When an Ecology Began to Evolve: VI. When the Environment Began to Evolve With the Organism

An organism develops in an environment.

At first, it seems natural to imagine the environment as something already there.

The organism has to cope with it.

It finds food.

Avoids danger.

Learns where to go.

Learns what to expect.

The environment sets the conditions.

The organism responds.

But what if the organism changes the environment?

Then the next organism does not encounter quite the same world.

The environment has changed.

And if that change affects development, the next organism develops differently.

That organism may then change the environment again.

The relation has become reciprocal.

The organism changes the environment.

The changed environment changes development.

Development changes what the organism can do.

What the organism can do changes the environment again.

The cycle has begun to evolve.

This is more than an organism adapting to a fixed world.

The world in which development occurs is itself being transformed by the organisms developing within it.

A nest changes the environment of the young that grow in it.

A path changes the possibilities available to those who follow it.

A social practice changes what the next generation encounters.

A learned behaviour can alter the behaviour of others, which alters the environment again.

In each case, the organism is not simply responding to the environment.

It is participating in its construction.

And the constructed environment becomes part of the developmental conditions for subsequent organisms.

The distinction between organism and environment therefore becomes less absolute.

Neither remains unchanged while the other adapts.

They are changing one another.

Human beings make this reciprocity extraordinarily visible.

We build houses, roads and cities.

We cultivate plants.

We create institutions.

We organise activities.

We make tools.

We create systems of signs.

And then we develop within the worlds we have made.

A child born into a city does not encounter the same environment as a child born before the city existed.

A child born into a literate culture does not encounter the same developmental possibilities as a child born before writing.

A child born into a language community encounters distinctions and meanings that previous generations have made available.

The environment has become part of the inheritance.

But it is also part of the process of change.

What human beings make changes the conditions under which subsequent human beings develop.

And what those human beings become capable of doing changes what they make.

The relation therefore becomes cumulative.

Previous organisms alter the environment.

The altered environment changes development.

Development produces new capacities.

Those capacities alter the environment again.

Over generations, the two histories become entangled.

The history of the organism cannot be separated neatly from the history of the environment in which the organism develops.

This is especially important when the environment becomes semiotic.

A physical structure can persist.

A tool can persist.

But a meaning can also persist.

A practice can be taught.

A distinction can be named.

A way of interpreting the world can become part of what a child learns to expect.

The environment can therefore carry not only the physical consequences of previous organisms, but some of their organisation of experience.

Language intensifies this process because it allows that organisation to become extraordinarily portable.

What one generation has learned can become part of the developmental environment of another.

And what the next generation develops can become part of the environment after that.

The environment is no longer merely the place where evolution happens.

It has become part of what evolves.

Not independently of the organisms within it.

With them.

This gives us a different picture of evolutionary change.

Evolution is not simply the accumulation of changes inside organisms while the world remains a passive backdrop.

The organism and its developmental environment can form a changing system.

Each alters the conditions of the other.

And once the environment itself carries the consequences of previous development, evolution can begin to involve the changing organisation of the relationship between organism and environment.

That is a much more complicated story than adaptation to a fixed world.

But it may also be a more accurate one.

For by the time human beings appear, the world into which a human being develops is already partly a product of human development.

The organism is born into an environment made by organisms like itself.

It develops there.

And then it helps make the environment for those who come next.

The organism and its environment have begun to acquire a shared history.

And now the question becomes unavoidable.

What kind of evolutionary process is possible when the developmental environment can itself carry, accumulate and transform the history of the organisms that inhabit it?

When an Ecology Began to Evolve: V. When Organisms Began Inheriting More Than Genes

An organism is born with a history.

Some of that history is inside it.

Genes carry organisation from previous generations into the developing organism. They provide possibilities for how development can proceed.

But genes are not the only things that can carry a history forward.

The organism is also born into an environment that has already been changed by other organisms.

There may be a nest.

A burrow.

A path.

A territory.

A pattern of behaviour that other members of the population respond to.

The developing organism encounters a world that has already been organised.

Something has been inherited without being carried in the genome.

This is not inheritance in quite the same sense.

The organism does not receive another organism's genes through the environment.

It receives conditions for development that previous organisms have helped create.

And those conditions can matter.

A young animal can learn from the behaviour of others. It can acquire a response that was not encoded as a particular behaviour in its genes. It can enter a social world whose organisation has been accumulated through the activities of previous generations.

The organism inherits a developmental environment.

Human beings take this much further.

A child is born into a world of objects, practices, expectations, distinctions and meanings that existed before the child arrived.

Someone has already named things.

Someone has already built the house.

Someone has already invented the game.

Someone has already told the stories.

Someone has already developed ways of explaining what is happening.

The child encounters all of this as part of the world in which development takes place.

And much of it is semiotic.

The child therefore inherits an organisation of the environment that cannot be reduced to genes.

The inheritance is not simply a set of things.

