The Gestural Theory of Language Origin: Philosophical Implications?
While researching this topic, I came across a paper by Robin Allott (2003) which was somewhat technical and wide-ranging in covering issues in philosophy, linguistics, psychology and neurology. Allott’s discussion may interest a wider readership, and I have taken the liberty of writing this short non-technical piece introducing what I believe to be a key theme in his paper, philosophical implications of the gestural theory of language origin. The theory presents an opportunity for mutually fruitful collaboration between language origin research and the philosophy of language.
Language Origin Research (LOR) is a multi-disciplinary enterprise, drawing on anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, psychology and the biological sciences. Despite sharing a preoccupation with the necessary and sufficient conditions for language, philosophy and LOR rarely cross paths. The central question in LOR is: If language is a natural stage in the evolution of animal communication, why are humans the only known language-using species? The apparent uniqueness of language to humans suggests that it developed at a time when the human species branched off from the evolutionary tree and took on unique characteristics leading to language-use.
To identify this take-off point, the gestural theory of language origin (GT) posits that language began as sign language (perhaps accompanied by marginal vocalization). According to GT, language developed quickly in the evolutionary time frame, after humans gained sufficient brain size, full bipedalism and manual dexterity. In the GT hypothesis, the ‘trigger event’ for human language was bipedalism, which freed the hands not only for tool-making but also signing. GT would account for the discrepancy between the long time-span apparently needed for language to evolve, and the fossil evidence that seems to show a late development of the vocal apparatus for articulate speech in our hominid ancestors.
If language began as gestures, the reasons for the switch to verbal communication are unclear. Speech has distinct advantages over signing, such as the ability to communicate out of sight, over distances and at night, with both hands free. These advantages may have played a role in the transition. Sign-language allows silent communication, which would have better suited the day-time activities of early humans; hunting, warfare and the avoidance of predators. Given their mutually contrasting roles, it is plausible that sign-language and speech co-existed for some time, and the shift to a more settled and secure human environment played a role in the marginalization of gesture.
GT also addresses a central philosophical question: Why do we think language ‘mirrors’ the world? Attempts to posit vocalization as the original medium of language run into problems in explaining the origin of indexicality (the ability of language to refer to objects), meaning (the mediating structure, partly mental and partly social, that determines what a word refers to), and grammar (the fact that words have a ‘building block’ configuration, they can be shifted around to make a variety of sentences), all apparently missing from non-human animal ‘communication’. Sign-language is inherently iconic and indexical. Signs can be arranged in different ways to make different sentences. In combination, these features make sign language a system for ‘mirroring’ the world.
If speaking developed much later in evolutionary time than signing, it is likely that a neural correlate of signing occurs in the brain when we speak. This hypothesis is being tested in neurology, with some promising initial results. Such as the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’, in the Broca’s area of the human brain that is believed to play a major role in both speech and the execution, imagination and imitation of hand-arm movements. Mirror neurons are activated when the subject either performs an action, or sees someone else doing it, and may underlie the inter-subjectivity that is integral to human communication (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998).
If the GT hypothesis is correct, the neural correlate of signing that accompanies speech is the progenitor of linguistic sense or ‘meaning’, the mediator in the brain between word and object. The GT hypothesis presents an elegant and powerful theory of the origin of language as a uniquely human phenomenon, as well as a biological basis for the analogical or ‘mirroring’ structure of both language and thought.
GT may therefore have philosophical implications, since the theory suggests that the ‘deep structure’ of language, the ‘picturing’ or analogical relationship to reality, is possibly hard-wired into the human brain. This claim runs counter to a familiar (sometimes labelled ‘postmodernist’) view of meaning as ‘use’, which characterizes the mirroring hypothesis as at best misleading, and at worst ideological in concealing uses of language to legitimize and reproduce structures of power behind a facade of ‘just mirroring reality’.
There are, no doubt, many historical and contemporary instances of ‘linguistic tyranny’ (for example, in the Ancient Greek word for ‘slave’, which carried connotations of innate inferiority, and thereby legitimized the dominance of free Greeks). But does linguistic tyranny exploit necessary elements of the ‘mirroring system’ of language, the distinctions between objective and subjective, semantics and pragmatics, denotation and connotation (though particular applications of these distinctions may be contestable in various ways), or is the ‘mirroring system’ itself an ideological construct or at best, a myth, that needs to be done away with, as radical postmodernists suggest?
