A child says something.
Someone answers.
The child says something else.
Someone laughs.
The child tries again.
Something has happened.
The child is not merely producing sounds.
The child is discovering that meaning can change what another person does.
And another person's response can change what the child does next.
Intelligence is becoming social.
This sounds obvious.
Human beings are social animals.
Children learn from adults.
People communicate.
But something more specific is happening.
The child's developing intelligence is taking shape within exchanges with other people.
Someone asks a question.
The child learns that an answer is possible.
Someone gives an instruction.
The child learns that action can be organised through language.
Someone disagrees.
The child discovers that what has been said can be challenged.
Someone tells a story.
The child learns that an event can be construed from another person's perspective.
Someone says “why?”
The child discovers that a reason can be expected.
The child is not simply learning what words mean.
The child is learning what it means to participate in a meaning-making relationship.
A repertoire is therefore becoming interpersonal.
The child develops resources not only for construing things, but for doing things with other people.
To ask.
To answer.
To offer.
To demand.
To agree.
To refuse.
To evaluate.
To explain.
To persuade.
To imagine together.
These are not merely different uses of language.
They are ways of becoming a participant.
And becoming a participant changes the kind of intelligence that can develop.
A solitary organism can learn from its environment.
But a human child can learn from someone else's experience without having lived it.
Someone can point.
Someone can warn.
Someone can remember.
Someone can explain.
Someone can say what happened when the child was not there.
The child can therefore inherit not only the organisation of the physical environment, but aspects of another person's experience of that environment.
Meaning can move between lives.
Not as a thing transferred from one mind to another.
As an exchange in which each participant changes what the other can do next.
This gives sociality a different significance.
The other person is not merely part of the environment.
The other person is a participant in the child's development.
And the child becomes a participant in theirs.
The relationship is reciprocal.
The child learns from what others say.
Others respond to what the child says.
The child's developing repertoire changes those responses.
Those responses become part of the child's further development.
Development is therefore taking place between organisms as well as within them.
The human developmental environment has become interactive.
And because it is interactive, it can become cumulative.
A child learns something.
Uses it.
Someone responds.
The child develops further.
The response becomes part of what the child can now construe.
The child produces something new.
Someone else takes it up.
What began as an individual variation can become part of the shared repertoire.
The social environment has changed.
This is the same recursive process we have been following at another level.
The organism develops within an environment.
The organism changes through its participation in that environment.
The changed organism contributes to changing the environment.
The changed environment becomes part of the conditions of further development.
But now the environment includes other meaning-makers who can respond to the change.
The developmental cycle has become a social cycle.
And this may be one of the deepest consequences of language.
Language does not merely allow one intelligent organism to communicate with another.
It allows the development of intelligence to become part of a relationship between organisms.
A child can become more capable because someone else responds.
The other person can become more capable because the child responds.
Each participant becomes part of the developmental environment of the other.
Intelligence is no longer simply something an organism develops.
It is something that develops through participation.
The child becomes someone who can mean something to someone else.
And someone else's response becomes part of what the child can become.
Perhaps this is why the question “Who invented language?” becomes increasingly difficult.
There may never have been a point at which an already intelligent individual invented a system called language.
There was a developing population of organisms.
They interacted.
Their interactions became increasingly organised through meaning.
Their meaning-making became part of one another's developmental environments.
And the intelligence of subsequent individuals developed within that history.
Language and intelligence were therefore not simply two things that eventually met.
They became entangled in development.
And once an organism can alter the developmental possibilities of other organisms through meaning, something new becomes possible.
The organism can begin changing not only its own environment.
It can begin changing the environment in which someone else will develop.
That is the step that takes us beyond social intelligence.
It takes us toward an organism capable of changing the developmental future of its own kind.
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