[now see also:Ascent of Intelligence]

INTRODUCTION

Introductions should be short. They are often last written and last read (if they are read at all). But having an introduction is one of the universal conventions observed by authors - often a kind of self-indulgence, an opportunity to appeal to the considerateness of the reader, to try to anticipate criticism or reluctance to embark on the solid matter of the book itself. Some authors use it, at inordinate length (see Hegel, see Kant) to foreshadow the main content of the work, to claim novelty or certainty for what is proposed (see Wittgenstein's Tractatus or the Principia Mathematica) or to explain the author's personal motives for the choice of subject, the importance of the matter; others, with more justification, use it both to acknowledge intellectual debts, to pay tribute to precursors and to recognise the unavoidable limits of the author's personal knowledge of quite distinct fields of philosophical or scientific study. The more far-reaching the theoretical view presented in a book, the more need there is to concede the speculative and tentative nature of what is proposed, the extent to which, on specialised topics, there is a risk of misunderstanding, or error, or simply of not having kept up to date with a vast and rapidly growing literature. "At single points every philosophical treatise may be pricked (for it cannot be armed at all points like a mathematical one" - Kant's comment on the Critique of Pure Reason (which he was convinced was in total unassailable) applies with even greater force to a work such as the present which attempts to bring together evidence and theories from many so far unrelated disciplines and form them into a coherent whole, drawing on linguistics, the physiology of perception, neurology, psychology and the philosophy of language and perception.

The starting-point for the book is the straightforward question: Where do these words come from? What is the source of the unbroken stream or river of language, which we all experience, both in talking to others and in formulating our own thoughts? The answer proposed (for which the whole volume is one long, cumulative argument) is that words, the fabric of language, are not arbitrary, a conventional cultural product of human ingenuity, but derive directly from, evolutionarily and physiologically, and are integrated with, perception and action, the other main components of total human behaviour. In asserting this, the book directly challenges the foundation assumption of modern linguistics that language is arbitrary and words are arbitrary. But science in the past has only progressed through challenging the unchallengeable. Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has illustrated how normal it is for new directions in science to start from questioning assumptions which no one of the scientific community of the time would venture to question. Though it is not claimed that the theory advanced here is of the same scientific importance, Kuhn records that Copernicus was called mad because he. proclaimed that the earth moved and his ideas made few converts for almost a century after his death; that the opponents of Newton said that his theories, with their reliance on innate forces, would return science to the Dark Ages, that Kelvin never accepted electromagnetism, Priestley never accepted the theory of oxygen (rather than that of phlogiston); many naturalists refused to accept Darwin's assertion that animal species had developed one from another or that such marvellously adapted organs as the eye and hand of man were products of a process that moved steadily from primitive beginnings rather than the product of distinct creation. The belief of linguists, and following them of philosophers and psychologists, in the arbitrariness of language is as unquestioning and undemonstrated as ever was the belief of earlier astronomers in the stationary earth or of earlier physicists in an all-pervasive ether. Kuhn comments that "an apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time" and for the emerging community of the relatively new science of linguistics, the belief in the arbitrariness of the word is itself the arbitrary element of the kind Kuhn describes.

A few years ago, it would have been necessary to apologise for even venturing to discuss the origin of language, never mind for suggesting that words are not arbitrary, but such an apology is no longer necessary. The origin of language, so extensively discussed in the 18th century and earlier, is once again a living and respectable subject for scientists with many different types of expertise. The new interest in the origin of language was perhaps most clearly marked by the wide-ranging conference organised in 1975 by the New York Academy of Sciences precisely on this subject, but a great deal of other work is now in progress bearing on the origin and development of language both in the individual human being and in the human race. Though linguists more than a century ago officially rejected any further discussion of the origin of language within the framework of linguistics and though.professional linguists still take this position, this has not prevented neurologists, psychologists, anthropologists and many others from pursuing their researches. As Roger Brown commented in his book Words and Things (writing as a psychologist), the subjects he discussed (the character of primitive language, the relations between language and thought, the nature of meaning) were "a set of real chestnuts, most of them either given up for dead, or demonstrated to be pseudo-questions or proscribed by scholarly societies ... but there is a lot of new evidence on these matters ... and no one today would suggest that the topics should be given up for dead".

