Glenda B. Claborne
Soc 500b
March 2, 1999
Bickerton, D. (1990). Language and Species. Chicago, IL:The University of Chicago Press
How is Bickerton's theory of the relationship of language, mind, and self-consciousness different from that of Mead's?
1. Antecedents of language.
Bickerton lays out the Paradox of Continuity, which requires of anyone accepting the theory of evolution to regard language, though unusual and unique to the human species, like any other evolutionary adaptation. To accept that means to accept also that language cannot be as novel as it seems because evolutionary adaptations do not emerge out of nothing. Evolutionary adaptations must have antecedents - prior instructions or structural properties that can be altered to make the species more fit for survival in its environment. The obvious answer to many theorists, including Mead, was to look for the primitive beginnings of human language in animal communication. Mead saw in the grunts and snarls of animals the beginnings of language and correlated these with gestures in human beings. Mead describes these gestures as largely automatic and visceral, a characterization of the beginnings of language that Bickerton criticized as implying that anything automatic or visceral must be lower down a hierarchy of desirable qualities.
Bickerton argues that animal communication could not have been the antecedent of human language because the differences between the two are qualitative rather than quantitative. That is, all of the systems of animal communication, including the sophisticated dances of honeybees and the sonar of dolphins and bats, have fixed and finite ways of combining information while human language have fixed structural properties that can combine information in infinite number of ways. Bickerton thus proposes that one must look for the origins of language at the point where we are certain it emerged - "somewhere between the separation of the hominid line from other primates and the dawn of recorded history." He then hypothesizes about a protolanguage from cases of people who have not acquired the language necessary in their social environment but who were able to produce sufficient means of communication with other members of their communities. However, these systems of communication lacked the grammatical structure of true language. Bickerton considers these structureless (formally) systems of communication types of protolanguage. They coexist with language and closely tied to the lexical component of language.
To account for the existence of protolanguage, Bickerton hypothesizes about which evolved first, lexical or the syntactical component of language. The latter could not have evolved first because syntax could only be expressed through a lexicon. Syntax and lexicon could not have emerged simultaneously because there has to be some prior structure and/or function on which syntax would have been preadapted. That leaves the lexical component most likely to have evolved first since it does not require any assumption of an antecedent and can be used apart from the syntactical component of language. That people can separate the lexical items of language from their syntactical matrix to produce structureless utterances can be observed when people lapse into a mode of talking primarily in lexical terms when drunk, sick, tired or in some other state of non-normal functioning. . Protolanguage resembles the lexical items of language and from this, Bickerton agues that protolanguage must have emerged in some particular hominid species.
While Mead describes the development of language from inaudible to vocal gestures, Bickerton assumes that protolanguage used the vocal channel from the very beginning. Earlier hominid species only had to overcome cortical and vocal tract constraints. Bickerton admits, however, that the gulf between protolanguage and language remains wide.
2. Language, mind, and self-consciousness.
Mead characterized the beginnings of language as unconscious and unreflective thus laying out the progressive relationship between the development of language, mind/consciousness and self. As humans developed language from unconscious, unreflective gestures to significant symbols, so did their consciousness of themselves as individuals and as members of society. While Bickerton treats mind and consciousness as separate entities, Mead tends to see the two as one and the same- mind emerges as consciousness emerges. To Mead the emergence of mind/consciousness occurs in a process external to the individual, the social process, and the basic and central structure of that process is the social act. For Mead, the emergence of mind and consciousness first have to occur in the external process of socialization then the meanings derived from this external process can then be internalized. To Bickerton, mind and consciousness are internal processes as well as innate structures within the neural and genetic makeup of the individual. The central or organizing structure in Bickerton's concept of mind and consciousness is the syntactical component of language. The processes and mechanisms are largely internal and the only external input are the features of the environment that sensory perception must pick up.
Bickerton writes that even though mind can be said to derive from the possession of language, this fact does not tell us the exact relationship between language and mind. He discusses two ways by which language is related to mind and suggests a combination of the two as an alternative. One way is to regard language as permeating all aspects of mind and mind as a general-learning mechanism. In this view, language was regarded as a window on the mind. Mead can be classified as one of those who subscribe to the concept of mind and language as general-learning mechanisms. Another way, however, sees mind not as a single general-purpose mechanism but as a cluster of task-specific modules that are linked to, but quasi-autonomous from, each other. Language is just one of these modules, a distinct organ with its own function and mode of operation. In this view, language does not have to have an effect on the operation of the other modules. Bickerton notes that the "window-on-the-mind" hypothesis is very unlikely in view of the modular hypothesis but also notes that the latter hypothesis is not without its own problems. Though the evidence for the modular view of the mind is massive, the hypothesis does not adequately answer the questions of whether mind is a consequence of the emergence of language and whether other modules evolved prior to or subsequent to the language module.
Bickerton reconciles the "window-on-the-mind" hypothesis and the modular view of the mind by arguing that the other modules can receive, represent, and output only material that has been organized by the syntactic module of language. Bickerton describes the syntactic module as "a type of nervous organization that permeates and interconnects those areas devoted to higher reasoning processes, concepts, and the lexicon, a type of organization that automatically sorts material into binary-branching tree structures" (p. 207). This model of the modules of the mind as organized by the syntactic module retains the modularity approach and also keeps the place of language as our readily available window on how the mind works. Based on this model, one can say that all outputs of the mind, whether it be scientific, philosophical, religious, or cultural, "will reflect the structural properties of language and indeed, would be impossible without them" (p. 208). Mead, on the other hand, would argue that the form and meaning of our thoughts would reflect the social structures in which the meanings of our thoughts emerged.
Another area in which Mead and Bickerton differ is in the relationship between language and self-consciousness. Mead argues that we can only become conscious of ourselves through the responses of others to our actions, that is, when our actions call the same response in others as we would have responded to our own action. We develop a sense of ourselves and of our roles from our consciousness of others and their roles. The ability to be self-reflexive and thus to be conscious of one's self comes from the external social process. Bickerton, on the other hand, notes that our kind of consciousness is innately self-reflexive, in that we can think of ourselves as doing or feeling something and can think of ourselves as thinking about doing or feeling something and so on, ad infinitum. Bickerton attributes this nonfinitely recursive ability of humans to reflect on themselves to syntax, which is, itself, nonfinitely recursive. Language provides the basic infrastructure for our thoughts.
Bickerton explains this basic infrastructure in terms of his representational model of language. In this model, language is just a single, albeit large, step in an orderly process of representing or knowing a world external to humans. At the primary level of representation (PRS), a model of the world is created based on sensory input from objects outside the creature as well as from stimuli and feedback from its own physiology. Once this primary level of representation reaches a level of sophistication, it makes possible a secondary level of representation (SRS) by which the output of the primary level can be represented in terms that do not necessarily correspond to objects in the external world.
This secondary level of representation is, according to Bickerton, the "minimal prerequisite for self-consciousness." The SRS is the platform on which a part of one's self can view another part of it. The SRS puts into words the feelings, experiences and behaviors produced at the PRS. However, since representational systems have properties on their own, the SRS also can create words that have no referent in the PRS. This suggests that our kind of consciousness can be just an illusion imposed on us by the structural properties of language. Our ability to reflect on ourselves not only derive from syntactical properties of language but also from other features of language such as the first-person pronouns I and my. These pronouns bring out the necessity of artificially dividing entities from their behaviors, of separating the observer from the performer. This feature of language suggests that our kind of consciousness stems from the way we are divided in some way. Mead's concept of the self as "I" also has the element of detachment but it still has to be abstracted from an established self as "me."