstream language and attitudes
fragment with isolation
• Impoverishment of vocabularies
• Loss of electronic ‘libraries’
• Disappearance of cheap messaging
Quo vadis Homo sapiens
• Swimming in a sea of bullshit will not kill us
off, just make us poorer---culturally,
psychologically and economically
• Language biteback---Dark Age scenario
envisages the catastrophic destructuring of a
global society which we could never have
built if we had not learned to talk
Some discussion questions
•
Why isn’t bullshitting recognised as a v. serious problem?
What price the ‘elephant-in-the-room shit’ of self-deception?
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Does bullshit have a higher evolutionary function which I am not
seeing?
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Should we be trying to develop a theory of bullshit as a social force?
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Apart from science, can we identify any recent major linguistic
triumphs---parts of the culture where language has become a lot more
useful ?
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If, as Mike Austin says, language is the DNA of culture (in the sense
that it ‘codes’ the symbolic recipes for technologies, culture’s building
blocks) could we build a ‘Darwinian’ model (selective retention of
variation) of the evolution of language?