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ЛИНГВОТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
PROLEGOMENA TO A NEW LANGUAGE SCIENCE Alexander V. KRAVCHENKO,
Doctor Habilis (Philology), Professor and Chair, Department of Foreign Languages, Baikal National University,
e-mail: [email protected]
The problem with the orthodox view of language as a symbolic system is identified and an outline of the biosocial approach to language as cognitive interactions in a consensual domain (languaging) is given. The crucial role of the relational nature of languaging in the organization and evolution of linguistic communities as social (living) systems is emphasized. It is suggested that the language sciences need a new agenda that would define their sustained productive development in the foreseeable future by focusing on naturalizing language rather than rationalizing it.
Key words: linguistics, linguistic sign, linguistic analysis, biology of language, living system.
ПРОЛЕГОМЕНЫ К НОВОЙ НАУКЕ О ЯЗЫКЕ
Александр Владимирович КРАВЧЕНКО,
доктор филологических наук, профессор, зав. кафедрой иностранных языков Байкальского государственного
университета, е-mail: [email protected]
Определяется суть проблемы, связанной с ортодоксальным подходом к языку как знаковой системе, и очерчивается биосоциальный подход к языку как когнитивным взаимодействиям в консенсуальной области (языковой деятельности). Подчеркивается важнейшая роль реляционной природы языковой деятельности в организации и эволюции языковых сообществ как социальных (живых) систем. Высказывается мысль о том, что науки о языке нуждаются в новой повестке дня, которая, поставив во главу угла не рационализацию, а натурализацию языка, определила бы их устойчивое и продуктивное развитие в обозримом будущем.
Ключевые слова: лингвистика, языковой знак, лингвистический анализ, биология языка, живая система.
1. Introduction
As a scientific discipline and a field of research, linguistics is thriving. Scores of learned societies and academic associations hold hundreds of conferences dedicated to linguistic research worldwide, and their numbers continue to grow. Thousands of books and academic journals are published every year, addressing a wide range of issues in even a wider range of various theoretical frameworks for the study of language. Such large-scale scholarly activity seems to suggests that some dramatic change in our understanding of the nature and function of language is imminent, to be followed by a major breakthrough that will forever change human praxis, not unlike in the case of physics, chemistry, biology or other 'hard' sciences. However, this is an illusion, and traditional linguistics in general, including its various schools, brands, and trends, has not yet yielded notable results comparable with the achievements of natural sciences. Neither can one hope to see such results in the foreseeable future for reasons I hope to make clear.
2. The problem with language as a symbolic system
In mainstream linguistics (and, broadly, cognitive science known under the brand name of 'cognitivism') language is viewed as a symbolic system - a set of abstract forms that somehow relate to aspects of the world which exists independently as 'external reality'. On such an approach, the core problem in cognitive science -the problem of meaning - becomes insoluble because of the so-called 'symbol-grounding' problem (Harnad 1990), when abstract symbols (particularly, graphic artifacts) are identified with signs of natural language, which are acoustic-auditory phenomena integrated in dynamically complex behavior and which, just for this reason, are never abstract (cf.: Deacon 2011). An assumption that languages resemble a fixed code sustains the language myth: the doctrine that languages consist in sets of determinate forms that are used to 'send' messages from sender to receiver (Harris 1981; Love 2004). This claim is not only institutionalized in orthodox linguistics, but also in our education systems. It gives rise to the publicly shared illusion that language is a tool for the transfer of thought. Thus, counter to Vygotsky's (1987) profound insights, language and thought become manipulable things ontologically independent of each other - the former 'out there', in the so-called 'external reality', and the latter 'in here', in the mind/head. However, we cannot coherently identify a realm of non-linguistic thoughts or ideas that language, according to the orthodox view, encodes.
The dualistic picture of language drawn by orthodox linguistics impedes progress in the study of human linguistic behavior, or languaging, as something that makes homo sapiens so uniquely special. Over the past quarter century or so there has been a lot of talk in the Russian linguistic circles about 'humanizing' language. It has become bon mot to speak of the 'human factor in language' and 'anthropocentrism' as a new paradigm for the study of language. However, the newly converted anthropocentrists seem to overlook the obvious: there may be no human factor in language because language itself is a human factor. Language is inseparable from our biology and the praxis of the living; it is what makes us what we are - humans.
