12. Paratax and the capacity for culture
Chapter 09
Symbolic interaction and the capacity for institutional culture
David Dwyer, Michigan State University
11/14/08
1. The problem2. Symbolic interaction (referential signs, objectivations, grammar
3. The foundations for institutions
4. How symbolic interaction enables institutional culture
5. How symbolic interaction enhances a complex self
6. The foundation for institutional culture (lower and upper Paleolithic developmets)
7. Conclusions (not done)
Abstrct
In the Lower Paleolithic, which began roughly 2 million years ago we have evidence of increasingly complex tool manufacture, control of fire, human burial, and a vocal tract and brain that have been evolving to facilitate symbolic interaction. This paper examines these developments from a perspective of how symbolic interaction, as proposed by Mead (1934) and developed by Berger and Luckmann (1967) could have played a role in these developments. The paper proposes that referential signs developed during the Lower Paleolithic. However, these signs were used in paratactic (Dwyer 1986), sentences. This form of discourse, while not syntactic, did lead to two important developments: the capacity to negotiate agreements and a growing distinction between a public and private self. Because agreements represent a prototype of the cultural institution and because the public self is the aspect of the self to which institutional roles attach, these two developments provide the foundation upon which cultural institutions are built. To test this proposal, I compare the behavior of feral and signing apes with respect to their abilities to negotiate agreements and to the properties of the self. I conclude that symbolically interactive apes have a well developed process of negotiation and a clear distinction between their private and public self.
The Problem
Most of the work on the evolution of language fails to acknowledge the possibility of a paratactic (Dwyer 1986[1]) stage in human development.[2] The consequence of this failure is to expect that syntax appeared as soon as humans could use referential signs. This one-stage model gives rise to two conflicting statements.
a. Language must have developed during the Lower Paleolithic because this is the period when the vocal tract and the speech areas of the brain began evolving toward their current form.
b. Language must have begun during the Upper Paleolithic because this is when true cultural diversity as evidenced, by areal variation in ritual burial practice, cave art, and tool manufacture and style.[3]
This dilemma dissolves when the emergence of syntax is assigned to the Upper Paleolithic period that began, roughly 40 thousand years ago and the paratactic period assigned to the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. With this two stage model one can explain the development of the vocal tract and the speech areas of the brain as a response to the selective pressures imposed by increased use of paratactic communication and the development of the cultural diversity of the Upper Paleolithic to the development of syntax which in turn enabled institutional culture.
The positing of syntax as a major stimulus for institutional culture in the Upper Pleistocene raises the question of what was going on during the almost 2 million years of the Lower Paleolithic, the period of Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus. Let me suggest that Lower Pleistocene humans, in addition to using and manufacturing tools, developed referential signs, as opposed to instinctively-based gestures, and began communicating with paratactic sentences. In this paper, I propose, given this presumption to focus on the consequences of this development. I first show how the concept of symbolic interaction, the use of signs to interact with others (Mead 1934) can lead to a more complex self. I then show how, following Berger and Luckmann (1967), symbolic interaction in a face-to-face situation can lead to the foundation of institutional life.
To do this, I contrast the behavior of feral and signing apes, who engage one another symbolically, to see what differences symbolic interaction may have imposed upon signing apes.[4] But in order to do this, I first need to elaborate the concepts of symbolic interaction and institutional culture.
Symbolic interaction
Symbolic interaction involves communicating with others using referential signs in a grammar that could be atactic, paratactic, or syntactic.
Referential signs
Following the work of (Mead 1934; Cassirer 1944; Keita 1997; and Dwyer and Moshi 2002), I divide lexical signs[5] into two classes, expressive and referential. Cassirer characterized this distinction as one between signals and symbols. Signals evoke, according to Keita, an image or impression of a situation, whereas a referential sign describes properties of a situation.[6]
This is the same distinction that many draw between words and gestures. Signals tend to be emotional and words tend to be referential.[7]
Although expressives have an instinctive source, they can be controlled, but because of their instinctive source, they do have limitations to what they can refer, as Burling (1993) points out. For this reason, Burling further concludes that referential symbols could not have evolved from the control of expressive signals.
The great apes all have a capacity to learn referential signs, though due to limitations in their vocal apparatus, this capacity was discovered only after alternative means of sign representation were made available, e.g., American Sign Language and keyboards. Appendix A contains a partial listing of referential words that these apes have been reported to have learned.
In contrast to expressive signs, referential signs depict aspects of a situation under discussion such as things, activities and qualities. This is done by analyzing a situation and abstracting components of it and assigning them to individual words. Referential signs can be subclassified into different types according to their referents. Referential signs like cat and tree, as the name implies, have actual physical referents as do activities like go, come, and hit.[8] Categorical signs, like tool, fruit, clothing, represent categories of referential signs. Abstract signs, of which there are many subtypes form a third class. One subclass includes qualities, such as red, good, sweet, abstracted from referential signs. Another subclass includes objects which are products of the imagination. The development of referential signs adds a new dimension to symbolic interaction because they provide a measure of specificity that expressives cannot.
Objectivation
The process of using referential and expressive signs, symbolic interaction, enables me to export my subjective thoughts and intentions into the public domain for others to apprehend. Referential signs, in contrast to gestural signals, allow others to better understand one’s subjectivity, that is, one’s intentions, knowledge and feelings. This process is termed objectivation, because it involves the production of objects and referential signs are a special kind of object. Intersubjectivity, the sharing of our subjectivities, gives rise to the awareness that we have common understandings about each other. The objectivation of expressive signs, a capacity, which is widely distributed in the animal kingdom, is especially effective in clarifying for others one’s feelings and intentions. We are not surprised when apes observe others to access their intentions and feelings. However, the potential for increasing this intersubjectivity is vastly increased by the use of referential, as opposed to expressive, signs because of the specificity of referential signs. Along with the awareness of our intersubjectivity comes the awareness that there are things that I do not want to share with you. This will lead me not to share fully my subjectivity and with this I compartmentalize myself into a public and a private component.
