When Intelligence Became Linguistic: VIII. When Language Became Part of Human Intelligence

 A child is born into a world already organised by language.

The child did not invent the words.

Did not invent the distinctions.

Did not invent the questions.

Did not invent the stories.

They were already there.

The child develops within them.

At first, language is part of the environment.

Then it becomes part of the child's repertoire.

The repertoire becomes a resource for construing experience.

The child begins to ask questions.

To remember things that are absent.

To imagine things that have never happened.

To distinguish possibilities.

To explain.

To evaluate.

To tell someone else what happened.

Something has changed.

Language is no longer merely around the child.

It has become part of what the child can do.

And eventually, part of how the child can think.

This is not because words are thoughts.

Nor because language determines everything that can be thought.

The relation is more interesting.

A linguistic repertoire provides resources for making meaning.

Those resources become part of the developing organism's capacity to construe experience.

The organism can now do something that it could not do in the same way before.

It can make experience available to itself as meaning.

It can relate things that are not physically together.

It can compare the present with the past.

It can project possibilities into the future.

It can ask why something happened.

It can imagine what would happen if things were different.

It can make a distinction and then make something of the distinction.

Intelligence has become semiotic.

But it has not become merely individual.

The resources through which this intelligence develops came from other people.

And once the child becomes capable of using them, the child can alter those resources for others.

Language therefore participates in a remarkable cycle.

A population develops language.

Language becomes part of the developmental environment.

A child develops within that environment.

The child's developing intelligence takes up the language.

The resulting intelligence changes the language.

The changed language becomes part of the environment for another child.

And the cycle begins again.

Language is therefore both outcome and condition.

It is produced by human activity.

And it becomes one of the conditions through which human activity develops.

The same is true of intelligence.

Human intelligence produces new meanings.

Those meanings become part of the environment.

The environment contributes to the development of subsequent intelligence.

The intelligence of one generation becomes part of the developmental conditions of the next.

The distinction between producer and product begins to dissolve.

This changes how we might think about the evolution of language.

Language need not have appeared as a finished solution invented by an already intelligent human being.

Nor does human intelligence need to have appeared first and language second.

The two could become mutually constitutive within a developmental ecology.

Organisms develop.

They make meanings.

Meanings become part of the environment.

The environment changes what subsequent organisms can develop.

Those organisms make new meanings.

The cycle continues.

Over time, something extraordinary can happen.

The organism becomes capable of inheriting not merely a biological structure, but an accumulated history of meaning-making.

And that history becomes part of the organism's developmental environment.

Language has become part of human intelligence because human intelligence has developed through participation in a linguistic ecology.

This does not make language the whole of intelligence.

Human beings have bodies.

Perception matters.

Action matters.

Emotion matters.

Memory matters.

Biological organisation matters.

But human intelligence is not simply the result of those capacities operating in isolation.

It has developed within a world already organised by meanings.

Language has become one of the resources through which that organisation enters the developing organism.

And the organism, once developed, becomes capable of reorganising it again.

We began this series with a child in whom intelligence was not yet fully there.

We have followed the environment into which that child was born.

We watched that environment accumulate the consequences of previous organisms.

We watched meaning become part of development.

We watched the brain develop within a semiotic environment.

We watched a repertoire become a way of thinking.

We watched intelligence become social.

And finally, we watched the developing organism begin to change the developmental environment of others.

The circle has closed.

The child who once developed within a world made meaningful by others becomes one of the people who make that world meaningful for someone else.

Human intelligence is therefore not simply something that exists inside human beings.

It is also something that has a history outside them.

A history carried through the environments in which human beings develop.

And language is one of the principal ways that history becomes available to the next generation.

Perhaps, then, the deepest reversal is this.

We usually imagine that intelligent humans created language.

But the developing human being encounters language before becoming the kind of intelligent being who could create anything like it.

Language is therefore not merely something human intelligence produced.

It became part of the environment through which human intelligence became what it is.

Human intelligence did not simply invent language.

It developed with language.

And then, through language, began inventing new possibilities for what human intelligence could become.