THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE
AND THE TOPIC OF REFERENCE
R. E. JENNINGS AND A. J. HARTLINE
Fundamental Observations
To researchers accustomed to the stylistic idiom of the philosophy of language, the manner of this essay will seem oddly clinical. Though it is written
without mathematical symbols, formal researchers may find the style oddly
familiar. Our hope is that on reflection, both will agree that it is simple and
cumulative, the simplicity of later remarks depending on that of the earlier.
How far we fall short of transparency must of course be judged by the reader.
We ask only what one asks of logic tiros: do not assume that we are trying
to say something deep, for we are not. Indeed, outside of philosophy no one
would take our initial observations as anything but banal. We hope that such
inferences as we permit ourselves to draw from them are equally unproblematic. They ought to seem modest by philosophical standards. Indeed,
the response that experience has taught us to anticipate from philosophical audiences is that they seem problematically modest. Philosophers, on
hearing the matter of this paper presented have reported it bereft of much
that their tranquility had depended upon. Our task thus far has seemed
not so much that of justifying our claims as that of reassuring philosophers that they are rich enough to constitute philosophically substantial and
Both authors are grateful to other members of the LLEP language group for useful
discussions of the material in this essay. We wish in particular to thank Jeanette MacLean,
Marla Meynell, Keir Thornburg, Marcus Watson, and Scott Webber. This paper was
written with the financial support of SSHRC through grants 410-2005-1088 and 706-20040544.
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R. E. JENNINGS AND A. J. HARTLINE
philosophically satisfying understanding. The philosophical reader whose
first temptation is to say ‘Yes, but it’s not just that’ will aid himself and
oblige the authors by bearing in mind that we are not engaged in analysis.
We are merely asking what is sufficient for how much understanding.
Reference is not the primary subject of this essay; it is its primary illustration. The subject matter is method, in particular biological method as
applied to the study and understanding of the nature of language. It is not
an attempt to discredit other methods per se. The selection of one approach
over another must remain in part a matter of temperament. Selection of
method is, however, for young researchers, also a matter of availability. Our
aim here is to demonstrate the value of an available approach, not to convert
everyone to it. Accordingly our discussion bypasses rather than confronts
large philosophical debates such as that about the nature of compositionality
as it might and might not apply to natural language. We merely take what
we need and pass on, reserving the right to return for more.
Why Biology of Language rather than, say, Historical linguistics? In the
first instance we should admit that the label represents an appropriation of
the term biology for a pre-existing method, not an attempt to base a study
of language entirely on known biological results. It is by working in the
method that one sees the suitableness of this label over others. However,
the phenomenon of language does bear important connections with other
indisputably biological phenomena. Most notably, the physical significance
of particular morphemic streams changes through succeeding generations of
linguistic organisms. Accordingly, among the most fundamental principles of
language science must be those that reveal the general nature of linguistic
change. Our aim in the end is a theoretical understanding of language
that eventually integrates seamlessly with other subspecialities of biological
science such as evolutionary biology and evolutionary neuroscience. Again,
THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THE TOPIC OF REFERENCE
3
the urge to reply ‘Why not “historical”?’ will be less insistent if it is borne
in mind that we are after integration, not some sort of reduction. And with
those warnings, it is perhaps safe to begin.
Human language is primarily1 physical, and more particularly biological,
since it is a condition of human organisms and a product of human physiology.
Humans commit vocal streams to their surroundings and inscriptions to their
laptops, and to some of these streams, sooner or later they and other organisms are found to react. No doubt this fact of physicality can be ignored,
even if it cannot be assailed. As to the long term usefulness of philosophical
studies that do ignore it, that question must await in the longer term the
judgment of history, and in the shorter, that of this essay. Certain it is
that there are significant biological studies of language from which philosophical considerations are entirely absent. It is less certain whether perfect
symmetry in this regard can or should prevail.
A case in point: even admitting the physical nature of language, it will
be rejoined, the physical significance of language is conventional. Witness,
for example, Glock dispatching Quine.
It is only through linguistic conventions that we can communicate fine-grained thoughts even to total strangers, people
who are not in tune either with the speaker’s thoughts or
with the circumstances of utterance.2
There is nothing about the physical characteristics of any particular element of language that suits it for the physical role that it plays. In different
languages, it is remarked, markedly different phonemic complexes play functionally indistinguishable roles. The language of convention has, on these
1
2
That is to say, as it presents itself to observation.
