Abstract
There is a general consensus that there is a division of linguistic labour and that it is important in explaining the expressive power of human language; our ability to talk about phenomena beyond the reach of our own experience. But there is disagreement between Michael Devitt and defenders of causal description theories as to how that division is sustained in a linguistic community. Causal description theorists argue that we have indirect ways of specifying the referential targets of our names and terms; Devitt (on behalf of causal theories) argues that the doxastic prerequisites for referential competence are much more minimal. It is unclear how to resolve this debate, as appeals to intuitions about particular cases have little evidential weight. This paper explores a way forward, by seeing the division of linguistic labour as a special case of cumulative cultural learning. There is to hand a rich (though highly contested) literature on the cognitive prerequisites of cumulative cultural learning; one aim of the paper is to connect these two literatures. The more substantive aim is to distinguish between the cognitive demands of the vertical and the horizontal transmission of referential competence (that is intergenerational versus within generational transmission of that competence) and to suggest that while Devitt’s minimalism is a plausible view of the requirements of vertical transmission (for these are environmentally scaffolded in various ways), something closer to causal descriptivism is more plausible for the horizontal cases.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This knowledge may well be tacit, but if so it’s tacit in a shallow way, relatively easily prompted; it is not information sealed off in an encapsulated cognitive subsystem.
- 3.
This is an important difference between cumulative cultural evolution and cumulative biological information. Almost all of the biological structures of a multi-celled organism do have to be rebuilt from the beginning by each generation: a fact that makes inherently plausible the idea that gene flow from parents to offspring is a set of instructions for rebuilding an organism.
- 4.
So for example, in a agent’s normative life, there are often inconsistencies between their reflexive and their considered opinion; I take this to be evidence of partial integration (Sterelny 2010).
- 5.
For the importance of this distinction, see Csibra and Gergely 2011.
- 6.
Nor would it have discriminated between causal descriptive theories and causal theories of reference.
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- 8.
Michael Tomasello contrasts with the Parisians in taking cumulative culture to be the core phenomenon to be explained in giving an account of human cultural learning. But he is in agreement with the Parisians in thinking that cumulative culture depends on very distinctive, high level features of cognition. Fidelity depends on our most sophisticated cognitive capacities, not our more routine and widely shared ones. Fidelity depends on imitation, on sophisticated theory of mind (joint and collective intentions), and on the capacity to represent the structure of joint actions in an agent neutral way (in his terminology, a “bird’s eye” representation of the organisation of collective action). For a brief overview, see Tomasello 2016. For a full elaboration of his views, see Tomasello 1999 and 2014.
- 9.
Though she also points out that this whole debate has been conducted largely in the conceptual framework of folk psychology, and suggests reframing the debate as one about the relative importance of type one versus type two cognitive processes: type one processes are fast, automatic, relatively opaque to introspection, parallel; type two processes are slow, topdown, somewhat transparent to introspection, serial (Kahneman 2011).
- 10.
Joseph Henrich and colleagues have developed models which they argue avoid the need to posit high fidelity transmission to explain cumulative culture (Henrich and Boyd 2002). But it is not clear whether the assumptions about learning on which these models rely are realistic; and not at all clear how they could apply to the transmission of a term through a reference-borrowing network.
- 11.
His paradigm of competence without comprehension is termite mound building: no-one suggests that speaker use of language is quite so lacking comprehension as that.
- 12.
Given the broad organisational similarities of all human languages, it is typically assumed that whether language evolved by genetic evolution, cultural evolution, or gene-culture coevolution, the main stages of its evolution took place before modern humans expanded out of Africa.
- 13.
For a striking case, see Dennett 2017: 201.
- 14.
Of course this is only a default, a bias, for otherwise children could not learn individual names.
- 15.
In a searching critical analysis of this model , Heyes is sceptical of some aspects of the picture, especially the idea that ostensive sensitivity and referential sensitivity are evolved adaptations of pedagogy. But the case that young children are in fact sensitive both to ostensive cues and the referential focus of interacting adults is pretty good; the machinery comes on line early, even if it is not innate, and even if its effects are not solely pedagogical (Heyes 2016).
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- 17.
In writing this paper, I would like to thank Michael for his friendship, philosophical comradeship and support over many years, and I would also like to thank the Australian Research Council for its generous support for my work on the evolution of human cognition and society.
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Sterelny, K. (2020). Michael Devitt, Cultural Evolution and the Division of Linguistic Labour. In: Bianchi, A. (eds) Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 142. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47641-0_9
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