A BRIEF RECAPITULATION
If I haven’t yet convinced you that the hypothesis that the conventions of our languages are a form of domesticated culture is worth entertaining, nothing I can say now is likely to change the situation. If I have succeeded, anything I add here will only detract from that success. The message of my story is right on the surface: that we have more agency in deciding what our language will be like than we might suppose and that we all are working on a shared project that benefits everyone all the time, even when our actions might seem futile or frivolous. So I will finish my narrative by simply reminding you of the overall trajectory of my argument and, for closure, drawing an unsurprising moral at the end.
At the beginning of this book, I introduced the hypothesis, first considered by Daniel Dennett (2009a), that our languages, or the words in them, might be thought of as domesticated. I examined a few of Dennett’s reasons for doubting that this hypothesis was true of ordinary language, but I couldn’t convince myself that they were genuine obstacles. I claimed that David Lewis’s ([1969] 2002) theoretical model of the conventions of a human language already commits us to a theory of their domestication, at least if we also admit that language is culturally transmitted and that culture can evolve.
To solidify this line of argument, I looked at the model of the language of a human population that Lewis presented in Convention, pointing out some of the places where it fit well with my hypothesis. I examined some of the ways that something can become conventional, or cease to be conventional, and found that they all appeared to involve the sort of locally rational human choice that’s also involved in the domestication of animals and plants. In the end, however, since Lewis himself never explicitly contemplated the possibility of evolution, I found myself faced by questions that his arguments didn’t address.
To consider the specifically evolutionary aspects of human language, I then looked at the theoretical models of the evolution of a closely related, but not identical, kind of communicative conventions articulated by Brian Skyrms (1998, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). This rather different approach seemed to solve some problems. Because of its wider scope, however, it raised a whole new set of questions about the evolution of communication among living things more generally.
In order to deal with these new puzzles, I spent some time thinking about that larger subject. I discussed the nature of biological information in general and identified some of the obstacles to richer forms of communication among nonhuman organisms, culminating with the strange case of the chimpanzee. I suggested that John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry’s (1998) model of the “major transitions” in evolution might provide a good framework for looking at the transition from something like that to ourselves. In the version of the “major transition” story that seemed right to me, this would mean that noisy transmission and internal conflict—conflict between humans and their possibly maladaptive culture—were the key problems that needed to be solved in order to effect the transition, which seemed to create a need for the same kind of “domestication” theory that I had started out with.
To make sure that I wasn’t alone in seeing these things as problems, I glanced at some existing models of cultural evolution, in particular Magnus Enquist and Stefano Ghirlanda’s (2007; Enquist, Erikson, and Ghirlanda 2007; Enquist et al. 2008) models of “critical learning” and “adaptive filtration.” Concluding that these models, too, seemed to support the hypothesis of domestication for culture in general, I next turned to the question of specific mechanisms.
I examined three general, overlapping types of process—the kind of specialized conversation called teaching, initial language acquisition, and, finally, conversation more generally. Education, I argued, is adaptive partly because it’s easier for an adult to spot a child’s mistake than it is for the child to spot its own. If cultural practices are to be transmitted with enough accuracy to avoid error catastrophe, their transmission apparently requires this sort of active cooperation by both parties involved. I glanced at the impact of this process on human evolution by looking at Kim Sterelny’s (2012) “social learning” hypothesis through the lens of a domestication theory of culture.
I then attempted to portray language acquisition as a process of learning to interpret and negotiating one’s way into a culture’s web of analogies, conducted in the course of drastically simplified conversations in the context of interactions with the immediate shared environment. After briefly explaining Hilary Putnam’s (1975b) model of meaning, in which it always depends on the indexical context, and our collaborative efforts to coordinate our picture of that context, I presented the games involved in early language acquisition as drastically simplified and repetitive collaborative contexts that give us opportunities to practice the difficult skill of sharing attention and interpretations, and to develop uniquely human habits like role reversal and recursive mind reading.