It is a set of possibilities.

A word makes some meanings easier to develop.

A classification makes some distinctions available.

A practice makes some actions expected.

A story makes some relationships imaginable.

A language makes an enormous range of meanings available for further development.

None of these has to be genetically encoded to become part of the conditions under which a human being develops.

This gives inheritance another dimension.

Genes carry organisation across generations through biological reproduction.

Semiotic environments carry organisation across generations through participation.

The two forms of inheritance are not interchangeable.

But neither is development understandable if we consider only the first.

A child does not begin with genes and then encounter an unrelated cultural world.

The developing organism is already interacting with an environment that has been transformed by the activities of previous organisms.

And because that environment can change within a single generation, the possibilities available to development can change much faster than the genome.

A population can therefore accumulate changes in its developmental environment without waiting for genetic change to occur first.

One generation creates a new practice.

The next generation grows up within it.

The practice becomes ordinary.

Another generation modifies it.

The developmental environment has changed again.

History can therefore accumulate outside the genome.

And once that happens, evolution acquires another dimension.

The inherited biological organisation of the organism is interacting with an inherited organisation of its environment.

The organism develops from both.

But there is an important difference.

The environmental inheritance is not merely received.

It can be altered by the organism that receives it.

A child enters a world made by previous generations, develops within it, and then participates in making the world that the next generation will inherit.

Inheritance becomes recursive.

What is inherited becomes the material for further development.

What develops becomes part of what can be inherited.

And in humans, language makes this process extraordinarily powerful.

Language allows the organisation of experience to be carried into the developmental environment in forms that can be taken up, modified and passed on again.

The child therefore inherits more than a biological capacity for language.

The child inherits a world already organised through language.

And by becoming a language user, the child becomes part of the process that will organise the world for someone else.

The history of the organism is therefore no longer contained within the organism.

Part of its history is outside it.

It is in the environment.

It is in the practices of others.

It is in the meanings that have accumulated before the organism arrived.

And once an organism can inherit an environment that has itself been transformed by previous organisms, the distinction between adapting to an environment and transforming an environment begins to lose its simplicity.

The organism inherits the conditions of its development.

Then, through its development, it changes those conditions for others.

That is more than inheritance.

It is a cycle.

And the next question is what happens when that cycle becomes capable of changing both the organism and the environment together.

When an Ecology Began to Evolve: IV. When the Environment Became Semiotic

An organism develops in an environment.

There is food.

There are threats.

There are other organisms.

There are changes in temperature, light and sound.

The environment matters because the organism can respond to differences within it.

But some environments contain more than physical differences.

They contain differences made significant by other organisms.

A particular sound may indicate danger.

A movement may indicate an invitation to approach.

A colour may signal ripeness.

A posture may indicate submission or threat.

The environment has begun to contain traces of what other organisms are doing.

This is not yet language.

Nor does it require anything like human consciousness.

But something important has happened.

The environment is no longer only a physical environment.

It has become, in part, a semiotic one.

An organism can encounter something that matters not only because of what it physically is, but because of what another organism has made it mean.

The distinction may be tiny.

A sound.

A movement.

A mark.

A change in behaviour.

But once such distinctions become part of the environment, they can participate in the development of organisms that encounter them.

A young organism does not have to discover everything for itself.

It can respond to what the behaviour of others has already made significant.

And this changes the relation between organism and environment.

The environment can now carry something of the history of other organisms.

What one organism does can alter what another organism encounters.

A warning call changes the behaviour of those who hear it.

A path repeatedly taken can become a route for others.

A learned response can spread through a population.

The activity of one organism has become part of the developmental environment of another.

The environment is beginning to contain the consequences of behaviour.

And once those consequences can be significant to other organisms, the environment can participate in development in a new way.

The organism is not simply adapting to a world that was there beforehand.

It is developing within a world partly organised by the activities of other organisms.

This gives biological development a curious circularity.

Organisms respond to environments.

Their activities change those environments.

The changed environments alter the possibilities available to other organisms.

Those organisms respond in turn, changing the environment again.

The environment is no longer merely the stage on which development takes place.

It is becoming part of the process.

And semiotic organisation intensifies this process because it allows behaviour to leave behind more than a physical effect.

A behaviour can become a difference that matters.

A distinction can become available to another organism.

A response can become part of what another organism learns to expect.

The environment can therefore begin to carry organisation from one organism to another.

This does not mean that organisms have created a language.

It means that the conditions for development are becoming increasingly shaped by the activities of other organisms.

And this gives us a possible bridge between biological evolution and the language ecology we have been exploring.

Human beings do not develop in an environment that is merely physical.

They develop in an environment already transformed by other human beings.

Objects have been made.

Practices have been established.

Meanings have been organised.

Words have been spoken.

Distinctions have been handed on.

The developing individual therefore encounters a world that contains the accumulated consequences of previous human activity.

Much of that accumulation is semiotic.