H.G. Glock, Quine and Davidson on Thought, Language and Reality (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003), pp. 256.
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R. E. JENNINGS AND A. J. HARTLINE
grounds, been appropriated to what is regarded as an indisputably philosophical remainder in the study of language.
This question, the place of convention, marks the first methodological
divergence of philosophical biology of language (PBL) from philosophy of
language. The philosopher says that no physical account can be given of convention. The biologer3 of language answers that, if language is inescapably
biological, then either some physical account can be given of convention, or
the language of convention simply has no place in a biological theory. There
remains for the biologer only the task of giving a satisfactory biological account of language which places no theoretical weight upon the language of
convention.
The biologer’s answer to the philosophical insistence upon convention
parallels the biologist’s answer to the philosophical insistence upon function.
What accounts for its apparent aphysicality is this: the physical significance
of a linguistic item, like the physical significance of an organic part, has itself
a physical history. An explanatory theory of language, like an explanatory
theory of the human neo-cortex or larynx, is in part a second-order physical
theory. The physical, organic parts of organisms that we label functional
have the physical significance that they have
(a1 ) because ancestral parts of ancestors had the physical
significance that they had, and
(b1 ) because of the manner in which the one physical significance gave way to the other.
Linguistic interventions have the physical significance that they have
3
The term is intended to suggest the relationship to biologists that the archaic logicianer
suggests to logicians.
THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THE TOPIC OF REFERENCE
5
(a2 ) because ancestral linguistic interventions of members of
ancestral linguistic communities had the physical significance
that they had, and
(b2 ) because of the manner in which linguistic physical significance engenders later linguistic physical significance.
Evolutionary biology seeks to articulate the general principles governing
emergence of later physical significance from ancestral physical significance.
The biology of language seeks to articulate the corresponding principles
for the emergence of novel physical significance of linguistic interventions
from that of earlier interventions. This is not merely a programmatic proposal. Within linguistics, the study of functionalization across natural languages (that is, the study of the emergence of functional vocabulary from
lexical vocabulary) is precisely such an investigation, and it is well underway. Within the philosophical biology of language, we have a pretty good
early understanding of how connective vocabulary emerges from the vocabulary of physical relationship. That is, we can account in some detail for
the emergence of the particular significance of connectives from the ancestral significance of particular prepositions and relative modifiers 4 But more
importantly, we know from these particular discoveries how to think more
generally about larger questions of linguistic evolution: sufficiently generally, we hope, that we can speak usefully about such large-scale questions
as that of the referentiality of language. A word about that generalization: we take the larger features of language that explain functionalization
4See for example R. E. Jennings’ The Genealogy of Disjunction (Oxford University
Press, 1994); R. E. Jennings’ “The Meaning of Connectives,” in S. Davis and B. Gillon,
eds., Semantics: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2004): 662-686; and R.E. Jennings
and Nathalie Schapansky’s “Without: From separation to negation; a case study in logicalization”, in Proceedings of the 2000 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistics
Association (Ottawa: Cahiers Linguistiques d’Ottawa, 2000): 147-158.
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R. E. JENNINGS AND A. J. HARTLINE
of lexical vocabulary to be more generally present in all natural language
diachronically understood. It is now a universal feature of established natural languages that the physical significance of later linguistic interventions
is a product of the physical significance of earlier linguistic interventions.
But though universal over established natural languages, this cannot be
straightforwardly universal over all natural languages. The reason is that
all linguistic humans have non-linguistic ancestors. So for sufficiently archaic
linguistic interventions, the explanation of their physical significance would
of necessity make mention of the physical significance of distantly ancestral
non-linguistic interventions. The point becomes apparent when we reflect
that the set of all linguistic interventions is a non-classical set. Not only are
there cases at its synchronic frontiers that we cannot non-arbitrarily decide,
but the same must hold at least at its most distant diachronic frontiers as
well: certainly past frontiers, perhaps future ones as well.
Now we have said enough about conventionality to bring out one distinctive flavour of this new discourse. A final remark about convention will
highlight another. Although within PBL we abandon the language of convention as a theoretical instrument, the word “convention” itself cannot be
completely abandoned. Like much of the philosophical detritus that PBL
considers theoretically suspect and hopes to render superfluous, the language
of convention passes into the realm of data that itself requires explanation.