I finished by reflecting on the shared human pleasure of laughter and what it tells us about the role of conversation in shaping a group’s interpretation of its language and culture. I contended that the behavior we call humor is partly a form of play, partly a form of display, partly a reward for keeping up with the group’s consensus reality, and partly a form of adaptive filtration in which interpretations are harmonized or extended by persuasive speakers and become common knowledge in the conversing group. Its role in making the implicit explicit, I argued, also makes it a source of new conventions or a way of clarifying and stabilizing existing ones.
I made an extended comparison between conversation and adaptive immunity, portraying each of them as a fast, cheap way of dealing with the challenge of a rapidly evolving set of opponents. In the case of the immune system, those opponents are our pathogens, but in human evolutionary history, I asserted, the problem has been corrupted or maladaptive items of culture. Finally I closed with some thoughts about the role this set of adaptations must have played in enabling the rise of our very complex modern societies.
The broad contents of the hypothesis that much of human language and human culture—or my version of it—must be thought of as domesticated should now be at least somewhat clearer. I also pointed out that the idea suggests a role for Ronald Fisher’s (1930) hypothesis about display in sexual selection in the evolution of our human adaptation for cultivating cumulative culture. This seems to me to raise an interesting question.
The more normal forms of sexual display—singing, bright plumage, acrobatics, pheromones, things like that—have evolved over and over in the history of life in many different kinds of completely unrelated organisms. Is human cultural display the same sort of universal adaptation, something that will emerge again and again in various different forms over the next few hundred million years now that mammals have large enough brains for it, or is it a fluke, something unique and strange, that will never reappear in the history of life on Earth? If the transition to human intelligence and human cumulative culture is just another of Maynard Smith and Szathmáry’s “major transitions,” is it the sort of transition that will be made again and again on Earth or elsewhere in the universe in more or less the same way as the transition to eusociality has, or is it something that can evolve only once? And if it did evolve again, would the creatures who made the transition the second time also end up with our kind of sense of humor?
Cumulative culture, I think, is too useful to evolve only once. If we ourselves don’t kill off all the apes, then I suspect it’s an adaptation that they, for one, might evolve over and over, given enough time. Once there were apes in the world, it took tens of millions of years for one lineage to find the adaptation. If we gave the same general kind of organism more tens of millions of years or hundreds of millions of years or a billion, I could easily imagine the same capability evolving several more times.
What isn’t as clear to me is whether the details of the way it’s achieved would be similar each time. Because a language seems useful for managing cumulative culture, I’m willing to believe that these creatures eventually would evolve a sort of language. The problem of interpretation would inevitably come up if they did, so they would have to have a socialization process in which the young learned how to interpret remarks made using that language. Even as adults, the same general problem would keep coming up and would keep needing to be dealt with, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find some sort of acrobatic display of interpretive ability. Sexual selection seems like a plausible mechanism for bringing these capabilities to a human level, although I suppose there could be others. (But there’s really nothing like sexual selection for producing florid and exaggerated versions of some feature, so I sometimes wonder whether anything else would work. There may not be any other way of achieving a human kind of intelligence, for the same reason there may not be any other way of creating a peacock’s tail.) Depending on the details, you might have a longer or shorter period of making only hand axes and transmitting a sharply limited amount of culture between generations, but again, the unlimited accumulation of culture is so useful that sooner or later, some way of achieving it would probably evolve.
I don’t know, however, whether the precise kind of interpretation game that we humans play is the only possible one. There might be other, perfectly good substitutes for a sense of humor. Joy in discovery, pleasure at keeping up, and the posing and solving of interpretive puzzles all seem like things we might expect to evolve again and again, but whether that joy would take the form of laughter or some other completely alien response to some other completely alien type of puzzle is a mystery.
