Language and Symbolic Culture: An Outcome of Hunter-Gatherer Reverse Dominance
Knight, C. (2014). Language and symbolic culture: an outcome of hunter-gatherer reverse dominance. In D. Dor, C. Knight and J. Lewis (eds), The Social Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 228-246.
Symbolic culture...requires the invention of a whole new kind of things, things that have no existence in the ‘real’ world but exist entirely in the symbolic realm. Examples are concepts such as good and evil, mythical inventions such as gods and underworlds, and social constructs such as promises and football games. Philip Chase (1994: 628)
From a Darwinian standpoint, ‘symbolic culture’ is an unsettling notion. Modern science became established in opposition to the idea that culturally accepted fictions can be equated with facts. Yet the concept of symbolic culture requires us to grasp just that paradoxical possibility. Long before the late twentieth century invention of the Internet, evolution allowed humans to flit between two realms: reality on the one hand, virtual reality on the other. Symbolic culture is an environment of objective facts—whose existence depends entirely on collective belief. To use language is to navigate within that imagined world.
17.1 Two kinds of fact
‘Brute facts’, in the terminology of John Searle (1995: 27), are facts which are true anyway, regardless of human belief. Suppose you don’t believe in gravity: jump off a cliff and you’ll still fall. Natural science is the study of facts of this kind. ‘Institutional facts’ are fictions accorded factual status within human social institutions (see Wyman, Chapter 13). Monetary facts are fictions of this kind. The complexities of today’sglobal currency system are facts only while webelieve in them: suspend the belief and the facts correspondingly dissolve. Yet although institutional facts rest on human belief, that doesn’t make them mere distortions or hallucinations. Take my confidence that these two five-pound banknotes in my pocket amount to ten pounds. That’s not merely my subjective belief: it’s an objective, indisputable fact. But now imagine a collapse of public confidence in the currency system. Suddenly, the realities in my pocket dissolve. For scholars familiar with Rousseau, Marx, or Durkheim, none of this is especially surprising or difficult to grasp. Some facts are true anyway, irrespective of human belief. Others subsist in a virtual realm of hallucination or faith. For Saussure (1983 [1915]: 8), it was the parallel between linguistic meanings and currency values—all in some sense hallucinatory—which made a scientific linguistics so problematical:
Other sciences are provided with objects of study given in advance, which are then examined from different points of view. Nothing like this is the case in linguistics...The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint: far from it. Rather, one might say that it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object.