Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2003 13:45:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HAB:] How does language evolve?


Thinking about the correction, re: Commissive vs.
perlocutionary speech

Re: G> I imagine, though, some business-world jargon, such
that critical analysis of X becomes: to problem X.

Strictly speaking---but I want to get beyond this to some
interesting matters of principle---the jargon equation
would go: "to DO a critical analysis of X" is: "to problem
X," turning 'problem' into a verb. 

In California, one may commonly hear in a meeting: "Let's
continue this issue off-line" (as if the face-to-face
meeting of the group is somehow online, and the 1-to-1 is
not), but I wouldn't be surprised to one day hear:  "Let's
off-line this issue." 

I find it very interesting to take a mis-typing as
*intended* (as not a mis-typing), such that its validity
claim to comprehensibility (the fourth dimension of the
validity basis of speech that JH rarely emphasizes, but
which is quite ordinary in multilingual
culture---especially tourist culture) is NOT questioned
here but accepted as a valid challenge to understanding:
"Some scientists would have to problem with authentic
religious experience." 

This is non-trivial for thinking about the evolutionarity
of language as a living thing. It could be one thing to
problem religious experience in the sense of doing a
critical analysis of religious experience, either in some
general way or relative to a specific avowal; yet quite
another matter "to problem with religious experience,"
i.e., to undertake critical analysis with the avower,
perhaps maieutically educing clarification, as a Socrates
would, in order to self-assess the critical analysis as it
develops (requiring collaboration). 

But this would be to propose a new idiom. In fact, I didn't
intend to do that. But 't' is far enough from 'n' on the
keyboard that one can't really say that I mis-fingered the
keyboard. I didn't type "mo problem". I typed 'to' instead
of 'no'. The tacit motor routine of typing 'to' enacted
itself, so to speak, rather than the 'no' routine. Does
that exhibit a nonconscious intention to say "to"? A
conflict of overt and covert intentionality (the Freudian
type of slip-of-the-pen, though there's nothing
specifically Freudian about it)?

In any case, the mistake became interesting. Not only was
the mistake analogous to random mutation in genomic
expression, but I found the mistake instructive or useful
for reflection. If you, too, like the coined idiom "to
problem X", then it might become something between us (I'm
not now indirectly recommending this!). If I were your
revered or feared supervisor (mentor, if revered, I guess),
then you might want to adopt my idiom as ours---or my
entire staff might, laughably at first, then as an in-group
idiom, until maybe it becomes an in-group expression for
other departments, so that a visiting journalist who's
interviewing staff for a profile of the company picks it
up, and it becomes a joke for a columnist and an idiom for
other companies. And so on---as indeed does happen---until
a decade later it turns up in a dictionary. (They say
Shakespeare single-handed coined hundreds of words or
original word usages that have become lexically normative).

What we have here is an example of a kind of dispute that
is currently at the forefront of evolutionary theory: the
extent to which advents are reflected into generalizing
efficacious "niche" transformations which then create
selective advantages for the advent. This pertains to a
kind of  quasi-Lemarckian effect (called "The Baldwin
Effect") that is strictly Darwinian. The general discursive
issue is of the sort: What feedback role may development
have in evolution? 

One might transpose this naturalistic issue into cultural
theory in terms of the efficacy of an exemplar for cultural
evolutionary trends. 

What's going on when a philosopher so ordinarily talks
about a "Kantian" position? Indeed, a philosophy student
learns that there are relatively few original positions in
philosophy, i.e., that philosophical fundamentals have
historically gravitated toward particular exemplarly
positions, such that others (which are less insightful)
become relativized to the exemplary positions, the
mountains in the topography of discourse. The exemplary
positions have a *generativity* for the future of discourse
that most positions do not; you can just see better from
their height-depths, so to speak. 

In fact, when you surmise how many people have considered
themselves philosophers, the number of basic perspectives
in the history of philosophy is amazingly small, and
they're associated with the exemplar who originated them.
There is a possibly ontogenetic efficacy to a basic
philosophical position which becomes generalized as durably
influential within an historical genealogy of conceptual
development. Hegel, I suppose, was the first to conjecture
such a thing. Heidegger originated a postmetaphysical
approach to this in terms of "stemmings" in the history of
Being, associated with the few original appropriations of
"being" that IS the historicality of philosophy, whose
endless "End" is a "task of thinking" which MH merely
sought to *exemplify* (in an original way). 

To further pursue this kind of issue in terms of
naturalistic evolutionary processes (leaving cultural
tropology to the philosophical investigaror), see
_Evolution and Learning: the Baldwin effect reconsidered_,
Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, eds., MIT Press 2003.
I'm especially interested in the figuratively "topological"
speculations of Terrence Deacon in the book, who appears to
be a main reason for the book's "reconsidered". (

It's a happy accident that Heidegger, too, sought, toward
the end of his life, to speak of a postmetaphysical
"topology of [the myth of] being"---which is *not* to say,
by the way, that I'm looking to naturalize Heidegger; it's
just interesting. 

But not accidental. Deacon appropriates topological
figuration because this is necessary for understanding the
biophysics of neural networking (I imagine that, in his
technical work as a neurobiologist, he gets mathematically
topological); Heidegger appropriated the trope because
mathematical science is primordially topological (which is
clear in contemporary talk about space AS "quantum
gravity"). 

Indeed, we cannot understand intentionality itself
linguistically, since the domain and range of intelligence
is obviously more than linguistic expression and
representation. I've harped on this issue in some detail
already (HAB archive.0205.167ff. on "cognitivist
pragmatism"). Just as the most formalistic analysis of any
non-linguistic phenomenon doesn't make the phenomenon a
mere linguistic construct (nominalism), so too analysis of
the phenomenological complexity of neural plasiticity
doesn't make mentality merely phenomenological (not
epiphenomenal or supervenient on the brain; as John Searle
says: "The mind is what the brain does."). 

"Semiotic constraints," writes Deacon about neural
plasiticity, "affect the evolution of language in much the
same way that boundary conditions affect the dynamics of
physical systems" (103). "In the study of complex systems,
many researchers have recognized the critical formative
influence of what might be described as topological
universals. Boundary conditions of various sorts---spatial
constraints, temporal parameters, connectedness of graphs
and networks, recursive and re-entrant, causal or
representational geometries, and mere finiteness of
systems---can determine the characteristic patterns and
stable attractor configurations of dynamical systems"
(ibid.). In other words, the Churchlands' "neurophilosophy"
hasn't had its obituary written by critiques of
computational reductionism.  

In any case, communicative life seems obviously irreducible
to linguistic understanding: graphical "language,"
mathematizability of most dimensions of reality, musical
efficacy, kinesthetic "hearing" spoken in dance (gesture as
other than proto-linguistic)---the holistic intelligence of
embodied, individuated, cohering life---is communicably
more than linguistic expression and representation of
itself. The evolution of "language" is more than
fundamentally about The Linguistic. Habermas' (Searle's)
"principle of expressibility" begs questions of how, say, a
Stephen Hawking, mathematically discovers black holes
before they're observed. Or what makes a Picasso? 

Philosophy belongs to such questions as only philosophy
can. To do philosophy realistically---which is to do
philosophy usefully vis-a-vis its sibling disciplines---is
to outgrow the linguistic turn (, Cristina).

Gary






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