The ‘meaning as use’ theory raises a major difficulty. How did the idea of language (and thought) as a ‘mirror’ get off the ground in the first place, and if it really is just an illusion, why do we keep falling for it? This problem is echoed in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, most memorably in his remark that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (1953, aphorism 109). Wittgenstein repeatedly alludes to the tendency of language to mislead through superficial analogical resemblances (for example, between ‘I have a beetle in a box’ and ‘I have a thought in mind’), and the seeming impossibility of ever freeing ourselves from this kind of linguistic confusion.
If, as GT suggests, the analogical structure of language is ‘hard-wired’ into the brain, then the source of the confusion and its intractability can be explained along the following lines:
The ‘mirroring system’ of language was not an ideological invention (indeed, such an invention would have been literally unthinkable). Nor can it be ‘dis-invented’ by politics or a philosophical theory such as ‘meaning-as-use’. The ‘mirroring system’, and its related objective-subjective, semantics-pragmatics and denotation-connotation distinctions, are innate in our brain structures and thereby, in human thought and language. Even the most radical postmodernists cannot think any other way, even if they can (at least in the ivory tower) talk as if they do. Analogies are not carbon copies. They work by simplifying reality to provide an organizing schema for specific tasks, and therefore have a built-in tendency to mislead when applied to tasks they were not originally intended for (the ‘mind as a container’ analogy being one infamous example).
We climb out of one analogical trap, only to fall into another. We cannot, however, remove the goggles that cause us to fall into these traps. We cannot stop thinking that language has to describe something ‘objective’ (the target, as distinct from the analogue), that some beliefs and belief-systems are more ‘true’ than others (as some analogies are more ‘apt’ than others), that there is a substantive difference between semantics and pragmatics, denotation and connotation (as between a model and various uses to which it can be put, some less misleading than others). There can be no future ‘utopia’, baring mass neural re-wiring, in which things will be otherwise. Language is inherently misleading and we must be constantly wary of its limitations and abuses, but its basic structural assumptions can never be anything other than what they are.
It isn’t clear what would count as empirical proof of GT, let alone for the philosophical thesis sketched out above. If GT was demonstrated to be true beyond reasonable doubt, scientists would still face the daunting task of tracing its impact on the human cognitive apparatus and drawing out any implications for the ‘deep structure’ of thought and language. There is also the possibility that even if the GT hypothesis is false, the same philosophical implications may follow from mental structures that are the result of some other evolutionary accident.
What is clear is, if it is to have methodological validity, a scientific program that seeks to map the origin of language to cognitive and linguistic processes cannot exclude the participation of philosophers. Many of whom have questioned the ‘inside-out’ paradigm that dominates LOR, the idea that language is simply a by-product of complex thought (and can therefore occur in any sufficiently complex non-human species). Wittgensteinean philosophers in particular have argued for an ‘outside-in’ approach, that language is a semi-autonomous system that shapes mental structures. GT fits the ‘outside-in’ model well (particularly in accounting for semantics and syntax), yet remains a minority view in LOR. Conversely, philosophy cannot afford to ignore the scientific findings that language may have a ‘deep structure’ that shapes how we think and communicate, structures that cannot be abolished by fiat. Both sides need to work together to ensure a proper ‘fit’ between theory and evidence.
On a bibliographic note, for readers wishing to explore this topic further, Robin Allott’s (2003) ‘Language as a Mirror of the World: Reconciling Picture Theory and Language Games’ discusses the relevance of recent research in linguistics, psychology and neurology to the project of reconciling Wittgenstein’s Tractarian and post-Tractarian approaches to language. For those who would like more details specifically on GT, a good place to start would be Michael Corballis’s (1999) ‘The Gestural Origins of Language’, in American Scientist, 87(2), 138. Corballis has also written a highly readable book, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language (Princeton University Press, 2002). A more recent work is David Armstrong and Sherman Wilcox’s The Gestural Origin of Language (Oxford University Press, 2007). A seminal paper on ‘mirror neurons’ and their possible role in language is that of Giacomo Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib (1998) ‘Language Within Our Grasp’, Trends in Neurosciences, 21(5): 188. A general survey of language origin research may be found in William Fitch’s (2005) ‘The Evolution of Language: A Comparative Review’, Biology and Philosophy 20 (2–3): 193.
