Posts Tagged ‘lying’

Language frees humans from the captivity of now

September 13, 2024

Introduction:

The capability for language (physical and mental) is physiological and lies in many of our genes acting together. These genes evolved individually for other reasons and came together, one assumes fortuitously rather than by design, to make language possible. Nevertheless our hominin ancestors only discovered they had this ability when, as need prescribed, they tried to communicate. The capability was discovered but languages themselves were invented by humans. As with most inventions, language invention was also driven by necessity. In this case it was social needs in the shape of the desire and the need to cooperate. Humans invented languages to answer the need to communicate. There is no doubt that language helps thinking but it is equally obvious that a man alone on a deserted island would not have invented language just for the sake of his solitary thinking. The driver for the invention was the need to communicate, not the need to think. So my contention is that the social desire/need to cooperate is what uniquely distinguished/distinguishes the human species. The discovery of language ability and the invention of languages was an evolutionary step change which lifted this distinction to an unprecedented level. But it didn’t stop there. An immensely powerful feedback loop was established when language aided thought which, in turn, enriched language. A virtuous spiral was born which has now been in place for some 200,000 years and continues. One apparent evolutionary weakness is that the language-thinking advances can only be passed on culturally and cannot be passed on (as far as we can tell) to new generations through our genes. So there is a risk of cultural discontinuity (as with the abrupt end of a civilization for example). I suspect that many such cultural discontinuities have occurred and manifested as Dark Ages which followed the end of some advanced civilizations. As, for example, after the heights of the Egyptian and Roman civilizations.

When were languages invented?

While there is no direct fossil evidence of language, the indirect evidence suggests that our ancestors from 200,000 years ago (most likely homo sapiens but possibly even Neanderthals) had language.

  • Brain Development: The human brain, particularly the areas associated with language, had undergone significant development by the time modern humans (homo sapiens) appeared some 200,000 years ago. This suggests that the species had the cognitive capacity for language at that time. It is not impossible that Neanderthals and perhaps even some later descendant of homo erectus also had the cognitive ability.
  • Social Complexity: Archaeological evidence indicates that early humans lived in complex social groups, which would have required effective cooperation and communication. The need and practice of social cooperation reached an unprecedented level with homo sapiens and possibly also with Neanderthals. It is most likely that social cooperation began with group hunting and group defense.
  • Symbolic Behavior: By 200,000 years ago humans engaged in tool making and some symbolism must have been required. Complex symbols in art are present, I estimate, by at least 70,000 years ago. The ability to construct abstract ideas and the need to communicate these also originate here. Again it seems that the capacity to use symbols was available to Neanderthals and sapiens.
  • Genetic Evidence: Recent genetic studies have identified genes associated with language development that are present in modern humans and likely existed in our ancestors 200,000 years ago.

It seems that the ability to have language was present earlier than 200,000 years ago. From the discovery of the ability to the invention of a functional language was a major breakthrough and would have taken some time. Primitive spoken languages began probably around 200,000 years ago. There are other major steps to get from early sounds and gestures to sophisticated spoken languages and then to the invention of writing (possibly via art). The origin of written languages probably dates to the time of the earliest known cave paintings around 50 – 60,000 years ago. 

Language is a tool for communication – not a lens

There is a philosophical argument (patently false but it keeps academics occupied) that language is a lens through which to view the world and that language determines reality. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (first proposed by Sapir in 1929) suggests that the structure of a language influences the way its speakers perceive and think about the world and that language is the lens through which the world is seen.

It is an academic hypothesis but it is more wishful thinking than based on empirical observation. I do not need language to observe the world but I do need language to describe what I observe. I need to describe the world because I wish to communicate. The idea of language primarily as a lens to view the world is fundamentally flawed. I find the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis unconvincing because the invention of a language – any language – must start with the need to communicate some aspect of reality. It is very plausible and even likely that this would have been to communicate some thing important for survival (e.g. Danger! Lion! Run! …..). Communication to cooperate was the human trademark. Whether for hunting or defense or building a settlement, the key was social cooperation enabled by communication.