And language makes it possible for an extraordinary amount of organisation to become part of the environment.

A child does not merely inherit genes.

They inherit a world that has already been organised by generations of meaning-making.

The semiotic environment is therefore not something added to the biological environment after development has taken place.

It has become part of the environment in which development takes place.

And once that happens, the history of the organism and the history of its environment can no longer be told separately.

The organism changes the environment.

The environment changes development.

Development changes what the organism can do.

What the organism can do changes the environment again.

The cycle has become semiotic.

And now we can ask what, exactly, is being inherited through it.

For perhaps the most important thing an organism can inherit is not something inside its body at all.

It may be the organisation of the world into which its body develops.

When an Ecology Began to Evolve: III. When Development Changed What Could Develop

A child develops within a world that already has possibilities.

Some things can be said.

Some things can be done.

Some distinctions can be made.

Others have not yet become available.

The child develops by entering into this field of possibilities and making it their own.

But then something unexpected happens.

The child does not simply become another user of the possibilities that were already there.

They may do something differently.

They may use an expression in a new way. They may make a distinction that nobody expected. They may combine familiar resources in an unfamiliar way.

Most of these differences will remain local.

Some will not.

A new variation can become part of what other people encounter. It can be taken up, adapted and repeated. Eventually it may become one of the possibilities available to someone who has not yet been born.

Development has changed what can develop.

This is a stronger claim than saying that language changes.

It means that the outcome of one developmental process can alter the conditions under which another developmental process takes place.

The child develops within an ecology.

The child's development changes the ecology.

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

That child develops within it, and changes it again.

The cycle is no longer simply:

environment → individual.

It has become:

environment → development → changed environment → further development.

And because the environment is itself changing, development is no longer occurring under the same conditions from one generation to the next.

Each generation begins somewhere different.

Not necessarily dramatically different.

A new expression here. A changed distinction there. A different way of organising an experience. A resource that has become familiar where it was once unusual.

Small changes can accumulate.

And as they accumulate, the range of possibilities available to development can change.

Something that could not previously be developed can become developable.

This gives history a peculiar role.

History is not simply a sequence of events that has already happened.

It is the accumulation of changes in the conditions from which further development can occur.

What happened before matters because it has changed what can happen next.

The developmental environment therefore has a kind of direction.

Not a predetermined destination.

But a history of altered possibilities.

A child today does not merely inherit the language of yesterday.

They inherit a language whose possibilities have already been modified by yesterday's children.

And tomorrow's child will inherit something modified by today's.

This is why the population matters.

No individual has to transform the language.

The population provides the mechanism through which individual variation can be taken up, retained, modified and made available to others.

Development changes the individual.

The population can preserve some of those changes.

The preserved changes alter the environment.

The altered environment changes what subsequent individuals can develop.

The individual and the population are therefore caught in the same process.

Neither is simply the cause of the other.

They continually become conditions for one another.

And now the developmental cycle has acquired something new.

It can change its own possibilities.

That is a very different kind of history from simply getting older.

A process that changes what can happen within it has begun to acquire a history of its own organisation.

The ecology is not merely carrying history forward.

It is changing the conditions under which history can continue.

And that brings us to a question that lies beyond language itself.

What kind of environment could make this possible?

For the ecology we have been describing is no longer merely a population of organisms living in an environment.

It is a population whose members have transformed their environment into something that participates in the development of those who come after them.

The environment has begun to respond to the history of the organisms within it.

And that is where biology begins to look rather different.

When an Ecology Began to Evolve: II. When History Became a Developmental Environment

A child is born into a world that is already there.

There are already people speaking.

There are already ways of asking questions, telling stories, making distinctions and responding to one another. There are already words for some things and no words for others.

The child has not made any of this.

Yet all of it becomes part of what the child can develop.

The child's developmental environment has a history.

That sounds obvious when we think about physical environments. A house has been built before the child arrives. A road has been laid. A landscape has been altered by generations of activity.

But the same is true of the semiotic environment.

The meanings available to a child have histories.

Some have been used for generations. Some are relatively new. Some have changed their significance over time. Some have disappeared from ordinary use.

The child encounters the results of all of this without encountering the history itself.

History has become environment.

And this changes what it means to inherit a language.

The child does not inherit a finished system from the past.

They inherit a developmental environment shaped by the past.

What previous language users have made available becomes part of what the next generation can encounter, and therefore part of what it can develop.

The distinction matters.

A finished system would simply be transmitted.

A developmental environment participates in the formation of something new.

The child takes up some possibilities, ignores others, combines resources, develops preferences and makes distinctions of their own.

The environment does not determine the result.

It makes a range of development possible.

And because every individual develops differently, the result is never simply a reproduction of what came before.

The history of the language therefore enters the child not as a record but as a field of possibility.

What previous generations have done becomes part of what the next generation can do.

And what the next generation does becomes part of what the generation after that can do.

