Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'

Tahir Wood twood at UWC.AC.ZA
Tue Dec 3 13:59:16 UTC 2002



>>> Tom Givon <tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> 12/02/02 09:57PM >>>
  The anthropocentric impulse to draw an absolute boundary between biological evolution ('the animal') and cultural evolution ('history', 'the human') goes back to antiquity

Tahir: I'm not sure if I am one of the people who supposedly drew an absolute boundary, but I confess imediately to not having the faintest idea what an absolute boundary is. I did however draw a conceptual distinction between evolution and history, on which see more below.
likewise, the idea that somehow cullture and history are wholly liberated from adaptive ('functional') constrants, that they are--to paraphrase Charles Li (and, for that matter, Bill Labov)--matters of only society and culture, falls squarely on the Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Wallace-Chomsky side of the debate. 
Tahir: "They are matters of only society and culture" looks like it might be one of those "absolute boundaries" you spoke of, except that I doubt whether anyone was foolish enought to say something like that.
The funny thing is, in biology itself there have been strong recent trends to obliterate this rigid --artificial, ideological--boundary between mind/language/culture/behavior and 'plain' structural biology. 
Tahir: Well they might do that in the same way that the chemists at my university say that "chemistry is the science of everything". And no doubt someone who had plenty of time to waste could dream up a chemical or biological theory of why the French revolution happened or why a particular metaphor is more common in one language than another. But I doubt whether such theories would attract much attention. Most of us would find a historical or linguistic theory more satisfying.
It therefore boggles my (admittedly simple) mind to see self-declared functionalists, who believe that language is adapted to its main tasks of representation and communication of information, come up with the idea that the main process that shapes both phonology and grammar--diachronic development--is somehow only 'culturally' and 'socially' constrained (and pray, what does it mean exactly? Total lack of constraints?) This certainly flies in the face of all detailed, fine-grained studies of the process of diachronic change in both phonology and grammar. 
Tahir: The argument is rather that given the biological constraints, a wide variety of linguistic forms are possible, but the constraints themselves can tell us nothing about which of those possibilities are actualised or why they are. There we have to look at the history of the users of the language, the environment they live in, etc. Thus it would be nonsense to try to explain the difference between, say, old English and modern English, which are mutually unintelligible, in terms of a biological change in the users of English over the last thousand years. I say that it is a historical change that has occured; I say furthermore that I don't think anyone would say that it is a biological change; you apparently say there is no difference between the two. 
I also pointed out that differences in the languages of different peoples cannot be attributed to biological differences between those peoples. I don't think that you or anyone really argues this outside of maybe the most demented of sociobiologists or racists. 
To say that language changes historically is to say that it changes in correspondence with the functional requirements of its users in the changing context. Why is that not a functionalist kind of explanation?
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