A legitimate function of an Introduction, it has already been said, is to acknowledge intellectual debts. Roger Brown would certainly be one of he creditors, not only for his discussion of sound symbolism but also for the mass of interesting evidence on the development of language in children presented in A First Language. Others to whom the ideas in this book owe a clear debt include both authors whose ideas anticipate or coincide with those presented and authors whose discussion of language has stimulated ideas which have gone to form the theory, not necessarily because they are in harmony but because opposing ideas were presented fully and seriously enough to require attention. This latter category would include, inevitably, Chomsky (his development of transformational grammar has clearly brought linguistics to a point of crisis), Whorf (though this book totally disagrees with his assertion of the priority of language over perception) and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein has been an especially powerful influence because, at one time or another, he adopted such diverse views on the nature of language, and supported the opposing views with such ingenuity and vigour The rightness of the early Wittgenstein (on the view presented here) is precisely balanced by the wrongness of the later Wittgenstein. In his Notebooks of 1914-1916 (before he forced his ideas into the straitjacket of the Tractatus) his observations that "Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it", that names "themselves are connected; in this way the whole images the situation like a tableau vivant", "The name compresses its whole complex reference into one" and "Words are like the film on deep water" - would have fitted well into the theory presented here, had he not subsequently equally sharply asserted the arbitrary and conventional nature of language and the uselessness of seeking any philosophical enlightenment from it. The same category of authors, those stimulating by disagreement, would have to include Locke. Despite his denial of the possibility of innate ideas and his assertion of the arbitrariness of words, Locke's recognition of language as the great instrument and common tie of society and his careful discussion of the relation of words and knowledge have provided material used later in the book. Amongst linguists proper, Saussure and Sapir have been influential, in expressing so clearly ideas with which the present theory disagrees.

The positive debts can be referred to more briefly because evidence of them is apparent at many points in the book. Most important of all have been the ideas of Karl Lashley as a neurologist on the structural relation between speech, vision and action; his view that the rudiments of every human behavioural mechanism will be found far down in the evolutionary scale, that the problems of syntax and of the organisation of language are characteristic of almost all other cerebral activity, that temporal integration is found similarly in language, vision and action, and that spatial and temporal order appear to be almost completely interchangeable in cerebral action (with integration carried out hierarchically at a series of levels), are the direct foundation for the central argument presented in this book. One might repeat here his observation that "the study of comparative grammar is not the most direct approach to the physiology of the cerebral cortex yet speech is the only window through which the physiologist can view cerebral life... language presents in a most striking form the integrative functions that are characteristic of the cerebral cortex". Other important sources have been Lenneberg's pioneering Biological Foundations of Language with its discussion of children's acquisition of language as a maturational process within a critical period, Richard Gregory's stimulating ideas on the 'grammar of vision' and his speculation that language and vision are indeed based on common ground and the basic problems of both must be solved together. Last but far from least, Konrad Lorenz's broad approach to the development and integration of animal and human behaviour as well as his study of the vitally important process of 'imprinting', that is, genetically-programmed neurological development, making it possible for the cerebral structures of the animal (or human being) to be modified, after birth, to match the specific environment, social or physical, to which the individual is in fact exposed.

The chapter headings indicate in a summary way the 'articulation and concatenation of the whole system', the systematic development of the hypothesis from chapter to chapter, starting from the elementary units of speech, vision and action and progressing to the interrelation of sentence, visual scene and complex action. However, whether the theory seems probable. well argued and convincing depends not on the outline but on the detailed presentation and argument both in each chapter individually and in all the chapters taken together as mutually supporting each other. How readily the new view presented will be given a hearing, or accepted, is subject not only to the usual and often scientifically justified suspicion of the unorthodox - Locke remarks that new opinions are always suspected and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common - but also to two special considerations, first that there is a powerful community of professional linguists whose careers and work have been founded on an assumption totally incompatible with the basis of the present hypothesis and secondly that there is no existing community of scientists or philosophers whose interests range as widely as the assumptions and evidence presented in this book require. We live in an age of specialists and sub-specialists. Even philosophers. who once took all life and all knowledge as their field now are often specialists only in philosophy in a narrow sense, in one corner of philosophy. There are no general 'natural philosophers' in the academic community, though there are psychologists, sociolinguists, neurolinguists, physiologists, whose specialisms ultimately can only be comprehensible as part of a total science of human nature. Perhaps the nearest successors to the 'ancient philosopher' who took the whole of nature as his study are to be found, as Monod suggests, among the biologists, or the sociobiologists - or amongst the exponents of artificial intelligence techniques. The most an author presenting a theory as wide-ranging as the present one can look for is that it should be treated on its merits, not dismissed out of hand. A theory of this kind must persuade; it cannot be cast in the form of a logical or mathematical proof. Hume, the great sceptic, at one point remarked that " a true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubt". All that the author of the present work would hope for is that those reading it will be prepared, provisionally, to be diffident of their certainties - and particularly of the certainty so generally prevailing that words and language must be arbitrary and cannot be natural.