Generally philosophers have – in their own winding ways – always returned to the idea of language being a communication tool rather than a lens to view reality. Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar suggests that humans possess an innate language faculty that allows us to acquire language with relative ease. The capability for language surely lies in our genes. But I am not so sure that grammar is also explicitly in our genes. But it could be so, since the software in our brains for what we consider logic and reason (and hence grammar) probably has dependence on our genes. Nevertheless, his theory implies that language is a tool that we use to represent the world, and where language and reality are interconnected, but that language does not determine reality.  Wittgenstein flip-flopped (which professional philosophers are allowed to do). In his early work, he argued that language was a picture of the world and that the meaning of a sentence was determined by its relationship to the world. Not quite Sapir-Whorf but close. However, in his later work, Wittgenstein shifted his focus to the role of language in human life and activity. He found that the meaning of words is not fixed but is determined by their use in specific contexts. Thus language was actually more a tool for various tasks than he had previously thought.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis derives from the philosophy of cultural relativism where empirical observations of reality are taken to be subordinate to our cultural understanding of the world. It is speculation rather than based on observation. This is more a political position than a true hypothesis which can be falsified. Certainly language is intricately entwined with thinking. But we can think without language. As a species we thought long before the chimps separated from homo. However, when language is applied, thinking is transformed and thought is elevated from roiling, diffuse, emotional clouds to crisper, clearer, delineation of ideas. This clarity of thought feeds back into new developments of language to be able to describe the new ideas and the abstractions that emerge. New language leads to even more nuanced and complex thoughts and so on ad infinitum. This loop from  language to thinking and back to language is probably the most powerful cultural feedback loop we have and is, I believe, a primary differentiator of humans from other animals.

It is language which provides a kind of digitization of the analogues of emotion. I look at the leaves of a tree in my garden and I can see more shades of green than I have words to describe. For my own contemplation of the tree I do not need to describe all the various shades of green or define any new words. Emotions and feelings and existing language will do. But if I wished to communicate some particular shade to someone else then I would use language to do so – either by inventing a new word or using other words as adjectives. It is my ability to discern many unnamed shades of green in the real world which demands the invention of new words. Reality is observed by my senses not through my language. I do not define a new colour and then go and find it in the real world. In any event it is reality which is reflected in language, not language which determines reality. The history of the evolution of words suggests that we invent new words as we observe or find new ideas – real or not – that we wish to communicate. The capability for language is physiology but languages are invented – always – for the purpose of communication.

We observe the world through our senses which both enable and restrict our observations. We use language to communicate what we observe. It was invented as a brush to paint the picture of what we observed and wished to communicate.. But language, we find, is a much more versatile tool than we set out to invent. It is not restricted to describe only the real world that we observe. As with any tool, we find language has many more uses than it was first designed for. 

Language frees humans from the captivity of now

From describing immediate and surrounding reality in the now, language progresses to describing actions. In the development of any language, first comes the naming of real things (nouns) and then come the actions we need to communicate (verbs). First things (you, me the tree, the dog, the lion, the sky, …) and then what to do (run, hide, come, go, fight, …). It is only then we discover that language can  even describe abstractions. Our minds are full of abstractions because of our ability to think not because we have language. Animals may remember the past and even take actions regarding the future but they do not, as far as we can tell, refer to past or future events. Language is what allows humans to address unreal events in the past and in the future. It is a short step from abstractions and unreal things to thoughts and imaginary things. That in turn led to the emergence of imagination and fantasy which provided the creative impetus for human development.

While language can influence our thinking, it does not determine it. Language allows us to explore concepts and experiences that may not be directly observable or verifiable, such as the past, the future, and fictional worlds. It is language which allows us to describe the abstract the unreal and the imaginary. The past and the future and all other things which do not exist cannot be observed but can be described. Thus language allows and enables all that human imagination and fantasy can conjure up. In reality, the real world itself is merely a tiny sub-set of what language can describe. Language’s ability to describe non-existent things, such as the past, future, and fiction, is an unlooked for facet of language that emerged from the initial need for communication. The ability of language to deal with the unreal and the imagined was a discovery not an invention.

It is language which makes it possible to lie. (The evolution of lying can also be traced back to the survival need for deception and thence the use of language to create and communicate falsehoods).  Language is a tool invented primarily for communication rather than for thinking. But the feedback loop between language and thinking has allowed the species to take off. Language allows us to paint and communicate not only our view of the real world but even our thoughts. Language is that which has enabled and empowered social groups and cooperation among humans.

The power of language lies in its ability to transcend the boundaries of direct experience and explore the realm of imagination. Language is not confined to reality. It could be argued that imagination, fantasy and creativity are enabled by language. Rather than language being a lens through which to view reality, the real need to communicate is what enabled language and freed humankind from the captivity of reality and the shackles of now.

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With language came lies

October 13, 2018

First came deception, then came language and then came lies.

