Abstract
This paper discusses three related claims. The first claim is that the expressive limitations of iconic and indexical communication and cognition are reasonably measured by their minimal arbitrariness across three distinct dimensions—resemblance, alternative, and acquisition—when compared to the high measures of resemblance, alternative, and acquisition arbitrariness of symbolic communication and cognition. The second claim is that the ways that developed symbolic communication systems ground symbols to the world can also help explain how iconic and indexical communication systems underwrote the generation of symbols in the first place. And the third claim is that contemporary accounts about the origins of symbolic communication would benefit from kee** in mind the differences between resemblance arbitrariness, alternative resemblance, and acquisition resemblance as each is exemplified by icons, indexes, and symbols.
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Notes
Noam Chomsky and those influenced by him often argue that symbolic language first developed suddenly as a tool for representational thought and only afterwards came to be used for communication with others. See Chomsky, 1965, 2011. More recently, Chomsky and his followers have allowed a distinction between the Faculty of Language in the Broad Sense and the Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense. On this more moderate view, evolutionary continuity between hominins and hominids, and between different hominins, is allowed across a number of dimensions. However, the fundamental syntactic ability to form infinite recursive combinations from finite lexical elements—Merge—is characteristic only of the Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense and, according to them, has no evolutionary precursor. See Hauser et al., 2002; Berwick and Chomsky, 2016. The distinction between the Faculty of Language in the Broad Sense and the Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense maps roughly to the distinction between protolanguage and language. A protolanguage is typically understood to be lexically developed and syntactically undeveloped, that is, a protolanguage is a communication system that contains meaningful words but has little structure to organize those words to create more complex constructions.
The term ‘representational structure’ is borrowed from Planer and Kalkman, 2021.
From a strict Peircean perspective, the interpretant is the interpretation of the representational structure as representing the represented content rather than the entity, process, or phenomenon that produces that interpretation. We gloss over this distinction to ease presentation.
As a referee notes, it is an open question whether social groups acting as interpretants use mechanisms other than, or in addition to, those used by individual interpretants. If so, then those mechanisms need to be identified; if not, then whatever mechanisms available to social group interpretants are nothing more than the aggregations of those used by individual interpretants comprising the social group.
Peirce developed increasingly fine-grained representation typologies during the four decades he thought about these matters, eventually settling on 66 distinct kinds of signs. He also added the claim that icons are more basic than indexes and that indexes are more basic than symbols. We do not need to comment on either of these matters beyond noting them here.
Home-signing languages are sets of gestures and signals generated by individuals isolated from the Deaf community. Home-signing gestures and signals are typically idiosyncratic to the set of individuals using them, so they rarely pass from one generation to the next and are rarely shared across large segments of the Deaf community.
‘Form/ meaning arbitrariness’ is widely used in the literature instead of ‘resemblance arbitrariness’. I use ‘resemblance arbitrariness’ to maintain terminological uniformity with other kinds of arbitrariness to be introduced below.
Gasparri et al., 2022, call alternative arbitrariness ‘sign-function optimality arbitrariness.’ I use ‘alternative arbitrariness’ to maintain terminological uniformity. Gasparri et al., 2022, also identify a fourth kind of arbitrariness, ‘lack of motivatedness arbitrariness,’ which they characterize as “the sign-function map**s that, either absolutely or comparatively, do not respond to structural pressures or do not fulfill any observable adaptive role” (p.1128). We do not consider this arbitrariness measure here.
Planer and Kalkman, 2021, goes into considerable detail in specifying the conditions required for fixing relevant counterfactual alternatives. One point they note is that when alternative arbitrariness is low, it is not possible to develop social conventions. Unlike innate capacities and highly canalized capacities, social conventions entail the existence of other social conventions, a point that Lewis, 2002, p. 70, makes succinctly: “[T]here is no such thing as the only possible convention. If R is our actual convention, R must have the alternative R', and R' must be such that it could have been our convention instead of R, if only people had started off conforming to R' and expecting each other to [as well].”.
Gasparri et al., 2022, call this kind of arbitrariness ‘acquisition-dependent sign-function arbitrariness.’ I use ‘acquisition arbitrariness’ to maintain terminological uniformity.
Thanks to a referee for suggesting the alternative of using an artifact as a demonstrative.
This set of features is a reorganized and amended set of features identified by Harnad (and many others). See Harnad, 1990, 336.
As important as discriminating one entity, process, or phenomenon from another may be, it does not capture the categorization that identifies an entity, process, or phenomenon as being a member of one category rather than another category. For categorization, interpretants instead distill the constantly varying and continuously blended iconic and indexical perceptual content and cognition into salient “invariant features” that are “selectively filtered to preserve only [those] that reliably distinguish [category] members from non-members” (Harnad, 1990, 342).
I would like to thank the participants attending the Workshop on Symbols in the Middle Paleolithic: Moving Beyond Peirce and de Saussure II—Thomas Wynn, Frederick Coolidge, Karenleigh Overmann, Steven Kuhn, Corijn can Mazijk, and James Cole—for comments and criticisms of a precursor to this paper. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences for comments and criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper. The paper is better for all of their efforts, although I know that it is still not the paper some of them wish it could have been.
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Welshon, R. Representation, arbitrariness, and the emergence of speech. Phenom Cogn Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10006-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10006-x