By contrast with the orthodox view which separates identification of form from identification of meaning and posits that forms enact (denotative) functions, emphasis should be laid on the necessity to view signs, meaning, and knowledge as intrinsically interdependent and codetermined (Kravchenko 2003a): the sciences depend on knowledge which is the product of humans as a biological species and can be traced to its biosocial functions that lie in relational dynamics. And the human relational dynamics pivot on languaging: as long as these dynamics have not been identified, one cannot fulfill the purpose of scientific enquiry.
Despite the scale and scope of linguistic research mentioned above, neither the nature of linguistic ability as a most important and intriguing cognitive endowment of humans, nor the role of language in the evolution of our species - emphasized, for example, by Deacon (1997; 2005) - have been adequately understood or explained by linguists. Linguistics continues to live by the myths it created (Kravchenko 2006), and common sense reasoning about language, done in the very same language, is often taken for scientific explanation. As noted by Givon (2009), linguistics from the very start has been fatally attracted to structuralism, supplanting explanation by description or its formalization:
This dark specter still bedevils the best of us, functionalists and formalists alike, impelling us to seek inappropriate models in physics, mathematics and computer science. And it has obscured from us the true mother discipline of the study of mind, behavior and diversity - biology (Givon 2009: XVIII).
As has been argued by Kravchenko (2016), by adopting the structuralist maxim of synchronicity and describing language as an autonomous system of signs devoid of any previous history, orthodox linguistics commits the error of overlooking the fact that, evolutionarily, language as a functional behavioral feature of humans has an emergent architecture which cannot be understood outside the domain of biological organization:
Language has an emergent architecture to the extent that its structure is a product of spontaneous bottom-up self-organizing interactions, not top-down imposition of structure or constraint by any pre-existing template. This requires conceiving of basic linguistic units as differentiated end-products of a cognitive process rather than as fundamental atoms of analysis (Deacon 2005: 274).
It should not, therefore, come as a surprise that traditional linguistic analysis is, strictly speaking, not an analysis of language as the product of spontaneous self-organizing interactions; the term 'linguistic analysis' is just a misnomer (Kravchenko 2015a).
The biology of language (Maturana 1978) offers a renewed epistemology needed to get rid of the dark specter of structuralism and come closer to understanding the nature of language as biologically grounded and socially constrained behavior in a consensual domain.
3. From symbolic system to languaging
Following the semiotic tradition of Peirce enhanced by Deacon's research on the nature of symbolic meaning, and building on Maturana's biology of cognition (Kravchenko 2011), I claim that natural linguistic signs (verbal patterns) are intrinsically indexical; they are grounded in the flux of experiential phenomena constitutive of the first-order consensual domain.
Peirce's famous triad of icon, index, and symbol has been somewhat misinterpreted in linguistic semiotics as a rigid hierarchical system of sign vehicles, when linguistic signs, such as words, are defined as symbolic, indexical, or iconic. However, Peirce's approach was based on how a sign vehicle was to be interpreted in a particular instance of its use. As pointed out by Deacon (2011), the symbolic function of linguistic signs is made possible by their groundedness in indexical reference:
Whereas iconic reference depends on form similarity between sign vehicle and what it represents, and indexical reference depends on contiguity, correlation, or causal connection, symbolic reference is often only described as being independent of any likeness or physical linkage between sign vehicle and referent. This negative characterization of symbolic reference - often caricatured as mere arbitrary reference - gives the false impression that symbolic reference is nothing but simple unmediated correspondence (p. 394).
Positing the indexical nature of linguistic signs is tantamount to questioning their inherent symbolism as the one and only decisive factor in understanding how language works and how it is related to mind - which has been the trade mark of first-generation cognitive science in general, and generative linguistics in particular, where intelligent performance is viewed as certain symbolic processes involving representations (Fodor 1975; Pylyshyn 1999). The signifying function of linguistic signs does not arise from their direct relation to the external world; it arises from human experience as the basis of knowledge. Language cannot be context-free, and every contextualization is unique. For a child learning language, linguistic structures, or signs, function, first and foremost, as icons and indices, thus ensuring perceptual groundedness of language as orientational activity in a consensual domain of interlocked conducts. This groundedness allows us to use verbal patterns as the elements of the first-order consensual domain without the consensual domain, whereby a second-order consensual domain is established - the domain of language as a manner of operating in consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behavior, or languaging (Maturana 1988): "Linguistic behavior is behavior in a consensual domain" (Maturana 1978).
