There’s a review, Language and spandrels, at the weblog of John Hawks which discusses the question: “How can there be one grammatical structure for all human beings if there is no known way to see selective pressures for the rules of grammar?” As the review notes, the famous linguist Noam Chomsky did a lot of work on this question. I’m going to go off on my own to deal with this question from my viewpoint, but Professor Hawks’ review is well worth the read.
I think that the possibility of selective pressures might arise if evolutionary theorists were to consider the rationality of the universe, a rationality which would show less clearly in the environments of an evolving species of apes, but it would show — physicists and philosophers didn’t even need to know that there is such an entity as the universe before they began to speculate about a rational all-enclosing something, cosmos or whatever. If we live in a rational universe, a universe which isn’t just an as-if way of speaking of a collection of arbitrary environments, there might then be selective pressure on grammatical structure forcing it to correspond to that rationality.
In my understanding of matters, the rationality of human beings is a result of our minds being shaped in active response to that rationality which shows up in our environments. We don’t bring pre-existing minds to the task of understanding our environments. Our minds are the result of actively responding to those environments as we seek to survive, prosper, and maybe understand. To develop those minds, we had to have proper brains which I’ll treat as being ‘racial minds’ or maybe the evolved biological foundations of mind. For those minds to be rational, that rationality had to be present in the environments to which we respond. How else can we explain it without sneaking in a dualism?
Brain-scientists, and perhaps most biologists, seem to be at least roughly describable as Jamesian pragmatists. In What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism and What is Mind?: More on Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism, I discuss this issue by way of responding to the book How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the brain-scientist and philosopher Walter J. Freeman. Freeman sees the development of the human mind in terms of an organism actively responding to its environments. This modern view is essentially the view taught in the 13th century by St. Thomas Aquinas. In fact, Freeman claims Aquinas to be the major thinker who provides the best foundation for modern science. At the same time, Professor Freeman remains a pragmatist where I’ve expanded Thomistic ideas to consider greater possibilities for the other ‘party’ to selection — created being at the level of environments or the universe or even all of Creation.
In my way of making greater sense of this, there are three levels of evolution/development over which this shaping takes place: the human race as a whole, local communities, and the individual. The human ‘racial mind’ is shaped largely by proper responses to environments by way of natural selection, that is, those family lines were selected which had brains which could develop proper minds to carry out the abstract reasoning processes important to human survival and prosperity. There was probably no turning back for the human race once dependent upon rationality and abstract mental skills. Various evolutionary and development processes also take place at the level of communities up to the scale of civilizations as well as at the individual level.
I’m conjecturing that human grammatical structures have evolved and developed in a parallel way. It might even be proper to speak of the two processes as being two currents in the same streams of evolution and development of human organisms.
At the same time, it’s clear our current actual languages are not sufficiently rich and complex to allow us to speak and write truthfully about the world in its rich and complex wholeness. We might have a subset of the greater grammatical structure which would meet the needs of discussing the rationality, not strangeness, of quantum mechanics while still being usable to form effective political arrangements, to make profitable business deals, and to describe the joyful and innocent beauty of children at play. If my way of understanding created being is true, then this would be the case: we could find greater possibilities of speaking wider truths if we ascend from our relatively concrete languages to languages with greater capabilities for discussing abstractions in the way that mathematicians ascended from finger-countable numbers and perceptible geometrical figures to numbers greater than ordinary infinity and geometrical ‘figures’ with an infinity of dimensions. In the essay The Disembodiment of Knowledge in Modern America, I give a summary, in the context of a particular problem, of my background views on the nature of knowledge and of the human mind including my claim that concrete being is shaped from very strange stuff which I call abstract being — as a first step, think of this abstract being as something on the ‘other side’ of the so-called Big Bang.
So it is that an interesting question has risen: How can we expand our ways of speaking and writing to meet needs beyond those of our long-ago ancestors? Can I do more than speak vaguely about such an expansion?
In my freely downloadable novel, Open Seas, the protagonist tries to expand the grammatical possibilities of human language by developing grammatical structures corresponding to the elegant algebraic notation developed by the physicist Paul Dirac for working with the state vectors of quantum mechanics. The protagonist of my novel wished to speak more richly of of the uncertainties as well as the realized and unrealized possibilities of human life. Take this novel as a first step into the unknown, not a serious proposal. In any case, this is a possible step only because the human mind can think and speak, however clumsily and formalistically, about empirical matters as strange as the workings of matter and energy at the level quantum physics deals with. I chose a mathematical expansion in that novel rather than one reflecting the new and poorly understood possibilities of life in densely populated and technologically advanced civilizations only because we’ve seen mathematics derived from concrete levels of experience being expanded into abstract forms quite capable of dealing with quantum mechanics and a lot more. We concrete creatures have clearly not learned how to deal with or even speak about the abstract relationships of modern social and political life.
We have to remember a strange fact: the possibilities of transfinite set theory and quantum mechanics did somehow come into existence in the human brain as our ancient ancestors were selected to have the brain components which allowed them to count on their fingers. I suspect something similar happened in regards to human languages.