Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language

SEVEN: The Sociobiological-Computationist Viewpoint: A Vichian Critique

SEVEN THE SOCIOBIOLOGICAL.. COMPUTATIONIST VIEWPOINT: A Vichian Critique Human language could have evolved only in relation to the total human condition. Lieberman 1975: 1 In this chapter I will discuss what I perceive to be the main alternative to the Vichian scenario sketched in this book-the sociobiological-computationist paradigm. Although sociobiology and computationism belong to different disciplinary domains, they can be seen to share the same basic viewpoint-that (syntactic) language reflects a universal genetic etiology. I will start by revisiting the Vichian scenario by way of synthesis, stopping briefly to consider the question of the sequence of its four events and the question of the monogenesis vs. the polygenesis of language. I will conclude this chapter, and this book, by offering two final reflections. The Vichian Scenario Revisited The main "events," as I have designated them, of the Vichian glottogenetic scenario can be summarized as follows: • Language is, ultimately, a product of the imagination, not of genetic mutations. The primitive mind emerged when the imagination transformed the brain's images of sense impressions and affective states into iconic signs. Iconic semiosis is the basis of consciousness. Why human beings are endowed with an imagination is a mystery. Our rational minds will never be able to find out for, as Vieo argues, they are themselves a product of the imagination. Indeed, the very word imagination is our 144 VIeo, METAPHOR, AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE attempt to explain the mysterious creative capacity that we possess. But all this word really does is to acknowledge our awareness of this capacity. It certainly does not explain it. • The imagination is at the core of human thinking. Its primary neurological locus is in the RH. • There is a two-level reality to the mind. The deep level is governed by the workings of the imagination. At this level the human being can step away from the world of unreflective, instinctual, and biologically programmed responses (World 1) and move into the world of the conscious self (World 2). The surface level is generated by Metaphor and contains our World 3 concepts and abstract cognitive structures. • The fundamental form of thought was, and continues to be, iconic. Langer (1948) calls it a presentational form of mind: Le., it inheres in the presentation to the mind of units of perception (the iconicity hypothesis). The representation, or externalization, of these units produced the first "languages" which were also iconic-indexical, deictic, gestural, pictorial , and ideographic (the visual mimesis hypothesis). • This deep-level form of language became speech when our sapient ancestors associated sounds in the audio-oral tract with natural sounds in the environment and with vocal ejaculations made in response to affective states and urges. This osmotic process produced the first words. These were the vocal counterparts of the iconic signs produced at an earlier stage (the audio-oral osmosis hypothesis). • Metaphor is an epiphenomenal product of the fantasia and the ingegno. It came onto the glottogenetic scene to transform the world of concrete reality into one of abstraction. In so doing, it generated modern conceptuallanguage and what Langer (1948) calls discursive thought. Our firstorder concepts were forged through a metaphorical transformation of perceived bodily experiences (the metaphoricity hypothesis). • The first attempts to explain reality were structured by the ingegno into the form of myths. There exists no culture without myths. • At the surface level of mind, Metaphor continues to make associations among conceptual domains, creating second-order concepts and, out of these, a very abstract system of thought. Through the workings of the ingegno, syntax-the connecting and organizing of concepts-emerged to stabilize this system, which has become the basis for constructing modern institutions and scientific theories-including theories of grammar . Discursive thought dominates the human mind but continues to rely on Metaphor to make "discoveries." Metaphor helps rational thought literally "look" for connections among things. 'The Sociobiological...Computationist Viewpoint 145 The plausibility of this scenario is supported by evidence coming out of various domains: by large portions of the psychological research on mental imagery, by research on child language development, by findings on hemisphericity documented by neuroscience, by linguistic reconstruction, by the etymological analysis of core vocabularies, and by various bits and pieces of paleographical, paleoneurological, and archeological evidence. The vast research on verbal metaphors in particular lends substantial and substantive support to the metaphoricity hypothesis. Event 4 opened the door to the development of culture in the modern sense...