Why? Because the word “convention” shares a puzzling feature with much
of the other philosophical detritus that PBL sheds. That feature is this:
that we can and do gain easy conversational command of the use of the
word convention without thereby acquiring any satisfactory understanding
of what it is. Philosophical accounts of convention that introduce the language of intention and belief merely compound the difficulty, since, with
respect to that introduced vocabulary, we are in a similar semantic pickle.
THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THE TOPIC OF REFERENCE
7
In the transition from philosophy of language to PBL, the words “intention”
and “belief” are themselves among the items of vocabulary that pass from
the role of theoretically relied-upon terms of philosophical discussion, to the
role of physical data the origins of which confirm the opposing methodology
of PBL.
In committing oneself to PBL, one accepts the minimal methodological
constraint that a satisfactory explanatory theory must be transparently capable of integration with those of neuroscience, of historical linguistics, and
of physical anthropology. But PBL holds the promise of surpassing this
minimum, by defining directions for empirical investigations within these
disciplines. We say little of these subjects here; but with respect to the last,
physical anthropology, one earlier remark bears repeating.
Since we have non-linguistic ancestors, the physical significance of linguistic events must ultimately be traced to the
physical significance of non-linguistic ones.
Sufficiently general principles within this new theoretical idiom must cover
this transition as well. We may add that since the features of language that
prompt questions about reference are so fundamental to the very nature of
language, we must certainly look to the transition from ante-language to
language to explain it. We cannot conceive of an historical transition from
a condition that we could properly call linguistic but non-referential to a
successor condition that we call linguistic and referential. Whatever there
may have been before linguistic referentiality, we would hesitate to call it
language. That is where the course of this discussion will eventually lead
us.
The foregoing remarks notwithstanding, we insist that PBL really is a
philosophical sub-discipline. It is a response to the same puzzlement that
prompts other philosophical inquiries. It is distinguished perhaps by more
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R. E. JENNINGS AND A. J. HARTLINE
evident lines of communication with empirical sciences, since it seeks to
explain empirical data in physical terms. And it is further distinguished
ideologically from other philosophical approaches too. In particular it rejects
rather than acquiesces in the common philosophical notion that we can find
out what we are talking about by talking about it, howsoever thoughtfully.
Indeed it claims to explain why the method cannot succeed.5 Instead, PBL
seeks a theoretically attuned acquaintance with linguistic data.
The two approaches to the study have perhaps sought, and certainly have
produced markedly different kinds of guides to the linguistic terrain. The
philosophy of language has in some instances borne plausible conceptual
geographies accessible to anyone having conversational command of the language of intention, belief, knowledge and so on. Without some independently
certified metalanguage these can hardly be called semantic studies, but they
undoubtedly enrich the lexicon of informed use. The philosophical biology
of language uses this kind of informal exercise to distinguish types, but its
goal is more an explanatory one than semantic or lexical. For example, if it
distinguishes half a dozen uses of the word but, it is with a view to having a
unified explanation of the diversity rather than a unified semantic account.
To press the cartographical metaphor, its map notes geographical features
to be sure, and insists upon doing so in more specific detail and with fewer
generalizations that is usual in the philosophy of language. But its aim is
to show those geographical features as the surface of an underlying geology
however complex and however accidental. In this idiom, one could say, it
wants a unified geological theory that explains geographic diversity. In this
respect, PBL differs both from philosophy of language and from formalist
5See for example A. J. Hartline and R. E. Jennings’ “How to eliminate analytic epi-
stemology,” in Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts
and Humanities (ISSN#1541-5899, 2004): 2367-2385.
THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THE TOPIC OF REFERENCE
9
linguistics. Unlike the philosophy of language, it does not trust the conversational language of folk-linguistics for its theoretical vocabulary. That
vocabulary must, as we have said, betake itself among the data. But unlike various formalist approaches it does not look for simplifying underlying
structures, only for a unified account of the principles by which such structures form themselves.
PBL is, however, formalist to this extent: that its theorists adhere to the
general principles of formalist methods as understood by research logicians.
That is, they try to make the fewest and least assailable assumptions that
they can, and then try to respect the fealty that theory owes to its basic
assumptions and to the data.
Reference
Now unfortunately, among the theoretical vocabulary that our approach
relegates to the status of data must be the vocabulary of reference. A
biological approach to language does not enable us to say what reference is;
in fact it goes some little way toward explaining why we should not expect to
be able to say what reference is, and why that inability is no impediment to
our using the word refer with conversational propriety. But we understand
well enough at a conversational level what the problem is, and if we set
about trying to explain what could be called the referentiality of language,
we can do so on friendly terms.