'Consensual' refers to the domain of interactions of organisms as common to these organisms in that they are exposed to similar sensory stimuli in the same physical environment. In more familiar terms, a 'consensual domain' may be described as an experientially shared physical context in which interactions occur. The concept of consensual domain is important in understanding the biology of cognition and the cognitive nature of linguistic behavior not as solely centered on individual organismic organization, but grounded in interactional behavioral patterns (interactions with other observers). Thus, as a key concept consensual domain is very close to the ecological perspective on language when linguistic interactions that define and sustain the cognitive niche of the human society as a living system are viewed as a crucial ecological factor affecting human evolution (Ross 2007; Hodges 2007; 2011; Steffensen 2011; Kravchenko 2016, inter alia).
Languaging is a second-order consensual domain because utterances, being grounded in first-person experience, orient each of the linguistically interacting individuals with respect to their first-order consensual domains. In this, they help establish common ground for understanding by referring to similar individual experiences. As a kind of biological (adaptive) behavior predetermined by an organism's history of fine structural coupling with its niche, languaging cannot be interpreted other than within the context of the organism-en-
vironment system (Jarvilehto 1998). Meaning is not an autonomous thing; it is the relationship between an organism and its environment, determined by the value which particular environmental aspects hold for that organism (Zlatev 2003).
All nervous systems support iconic and indexical reference as a meaning-making process of interaction with the environment. However, organisms with a nervous system cannot go beyond their limited realm of first-order consensual domain; to do so requires language as a second-order consensual domain not limited by the here-and-now of the physical context of communicative interactions. This freedom - as it appears to an observer - from the here-and-now of the cognitive niche is a distinctive property of symbols as coordinations of coordinations of behavior. The symbolic function of linguistic signs, viewed as arbitrary couplings of form and meaning in orthodox linguistics, is an emergent property. It arises with the establishment of language as a second-order consensual domain in which elements of the first-order consensual domain (linguistic signs perceptually grounded in the physical context - icons and indices) are used without the consensual domain. Since indexicality is, to use the terminology of the biology of cognition, a consensual property by definition, the concept of sign approached from this perspective leaves no room for the idea of coded equivalence as unmediated correspondence (Kravchenko 2007a), thus making the 'fixed code' doctrine void.
The crucial difference between the traditional view of language and the view taken by the biology of language is that the latter, building on the approach that emphasizes interactional dynamics, assumes its connotational, rather than denotational, nature. The notion of consensual domain, in which languaging takes place, allows us to attribute a function to language which is to modify an organism's environment by modifying other organisms' behavior via consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behavior. Since representation, meaning, description and other similar notions apply only and exclusively to the operation of living systems in the consensual domain of observers living in language, the entire problem of meaning takes on a new perspective, calling for a revised dialectics of knowledge. Meaning in the biology of cognition is not something that exists 'out there' waiting to be discovered, identified, and 'harvested' - an undertaking that semantic theories developed within analytic philosophy have notably failed to do. Instead, as emphasized by Varela (1992: 14),
living beings and their worlds of meaning stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or co-determination. Thus what we describe as significant environmental regularities are not external features that have been internalized as the dominant representationalist tradition in cognitive science [...] assumes. Environmental regularities are the result of a conjoint history, a congruence which unfolds from a long history of co-determination
As a cognitive phenomenon, the meaning of linguistic sign cannot be defined other than a certain associative potential which is basically a person's memory of the previous uses of a particular sign. The meaning of a sign is specified and co-determined in the course of interactions in a consensual domain. An entity becomes a sign by acquiring value which emerges as the result of such cognitive interactions. Consequently, just as a word (a linguistic sign), which itself is a physical entity, can be a sign of another entity, any physical entity can be a (non-linguistic) sign of a word. Circularity and reciprocal causality as specifying properties of a living human organism result in the semiotic multiplication of the world (Kravchenko 2003b). The reality of these multiple worlds is something that modern theories of knowledge should take into account.
4. Linguistic interactions as relational phenomena
The intrinsically dualistic assumption that there is, in fact, a phenomenon called 'language' which is on-tologically independent of the phenomenon called 'mind', marks cognitivism as the mainstream science of mind. However, mind cannot be understood without and outside of language as a manner of operating in consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behavior. The notion of mind, along with the notions of consciousness, thinking and intentionality "correspond to distinctions that we make of different aspects of our relational dynamics in our operation as human beings, and as such they do not take place in our bodies, nor are they functions localizable in our brains" (Maturana, Mpodozis & Letellier 1995: 24).