The way that humans converse seems to be an exaggerated adaptation of a specific set of cognitive mechanisms that chimpanzees and bonobos already use for play, sex, and toolmaking, coupled with a new set of motives. Another way of doing the same job that came out of a different set of interactions among another kind of animals might look very different from what we do. My best guess is that intelligent orangutans would have a cognitive adaptation that served the role of a sense of humor, but it might scare us, disgust us, or baffle us if we actually saw it. It could easily be mixed up with other behaviors in a way different from humor in humans.
Creatures that evolved from a more distantly related animal might possess something even less recognizable. Bees and termites have solved many of the same evolutionary problems, but the solutions are very different because of the differences in the organism in which the process started. Do dolphins have a sense of humor? Maybe they do or maybe they don’t, but it’s also possible that they have something else, something that isn’t better or worse than a sense of humor, just different, something we’ll have a hard time recognizing as part of their particular way of cultivating domesticated culture.
The question of whether dolphins or elephants or sperm whales are “intelligent” in the same way that we are may not have a simple answer. On the one hand, they all lack hands and the resulting possibility of coming up with an evolving material culture. On the other hand, whales and dolphins have sonar, something that we don’t have, something that may be susceptible to cultural modifications that are even better than a fancy hairstyle. Their brains are quite big and have been big for much longer than ours have, so they may well be very clever; in some ways, they may even be more capable than we are. But the details are probably so different that a linear comparison would be difficult. Sperm whales, with their huge, complex brains, may be at the very pinnacle and summit of type 1 intelligence—the type you evolve when you can’t make tools or, like the chimpanzee, can’t quite sustain a toolmaking tradition—and lack type 2 intelligence, the kind that we humans have. In some ways, sperm whales may be as superior to us as chimpanzees are to marmosets, just not in the ways that matter most to humans. Over the course of a long life, each individual may become very wise in the ways of the deep ocean without that ever cumulating into any sort of complex cultural tradition. Of course, we don’t really know what whales use their big brains for. It’s bound to be something very complicated, because everything in nature is complicated when you finally get a clear view of it.
Somewhere in the universe, there probably are other creatures with cognitive adaptations similar to our own, but I now doubt that all intelligence in the universe is arranged on a single linear scale. The story I’ve told here, with its many accidental and contingent features, suggests that things must be more complex than that.
AN UNSURPRISING MORAL
Because I started this book with Cratylus and its implausible suggestions about the origins of language, I’ll finish it by reflecting briefly on what must be the single most implausible suggestion in that whole dialogue, something I haven’t yet mentioned. I’m speaking of Socrates’s claim that a word is supposed to be a kind of sonic portrait of the things it represents, with sounds like lambda representing slick, slimy, liquid kinds of things, and other sounds, like rho, representative of motion, rippling, or rolling, and so on. To be a real, proper, name, he argued, it somehow must be iconic.
Instead, we moderns all believe that the sounds of words are completely arbitrary and conventional. For most purposes, they certainly can be treated that way, but it is true that particular words have particular sounds. We know that some aspects of the way they sound affect their fitness; people tend to avoid words that sound too similar to taboo or obscene words, words that force everyone to think about the fact that everyone’s thinking about some unpleasant or upsetting subject. Synonyms with a different sound, or foreign words, are often chosen instead, and the almost-taboo word drops out of the language (Dixon 1997:19).
In a preliterate culture, the words that were preserved and repeated most frequently and in the most attention-grabbing manner were presumably the words used in various kinds of oral culture, including songs, epic poems, and various sorts of stories. The poetic qualities of a word do matter to its employment in poetry. The person who creates or incrementally modifies a song does so on the basis of judgments about the suitability of particular words for conveying the associations and the mood he’s trying to evoke. In conversation, we make similar judgments at lightning speed and while our attention is mainly focused on other things. It wouldn’t surprise me to find patterns in the relationship between sounds and meanings in a natural language, because that is part of what people think about when they’re actually using language.