The temporal sequence begins to look less like a chain of transmission and more like a changing environment.

The past is not gone.

It is present in the possibilities that have survived.

The future is not yet here.

But it is already being prepared by what the present makes available.

This gives the language ecology a remarkable continuity.

It can preserve history without preserving sameness.

A possibility can survive while its use changes.

A distinction can remain available while acquiring a new significance.

An old resource can be taken up in an entirely new way.

The history carried by the ecology is therefore not a frozen inheritance.

It is material for further development.

And that means that development is never simply development from scratch.

Every new language user begins from a world already transformed by previous language users.

But neither is development merely the reproduction of that world.

Each new repertoire adds another variation to the population.

The developmental environment is therefore continually being modified by the very processes it makes possible.

History becomes environment.

Environment becomes development.

Development becomes part of history.

The cycle closes again.

And now something rather important follows.

If the environment in which individuals develop can itself be changed by previous development, then development is not occurring against a fixed background.

The background is moving.

The conditions of development are themselves acquiring a history.

That means that what evolves may not be only the individuals who develop within the ecology.

The developmental environment can change with them.

And once the environment and development begin changing one another across generations, we are very close to a different kind of evolutionary question.

Not simply:

How did organisms adapt to their environment?

But:

How did organisms and the environments in which they develop begin to change together?

When an Ecology Began to Evolve: I. When Development Became History

A child learns to speak.

It happens every day.

A child encounters words, expressions, questions, stories and ways of making meaning. Gradually, possibilities that were once unfamiliar become available. The child develops a repertoire.

Then the child grows up.

And begins speaking to another child.

Something has changed.

The repertoire that was once being developed has become part of someone else's developmental environment.

This seems almost too ordinary to notice.

Yet it changes what development means.

Development is usually imagined as something that happens to an individual. A child develops through interaction with the world, acquiring capacities that were not there before.

But in a language ecology, the result of one person's development does not remain inside that person.

It enters the population.

A new way of saying something can be heard by someone else. A distinction one person has learned to make can become available to another. A pattern of meaning developed in one life can become part of the environment in which another life develops.

Development leaves traces.

And those traces can become conditions for further development.

This means that the developmental process does not simply repeat itself from one generation to the next.

The next individual develops in an environment that has already been changed by previous individuals.

The child does not encounter exactly the same possibilities that the previous generation encountered.

Some have become more familiar.

Some have disappeared.

Some have been transformed.

Others have newly entered the population.

The environment of development therefore has a history.

But that history is not simply a record of what happened before.

It is present in what the next individual can encounter.

History has become developmental.

And development has become historical.

The distinction between the two begins to blur.

An individual develops within a population of existing variations.

That development produces another variation.

The variation enters the population.

The population changes.

And the changed population becomes part of the developmental environment for someone else.

The cycle can continue indefinitely.

What was once the outcome of development becomes a condition of development.

This gives the ecology a peculiar kind of inheritance.

A child does not inherit another person's repertoire intact.

What they inherit is a world already altered by the repertoires of those who came before.

They develop their own repertoire within that world.

And in doing so, they alter it again.

History is therefore not merely behind development.

It is carried forward through it.

Each generation develops from conditions inherited from previous generations, while producing conditions that subsequent generations will inherit.

The developmental process has become cumulative.

And once that happens, something more than individual change is taking place.

The history of the population is beginning to become the history of the conditions under which the population can renew itself.

Development is no longer simply something that happens within an ecology.

Development is helping to make the ecology that future development will encounter.

That is a small change in how we think about a child learning to speak.

But it may be a very large change in how we think about the evolution of language.

For if development can alter the conditions of later development, then the developmental cycle itself can acquire a history.

And once a developmental cycle has a history, we have begun to approach evolution.

When a Language Became an Ecology: VII. When the Ecology Began to Have a History

A language has a history.

We know this because languages change.

Words disappear. New expressions appear. Pronunciations shift. Meanings change. New distinctions become possible while old ones become less important.

But perhaps we have been looking at this history from the wrong end.

We might imagine a language changing through time, as though the language were a thing that persists while its users come and go.

But the language is not separate from its users.

It exists through a population of individual repertoires.

And that population changes because the individuals within it change.

A child develops a repertoire from the possibilities made available by the population.

That repertoire becomes another variation within the population.

Instances produced from it may be taken up by others.

Some become part of what the population makes available.

The next generation therefore develops within a population that is not quite the same as the one its predecessors encountered.

History has entered the ecology.

Not as something that happens to the language from outside.

History is being carried forward through the changing relations between potential, individual repertoire and instance.

This makes the developmental cycle rather remarkable.

The population makes development possible.

Development produces variation.

Variation can alter the population.

The altered population changes the conditions of subsequent development.

And so the cycle continues.

Each turn begins with conditions inherited from previous turns, but it does not simply reproduce them.

Something has changed.

The ecology therefore has a memory.

