Language as a cultural emergent property
Reference to 'culture' entails a departure from the physical and natural science orientations which have contributed most to explanations of phenomena in terms of complexity and emergence. The distinctions between the domains of reality identified by Bhaskar, for example, are illustrated with reference to the properties of a gemstone: what we can observe empirically is the way it glitters as it reflects light of a certain wavelength; the atomic structure of the crystal is real, existing as it does whether or not human beings are aware of it; the actual is exemplified by scientists acting on substances, causing events to occur in the process of their investigations. The properties of culture, and of language, are different in significant ways from the properties of crystals, so let us now state what we mean by emergent properties in this context. As we have seen, the capacity to process grammar may be conceptualized as existing within each human organism, but the pro ducts generated by that individual property are not reducible to individuals. If Bickerton is correct, the capacity for language which facilitated distinctive kinds of cognition in the human species also made possible self-consciousness and 'off-line' thinking- thinking, that is, which is not tied to the present time or location, the 'disengaged awareness' which Taylor (1985) alludes to: 'To be able to talk about things is to be potentially aware of them outside of any particular transaction with them' (p.151). This linguistic ability turned the human brain 'into an inference engine powerful enough to make possible the totally unprecedented cultural explosion of the last fifty millennia' (Bickerton 1996: 84). It is the ability of members of our species both to entertain 'off-line' thoughts, and, crucially, to share them with others, that represents the qualitative difference which language makes, and which makes culture possible: 'Human thinking possesses capacities wholly outside the range of nonhuman thinking; it changes the world, while the latter does not even change the individual' (ibid.: 112-13).
These thoughts, externalized in utterances, are the 'intelligibilia' which Archer (1988: vxi) glosses as 'any item which has the dispositional capacity of being understood by someone', and which culture as a whole is said to comprise. Linguistic products-language behavior, utterances, discourse, texts- have an externality from the individual mind, and this is the source of some of the properties and powers of language which we see as critical to a social science of (applied) linguistics. These claims are hardly original, having been debated within philosophy for centuries. The contributions of Herder, Humboldt and Heidegger are discussed by Taylor (1985), for example, in a review which considers both constitutive and expressive theories of meaning. He concludes that language has the power not only to 'bring to explicit awareness what we formerly only had an implicit sense of' (p.256), but also that it 'serves to place some matter out in the open between interlocutors.... [It] enables us to put things in public space' (p.259). Or, as Carr puts it: '... the grammar which constitutes the language is a public object, whereas the HSPM [human speech parsing mechanism] is a part of human psychology', and further, '[l]anguage ... exists in an intersubjective space, and in this sense we literally do not "stop at our skins": it is precisely language, subsisting intersubjectively, which allows us to reach beyond our private existence' (Carr 1990: 44). Volosinov (1973: 86) expresses a comparable idea: 'I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately from the point of view of the community to which I belong'. Itis only in this speaker-external public space that linguistic symbols such as the deictic pronouns I and you have meaning (Halliday 1978; Searle 1995; Taylor 1985).
Such a 'public space' is also invoked in Popper's notion of 'World 3', whose distinction between subjective and objective knowledge. World 3 could not exist without language, and it is where propositions about all aspects of human knowledge (and imagination) are located:
By World 3 I mean the world of the products of the human mind, such as stories, explanatory myths, tools, scientific theories (whether true or false), scientific problems, social institutions, and works of art. ...
Many World 3 objects exist in the form of material bodies, and belong in a sense to both World 1 and World 3. Examples are sculptures, paintings, and books, whether devoted to a scientific subject or to literature. A book is a physical object, and it therefore belongs to World 1; but what makes it a significant production of the human mind is its content: that which remains invariant in the various copies and editions. And this content belongs to World 3.
