The Articulatory Basis of the Alphabet

The origin of the alphabet has long been a subject for research, speculation and myths. How to explain its survival and effectiveness over thousands of years? One approach is in terms of the practical problems faced by the originator of the alphabet: another would examine the archaeological record; a third might focus on the perceptual process by which the alphabet makes rapid reading possible. It is proposed that the alphabet originated in an intellectual sequence similar to that followed by Alexander Bell and Henry Sweet in constructing their Visible and Organic Alphabets.The originator of the alphabet used the same kind of introspective analysis of his own speech sounds and of the manner in which they were articulated. This was the vital step. The next step was to represent the articulatory differences in terms of visual patterns. One way to understand what might have been involved is to attempt to replicate the process oneself

THE CHILD AND THE WORLD: How Children acquire Language

HOW CHILDREN ACQUIRE LANGUAGE Over the last few decades research into child language acquisition has been revolutionized by the use of ingenious new techniques which allow one to investigate what in fact infants (that is children not yet able to speak) can perceive when exposed to a stream of speech sound, the discriminations they can make between different speech sounds, differentspeech sound sequences and different words. However on the central features of the mystery, the extraordinarily rapid acquisition of lexicon and complex syntactic structures, little solid progress has been made. The questions being researched are how infants acquire and produce the speech sounds (phonemes) of the community language; how infants find words in the stream of speech; and how they link words to perceived objects or action, that is, discover meanings. In a recent general review in Nature of children's language acquisition, Patricia Kuhl also asked why we do not learn new languages as easily at 50 as at 5 and why computers have not cracked the human linguistic code. The motor theory of language function and origin makes possible a plausible account of child language acquisition generally from which answers can be derived also to these further questions. Why computers so far have been unable to 'crack' the language problem becomes apparent in the light of the motor theory account: computers can have no natural relation between words and their meanings; they have no conceptual store to which the network of words is linked nor do they have the innate aspects of language functioning - represented by function words; computers have no direct links between speech sounds and movement patterns and they do not have the instantly integrated neural patterning underlying thought - they necessarily operate serially and hierarchically. Adults find the acquisition of a new language much more difficult than children do because they are already neurally committed to the link between the words of their first language and the elements in their conceptual store. A second language being acquired by an adult is in direct competition for neural space with the network structures established for the first language

THE PYTHAGOREAN PERSPECTIVE: The Arts and Sociobiology

Literature, music, mathematics, art, are constituents of culture and each of them has its separate history. But each of them can also be seen as a manifestation of a human biological drive, a drive towards exploration, experimentation, the analysis of human perception. Culture is not something separate from human evolution but a part of a continuing human evolution, indeed the main form which human evolution has taken over the last few thousand years. It is a familiar idea, but perhaps a wrong one, that human evolution, as a Darwinian process, has ceased and been replaced by something quite new, a more Lamarckian process involving the inheritance of acquired characteristics, more specifically of the changing forms of human culture. On this see for example Dawkins(1986), or Huxley(1926)

The motor theory of language

This paper amplifies and at certain points extends the account of the motor theory given previously. The semantic, syntactic and phonetic structures of language developed on the basis of a complex pre-existing system. More specifically, the structures of language were a transfer from or a calque of the structures of the pre-existing motor system. The motor system had developed in terms of neural motor programs controlling the different categories of movement. The motor programs were formed from a limited set of basic subroutines which in combination could be used to produce an open-ended and essentially infinite range of actions. The development of language made use of these pre-existing subroutines into extended programs. By way of the motor patterning imposed on the anatomical features which went to form the articulatory system, language emerged as an external physical expression of the physiological and neurological basis for movement control. Movement control was already necessarily closely integrated with the parallel system for the processing and control of perception. Language thus acquired the ability to express the range and inter-relations of perceptual content

Religion and Science - Sex and Society: Forms and Processes of Cohesion

Religion has been in the past, and still is in a number of countries, the main cohesive force holding populations, particularly genetically disparate ones, together in one system. Patterns of sexual behaviour (often strongly influenced by religious beliefs and prescriptions) in different societies have determined the organisational character of the society - from the nuclear family (now apparently in decline) in most Western countries and the extended family of earlier periods. Both religion and patterns of sexual behaviour as cohesive forces have been radically challenged by science, both as a mode of thought and as the source of technologies which change the environment in which societies operate. A sociobiology of societies has to be founded on a sociobiology of the individuals forming the society and on a biologizing of sociology. The survival of populations (interpreted as gene pools) and of societal forms are interlocked; a sociobiology of societies can start to consider the conditions and forces which over long periods determine the relative success or failure of nations and social systems

Objective Morality

An objective basis for morality can be found in an evolutionary account of its origin and development. Morality is a key factor in the success of human groups in competition or co-existence with each other.A group's moral code represents an increasingly rational pattern of behaviour derived from the collective experience of the group handed down from generation to generation. Group selection is a controversial idea for animal evolution but it is inescapable in accounting for human evolution under the influence of language and the accumulation of cultural patterns. Morality has an objective physiological and neurological basis in so far as it exists to moderate the expression of the array of genetically-derived emotional patterns. Emotions represent the combination of action tendencies (neural motor programs) with (physiologically-derived) affective concomitants. The relation between emotion, empathy and morality is important. Empathy (a special form of perception still largely unexplained) has a key role both in the formation and cohesion of human groups and in the observance within groups of a moral code. Ultimately observance of moral rules depends on recognition by each individual of an integrating purpose in his life. In so far as the moral code is directed towards achieving this integrating purpose, morality for the individual becomes objective