The Constraints of Composition. It’s a methodologically curious thing
that writers about language should have settled on the term, compositionality, (a term well defined for formal languages) and thereafter have striven
to find out what it means as it applies to natural language. The theoretical
question of compositionality has largely given way to a philosophical one:
investigated in the hope that we will find out what it is if only we can talk
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R. E. JENNINGS AND A. J. HARTLINE
about it long enough. To an outsider it would make more sense to begin with
what can securely be said about natural language, refine it by further observation and eventually, if the question remains of any interest, say whether
natural language is, in this respect (whatever respect emerges), anything
like a formal language.6 PBL has no ambition to make useful contributions
to this debate. The particularities of produced speech are so unconsidered
that even the language of composition understood as denoting some sort
of mental as distinct from some neural process is hardly supportable. Certainly we compose from time to time. Think of Clarence Thomas’s careful
pronouncement
I have never done anything that could be mistaken for sexual
harrassment.7
That speech can be considered notwithstanding, there is no reason to suppose that the speech we produce does not merely happen to us. What makes
me the author of my conversational responses is only that the processes that
produce them take place in my brain, and not in someone else’s. If William
Calvin is right, their production is the outcome of a very fast Darwinian
6A kind of mental back-formation has tyrannized the philosophical approach to lan-
guage. It is natural to read as ‘or’ the binary truth-function whose outputs in canonical
order are 1110. It is natural to give the label ‘language’ to the triple hAt, k, Φi of atoms,
constants and recursively enumerable set of sentences, that underlies a formal system.
However, it does not follow that or of natural language is any more like the eponymous artefact than sufficiently to suggest the choice of label. It is as though because the
unidentified deceased had been labeled John Doe, I had inferred of my neighbour, John
Doe, that he was deceased. For the corresponding error in the application of Existential
Elimination, the same theorists, no doubt, dock their undergraduate students points. For
a similar point see Eve Sweetser’s From Etymology to Pragmatics (Cambridge University
Press, 1990): pp. 93.
7
From his confirmation hearing before a congressional judiciary committee. Notice that
his response does not entail that he has never committed sexual harassment; only that
any such commission was obviously just that. No member of the committee seemed to
notice.
THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THE TOPIC OF REFERENCE
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process in neocortex.8 The best we can say is that my responses are produced, by whatever means, out of my neurological preparation and not, for
example, out of that of my interlocutor. Accordingly, though our speech
comprises parts of speech, we avoid the language of composition and speak
more observationally of linguistic productions and their effects. A normal
expectation of linguistic productions is that they comprise typable parts
of speech that have been, are now, and will later be available for comprisions of other productions. But a biological approach is better served by a
cautious neutrality on the subject of how they will eventually be typed in
theoretical understandings of language. In the meantime, our preference for
the language of production does not free us from core questions about the
relationship between speech and its parts. So, in this more neutral language
of linguistic productions, we must ask: what can be securely claimed about
that relationship? What defines its character? Two safe initial principles
are the following:
Constraint: Later productions and their effects are constrained, but
not wholly, by the effects of past productions.
Exploitation: Novel productions generally exploit incidental effects
of past productions.
Whereas the language of compositionality suggests a stable set of atoms,
and a stable set, albeit very large, of composables, the language of production
invites us to recognize a third safe initial principle:
Change: Linguistic production is the principal vehicle of language
change.
Every production changes, however minutely, however locally, the repertoire
of exploitables for future productions.
8
William Calvin, The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
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R. E. JENNINGS AND A. J. HARTLINE
We do not propose introducing a name for the subject matter that these
three principles define. It remains unclear what the major divisions of a
biological understanding will be. However, anyone wishing to set among
the standard triad of Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics, the subject matter defined by the principles of constraint, exploitation and change, could do
worse that label it Laconics, for those three principles define what guarantees
manageable lengths of productions. Semantic and syntactic compositionality
of a formal language admits unrestricted novelty of composition by the availability of all finite lengths of strings. But the picture such compositionality
presents is one of linguistic agents who possess some atomic constituents of
compositions and a set of generative principles. It neglects as a resource the
shared memories of past productions, and says nothing about how and why
the stock of atomic constituents might change. In contrast, the first two laconic principles, Constraint and Exploitation, admit practically unrestricted
novelty of processably short productions by the availability of sufficiently
many exploitable effects of past productions. Laconics expects the introduction of new atoms and creative riffs on generative rules; whence the third
principle, Change. Having ‘edible’ and ‘bauble’ in our repertoire, we will
need few additional cues to manage ‘edibauble’. The construction, Now
you’re cooking with gas, for its own effects, exploited effects of the earlier
commercially touted efficiency of gas cookery. As an idiom, it must be regarded semantically as compositionally atomic. But because of the effects
of this idiom, we can readily create other idioms that exploit its effects.