One of my main theses is that World 3 objects can be real, ... not only in their World 1 materializations or embodiments, but also in their World 3 aspects. As World 3 objects, they may induce men to produce other World 3 objects and, thereby, to act on World 1; and interaction with World 1- even indirect interaction- I regard as a decisive argument for calling a thing real. (Popper and Eccles 1977: 38-9)
Of course it is challenging to operationalize these ideas in this particular context because language is both topic and medium. So there is debate even between the various exponents of Popperian and realist claims about science as to whether the 'World 3' status of propositions about intersubjective understanding are claims about language; an alternative position is that 'linguistic facts', while available as propositions in a World 3 space, are facts exclusively about the language faculty and not about language as any kind of intersubjective entity. Pateman (1987), for example, posits two conceptions of language, distinguishing the nativist characteristics of language from its sociocultural instantiations, and reserving for propositions about the former the label of 'linguistic facts', while the latter can, for him, only be 'social facts'. A different position is adopted by Searle (1995: 228), who is willing to identify language as 'a kind of institutional structure', and who proposes that it is the symbolic medium which makes culture possible. Only through language can material objects come to be assigned functional values, such as the marks on paper which signify that it is to count as money, for example, or the system of beliefs which makes possible the idea of 'scoring points' when a person physically crosses a visible line carrying a material object such as a ball. Wittgenstein's arguments against the possibility of a private language are cited as evidence for language as an essentially social phenomenon by Itkonen (1978), who claims that 'use of language is logically inter dependent with public use of language' (p.119), and who builds on the intentionalist theories of Grice, Searle and others to identify language with social action.
The distinctiveness of a conception which is emergentist, stratified, and which recognizes the importance of complexity explanations, is that it allows for an interplay between the language processing capacity of the individual and the products of that capacity as World 3 entities. The intersubjective actualizations of language are, as we have claimed, the 6000 or so human languages extant in the world today and the epistemological and methodological difficulties inherent in demarcating the boundaries between those which are spatially proximate does nothing to diminish their reality as both social and linguistic entities.
The claim that languages are cultural emergent properties owes much to the recent work of Archer (1988, 1995, 2000). She asserts that it is human practice, the business of being in the world, which is the source and origin of social life and the social world. The logical and substantive priority of practice implies that language needs to be viewed as a practical activity, a means by which the working relationship between human beings and the world about them is accomplished (Archer 2000). Since practical, embodied activity in the natural world 'comes first', as it were, languages must be seen as emergent from this engagement between human practice and the natural environment. One implication of this is that the practical order and the linguistic order are not co-extensive: we can do or experience things that we cannot express in language, that reach beyond our discursive abilities or understandings.
We are proposing, then, that languages are emergent products of the engagement of human practice with the material world. They qualify as emergent, as defined above, on several counts. Firstly, they are not reducible to their material embodiment as sound waves (or written marks), nor to processes taking place entirely within individual human minds, nor yet to sets of internal relationships between linguistic symbols.
Secondly, languages have a partial autonomy both from human beings and from the material world. The practices of children developing creoles from the under-grammaticalized pidgin varieties of their parents are sometimes cited to counter the claim that language is essentially sociaL However, while these practices may indicate the involvement of the innate capacities of human beings to develop new actualizations of linguistic potential, it is also the case that even these practices are intersubjective, and give rise to emergent language varieties that are not reducible to their constituents. Meanwhile, most people learn one or more of the human languages that existed before they were born and will be in existence after they die: the existence of languages is attributable to human beings, but not only to those human beings currently speaking them. Each generation changes the language varieties it inherits, but it is a property of languages that some features are accommodated while others are not. Thus languages may facilitate or constrain what people seek to do, and it is the recognition of language and practice as distinct which allows for the investigation of their mutual interplay, whilst the recognition of language as emergent from embodied practice within the world maintains the crucial connection between language and reality. Our language about reality is thus constrained in important ways by how the world is, even though what we do with language and how ably we deploy it remain a matter of human practice. This is why, as Devitt and Sterelny put it, '... a theory of language belongs within a theory of people' (Devitt and Sterelny 1987: 192).
It is important to emphasize that it is human beings- and not languages- which do things in the social world. In seeking to accomplish things in the world, social actors must use language. Whenever they do so, however, there is an engagement with the linguistic resources available or accessible to them. Through this engagement they experience these resources in enabling and constraining ways.
Thirdly, languages possess an ability to interact with their constituent elements. That is, there is feedback between people, the material world and the languages which are emergent products of the interaction between these. Bates and Goodman (1999: 35) suggest that, 'once it finally appeared on the planet, it is quite likely that language itself began to apply adaptive pressure to the organization of the human brain'. Language enables us to reflect upon, interpret and make judgements about ourselves and others. As Austin, Searle and other 'natural language' philosophers have pointed out, the things we do with language, those ways of acting upon and modifying the world which are performed through linguistic acts, are examples of interactions between languages and people.