Not necessarily a memory located in any one individual, but a history sedimented in what the population makes possible.

What a child can encounter today depends, in part, on what previous language users have made available.

And what that child makes available may become part of what another child encounters tomorrow.

The history of the language is therefore also a history of the developmental environments through which its individual forms come into being.

This is where the idea of an ecology becomes more than a metaphor.

An ecology can sustain a population while being changed by the activities of that population.

The language ecology does exactly this.

Its possibilities shape the development of individuals.

Those individuals, through their instances of meaning, contribute to the changing possibilities of the ecology.

The relation is recursive.

And once that recursion extends across generations, something new becomes possible.

The developmental process itself can acquire a history.

The child of one generation does not develop under exactly the same conditions as the child of another. The population has changed. The available meanings have changed. The relations among its variants have changed.

Development is therefore taking place in an environment that has itself been transformed by previous development.

The ecology is not merely being reproduced.

It is becoming.

And now we have reached the edge of a different question.

It is one thing to say that language changes historically.

It is another to ask how a developmental ecology of this kind could itself have come into existence.

For before there could be generations of individuals developing within a language ecology, there had to be a history in which such an ecology became possible.

That is no longer simply the history of a language.

It is the history of the conditions under which language could develop at all.

And that may be where the story of language evolution really begins.

When a Language Became an Ecology: VI. When the Population Became a Resource

A child does not begin with a language.

They begin with other people using one.

Before they can make the meanings for themselves, meanings are already being made around them. Words are being used. Questions are being asked. Things are being named, requested, noticed and remembered.

The child enters a world in which a population of language users is already making possibilities available.

But what the child encounters is not simply the language.

They encounter particular people using particular versions of it.

One person says things one way. Another says them differently. One uses words the child has never heard before. Another repeats the same expressions. Some meanings are familiar; others gradually become familiar.

The population is the child's resource.

This changes how we might think about learning a language.

The child is not simply acquiring a fixed system that exists independently of the people who use it. They are developing a repertoire from what the population makes available.

And what the population makes available is already the result of its history.

Every generation encounters possibilities that have been shaped by previous generations of language use.

Some possibilities have become commonplace.

Others remain specialised or local.

Some have disappeared.

New ones have appeared.

The child therefore enters not just a language, but a population of variations through which the language is being continually renewed.

And the child does something more than absorb it.

They reorganise it.

A child does not reproduce the repertoire of any one adult. They construct a particular repertoire from the possibilities they encounter, making distinctions that matter to them, developing preferences, extending meanings and combining resources in ways that are their own.

Their individual language becomes another variation within the population.

And so the process turns back on itself.

The population makes individual development possible.

Individual development produces new variation.

New variation becomes available to the population.

The population changes.

And the changed population becomes the resource for the next individual.

There is no first step that stands outside the cycle.

The language is not simply transmitted from one generation to the next like an object being passed from hand to hand.

What is passed on is a changing field of possibilities.

Each individual enters that field, develops within it, and contributes to its further change.

This gives the ecology a peculiar kind of continuity.

It can persist without remaining the same.

The population provides enough continuity for a developing individual to enter an already meaningful world. At the same time, its variation provides enough openness for that individual to develop a repertoire that is not simply a copy of anyone else's.

Continuity and variation are therefore not opposites.

They are what allow the cycle to continue.

The population is a resource for the individual.

The individual becomes a resource for the population.

And now the ecology begins to look less like something that surrounds development and more like something that develops through development.

Every new language user enters a world already made possible by previous language users.

But in becoming a language user, they become part of the population that will make a different world possible for those who come after them.

The ecology does not merely contain a history.

It carries that history into development.

And perhaps that is the point at which we need to ask the largest question yet.

What happens when a developmental cycle like this is itself changed across generations?

When the ecology does not merely pass through history, but becomes something that can evolve?

When a Language Became an Ecology: V. When an Instance Changed the System

A language makes particular meanings possible.

And then someone says something.

The words, the grammar, the choices of meaning are an instance of what the language makes possible.

It would be easy to stop there.

The system makes the instance possible. The instance is simply what happens when someone uses the system.

But language does not quite work that way.

Sometimes what someone says changes what can be said afterwards.

A new expression is used. Someone else picks it up. Its meaning shifts slightly. The new use becomes familiar. Eventually it no longer feels new at all.

Something that began as an instance has become part of the potential.

The system has changed.

This can happen so gradually that we barely notice it.

A particular way of using a word becomes common. A construction acquires a new function. A distinction that was once unusual becomes available to more people. Something that was once impossible to imagine saying becomes an ordinary thing to say.

No single instance caused the language to change by itself.

The change emerges across the population.

But it begins with instances.

This gives the relation between potential and instance a curious directionality.

The potential makes instances possible.

Instances, accumulated and taken up across the population, can reorganise the potential.

The system is therefore not simply prior to its instances.

It is continually becoming what its instances make of it.