Language and the origin of semiosis

Language is the type of semiosis which has been most closely examined and which has served as a model for considering other forms of semiosis. Semiotics has been based, certainly in the case of language, very much on the proposition of Saussure that the sign is arbitrary - a questionable idea (Holdcroft 1991) - and that the sign is conventional or social. If this fundamental idea of semiotics, and linguistics, is discarded, what does this do for semiotics, the 'science' of signs ? This paper seeks to trace out the implications for semiotics of a very different account from Saussure's of the origin, development and functioning of language, leaving it open whether one should conclude, in the light of this, that language does not constitute a paradigm or model for a general science of semiotics (and is not a typical or useful example of a semiotic system) or that language should be treated as the paradigm but a totally changed paradigm, so that the new view of language will require a restructuring of semiotics and lead to a much more biological and indeed neurological approach to the science of signs

Evolutionary aspects of love and empathy

Love has always been a central preoccupation in individual human lives, but there has been little consideration of it by psychologists or other scientists and little attempt to explain it as an evolutionary phenomenon. There are various possible behavioral precursors of love: animal "love", empathy, group feeling, sexuality, the mother/infant bond. The principal candidates are sexuality and the mother/infant bond. Sexuality has been favored as an origin by those few writers who have discussed the issue but has characteristics which distinguish it sharply from love and make it an unlikely precursor. However, the mother/infant bond alone does not fully account for the characteristics of human love. Love evolved as the outcome of interaction between the genetic basis for mother/infant attachment and other capabilities of the evolving human manifested in and made possible by the increase in human brain- size: enlarged cognitive capacity, improved communication abilities and the evolution of language. The capacity for language led to the emergence of the conscious self, and with this the capability to recognise and empathise the selfhood of others. The deepening of the mother/infant attachment into love played, and still plays, an essential role in the transmission of culture from one generation to the next and in making possible the cohesion of the human group. This account fits well with recent research into the process and significance of the mother/infant relation

IMITATION IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH Roles and functional base

Language is a skilled activity. In the development and acquisition of the skill, imitation may play different roles. Imitation in language may be related to and throw light on the role and functioning of imitation in other areas including imitation in robotics. What part does imitation play in the child’s acquisition of its mother language? What role did imitation play in the evolutionary origin and diversification of language? How much has imitation to do with the sources of the words we use and the ways those words are put together? These questions can be considered at different levels, the surface forms of language and speech, the underlying systematicies of language and speech, the problem of speech at the articulatory level and beyond or beneath that the problem of the functioning of imitation at the neural level. Imitation of any kind involves a relation between motor and perceptual functioning, between the motor system of the brain and the visual and other sensory systems. Language and speech also require interaction and coordination between motor activity and perceptual activity. The role and functioning of imitation in language and speech are subjects of study in many different disciplines, not only linguistics proper but also child development, neurology, evolutionary theory, social psychology. A central idea in this paper is a new emphasis on the bodily basis of language in relation to imitated speech and gesture, and more specifically on cerebral motor organisation as providing a possible new approach to the symbol-grounding problem

LANGUAGE AS A MIRROR OF THE WORLD: Reconciling picture theory and language games

Wittgenstein in the Tractatus focussed on a picture theory of language. He was clear that this meant that language mirrored reality, mirrored the world. The picture theory was an account in essence of the relation between a word and what it referred to in the external environment, or between a sentence, a proposition or sachverhalt and the event or situation to which it referred. The Tractatus was completed in 1919 and published in 1922. Within the space of 11 years after its publication Wittgenstein had abandoned the picture theory and, in the Blue Book and the Brown Book, sketched out a quite different account of language as a congeries of language games, and different languages as different sets of language games; words were given their meanings by use, by explanation, by training and essentially by social interaction. This changed account took its definitive form in the Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953. Wittgenstein did not wholly abandon the Tractatus and would have liked the Tractatus and his later writings to be published together, though this was never done before his early death (Hacker 1996). There is a problem how he could have presented two such different accounts of language with equal conviction. Can they be reconciled? The examination in much greater depth of both may solve the problem. Since the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, there have been massive advances in different but equally relevant fields: in linguistics, in neurology, in philosophical discussion, in evolutionary theory, in psychology, in child development. Most recently and relevantly, there has been the discovery of mirror neurons (Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998), neurons which are excited by the perception of action and which seem to constitute the precursors of motor programs to reproduce the perceived action, that is, a plausible basis for imitation and communication. There has also been great progress in the study of the active brain in the production of speech, using fMRI, PET, ERP, MEG and there are new ideas on the motor basis of speech production and speech perception, on the relation of speech and gesture, on visual and auditory perception. The paper will suggest that in the light of all these developments Wittgenstein's two accounts of language can be reconciled within a larger framework, and the philosophy and science of language can profitably be linked with each other