Isn’t this just a needless complication? Yes, it is, and that’s the point of the story. Human language is an adaptation of an organism, like the mammalian immune system or the wings of a bird or a bat. When we look closely at such a thing, what we always see is not something clean, simple, and easy to model but an incredible, almost endless wealth of specific, idiosyncratic details, many of which end up mattering a lot. This is a consequence of the nature of the optimization mechanism that produces such systems. It’s a consequence of the fact that Nature, the selector, doesn’t care how complicated the thing it’s being asked to evaluate might be, that like a wind tunnel, Nature can decide in the blink of an eye whether or not something will work, no matter how complex it is. Things can become incrementally more and more complicated, without limit, and so over time, as situations keep coming up in which something can be gained by becoming just a little more complex, they may become very complicated indeed.
The moral with respect to human language is that we should expect it, too, to be very complicated, even more complicated than a fly, although that’s already mind-bogglingly, incomprehensibly complicated. We should never expect the full meaning of a word—justice or convention or power or truth or beauty—to be its dictionary definition and nothing else. Beyond the senses that can easily be described in such a definition is a tangled web of associations and suggestions and implications that is very hard to unravel.
This means that we, as humans, have an impossible responsibility, the responsibility of managing something, our language, that we can never understand completely, something so complex that much of what is important about it is always likely to elude us. We have no choice but to attempt something we’re very likely to fail at, through sheer ignorance and stupidity. It matters what we all think justice is, what we all think a convention is, what we all think truth and power and beauty are, but as individuals, we aren’t completely competent to decide what any of those words should mean.
Fortunately, only a few of our attempts to put our language back into good order need to succeed. It’s easier to recognize success than it is to plan it, so the few real successes, like Lewis’s ([1969] 2002) success in refining the full set of associations of the word convention, may well be recognized as successes over time and accepted into the idiolects of a population of speakers. As individuals, our efforts to improve our language are likely to fail, but in aggregate, we tend to find the right solution sooner or later. That’s the problem with evolution; it’s incredibly wasteful. A lot of seeds fall on barren ground. A few sprout, but most of them are crowded out by weeds or die in the shadows of taller saplings. Far fewer become trees, but those produce so many seeds that even though most of them fall on barren ground. …
This is a daunting prospect, at least for a philosopher, since it means that most of our efforts to clarify things are likely to be futile. Still, it’s much better than hearing that we can’t possibly succeed at all, ever, no matter what we try, or that the activity itself is unimportant. It takes a lot of courage and perseverance to be the kind of creature we are, but in the end we humans sometimes do achieve spectacular results. It’s just that we have to be reckless and daring and try dangerous things, even though we know that most such efforts will fail and that people may legitimately mock our failures.
For me, all this just reinforces, perhaps in a slightly surprising way, a very old set of conclusions about the human role in the world, the conclusions that Longinus, in On the Sublime, said that we could draw from Plato’s writing style. From the work of that exemplary nomothete, we supposedly learn that “it was not in Nature’s plan for us her chosen children to be creatures base and ignoble—no, she brought us into life, and into the whole universe, as into some great field of contest, that we should be at once spectators and ambitious rivals of her mighty deeds, and from the first implanted in our souls an invincible yearning for all that is great, all that is diviner than ourselves” (1890:68).
The phrase in this sentence that now leaps out at me, after all the work that we’ve done to get to this point, is “spectators and ambitious rivals.” We often seem to think of ourselves as mere spectators of nature and even of our own culture and language, passively consuming or imitating what luckily has somehow fallen from the tree. That way of looking at things seems to assume that there is no real difference between a human being and one of Alan Rogers’s (1988) imitative snerdwumps. But in his use of language, Plato was more than just a thoughtless imitator. A view of humanity that fails to account for that part of our nature is fatally flawed. In the final analysis, we are not passive spectators, consumers, or victims of our culture. We humans are not puppets dancing at the end of strings held by maladaptive memes—we’re gardeners, domesticators and creators, the ambitious rivals of Nature itself.