That does not mean that every utterance changes the language.

Most instances disappear into the flow of ordinary meaning-making. They do what the system already makes possible and leave no lasting trace.

But some are taken up.

They are repeated, adapted, remembered, conventionalised.

And when that happens, the boundary between system and instance becomes less secure.

What was once an instance can become a resource for future instances.

A possibility that once belonged to one person's repertoire can become available to many.

The population has changed, and with it the potential that the population sustains.

So the movement is not simply:

system → instance.

It is:

potential → instance → uptake → changed potential.

The system makes the instance possible.

The instance can become part of what makes future instances possible.

This is why a language can have a history without there being anyone standing outside it directing its development.

Its history is made from within.

Each generation inherits a potential that has already been shaped by innumerable previous instances. It then develops its own variations, produces its own instances, and contributes those instances to the population from which subsequent possibilities emerge.

The language is never simply handed down unchanged.

What is handed down is a potential that has already been changed by the people who inherited it before.

And this brings us back to the population.

The collective potential exists through individual repertoires.

Individual repertoires are formed within the population.

Instances produced from those repertoires can alter what becomes available across the population.

The population therefore does not merely contain variation.

It carries variation forward.

And once variation can be carried forward, something rather important has happened.

The ecology has acquired a history.

The next question is no longer simply how individuals develop within it.

It is how the ecology itself becomes part of the conditions under which the next individuals can develop.

When a Language Became an Ecology: IV. When Languages Began to Meet

If a language exists as a population of individual variations, then those variations are constantly meeting.

Every conversation is a meeting of repertoires.

So is every classroom, workplace, family gathering, friendship and chance encounter. Wherever people make meaning together, one person's way of using the resources of language encounters another's.

And something happens.

A word one person uses may become part of another person's repertoire.

A pronunciation may be adopted.

An expression may be modified.

A distinction that was unfamiliar may become familiar.

Sometimes the change is barely noticeable. Sometimes it spreads through a whole population.

The important point is that the meeting does not leave the individual repertoires exactly as they were.

One variation can become a resource for another.

This means that the population is continually changing through the interactions of its members.

There is no need for anyone to decide that the language should change.

No committee has to introduce a new expression.

No individual has to invent a new language.

The changes can begin with something much smaller: someone using an available resource in a slightly different way, someone else noticing it, and someone else using it again.

What was once one person's variation can become part of the variation available to others.

And the process can run in the other direction.

A form that was once widespread may become less useful, less familiar or less frequently encountered. It may gradually disappear from some repertoires while remaining alive in others.

The population does not change all at once.

It changes unevenly.

Some variations spread. Some remain local. Some coexist for generations. Some encounter one another and combine. Others mark differences between groups.

The language is continually being redistributed across the population.

This is why the ecology is not simply a collection of individual repertoires.

The individuals are resources for one another.

Each person develops within a field of possibilities partly created by the people around them. And when they use those possibilities, they may alter that field for someone else.

The collective potential therefore has no need to sit above the population as a fixed model.

It can be sustained through the population itself.

What is collectively available is continually being renewed through what individuals make available to one another.

And this gives variation a rather unexpected consequence.

Variation does not merely produce differences between individuals.

It provides the material through which the collective system can change.

A language can therefore change without anyone changing the language.

It changes because its speakers are continually meeting one another's versions of it.

The ecology is doing the work.

And now we can see something else beginning to happen.

The individual does not merely inherit a language and then use it.

The individual encounters a population of possibilities, develops a particular repertoire within it, and then returns that repertoire to the population through everything they say.

The circle is beginning to close.

What comes next is the really interesting part.

For what happens when an instance of language does more than express a variation that already exists?

What happens when what someone says becomes something that changes what the language can be?

That is where an instance can begin to change the system.

When a Language Became an Ecology: III. When Variation Became a Population

If no two people speak quite the same language, then there is no single individual version of the language that could stand for all the others.

There is only the population.

That changes the picture.

We might imagine individual repertoires as separate things, each belonging to a particular person. But people do not develop their repertoires in isolation. They encounter other people's ways of making meaning from the beginning.

A word heard from someone else becomes available for use.

A new expression catches on.

A familiar expression acquires a different shade of meaning.

A way of saying something spreads through a group, while another disappears.

One person's variation becomes another person's resource.

The population is therefore not simply a collection of individuals who happen to speak the same language. The variants are continually entering into relations with one another.

They overlap.

They influence one another.

They compete, combine and diverge.

And through all of this, something recognisable as the language persists.

This gives the word population a significance that community does not quite capture.

A community tells us who is involved.

A population draws our attention to variation within what is collectively sustained.

The individual repertoires are not identical members of a uniform set. They are variants of one another, with different histories and different possibilities. Some may be very close; others may be surprisingly distant. There need be no sharp boundary between them.

Yet they remain part of the same larger potential.

The language, viewed from the collective pole, is therefore not simply one system.

