Ourselves alone?
Is there anyone out there? Our science correspondent Dr. Chris Knight refuses to go extraterrestrial.
HEADLINES across the world during August reported the shattering news: there was once life on Mars! The evidence consisted of strange microscopic ovoid structures in a meteorite discovered in Antarctica. The American journal Science had hardly appeared when President Clinton hailed the scientific discovery as perhaps the greatest in all human history.
J. Linguistics 39(2003).
DOI: 10.1017/S0022226703252294
© 2003 Cambridge University Press
Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & James R. Hurford (eds.), The evolutionary emergence of language: social functions and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 426.
Reviewed by PHILIP LIEBERMAN, Brown University
Over the course of decades spanning a century, linguists avoided addressing the question of how human linguistic ability might have evolved. The apparent problem was the tendency towards unsupported speculation in the heady period in which evolution first became part of the conceptual framework of human thought. This remained the case until the last decade, even through the Chomskian ‘revolution’, although the centerpiece of the theories promulgated by Noam Chomsky is a hypothetical innate ‘Universal Grammar’ that determines the syntax of all human languages. Continue reading “Journal Of Linguistics review”
CHRIS KNIGHT
From the outset, ‘spirit’ is cursed with the ‘burden’ of matter, which appears in this case in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness, as it exists for other men, and thus as it really exists for myself as well. Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men.
(Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1845-6/1963: 85-6)
Replying to his many critics, Chomsky (1979: 57) once accused them of not understanding science. To do science, Chomsky explained, ‘you must abstract some object of study, you must eliminate those factors which are not pertinent…’ The linguist — according to Chomsky — cannot study humans articulating their thoughts under concrete social conditions. Instead, you must replace reality with an abstract model. To deny this is to reject science altogether. Continue reading “Language and Revolutionary Consciousness”
Interview with Chris Knight and Pauline Bradley on 9th March 2002. Video recording by Peter Woodward and transcription by Heather Stephenson. Edited by Alan Woodward.
Continue reading “Reclaim the Streets and the Liverpool dockers”
It all began when women set out to fool their men with a dab of make-up.
Chris Knight, James R. Hurford and Michael Studdert-Kennedy (eds), 2000. The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social function and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Click to download Editor’s Introduction: Language: A Darwinian Adaptation? [PDF 76KB]
CHRIS KNIGHT
From The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: social function and the origins of linguistic form, eds Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & James R Hurford. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 0 521 78696 7. 2000
The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that found in riddles, jingles, or tongue twisters — and beyond this into the poetic and ritual function of language, as well as into parallels between language and ritual, language and music, and language and dance. It also provides an explanation for the obvious fact that so much in language is non-optimal for purposes of communicating cognitive information. Morris Halle (1975: 528)
Primate vocalisations are irrepressible, context-bound indices of emotional states, in some cases conveying additional information about the sender’s condition, status and/or local environment. Speech has a quite different function: it permits communication of information concerning a shared, conceptual environment — a world of intangibles independent of currently perceptible reality.
Continue reading “Play as Precursor of Phonology and Syntax”
Marek Kohn on the Knight/Power/Watts theory of human origins.
Ochre comes in shades of yellow, orange, red and brown; the core of it is the iron red of ferric oxide. Together with manganese dioxide, which is densely black, it offered Palaeolithic hominids a palette covering the spectrum of fire, from flame to charcoal.
Up to about 110,000 years ago, they only dabbled occasionally. Then, in southern Africa, ochre seems to have coloured their whole lives. It is present in ‘copious’ quantities at every cave and rock shelter that contains relics of occupation from this period. This was a monochrome explosion, based almost entirely on red ochre, and particularly upon strong reds, rather than orange or brown shades. The collectors of pigment made little or no use of the deposits of manganese ore and magnetite, a black iron oxide, which were available in some areas. According to Ian Watts of University College, London, who has made the study of prehistoric ochre his own, 99.5 per cent of all known African Middle Stone Age pigment is iron oxide, and 94 per cent contains a red streak.
Download As We Know It: Coming to Terms With an Evolved Mind [PDF 380KB]
CHRIS KNIGHT
Lie and alternative, inherent in language pose problems to any society whose structure is founded on language, which is to say all human societies. I have therefore argued that if there are to be words at all it is necessary to establish The Word, and that The Word is established by the invariance of liturgy
Rappaport 1979: 210—11
Language can be studied independently, or as an aspect of human sociality. Theoretical linguistics could not exist as a discipline were it not for the relative autonomy of language as a system. Ultimately, however, this system functions within a wider domain of signals which include cosmetics, dress, art, ritual and much else whose study takes us beyond linguistics.
A Darwinian theory of the origins of language must therefore address two issues. Firstly, it must explain the relative autonomy of language. Secondly, it must elucidate the evolutionary relationship between speech and a wider biological, social and symbolic domain of signals and displays. Continue reading “Sex and Language as Pretend-Play”
Chris Knight
From Approaches to the Evolution of Language, ed James R Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & Chris Knight.
1998. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, ISBN 0 521 63964 6. 1998
Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research. Rival paradigms from the human and social sciences — Freudian, Piagetian, Chomskyan, Lévi-Straussian — cannot explain evolved human mentality because they already assume this as a basic premise. Tried and tested as a methodology applicable to the social behaviour of all living organisms (Dawkins 1976; Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1985), Darwinism makes no such assumptions, thereby avoiding circularity.
Modern Darwinism seeks to harmonize research into human life with the rest of scientific knowledge. This project depends, however, on accounting for the emergence of symbolic culture, including speech, a system of communication unparalleled elsewhere in biology. While Darwinians confidently expect an explanation (Pinker & Bloom 1990), it has to be admitted that, to date, no compelling account has been advanced.
Continue reading “Ritual/speech coevolution: a solution to the problem of deception”
