Symbiosism
The Symbiosismus (from ancient Greek σύν "together" and βίος "life" formed with the derivational -ισμός; English symbiosism ) is a philosophical mindset Darwinian coinage that with language , awareness busy and the position of man in nature.
According to the symbiosis, language can be explained analogously as a 'biological organism', more precisely as a mutualistic symbiont whose carrier is the human brain. Language mediates memes , the smallest replicable elements of extra- genetic information, and is therefore of great importance in the history of human development . In the symbiosistic “Leiden School” these memes are interpreted as linguistic signs according to Saussure .
Historical development
In the early Indo-European studies and linguistics in general, ideas of language as an organism already existed; this parable was used by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1812 , for example . It was not until August Schleicher that language specifically referred to as living tissue, which is subject to processes of natural selection , after reading Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species . The more modern, specifically symbiosistic philosophy of language was developed by Frederik Kortlandt in Leiden in the early 1980s . Symbiosism is based on the concepts of Darwinism, constructivist mathematics and Richard Dawkins ' memetics , and develops them further. The work on classical logic, which the Dutch mathematician LEJ Brouwer wrote, can also be counted as an influence. The most prominent present-day representatives of symbiosism from the so-called "Leiden School" are Frederik Kortlandt and George van Driem .
Theoretical positions
The memetic organism of language
According to the advocates of symbiosism, language is primarily to be understood as an organism that is subject to natural selection, and about whose relationship to its human carrier there are different views. Kortlandt argues for a parasitic nature of language, as the memes it mediates can have fatal consequences for the human host. According to van Driem, language is more of a mutualistic symbiont, since language itself is not harmful to the human host and can also convey benign memetic concepts or memeplexes and increase the fitness and thus the chances of survival of a group. He further postulates: "[...] the birth of language was the birth of the first meme" (2001: 33).
The definition of the meme in the Oxford English Dictionary is based on the position that Richard Dawkins takes in his work The Selfish Gene : the meme as a cultural component, which is extragenetically replicable, especially through imitation. The definition of the "Leiden School", based on van Driem's Languages of the Himalayas , redefined the meme as a neuroanatomical anchoring of the meaning and the phonological form of a linguistic unit, i.e. as a Saussure sign . The units of imitation in the Oxford school are called mimes in the Leiden school , which can have arisen before or after linguistic, such as the washing of rice by macaques or music. Linguistic meaning, as represented by the Saussure sign, is based, according to the symbiosis, on closed, non-constructible sets in the logical-mathematical sense. Linguistic meaning is not subject to the Aristotelian principle of the excluded third party ( tertium non datur ). The language, however, leaves a greater number of possible meanings open than the yes / no dichotomy of Aristotelian logic would allow. This observation was already made in mathematics through Brouwer's intuitionistic set theory .
Memes and awareness
Influencing people through memes is understood in symbiosis as a fundamental principle of human consciousness, "[...] we are what we believe" (van Driem 2001: 59). While the human physique is based on genetic information, language serves as a vehicle for extra-genetic information. Humans are thus at the interface between memetic and genetic information, with the amount of memes or memetic information quantitatively exceeding the human genome.
Criticism of religion
In symbiosistic philosophy, religion is most likely to appear as an argument for the parasitic nature of language and is described as a pathological memeplex ( i.e. , a memetic complex). Religious ideas that have self-legitimizing structures need language as a mediation tool. The religious memeplexes take over the human brains as a result of indoctrination and potentially lead to pathological and even fatal situations of religious extremism, such as religiously motivated terrorist attacks or group suicides. In general, concepts conveyed through language that contributed to increasing group identity would have played an essential role in human evolution and particularly in the possible extermination of other hominids . Nevertheless, according to van Driem, religion does not necessarily have only negative effects on the person in whose brain it is lodged.
Criticism of other (linguistic) currents
The symbiosistic philosophy of language understands language neither as an organ nor as a pure tool for conveying information. The first position is a widespread view in formalistic- generativistic theories, the second conception can be found in European linguistic structuralism . Above all, formalistic theories and their representatives are rejected and criticized from the symbiosistic point of view, since, due to their fundamental assumption that semantic and syntactic phenomena of language are separate units, the findings of primate research and criticism in linguistic controversies (such as those presented by the debate around the Pirahã language emerged) would fundamentally misinterpret and the scholarly disputes clad in "pseudo-scientific" jargon within the formalist camp made at best a small contribution to the understanding of the language. Any linguistic explanation of language evolution that ignores the problem of linguistic meaning is therefore non- empirical or incomplete. In connection with language documentation, representatives of symbiosis criticize Platonic essentialism , since a language should always be interpreted from itself and not with prefabricated theoretical categories, which may have proven useful in describing other languages.
literature
- Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
- Kortlandt, Frederik (1985). A parasitological view of non-constructible sets. In: Gerhard Stickel, Ursula Pieper (eds.). Studia linguistica diachronica et synchronica. Berlin: Mouton. Pp. 477-483.
- Kortlandt, Frederik (2003). The Origin and Nature of the Linguistic Parasite. In: Brigitte LM Bauer, Georges-Jean Pinault (eds.). Language in Time and Space. Berlin: Mouton. Pp. 241-244.
- van Driem, George (2001). Languages of the Himalayas. An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language. 2 volumes. Suffering, brill.
- van Driem, George (2003). The Language Organism. The Leiden theory of language evolution, in: Jiří Mírovský, Anna Kotěšovcová and Eva Hajičová (eds.). Proceedings of the XVIIth International Congress of Linguists, Prague, July 24-29, 2003. Prague: Matfyzpress vydavatelství Matematicko-fyzikální faculty Univerzity Karlovy.
- van Driem, George (2004). Language as organism. A brief introduction to the Leiden theory of language evolution, in: Ying-chin Lin, Fang-min Hsu, Chun-chih Lee, Jackson T.-S. Sun, Hsiu-fang Yang, and Dah-ah Ho (Eds.). Studies on Sino-Tibetan Languages (Language and Linguistics Monograph Series W-4). Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica. Pp. 1-9.
- van Driem, George (2005). The language organism: The Leiden theory of language evolution, in: James W. Minett and William SY. Wang (ed.). Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence: Essays in Evolutionary Linguistics. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. Pp. 331-340.
- van Driem, George (2008). The language organism: Parasite or mutualist, in: Rick Derksen, Jos Schaeken, Alexander Lubotsky, Jeroen Wiedenhof and Sjoerd Siebinga (eds.). Evidence and Counter-Evidence (Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, vol. 33). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Pp. 101-112.
- van Driem, George (2015). Symbiosism, Symbiomism and the perils of memetic management. In: Mark Post, Stephen Morey, and Scott Delancey (Eds.). Language and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. Pp. 327-347.