It is a system whose individual existence is distributed across a population of variations.

And now the population begins to look rather like an ecology.

Not because language users live in an environment called language.

The population itself is the environment in which individual repertoires develop.

What one person says can become part of what another person encounters. What another person encounters can become part of what they can say. And what many people do with the resources available to them can gradually alter what becomes available to others.

The direction runs both ways.

The individual repertoire depends upon the population.

The population depends upon the individual repertoires.

This means that variation is not merely tolerated by the language.

Variation is one of the conditions through which the language continues to exist.

The language does not survive by keeping its variants identical.

It survives by remaining recognisably itself while its variants continue to differ.

And that gives us a rather different image of a language system.

Not a single structure reproduced in many heads.

Not a community gathered around a fixed code.

But a population of related variations, continually making one another's possibilities available.

A language may be one thing at the collective pole.

But at the individual pole, it is many.

And perhaps that is what it means for a language to have an ecology.

When a Language Became an Ecology: II. When No Two Languages Were Quite the Same

No two people speak quite the same language.

That sounds more radical than it is.

One person says supper, another says dinner. One has a dozen ways of talking about something another rarely talks about at all. One person's speech carries traces of a particular family, region or profession; another's carries traces of a different history.

Even people who have lived together for years do not develop identical repertoires.

And yet they can understand one another.

More than that: they can recognise what they are doing as speaking the same language.

So perhaps the interesting question is not why people differ.

The interesting question is how so much variation can remain recognisably the same system.

We might be tempted to think that there must be some core of the language that everyone possesses unchanged. But that would make the variations look like deviations from the real language.

The alternative is more interesting.

Perhaps the language remains a language precisely because its individual versions are not identical.

A language has enough shared potential for different repertoires to remain mutually relevant, but enough openness for each repertoire to develop its own particular organisation of that potential.

The individual repertoire is therefore neither a copy of the collective system nor an independent invention.

It is a variation within it.

And variation is not something that happens after the system has been established. It is one of the ways the system exists.

Every individual brings a slightly different history to the possibilities of meaning. Every individual therefore organises those possibilities somewhat differently. The differences accumulate across the population.

Some remain local. Some spread. Some disappear. Some become conventional. Some acquire new meanings. Some never get beyond the person who first used them.

The language does not stand outside this process, regulating it from above.

It persists through it.

This gives the collective language a rather different character.

It is not a single uniform object reproduced in many places. It is a potential sustained across a population of variations.

The question is no longer:

How does one language become many versions?

It becomes:

How can many versions constitute one language?

And perhaps the answer begins with a simple fact.

They do not have to be the same.

They only have to remain sufficiently related for what one person does with the possibilities of meaning to matter to another.

Once we see that, individual variation stops looking like noise around the language.

It begins to look like the population through which the language lives.

When a Language Became an Ecology: I. When a Language Became Someone’s

 A language seems to belong to a community.

We speak of English, French, Japanese, Arabic. We talk about a language as though it were a single thing shared by everyone who speaks it.

But listen to two people speaking the same language.

Their accents may differ. So may their vocabulary, their preferred expressions, the distinctions they habitually make, the ways they organise experience, even the ways they use the resources of the language in interaction. Give them different histories, different families, different occupations and different lives, and their ways of meaning will not be quite the same.

Yet both can speak the same language.

This is not simply because they know different amounts of it. The difference goes deeper than competence. Each has a particular repertoire: a particular organisation of the possibilities made available by the language.

The language, in other words, has become someone’s.

That sounds straightforward. But it raises a peculiar question.

If a language is a collective meaning potential, what happens when that potential is organised in an individual?

It does not simply become a smaller copy of the collective system. The individual does not carry around English in miniature. What exists is a particular configuration of the possibilities of English, shaped by everything that has entered into that person's experience of meaning.

And another person's configuration will be different.

So the relation between the collective and the individual is not quite the relation between an original and a copy. The individual pole of language is already a point of variation.

This matters because it changes how we might think about what a language is.

We can look at the collective potential and see a system of possibilities shared across a population. Or we can look at that same potential from the other direction and see a population of individually organised variants.

Neither view is more real than the other.

The collective exists through the individuals who instantiate it. The individuals, in turn, become possible because there is a collective potential from which their repertoires can develop.

And so a language does something rather strange.

It becomes many without ceasing to be one.

Perhaps that is where the story of a language's ecology has to begin.

Not with a community surrounding a language.

But with a population of different ways in which a language has become someone's.

The Senior Common Room on When Mathematics Became a Proposition

Professor Quillibrace was halfway through his tea when Mr Blottisham arrived.

“I have been reading the latest series,” said Blottisham.

Quillibrace looked up.

“That sounds ominous.”

“It is mathematics.”

“I see.”

Blottisham sat down heavily.

“I have one objection.”

“Only one?”

“One principal objection.”

Miss Elowen Stray, who had been reading by the window, looked over the top of her book.