CONCLUSION

There is something paradoxical about having a final section of a book of this kind (presenting a closely-argued thesis) under the rubric of 'Conclusion'. In any systematic theory (as a matter of history in the development of science, and possibly also in the development of philosophy), the conclusion is the point from which the author has started. Conversely, the Introduction of such a book looks to the past, to the work that has already been done, both by others and by the author himself, and indicates, as the introduction to this book does, the guiding scheme, which there seems no need to recapitulate here. The function of the seven preceding chapters has been an attempt to give solidity to the outline, to bring the reader to see the specific manner in which ideas drawn from widely separated scientific and philosophical disciplines share similarities of underlying structure. Bohm has commented, in a quite different context, that the purpose of a theory is to obtain the essence or unity behind the diversity of phenomena (in his case to bring order into the multitude of elementary physical particles, which can only be accommodated, at present, by increasingly elaborate theoretical constructs resembling the Ptolemaic epicycles). Curiously, the enterprise in this book can be presented in the terms of the theory itself, that it constitutes an attempt to show how a coherent view, a new perception of the elements and relationships in the intellectual 'raw material' provided by the present-day results and speculations of linguistics, psychology, neurology and philosophy, can be arrived at, how new Figures can emerge from the Ground of current thought and theory. As with the familiar voluntary changes in perception demonstrated by the Gestalt psychologists, the book has sought to demonstrate how the whole scientific and philosophical scene changes if one chooses to see a natural orderliness in language rather than the merely arbitrary.

But if this Conclusion is to be thought of rather as a beginning, in what direction should we expect to move? Kant commented that knowledge must not remain a rhapsody but must become a system. There are obviously large gaps in current knowledge and understanding of visual perception, of the neurological co-ordination of action, of the cognitive patterning underlying language and thought - and indeed in the systematic analysis of the familiar phenomena of world languages. These are gaps which it will take many years and much effort to fill and, though the attempt made in this book to relate the structures of language, vision and action, may be criticised as premature because these gaps exist, any general theory is always in a sense premature - it has to reach out ahead of the hard experimental fact. The test of the value of a general theory is whether, whilst preserving what has already been learnt or partial theory has already validated, it suggests new questions to be asked, new directions of research to be followed, a new concreteness in the significance attached to the terms already in use in the different disciplines. Specifically, what difference would this new view of the nature of language make, most narrowly, to the practice of linguistics and, more broadly, to our attitude to language in all its uses, to the understanding of the relation of language, perception and brain function, to our view of the natural basis of social and cultural organisation and, finally, to the philosophical understanding of human nature, the relation of human consciousness and the world?

For linguistics, acceptance of a natural basis for language must mean a radical transformation. There is a growing consensus, amongst those not professionally committed to the particular dogmas of generative grammar (based on concepts of deep structure and specifically linguistic 'competence') that linguistics has reached, if not a dead end, at least a point of crisis. It has been argued, with much force, that contemporary linguistics has gone fundamentally astray, both conceptually and methodologically, and linguists now are faced with the question whether a science of language (of the language process) is possible - or whether anything as variable and intricate could ever be 'tamed' by scientific theories. "One does not make an empirical science out of a discipline merely by wishing or proclaiming it to be so ... and to become truly scientific the "condition is that language loses its singularity, becomes one phenomenon among many ... subject to the same principles of perception, learning and motivation, that are believed to govern all thought and behaviour". The hypothesis of the natural and evolutionary basis of language presented in this book has as an immediate consequence the integration of linguistics with the rest of science, and particularly with biology, neurology and physiology. This consequence closely parallels what Darwin described as an immediate consequence of acceptance of the natural origin of species: "the terms used by naturalists, of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters etc. will cease to be metaphorical and will have a plain signification". The same can be said of many of the traditional and modern terms and concepts in linguistics - the metaphorical 'genetic' relation of languages becomes a genuinely genetic relationship, the forms of words and sentences are seen to reflect real forms of neurological and physiological organisation, the 'deep structure' of syntax is seen to be literally a deep underlying structure of the physical organism as it reflects and models the external world,