As separable entities, living systems are distinguished by an observer in his observational domain which is not the physical space of molecules, but the space of entities perceived as unities of interactions. Depending on the way in which these entities maintain their identity, their boundaries may be definable - not in terms of the
physical space (the here-and-now of the observer) - but in terms of an evolving relational domain. Linguistic interactions are relational phenomena; because a human organism is a structure determined system, what happens in language also becomes, as part of the relational domain, part of the domain of transformation of the human nervous system, giving rise to what appears as mind/body mutual modulations. Thus, language is neither in the individual heads, nor 'out there', in the so-called external world; it is radically distributed in space-time (Cowley 2011a), enabling the human society to sustain its unity as a living system.
When it comes to humans as a biological species, the evolutionary function of language may be seen in supporting the epigenetic mechanism responsible for the evolution of hominids into homo sapiens (Deacon 2009), while ontogenetically its biological function may be seen in constraining the cognitive development of an organism in the organism-environment system. For humans, such a system is constituted by individuals and the relational domain of language; in the biology of cognition, it is a third-order living system (community/ society), as compared to first- and second-order systems with lower levels of organization (e.g., single cell organisms and higher organisms with a nervous system). Taking an ecological perspective, we may speak of linguistic changes as changes in the environment induced by individual organisms which, by return, begin to be influenced by these changes. This takes us to the challenging issue of the relationship between language and mind, if 'minded cognition' is what distinguishes human mental capacities from mindless cognition of non-human organisms (cf. Kravchenko 2007b; 2009a).
The distributed language view (Cowley 2011a) focuses on language as a key aspect of social (dialogical) activity distributed over different time scales. In the non-objectivist paradigm, the 'object' of communication is not a referential state of things in an objective external reality, but the co-ordination of actions between the interacting cognitive agents; hence, other-orientation, contexts, interaction, and semiotic mediation become key concepts (Linell 2009). As Cowley (2007) emphasizes, language activity is tightly constrained by both our sensitivity to circumstances and our skills in using many second-order cultural constructs.
In Maturana's terms, if individual humans are second-order living systems, then communities are third-order living systems. Since these increasingly depend on texts in their organization, the rise of writing leads to the emergence of a new ecology (cf. Bang et al. 2007; Kravchenko 2009b; 2015b).
A third-order living system is sustained as a unity of interactions through the relational domain of linguistic behavior (schematized in Figure 1). In such a system, human individuals, each in their specific physical environment (solid circle), establish their consensual domains of interactions with others (overlapping circles). Since these include linguistic interactions (overlapping dotted ovals), the events create a relational domain which surpasses the physical boundaries of any given individual's environmental niche.
Figure 1. A community of individuals as a unity of linguistic interactions
The linguistic behavior of a third-order living system exploits a relational domain that depends on uninterrupted space-time continuity. Conversely, when links between individuals in the domains of communicative interactions are severed for an extended period, the community ceases to exist as a unity. Thus one living system disintegrates into two or more smaller systems (Figure 2). Human history provides many examples of such disintegration. In standard terms, this leads to the emergence of dialects which may later become new languages with associated communities/cultures/nations.
Figure 2. Disintegration of a third-order living system as a unity of interactions
5. New agenda for the language sciences
Enacting intersubjective behavior, our contextualizing bodies prompt us to vocalize, engage with others and, eventually, act in line with constraints that are perceived as verbal patterns (Cowley 2004). In this context, becoming human should be viewed as a developmental process in the course of which we learn - not to 'acquire' language as a tool for expressing thoughts about external reality allegedly 'represented to the mind' - but to take a language stance when we learn to act in our human world (Cowley 2011b). Language is, at once, collective, individual and constitutive of the feeling of thinking.
As a relational domain of interactions, language is where we happen as humans. Human cognitive abilities that set them apart from all other species emerge in the process of the development of the system components (infants) into fully functional agents capable of purposefulness and free will. While the whole systemic behavior of human society depends on the cognitive properties of the components themselves, these cognitive properties emerge in the domain of languaging (the relations between components) as systemic behavior of human society.
Maturana's concept of languaging as a domain of consensual coordinations of consensually coordinated interactions allows the language sciences to depart from the outdated, unproductive view of language as a fixed system of symbols, or a code. Instead, emphasis should be laid on how the relational dynamics of linguistic interactions trigger changes in the dynamics of the nervous system and the organism as a whole, and how their reciprocal causality is distinguished and described by the languaging observer in terms of mind, intelligence, reason, and self-consciousness. This calls for a radical revision of the agenda for the language sciences; because the human mind is a linguistic mind in that it emerges and develops in language as a manner of living it creates, the instrumental view of language should be abandoned as inadequate, and a new framework for the cognitive study of language worked out. Such framework should be able to provide an account of language as biologically, socially, and ecologically constrained interactional behavior in the course of which intelligence emerges.
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