The following paper was read at the Southern Anthropology Society meeting in Atlanta, GA, in March 2004. The paper abstracts a number of arguments developed in my collaborative work with Karen Haworth and Robert Philen on the origins of language and the semiotic expression of language as a modeling system. The ideas in this paper are central to understanding how humans encounter the natural environment, model it through conventional (i.e. symbolic) signs, and thus produce a behaviorally "conservative" yet highly flexible exosomatic adaptive structure. These ideas, furthermore, are closely allied to the notions of "emic" cultural objects as defined by Kenneth Pike, and the kinds of global premises called "cultural themes" by Morris Opler. I encourage students to attempt connections of the basic notions of this paper also to the examples of metaphorical language use described by Keith Basso for the Western Apache in the assigned text Wisdom Sits in Places.
The Minimal Conditions of “Argument”: Semiotics of Paleolithic Technology, Animal Tool Use, and Ape Signing in Relation to Human Language Origins
Terry J. Prewitt and Karen A. Haworth
The University of West Florida
ABSTRACT: Ethological and captive behavioral studies have grounded arguments for favorable comparison of ape cognition and communication to human language. This work is sufficiently celebrated to form a major part of textbook treatments of ape behavior and discussions of origins of language. Less well-known or developed, but no less important, are cognitive approaches to technology in the Middle and early Upper Paleolithic assemblages of Africa, Europe, and the Near East. This paper reviews these lines of research through the conceptual framework of C.S. Peirce’s semiotic typology, taking his definition of the “argument” in association with other forms of symbol use as the mark of fully “human” experience. The essay posits a set of minimal features for identifying “arguments” in archaeological and behavioral contexts.
Much has been made of the association of tool making and Paleolithic cave art with the origins of culture, and either directly or indirectly with the origins of language. As understood in anthropology, there is a generalized association of complexity in language that is assumed to correlate with the complexity of tool production. Within such a theory, the critical transformation to language appears in the record moving from the Lower Paleolithic, including all the tool forms associated with Homo erectus and related species in the Old world, through the relatively short Middle Paleolithic (either tied to Archaic H. sapiens or H. neandertalensis) to the fully developed technologies of the Upper Paleolithic, a time frame from about 150,000 years BP in Africa through about 50,000 years BP in Europe. Cave art, however, is linked to the Upper Paleolithic in Europe beginning around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago (which is also the end of Neanderthal populations), a consideration which is especially pertinent, as we shall see, to our understanding of the significance of changing forms of iconicity in language as an emergent human capacity (see Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967).
We now understand that culture may exist without language, at least in the rudimentary form expressed in animal uses of symbols in nature and in experimental situations. Though diverse claims of linguistic “competence” have been made for apes, careful experimental work suggests the following generalizations: (1) apes use symbols in very different ways from humans (naturally, and in experimental situations); (2) captive apes learn signs imitatively, and less convincingly through intentional correction by “signing peers”; (3) the syntax of ape communications with symbols tends to include two or three element juxtapositions, “name stringing” incorporating “things” and “actions” as objects (e.g., “NAME go”, “hat give”, “give drink”, “eat fruit good”, and similar strings). These remarkable levels of accomplishment actually say more about human language by what they do not achieve, though they are also useful for comparison to our reconstructions of cognitive abilities suggested by stone tool technology.
Less well known theories of language evolution (among anthropologists) derive from psychological studies of visual cognition, sequential processing, and pattern processing that are especially pertinent to our interpretation of hand-eye coordination and visual monitoring in tool-making, taken as a corollary of language development (Donald 1991; Sacks 1995). Central to these theories are empirical generalizations offering that visual cognition involves “filling-in” information to handle peripheral details of the visual field, and changing focal attention. This means that at least some visual information must be stored for use in interpreting non-specific qualities from the imprecise visual information on the periphery of focus (whether “distant” in a generalized focal-field of large size or “tangential” to a detailed focus on some close activity). This “distant/close” distinction may also parallel, cognitively, such distinctions as those we have often made between “power grip” and “precision grip” in manual operations. But the most important implication of the visual cognition studies is the fact that not everything we cognize as part of the visual field is actually a result of immediate active visual stimulus—the brain provides a complete and continuous appreciation of “image” for a rather incomplete and constantly changing field of visual values (plus, of course, kinesthetic information of other sorts).
Cognitive attention may present itself as a continuous construction from a sequence of “distinguished” experiences that differ in (selectively?) organized appreciations of line, color, texture, or intermediately constructed entities. Such continuities might entail the movement on the periphery of vision we experience generically as “animate”, or perhaps from memory as “the cat”, or projected as “prey”, etc.). In semiotic terms, the basic foundation of such visual continuity consists of monitored channels of qualisigns that link different things into gestalt experiences—something like “visual chords” realized through the patterns of qualities occurring or non-occurring simultaneously on a multi-channel staff of visual music.
We do not, in general, see objects as collections of details, but instead as a synecdoche of selected (indexical) qualities, from constellations of qualities we may construct a “type” realized as a “thing” which might present itself in myriad absolute ways (e.g., we recognize the hand-axe side-on or from partial views). Consider the difference between searching for a well known book on a library bookshelf. You may look for qualities of thickness, color, and height, or even typical “location” that is attached to the specific thing. The mental process is totally different, however, when searching for a book known only from its title in the library catalog. And most experiences of objects come to us through the familiar and non-symbolic forms of the first case.