Consider Now you’re cooking with camel dung. We can also create nonatomic constructions that nevertheless exploit these effects, such as Now
you’re gassing with Cook. This device of transposition finds an application
in poetical constructions. Consider They shall be one with the man in the
wind and the west moon, as a transformation of They shall be one with the
THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THE TOPIC OF REFERENCE
13
man in the moon and the west wind. In this case it is not implausible to suppose that the poetical effect nor, in the former transposition, the rhetorical
effect, could be usefully studied by present or future neuro-scientific methods. Now these are illustrations of the constraint, exploitation and change
assumptions, not an argument for them. The reader will easily think of
many other illustrations.
Of course, for any alleged sufficient set of principles, there remains the
question as to what a human language would have to be like for those principles to be sufficient. Moreover, there remains as well the question as to
what conditions are required for a language to be learnable. But the primary
question must be: what is learned in the learning of a language? On that
subject we can say at least this: that learning a language involves learning
some constraints on exploitations of the effects of previous speech. Not all
children acquire the same set of constraints. Nor does more mean better in
this regard. A child who can still ask of an estranged couple whether they
have fallen out of joy has not yet been constrained to pedestrian innovations.
There is a fourth assumption, which, in a somewhat altered understanding
of the term, we label Maximal Indexicality. In the ordinary way, philosophers think of indexicals as items of vocabulary the meanings of which are
such that their ultimate semantic value is locale-dependent.9 So the semantic value of I, you, here, now depends upon speaker, addressee, place
and time or circumstance (Now we are grown up . . . ) of utterance, and
this is so because of aspects of the meaning of these words. Anaphors are
considered to be another class of words with a locale-dependent semantic
value; ordinarily they are distinguished from indexicals with reference to
the diminished role of their respective meanings in producing this sort of
9
See for example François Recanati’s “Indexicality and context-shift” in Proceedings of
the 2004 Harvard University Workshop on Indexicality, Speech Acts and Logophors (2004).
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dependence. Of course the matter is complicated somewhat in narrative,
where circumstantial information is textually given (”Now we were ready to
strike” ”Here (There) we were without food, water, compass. . . ”) and where
now, here and so on are arguably anaphoric. From a biological perspective,
the distinction between indexical and anaphor, though preservable, assumes
less importance. On the one hand, both the circumstances of utterance
and the utterance itself are features of a sensorially accessible locale, and
so trivially locale-dependent. More significantly, though, and on the other
hand, both indexical and anaphor are generally successful exploitations of
locally accessible features. The distinction is not an especially subtle one.
It is as though the semantic theorist were to stress the dependence of a propositional function upon an assignment of variables, while the set-theorist
stressed that as a function, it yields a proposition for every such assignment. The contrast here is that between dependence and exploitation. Both
indexicals and anaphora contribute to the efficiency of linguistic intervention through successful exploitation of sensorially accessible circumstances.
In general, linguistic interventions are more efficient to the extent that they
are able to exploit sensorially accessible cues. But they are also more efficient to the extent that they are able successfully to exploit sensorially
inaccessible features as well. As a vivid example consider the language of
one-on-one collaboration. Here, then, is the fourth principle.
Maximal Indexicality: Linguistic productions are more efficient as
they are more indexical.
Evidently we are appropriating the language of indexicality and giving it
a more general than usual understanding. By indexicality we mean the
tendency of linguistic productions to exploit, on the fly, both linguistic and
non-linguistic preparations of the physical setting of the intervention. Typically, linguistic reception is one element of a physical setup already complexly
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prepared, and rich in other sensory receptions. We also resurrect an ancient
term, protext, for the totality of the physical preparation in which a linguistic
intervention is made. The term is intended to comprise all of the physical
circumstances available for exploitation by a linguistic intervention. At one
extreme, we can observe that neurally, we have been set up since early childhood in such a way that an intervener need only choose the right language.