A minuscule level of cognitive ability is sufficient for animal deception. Some animal mimicry and camouflage is probably at the instinctive level and requires no consciousness.

Some types of deception in animals are completely involuntary (e.g. disruptive coloration), but others are under voluntary control and may involve an element of learning. Most instances of voluntary deception in animals involve a simple behaviour, such as a cat arching its back and raising its hackles, to make itself appear larger than normal when attacked. There are relatively few examples of animal behaviour which might be attributed to the manipulative type of deception which we know occurs in humans, i.e. “tactical deception”. It has been argued that true deception assumes the deceiver knows that (1) other animals have minds, (2) different animals’ minds can believe different things are true (when only one of these is actually true), and (3) it can make another mind believe that something false is actually true. True deception requires the deceiver to have the mental capacity to assess different representations of reality. Animal behaviour scientists are therefore wary of interpreting a single instance of behaviour to true deception, and explain it with simpler mental processes such as learned associations. – Wikipedia

We have been using deception probably starting before we were primitive humans some 10 million years ago. Deceiving those who were hunting us, deceiving prey and even deceiving competitors of our own kind. Deception generally requires another mind to exist to be deceived (and self-deception is fanciful except for a schizophrenic). There is no deception involved in hiding from a tree or in avoiding a landslide or escaping a volcanic eruption. Deception lies in inducing the other mind to believe in something false as being true or in believing something true to be false. Before we had language, deception was confined to using behaviour and actions to induce the false belief. This could have been, for example, hiding from hunters or prey or of appearing taller and stronger than a competitor. Deception was a tool even for groups cooperating among themselves to induce a false belief in a third party. However the cooperative act of deception required communication between the cooperating parties – even if without language. This kind of deception was primarily about inducing a false belief about the present (and about the imminent future), but could not really address the past or the distant future or anything in the present which was not immediately perceivable.

And then came rudimentary language. That was more than 100,000 years ago and maybe even more than 200,000 years ago. But we already had some idea of the concepts of “good” and “bad”. It is not difficult to see that anything which helped survival would have been labelled good and the levels of goodness of any event would have been linked to its relevance for survival. This would have been the beginnings of the development of a value system. Good and bad lie as the foundation of any, and every, value system. There was surely communication before language, but without language there was no possibility of communicating about things past or things future. Life was in the now. What was, was true, and what was not was false. But the concepts of true and false had been established well before language was discovered.

Sometime after the world around us had been divided and classified into good and bad and all the shades in between, came language. First came the discovery that we were capable of language and then that language enabled communication. Then came the invention of various specific languages at different times. (I see language as being discovered and languages as being invented). Some were good and others were not so good. Naturally all those who spoke the same language were on the side of the good. Every language that has ever existed has an in-built logic which mirrors the logic perceived in the surrounding world. To begin with, language was anchored to perceptions of reality. But language opened the doors to the past. History could be communicated. Forecasts of future events could be made. The past could be connected to the now and the now to the future. As people communicated about the now, it would have become apparent that even events in the now were mere perceptions. And then came the dawning of the realisation that language did not have to be anchored in reality at all. Language could describe what was not. The concepts of true and false expanded to include the past and the future and the abstract. History could be guessed or invented. The future could be fantasy. Fake news became possible. Language made lying possible.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The most widely accepted definition of lying is ……. “A lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it” (Isenberg 1973, 248) ………there are at least four necessary conditions for lying.

  • First, lying requires that a person make a statement (statement condition).
  • Second, lying requires that the person believe the statement to be false; that is, lying requires that the statement be untruthful (untruthfulness condition).
  • Third, lying requires that the untruthful statement be made to another person (addressee condition).
  • Fourth, lying requires that the person intend that that other person believe the untruthful statement to be true (intention to deceive the addressee condition).

Lying needs the ability to make a statement which is enabled by language (condition 1). More than that, lying is endemic in the use of language. Lying, as a concept, is necessarily imbued with the intent to deceive (condition 4). Inevitably, given that intention, lying carries the (almost) universal value of being “bad”. Exceptions are made only when the intent to deceive is secondary to a more laudable intention.

All social interaction involves some level of lying. I suspect that “benign” lying is necessary for the human use of language. Every statement has a truth value. Any statement of belief (which includes also all “facts” which have not been personally verified to be true) is a lie to some extent. Most human behaviour is based on beliefs that statements, which are not personally verified, are true. We could not speak about the future, or of the past, or about abstract things, if language did not allow the lie. I suspect that modern humans would not have evolved, as we have done, if language was constrained to disallow anything other than true statements.

 

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