On a more processual level, organizing sequences of separate focal experience involves coordination and sometimes classification of sign events through similarities of cognized qualities that bundle differences into unifying types (i.e. as “concepts” or “ideas”, or on an unconscious level entities like phonemes or phrase structures) which are themselves an independent experience (this is the semiotic “object”, a cognitive construction or model which may be related to the sense experience of some phenomenon). From the juxtaposition of differing sign experiences (paradigms, ideal or real) cognized through a coordinating structure (syntax), we arrive at particular or unique “characterizations” of events that may be compared or “identified with” other events. Thus, the “potential streams” of action or physical result that are implied by any visual or material state of affairs are similar to the potentials of any morph positioned in an unfolding syntax—depending upon the constraints of the moment, several meaningful sequences might occur.
As we return our attention to the emergence of language and culture, we may distinguish first between “Culture I”, Culture II, and “Culture III”, and secondarily between “ Language I” and “Language II”, with these distributed across three distinct levels of behavioral/cognitive activity. (1) Culture I involves essentially “imitative” production of signs (as physical or behavioral events) in a natural “syntax” of surrounding contexts. This could include bonobo trail signs, natural ape gestural and vocal calls, and all of the examples of monkey and ape “learned” implement production for tasks such as termite fisihing, or water collection with leaves, or basic territorial memory. (2) Culture II and Language I occur in the intersection of “name signs” and rudimentary syntax, including trained ape sign usage. (3) Culture III and Language II occur when syntax allows unlimited semiosis—the unfolding of an infinite system of communicated signs derived from limited means. Language II is nothing short of “modeling the world” with signs as a habitual activity.
The level of Culture II and Language I identifies precisely the technological and cognitive achievement of the Middle Paleolithic, i.e.. Mousterian (and related) traditions. We can argue this with relative certainty based upon Kuhn’s excellent study of multi-final core reduction processes available to knappers. In order to produce particular kinds of “flake results”, Culture II knappers codified differences in kinesthetic, gestural, and hand-eye pattern recognition. Indeed, if we consider Figure 1, Mousterian knappers looked at raw material not from the unitary perspective of producing the particular shape of the multi-purpose core tool, but instead from a perspective allowing a limited modeling of material into multiple results, working cognitively through alternative decisions in the reduction process. In other terms, there was, for the Mousterian knapper, a visual synecdoche of qualities differentiating two or more alternative reduction starting points with quite different subsequent implications. Earlier species had experienced only one approach to the material that was either possible or not possible.
Figure 1. Mousterian Core Reduction Variants (after Kuhn 1995).
This point alone accounts for the nearly 2 million year span of core tool production, and the relatively short transition of the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic. It also leaves open the possibility that the earliest “language bearing” humans (in our terms the Upper Paleolithic peoples) were not necessarily all using their newfound syntactic capacities to their fullest. Given the implied structural changes in the brain that must have accompanied these changes in functional capabilities, we may suspect that some generations of transmission were necessary to achieve ubiquitous general capacities, as well as for redundant neurological systems to become established. Indeed, many early H. sapiens Sapiens may well have required “instruction” in the use of symbols much in the way we have to be taught writing today. Analysis of cave art by Haworth (1998) which we are now incorporating into joint work, strongly suggests this, together with the idea that the subsequent transformation to abstracted and narrative rock art around 20,000 years ago signals a cognitive adjustment to Language II. Thus, we suggest a division of Language II into early and late components wherein the patterned behavior of a population moves from language modeling possibilities to habitually using language to essentially semiotically (and uniquely humanly) construct and share all of the experience of the world.
What this semiotic theory of technology suggests is that Neanderthals (and other Mousterian groups) would have used a limited collection of “words” in a very limited association of “thing/action-types” within a simple syntax of immediate juxtapositions—i.e. Language I. More literally, the Neanderthal data suggest a “frame linking” of “names” that complete an independent construction of a complex action sequence for, or perhaps “through” some particular “object”. But also, for the derived H. sapiens who followed, Language II is not complete until larger collections of juxtapositions can be achieved, and this level is equivalent to the development of what C. S. Peirce called the “argument” (Figure 2). In semiotic terms, the “argument” moves beyond both naming and logical typing to a full-scale abductive experience of nature’s patterns and processes. What humans don’t experience, they desire to “fill in” with hypothetical details provided by symbolic constructions. The rudiments of this are first found as a natural Primate capacity in Mousterian core-reduction techniques, even though we may presume that Mousterian use of symbols was not far removed from that observed in the most adept sign-using trained chimpanzees and bonobos.
Figure 2
Finally, because cave art introduces an element of obvious “artificial” iconicity (essentially, a tricking of the mind into a false synecdoche of quality to object) appearing for the first time in the technological record, it offers the clearest sense of how metaphor changed with the evolution of language capacities (for semiotic treatments of metaphor, see Danesi 1992). The use of systematic but artificial qualities to call forth a sign object in mind, manifest in Upper Paleolithic cave art, becomes removed from purely imitative iconic processes, or kinesthetic production of tools actually useful for tasks that we find in the Lower Paleolithic. In this case, then, “Middle Paleolithic” really means Middle, from the perspective of time, technology, and cognitive ability.
REFERENCES
Danesi, Marcel, 1992. “Giambattista Vico: Signification as Metaphor” in Introducing Semiotics: An Anthology of Readings. M. Danesi and D. Santeramo, eds. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 95-111.
Donald, Merlin, 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Haworth, Karen A., 1998. Upper Paleolithic Cave Paintings and their Relation to the Evolution of Language. M.A. Thesis, Department of Psychology, University of West Florida.
Kuhn, S.L., 1995. Mousterian Lithic Technology. Princeston, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sacks, Oliver W., 1995. An Anthropologist on Mars. New York: Vintage Books.
Ucko, P. J. and A. Rosenfeld, 1967. Paleolithic Cave Art. New York: McGraw Hill.