That is, we have been set up multi-modally in what we could call the “immediate protext” of the intervention, so that our response to it is minutely
managed by the combination of gestural, prosodic, syntactic, and phonemic
dimensions of the intervention. The connection with the usual restriction
of the term indexical to a particular set of vocables (here, now, I, me, you,
etc.) is this: on the view of language that we are adopting, we should expect languages to have evolved in such a way that as many as possible of
the features of a linguistic intervention should depend for their effects upon
non-linguistic or other linguistic features of its physical environs. The obverse of this maximal dependence is that language is more efficient as it is
able to exploit more of such circumstantial features. Illatives and anaphors
obviously come within a much broadened class of exploitative devices, but
so do the so-called “logical” connectives.
Linguistic interventions, to take up a commercial metaphor, are low-cap
ventures in a market already extremely rich in sensory commerce, already
highly capitalized and structured, with a healthy, ever expanding derivatives sector deeply savvy from a long history of more and more sophisticated
derivative transactions. No commercial market within human experience
approaches in sophistication the commercial markets envisaged in the metaphor.
A larger view. Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, and “Laconics”, to indulge
the fancy for a moment, would be studies of language at about the same
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temporal scale as those of particular linguistic interventions. But Laconics,
did such a field of study but exist, unlike the more familiar triple, would be
a highly localized study of linguistic phenomena that can also be studied
in a much larger temporal landscape and with more ambitious explanatory
designs. With the increases in temporal scale emerge higher and higher
derivatives of its four basic features: constraint, exploitation, change, and
indexicality. For illustration, consider the elapsed life of the English language as we are capable of understanding it. Set that period generously
at about a thousand years. Within that single millennium we can explain
the process of grammaticalization by reference to the four principles listed.
So, for example, we can explain how the lexical item other has yielded the
grammatical item or. Moreover it may be that for the immediately preceding millennium, with little adjustment, much the same principles could be
drawn upon to explain the corresponding changes in English’s predecessor
languages. However, could we but shift our attention to the millennium that
ended say in the year 25,000 BCE, it is improbable that no major generalizing adjustment to our working notion of grammaticalization would be
required to apply the four principles to changes that had taken place in the
course of that 1000-year period. It may be that we should rather be forced
to say of that distant millennium that among the changes that come about
were some ancestors of functionalization. And of course, it may be that
the rate of such changes is itself slowly changing, and that millennia must
themselves give way to longer periods as our generalizations of the processes
of change take us further and further into the past. The point is not just
that language change accelerates, though it probably does so monotonically
with the increase in the number of linguistic productions. The point is that
as the temporal scale increases, the order of change increases in every dimension. In a millennium, we describe the processes of change, but over a
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decamillennium, we would have scope for describing the changes that beset
the processes of change themselves. To make the point concrete, not only
is grammatical language the product of change; so is grammaticalization
itself the product of change, though on a larger temporal scale. Ultimately
we must come to a period of prehistory in which wholly non-linguistic biological features of organisms themselves were ante-linguistically exploited,
and in which they themselves constrained later ante-linguistic developments.
(By ante-linguistic features, we mean features late in the non-linguistic ancestry of linguistic features.) Obvious candidates for illustrations of such
non-linguistic biological features might be the cyclicities (not to mention
the sounds) of respiration and ingestion whose incidental effects would have
constrained vocalizations but would also have been exploitable for them.
And again, one can speak of the larger-scale, biologically induced changes
in respiration and in ingestion (say those that came during the phylogeny of
bipaedalism, perhaps more specifically in consequence of increasing cranial
flexion) that constrained and were progressively exploited for ante-linguistic
innovations.
Only in the most general and abstract terms can we speak even probabilistically about the long period of transition from non-linguisticity to
linguisticity. “Just-so stories” can do no more than illustrate much more
complex and more general theses. PBL suggests that (a) ante-linguistic
effects involved the exploitation of earlier ante-linguistic biological effects,
that (b) they were constrained by those earlier effects, and that (c) they
themselves had incidental effects available for later exploitation.
The preceding discussion suggests that as with other biological characteristics, the more fundamental the characteristic of language we want to
explain, the larger and earlier the time-frame in which we must search for
its origins. For this reason, in the case of referentiality, it is perhaps an
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error to think of it as a problem, since the language of problem and solution suggests too small a temporal scale. Referentiality is so fundamental
to language that an understanding of it must take us to very early and very
prolonged pre- and ante-linguistic developments.
