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Semiotic systems with duality of patterning and the issue of cultural replicators

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Abstract

Two major works in recent evolutionary biology have in different ways touched upon the issue of cultural replicators in language, namely Dawkins’ Selfish Gene and Maynard Smith and Szathmáry’s Major Transitions in Evolution. In the latter, the emergence of language is referred to as the last major transition in evolution (for the time being), a claim we argue to be derived from a crucial property of language, called Duality of Patterning. Prima facie, this property makes natural language look like a structural equivalent to DNA, and its peer in terms of expressive power. We will argue that, if one takes seriously Maynard Smith and Szathmáry’s outlook and examines what has been proposed as linguistic replicators, amongst others phonemes and words, the analogy meme-gene becomes problematic. A key issue is the fact that genes and memes are assumed to carry and transmit information, while what has been described as the best candidate for replicatorhood in language, i.e. the phoneme, does by definition not carry meaning. We will argue that semiotic systems with Duality of Pattering (like natural languages) force us to reconsider either the analogy between replicators in the biological and the cultural domain, or what it is to be a replicator in linguistics.

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Notes

  1. As pointed out by one anonymous reviewer, and as we will see below, it is far from clear to what entities that term should apply. Henceforth, we will use lingueme as synonym to “linguistic replicator”, without wishing to imply a specific conceptual content.

  2. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NM_001172766, on 16/05/2016.

  3. Retrieved from http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/O15409.fasta, on 04/04/2016.

  4. See, e.g., http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/O15409 for an overview with respect to the function of the gene. See http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blastcgihelp.shtml for the meaning of the letters.

  5. See Lai et al. (2001).

  6. This is a very strong claim, and it implies that this property should be universal in natural languages—a claim we will investigate below. The correspondence between phonemes and nucleotides has been rejected by some authors, such as Collado-Vides (1993), based on the fact that there are no (what one would call in linguistics) phonotactic constraints on nucleotides (any nucleotide can follow or precede any other), and based on the idea that differences between nucleotides can be sometimes non-coding (a phenomenon that would be called neutralization in linguistics).

  7. Not all forms of life are DNA-based: some viruses (such as HIV or Ebola) are based on RNA.

  8. Note that the non-identity of the basic unit also holds if the retained meaningless entities are phonological distinctive features, e.g. [± voice], rather than phonemes—which is an option because phonologists do not necessarily see phonemes as unanalysable primitives. Ritt (2004, p. 133) rejects phonological features as potential replicators because of their ‘universality’. However, such an analysis is disputable: phonological features are universally accessible to any language, but they are not attested in all the languages. While some of them arguably are—e.g. [± consonantal]—, most of them are not—the feature [± constricted glottis] is absent from French, for instance.

  9. Taken from Crystal (2010), and Hall (2000, p. 80).

  10. As pointed out by Ladd (2012), the definitions by Martinet and Hockett are not completely identical, but for our purposes, there is no point in elaborating on these differences.

  11. We are simplifying a bit here. See the mentioned references for details.

  12. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1999, p. 8ff.) insist on information transmission in genes as well as in language. For them, “continuing evolution” (that is, the emergence of life, and what one generally associates with biological evolution) is possible only in a system of unlimited heredity—which is provided by both DNA and natural language. In this sense, they set apart “modules” (what they take to be not single nucleotides, but base-pairs). In any case, there is a functional distinction to be made for these two types of entities.

  13. For instance, Blackmore (1999, p. 66) concludes a long discussion on the issue as follows: “I shall use the term ‘meme’ indiscriminately to refer to memetic information in any of its many forms; including ideas, the brain structures that instantiate those ideas, the behaviours these brain structures produce, and their versions in books, recipes, maps and written music. As long as that information can be copied by a process we may broadly call ‘imitation’, then it counts as a meme”.

  14. Ritt (2004, p. 133) insists on the idea that “phonemes” must designate linguistic competence entities, that is, ultimately, neural networks in the brain for categorising a given class of sounds, and for producing them. That is, the replicator /t/ is not some (class of) physical and external sound(s), but a mental program capable of detecting and producing this class of sounds.

  15. Remember also Darwin’s quote on words at the beginning of the paper.

  16. It is probably safe to assume that the impact of phonotactics outweighs by far the impact of homonymy. Each case of homonymy reduces the number of unique signifiers by 1; each case of a phonotactic constraint reduces the number of unique possible signifiers by some factor n. For instance, English is generally assumed to have 44 phonemes, but the maximal sign length is clearly higher than 2 (for instance, banana has a signifier length of 6 phonemes).

  17. In order to code each sign with a unique one-length string, the number of phonemes would have to be equal to the number of signs, which would happen here with 2000 phonemes. But then, by definition, the language would no longer have DoP.

  18. Evidence from language acquisition with pragmatic impairment suggest that different kinds of illocutionary acts are basically independent (see already Skinner 1957), and that using one and the same symbol for describing and asking for an object has to be learnt.

  19. By “X first, Y second”, we do not mean that the semiotic system would have a complete articulation of one sort or the other in place, before starting the other; we merely wish to imply that there was at least the beginning of one articulation in place before the other starts.

  20. See, e.g., Sterelny (2012, p. xiv) who does not endorse a memetic perspective, but who helpfully provides a definition in his rejection: “I make no commitments to memes: to discrete, replicated units of cultural information that have fitness interests of their own” [our emphasis]. See also Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1999), as already cited above. Dennett (2017) also insists on the importance of information.

  21. They do so based on their conception of life, which is at the same time metabolic and genetic, equating the genetic part (following Gánti) with informational control. As they write, such a conception ultimately goes back to Aristotle. See the first chapter of Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1999, p. 1–13), which has the telling title “Life and Information”.

  22. The phonestemes discussed above possibly illustrate the same fact.

  23. In the type-theory of formal semantics, one would attribute the type 〈e,t〉 to both of them, even though the sort of entities classified (sounds vs. objects) would not be the same.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sylvain Billiard and Pierre Boudry for their precious help on some technical aspects of the discussion, which allowed us to make significant improvements to the paper. We are also indebted to Staffan Müller-Wille, the editor in chief of HPLS, and Stefaan Blancke and Gilles Denis, the guest editors of this special issue, for their precious work and suggestions. Furthermore, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, who guided us towards improvements in our argumentation. Portions of this article were presented at various workshops linked to the project ‘Darwinism in the Humanities and Social Sciences’, led by Johan Braeckman and Gilles Denis; we are grateful to audiences for their helpful questions and comments. None of them should be assumed to endorse anything in this article; all remaining errors and omissions are ours alone.

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Correspondence to Gerhard Schaden.

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“Darwin in the Humanities and the Social Sciences” guest edited by Stefaan Blancke and Gilles Denis.

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Schaden, G., Patin, C. Semiotic systems with duality of patterning and the issue of cultural replicators. HPLS 40, 4 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0167-9

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