In addition to increasing intersubjectivity, objectivation enables the process of negotiation, a process which allows greater specificity in cooperative efforts and, as I show below, negotiation lays the foundation of institutional culture.
Both the development of the complex self and the capacity to negotiate leads to an even greater interest in what the other knows, including what the other knows about the self. This reflexive self consciousness leads to an increasingly awareness of the public and private self.
Grammar
In a paper entitled ‘What are chimpanzees telling us about language (Dwyer 1986), I established a formal distinction between paratax (a two-word grammar) and syntax and that with a few possible exceptions chimpanzees and other apes showed a capacity for paratax and not syntax. Paratactic grammars lack the power of syntax because they cannot assign specific case relationships, for example actor-action, object-action and modifier-head, to the constituent. Thus a paratactic sentence like BITE DOG could mean (1) that the dog bites, (2) that the dog is bitten or (3) a dog bite. This lack of case specificity also renders the strategy of nesting, so central in syntax, ineffective in paratax.
For example in a syntactic sentence like ‘I see you’ we see first that the ‘I’ is an agent and the action is the sentence ‘see you,’ which has been nested in the main sentence as shown in the diagram on the right. Were this a paratactic sentence we would not know whether the ‘I’ was associated with ‘see you’ or just ‘see.’ Because nesting does not add clarity to a paratactic sentence it is little used. Paratactic speakers prefer to break this concept down into two sentences such as ‘I see’ and ‘see you.’[9]
What is important here is that as soon as these apes learn to sign, they develop the capacity to sign paratactically. This is a capacity of all apes, including young humans. Only adult humans have shown the capacity for using syntax. The potential of symbolic interaction for developing intersubjectivity using referential signs syntactically is vastly greater than using them paratactically. Nevertheless the paratactic use of referential signs provides a greater potential for 1) negotiation, 2) intersubjectivity, 3) self consciousness and 4) a complex self than use of expressive signs alone. And while these abilities can develop through other activities such as shared experiences and through face-to-face interaction using gestures (non referential signs) these processes are nowhere near as powerful as symbolic paratactic interaction.
The fact that all the great apes have the capacity to learn referential signs and to use them in a paratactic grammar, leads me to conclude that this potential was also a property of all species of human (homo). The key difference in this regard between humans and the other apes, is that humans developed referential signs and began to use them, whereas the other apes did not. The fact that these great apes objectivize these signs using the gestural signs of American Sign Language or key boards, suggests that improvements in the vocal apparatus over the last million years represent a response to sign use.
While not central to my argument, let me suggest that tool use may have played an important role in the development of referential words. However, rather than take language as the prerequisite for tool manufacture, I propose the opposite view, that tools are the exaptative predecessor of words. In fact tools can be turned into words by assigning a meaning to them. Suppose person A picks up a knife and shakes it at person B who may well ask himself, why is A doing this? More specifically B would ask, what are A’s intentions? Is A threatening me, asking me to go hunting, or something else. Person A may then clarify his intentions by not attacking B and by running in the direction where game are known to be. In doing this, A and B are adding meaning to the knife thus creating a sign. In formal terms, following Saussure (1931), a sign consists of a signifier (a token representing the sign) and a signified, a meaning assigned to the sign. In this case, the knife is signifier while the signified, the intended meaning, is ‘let's go hunting.’ In this way tools may have provided the exaptative prototype for referential signs.
The significance of developing referential signs is that the ability for humans to interact symbolically using referential signs with a paratactic grammar enabled humans to lay the foundation for institutional culture.[10]
The foundation for institutional culture
General versus institutional culture
As I demonstrate below, I use the term institutional culture because the general term culture is so vague I find it to be of little use. Nevertheless, the concept of culture is the cornerstone of the field of anthropology. It is used to explain why one group of people can act and understand things so differently from other groups of people. Culture is understood to be socially constructed by members of a social group, and because different social groups have the potential to construct culture differently, the cultures they produce have the potential to be different as well.[11] Because cultures are socially, rather than genetically given, they are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.
However, the concept of culture suffers from the contradictory problems of being overly specific and overly vague. It is overly specific because it suggests that the cultures do not overlap and consequently the world consists of a finite collection of cultures that have discrete boundaries. This conception fails to provide an adequate account of what we call a subculture and fails to acknowledge the possibility that the same institution, be it linguistic, religious or economic, could be shared by several societies.
On the other hand, the concept of culture is also overly vague, a view which vagueness can be traced to the origin of the concept attributed to Tylor’s 1871 definition that culture consists of "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." This aggregate definition describes many of the components of culture but does not say, as Street (1993) points out, how these components fit together and how culture works. Tylor also fails to explain what he means by society. Furthermore, using Tylor’s definition to signing apes, we have to conclude that because they have acquired knowledge and transmit this knowledge to others, that they have culture thus masking the substantial differences between apes and humans in this regard. This is essentially the argument that Savage-Rumbaugh et al (n.d.) make when they say that some chimpanzees have been acculturated and have acquired different degrees of human culture. [12] Their definition of culture also includes language and they hint at the capacity of language to develop intersubjectivity.[13]