But perhaps even more important than the direct impact on linguistics as a science in embryo, is the significance of the new view of language for research into brain function. The Introduction quoted Lashley's view of language as a route towards understanding the physiology of the cerebral cortex, speech as the only window through which the physiologist can view cerebral life. From quite different points of view others have commented that 'the central clue to the understanding of man is not his science but his language' and that 'language is something essential to comprehension, something at the very heart of consciousness'. At present, the neurology of voluntary action, of language and of perception, of thought and consciousness, present difficulties of 'astronomical proportions', and research into each of these has inevitably been treated as a distinct field of study. If one now assumes, on the theory presented here, an underlying functional integration of language, vision and action, then the 'window' into the brain that language affords becomes of vastly greater potential importance. One can begin to see how, neurologically, the correlation of perception, action and speech in the cerebral cortex might, against the background of awareness of the postural schema (the body image) from moment to moment, form the basis for the analogue or model of the world mapped in the brain, which Kenneth Craik, some years ago, put forward as a hypothesis. Such a model would serve to allow us to predict the outcome of events and to formulate and execute our own actions, to serve as the basis for all our computations. There is experimental evidence of the direct interaction of vision, speech and action with the postural schema and the brain's model of the external world. An animal that lacks information about the posture and movements of its own body, it has been found, cannot interpret visual information presented to it; human subjects with a disturbed postural model (through brain injury) may be incapable of voluntarily initiating a movement; patients suffering from aphasia 'may be able to name objects presented in their normal environment but not when they are presented in an artificial environment as part of a test'. J.Z. Young remarks that "the brain has many distinct parts but there is increasing evidence that they are interrelated to make one functioning whole" - and the inter-relation of speech, vision and action proposed in this book goes some way towards suggesting, in part at any rate, the form which that integration may take, through the correlation of patterns, sensory and motor, within the cerebral cortex, At the same time, the new view of language may suggest some new directions of exploration for the efforts being made by the practitioners of Artificial Intelligence to decipher the code of the brain by imitating small parts of it. Up to now, theories proposed in linguistics and related fields have been "too incomplete and too vaguely stated to be realised in computational terms" and "only a few tiny fragments of the spectrum of human abilities have begun to be simulated". In this book, an attempt has been made to translate a very broad theory into specific detail and this may well provide some solider grist for the AI mill.

Quine, in discussing the relation of word and object, at one point described a river as 'a process through time'. Language, as a naturally based system, can be seen as a river of thought flowing through time - like all human behaviour an expression of interaction between genetic patterning and the environment within which the genes are expressed. Language is stable yet at the same time over long periods it changes progressively and systematically. Evolutionary change to track the environment (using Wilson's terminology in sociobiology) can be long-term (as the genetic composition of a population shifts to a mode better adapted to long-term environmental changes) or medium-term (micro-evolution in inbred small human groups converting cultural practices into selective factors affecting the gene-pool) or fast, short-term. By this last is meant that in so far as the expression of a genetic inheritance is necessarily dependent upon the environment in which the organism is placed, and part of the genetic inheritance, in human beings, consists of potentialities for neurological structuring to match the social environment, as in the case of language, 'evolutionary change ... is going on now from second to second, as a result of the very rapid evolution of afferent neuronal structures, produced by the intake and accumulation of information" (J.Z. Young). The changes in the content of language, the concepts distinguished in the lexicon, the analysis of syntactic relationships ever more precisely and finely, on this view of language, represent real and not merely metaphorical cultural evolution - and one can conclude that in these terms all languages are not at similar stages of development; some are, evolutionarily, more advanced than others (reflecting real neurological differences between the members of different language communities). As an extreme example, one might speculate how difficult or easy it would be to translate nuclear physics or Hegel into a lexically or syntactically primitive language, such as those found among the Australian aborigines. At the same time, besides the rapidity of change in the content of language, there are factors making for stability which are directly analogous with those identified in other evolutionary processes what has been described as 'phylogenetic inertia This in social terms makes its appearance as the force of tradition. The factors which determine inertia, and so resistance to evolutionary change, include "the complexity of social behaviour. The more numerous the components constituting the behaviour, and the more elaborate the physiological machinery required to produce each component, the greater the inertia"., This account, which was formulated as a general sociobiological one relating to societies of creatures of all kinds, can be applied directly to explain the phenomena of stability and gradual change in language as a whole and in individual languages.

