From Imitation to Language
The emergence of the will and capacity to imagine what you cannot see with your own eyes, simply because you believe somebody else.
A final set of quotes from The Instruction of Imagination (highly recommended!):
At a more abstract level, everything that was happening [in our prelinguistic societies] revolved around one thing: the collective effort of experiential mutual-identification. . . .
With all their revolutions, pre-linguistic humans were still living in a social world defined by the here and now. Communicators could systematically negotiate their experiences only if both or all of them managed to experience them together. Handling situations in which the thing to experience was outside the experiencing range of the interlocutors remained beyond the functional limits of the entire system. With bodily and vocal mimesis, they helped each other experience—you see, you point, I see what I hadn't noticed myself, we look each other in the eye and acknowledge—but this they still did as perfectly experiential animals. Like all other species, they only knew how to follow their own senses. So, in the simplest scenario, if individual A pointed at x (a prey, a predator, other people, fire) and accompanied the pointing with some mimetic sound associated with x, and if individual B saw A pointing, looked in the direction pointed at and identified x, then all went well: mutual-identification has been achieved. But if x was positioned outside B's field of vision, the act failed. If anything, it widened the experiential gap between them.
Imitation, particularly sophisticated human imitation, does not come up enough in this theory, I think. If you were individual B in the example above, would A have to say anything or even make a sound (i.e., would you need language) in order for you to figure out that he was pointing at prey or a predator and to react accordingly? Probably not. You see A crouch and approach slowly in the direction of his pointing (prey) or, if not turn and start running, at the very least freeze and then slowly back away in the direction opposite the pointing (predator). Because of humans' exceptional imitative capacities, these behaviors—crouch and approach slowly or freeze and back away—function in much the same way as mutually identified signs in the social-semantic space. The freeze-and-back-away behavior, for example, is still a somewhat ambiguous code that is used to instruct your imagination (you haven't seen the predator). You must still convert the behavior to a private-experiential meaning. But imitation—or, rather, our imitative capacity—handles the mutual identification of signs: I infer there's a predator nearby, because freeze-and-back-away is what I would do too if that were the case (and I feel myself unconsciously doing it when I observe you).
Perhaps we can think of imitation, then, as a kind of early proto-language, with much of the same rudimentary structure as language (as a socially constructed technology designed to instruct the imagination)—private-experiential worlds interacting with a social-semantic space of (unconsciously) mutually identified signs (behaviors). What the full flowering of our language does, then, is build on and extend this capacity.
Turning such failures into success was exactly the pressing challenge. It must have emerged slowly but consistently, in more and more severe instances of epistemic dependency, situations where (i) A experienced something that called for action, but he or she could not act alone on the basis of the experience; (ii) another individual, B, was in a position to act but had not experienced the call for action; and (iii) the survival of both depended on A's capacity to get B to do what was needed. The challenge of epistemic dependency required a radical change of attitude: the failure would turn into success if B managed to interpret A's communicative act not as an invitation to experience—but as an invitation to imagine. B would have to understand (without words): "A is intentionally attempting to turn my attention to something by pointing. His or her vocalization indicates that it is of the type x. As for myself, I cannot see anything there. I will, however, choose to go against my own experiential judgment, believe A's experiential judgment, imagine there is something there of the type x, and act upon my imagination." For me, this was the essence of the linguistic revolution: the emergence of the will and capacity to imagine what you cannot see with your own eyes, simply because you believe somebody else.
This, I would like to suggest, is what the inventors of language began to experiment with: not the construction of a new system, but the use of the old tools of experiential-mimetic communication for a new type of communicative function—based on experiential trust.