What sort of earlier effects might these have been? Such an effect type
would have been one to which pre-linguistic bipaedal hominins would have
been hereditarily predisposed, a type of effect occasioned by any of a wide
class of natural occurrences: occurrences sometimes involving other hominins, sometimes not. The predisposition would likely have been shared by
other primates or an even wider family of organisms. But these effects would
be effects that for the hominins in question could be reliably produced, (and
thereby made available for systematic exploitation), through overt hominin
intervention. What would distinguish ante-linguistic hominins from other
primates in this regard would be the discriminable degree of precision with
which the effects could be produced, and exploited.
Here is a candidate effect. We offer it neither as a conjecture, nor as a
speculation; it can be no more than an illustration of the abstract notion
that some later ante-linguistic interventions capitalized upon earlier natural
effects of non-linguist events. It is the effect of motion visually detected
within the field of vision. The effect, shared by a wide range of organisms,
is the natural reaction of establishing foveal attention and the evolved tendency to track moving objects. The effect was not peculiar to hominins; but
bipaedal hominins would have been uniquely placed both to produce the effect artificially, and to exploit it. Consider a bipaedal hominin with forelimbs
by now freed from the duties of locomotion and a brain developed to exploit
them for articulated, increasingly precise ballistic motion, such as accurate
throwing. The evolved visual reactions to detected motion are elicited by
objects thrown as they are by animal movement, so the act of throwing
THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THE TOPIC OF REFERENCE
19
has this reaction as an incidental effect. It should be added that the visual
tracking response involves not just the maintenance of foveal attention; it
involves as well the anticipation of trajectory for intermittently visible motion. It is also more discriminating as the throwing is more accurate, since it
more reliably results in visual contact with the target of the throw. And it
is the more readily exploitable as the tracking can survive the interruptions
of visual contact by intervening objects such as trees. Such an incidental
effect is ante-linguistically exploited in the earliest instances in which the
effect is produced other than incidentally to any other activity, that is, when
it merely draws attention to its target. The capacity to track intermittently
visible motion permits an accurately discriminated ballistic motion, similarly to direct attention even when the motion is disarmed of any missile.
But since the ballistic motion serves no real ballistic purpose, it can become,
as it were, “functionalized”, reduced to a comparatively low-energy gesture
that merely directs attention. It is tempting to draw a comparison between
such a disarmed ballistic motion and the motion involved in pointing. It is
also tempting to compare the differences between throwing at a nearby object and throwing at an object behind another with the differences between
pointing at an object within sight, and one beyond, say, the next garden.
To this and similar temptations at least we cheerfully succumb. Others need
not. The essential point is less specific. It is that, whatever the nature of
the exploitation, whatever the evolved biological effect exploited, one must
suppose that reference in some form or other was available at the earliest
stages of linguistic evolution.
So there is no point in burdening ourselves with the belief that this is the
correct account of the origins of pointing, however plausible it may seem.
Its usefulness lies in its structural features. It illustrates the disarming of
a type of bodily motion, its gradually engendering a version incapable of
20
R. E. JENNINGS AND A. J. HARTLINE
producing the main effect originally occasioned. This happens through its
eventually occurring in settings that exert no selective pressure in favour
of features essential to the success of the ancestral motion. Since what
takes over as its principal effect was a mere incidental effect of the motion
from which it evolved, it retains only those low-energy features essential
to those altered standards of success. The illustration is a very particular
illustration of a development that has continued from pre-linguistic times to
the present. Language in all of its evolutionary stages has represented an
exploitation of an increasingly elaborate, increasingly fine-grained protext
of conditions. One important direction in which this exploitative aspect of
language has changed has been this: whereas, in the earliest stages, the
neural connectivities exploited were non-linguistic in character, in its latest
stages the evolved, specifically linguistic neural protext has assumed preeminence. Language still exploits a mixed protext of conditions, but that
mix is more and more dominated by specialized neural connectivities, less
and less by external conditions.
This then is one general lesson that PBL can teach us about the referentiality of language. On this account there is no general philosophical
problem of reference for language. The ancestors of reference predate language. Earliest ante-language exploited them. Present human language exploits the much broader class of biological conditions that are their distant
descendants.
E-mail address: jennings@sfu.ca
Laboratory for Logic and Experimental Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
URL: http://www.sfu.ca/llep/