As regards the impact of the new view of language on philosophy, this has already been discussed at some length in chapter VII, particularly in terms of the significance of language for philosophy, the problem of meaning and the relation of perception and knowledge. In relation to each of these major topics, a theory of language, as deriving its natural character from structural integration with the processes underlying perception and action, can make an important contribution towards extricating philosophers from some of the impasses in which they have long been imprisoned; it may not be too optimistic to suggest that this new approach could lead to actual progress in philosophy, something which otherwise has been rather infrequent, and may provide a basis for conciliation between those philosophers who take the view that all philosophy is a critique of language and those, like Popper, who consider that science matters and language does not (and that of Wittgenstein who, in describing other philosophers as flies buzzing in a bottle and unable to get out, was in his concern with language just as much himself the fly in a bottle). Though it is not possible to discuss the subject here because it would require too extensive a digression, there seems particular reason to think that the new view of language presented in this book ought to have a major impact on the foundations of logic; language, as has been said earlier, can only constitute a skeleton representation of the perception or action to which it relates, and logic (as historically and systematically heavily dependent on the syntactic structure of language) is no more than a skeleton of a skeleton. If language and syntax are structured by reality (as transmitted via perception and action), then logic, at one remove, also can only derive its structure and validity from perception and action, from what Royce describes as "the unavoidable structure of our experience". The concepts of necessity and causation originate not in language, and not in logic, but in what Hegel describes as the 'logic of life', in the sequences of causes we perceive in our own action and, by transfer, in the action of others or of inanimate objects.

So far, this Conclusion has spoken about language as the subject-matter of linguistics, about language as correlated with vision and action in the brain, about language as an evolutionary process and language in philosophy and logic. But language in fact is multifarious. Besides the specialised languages and approaches to language which have been discussed, there is language as it is used in everyday life (the medium of social interaction), language as used in science (attempting to give a regular and permanent form to the unifying perceptions of scientists and within which there are many special sub-languages) and finally, and perhaps most important, there is language which transforms minds, changes consciousness - the language of poetry, of oratory and persuasion, of conversion. The extraordinary development of language, forming scientists of different nations into one global community, the almost miraculous power of language displayed in the ability to formulate and comprehend the most penetrating and intricate thought, reaches its culmination in the use of the total resources of language that poetry and oratory constitute. In these remarkable, special uses of language, there is a whole world for further exploration, for which the structural integration of language, sight and action, is of supreme importance. Two quotations, from Wittgenstein and from Saint-john Perse, particularly about the poetic use of language: "Worte eines Dichters können uns durch und durch gehen."(Wittgenstein Zettel) and "Du savant comme du poéte, c'est la pensée desintéressé..Car l'interrogation est la même qu'ils tiennent sur un même abîme, et seuls leurs modes d'investigation diffèrent. Ce nuit originelle où tâtonnent deux aveugles-nés. Le mystère est commun."

To explain something - language, perception, thought - (or even to attempt to explain something) is not to explain it away. Each human function, language, perception, retains its immense potentialities. As language considers language and perception perceives perception, and the structure of what we come to know in finer and finer detail is expressed permanently in language, we are ourselves part of an unceasing development. The mind sees itself in all it sees, the world interprets itself through us and we realise that it is the nature of man to be a mirror of the world as well as a part of the world he mirrors. The individual has the privilege of seeing, from within the system, the development of the system of which he forms part - the society, the evolutionary process, the development of consciousness. He can see, and record, the ever-growing complexity of his own brain so that it can become an ever more accurate analogue of the structure of external things - and so that eventually there can develop, within his analogue of the world, an analogue of his own processes of language, perception and consciousness. The brain begins to understand its own nature, its own understanding.