“And what is the objection?”

Blottisham folded his arms.

“Mathematics is not interpersonal.”

Quillibrace put down his cup.

“Why not?”

“Because mathematics is mathematics.”

There was a short silence.

“That is not usually considered an argument,” said Quillibrace.

“It is in this case. Mathematics deals with quantities, relations, structures, proofs. Interpersonal meaning concerns interaction between people. Mathematics does not require people to interact. Therefore—”

“Therefore?”

“Therefore mathematics is ideational.”

Elowen closed her book.

“Does mathematics use propositions?”

“Obviously.”

“Can a proposition be asserted?”

“Certainly.”

“Can it be challenged?”

Blottisham hesitated.

“Well. Yes. But that doesn't make it interpersonal.”

“Why not?” asked Quillibrace.

“Because the challenge is external to the mathematics.”

Quillibrace raised an eyebrow.

“Is it?”

“Of course. Someone may object to a theorem. That is a social event. The mathematics itself remains unchanged.”

“Let us take something simpler.”

Quillibrace wrote on a sheet of paper:

x + 2 = 5

“Is that mathematics?”

“Obviously.”

“Is it a proposition?”

“Yes.”

“What does it say?”

Blottisham looked irritated.

“That x plus two equals five.”

“And if I write—”

Quillibrace added:

x = 5 − 2

“—what have I done?”

“Solved part of the equation.”

“Have I merely rearranged symbols?”

“Yes.”

“Does the second statement follow from the first?”

“Obviously.”

“Could I instead write—”

He added:

x = 5 + 2

Blottisham frowned.

“You could.”

“Would it follow?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is wrong.”

Quillibrace smiled.

“There we are.”

“There we are where?”

“The proposition has acquired a status.”

Blottisham stared at him.

“It is either valid or it isn't.”

“Precisely.”

“That is mathematics.”

“Yes.”

“Which proves my point.”

“I am afraid it does not.”

Elowen smiled.

“You have just said that a mathematical proposition is not merely something that has meaning. It is something that can be judged with respect to what has already been established.”

Blottisham looked from one to the other.

“That is validity.”

“Yes,” said Elowen.

“Validity is mathematical.”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So perhaps we should ask what kind of meaning validity belongs to.”

Blottisham leaned back.

“I still don't see the interpersonal connection.”

Quillibrace returned to the paper.

“Suppose I write:

x + 2 = 5

x = 5 − 2

x = 3”

He pointed to the second line.

“Is this statement independent of the first?”

“No.”

“Does it merely have its own meaning?”

“No.”

“Is its status partly determined by its relation to the preceding statement?”

“Yes.”

“And the third?”

“The same.”

“So each proposition is constrained by what has already been said.”

“Yes.”

“And open to what might subsequently be said about it.”

Blottisham paused.

“That sounds suspiciously like conversation.”

“It isn't conversation,” said Quillibrace.

“Exactly.”

“But it has something in common with conversation.”

“What?”

“The propositions have a status with respect to one another.”

Blottisham looked unconvinced.

“People have conversations. Equations don't.”

“Agreed.”

“People make claims. Equations don't.”

“Do they not?”

Blottisham pointed at the paper.

“That equation doesn't claim anything. It simply expresses a mathematical relation.”

Elowen spoke quietly.

“Then why can it be true or false?”

Blottisham turned towards her.

“Because of the relation it expresses.”

“And why does that matter?”

“Because—”

He stopped.

Quillibrace waited.

“Because it has to be correct.”

“Exactly.”

“But correctness isn't interpersonal.”

“Perhaps not by itself,” said Quillibrace. “But consider what happens when a proposition is challenged.”

Blottisham waved a hand.

“Someone says it is wrong.”

“And then?”

“We check.”

“And if the objection succeeds?”

“We reject the proposition.”

“And if it fails?”

“We retain it.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“Notice what has happened. The proposition has entered a space of possible acceptance, rejection, justification and challenge.”

Blottisham frowned.

“That still sounds like something mathematicians do to mathematics.”

“Does a proposition cease to have that status when nobody is currently objecting to it?”

“No.”

“Then the status belongs to the proposition, not merely to the social event of objection.”

Elowen looked up.

“That may be the important distinction.”

Blottisham sighed.

“Which distinction?”

“Between being challenged and being challengeable.”

There was a pause.

Quillibrace nodded slowly.

“Yes.”

Blottisham looked at the equation again.

“You mean that a proposition does not have to be challenged in order to be something that could be challenged.”

“Exactly.”

“That is a rather peculiar form of interpersonal meaning.”

“It may be,” said Quillibrace.

“There's no speaker.”

“There can be.”

“No addressee.”

“There can be.”

“No exchange of turns.”

“Certainly not necessarily.”

Blottisham looked triumphant.

“Then it isn't interpersonal.”

Elowen shook her head.

“Why must interpersonal meaning require a completed exchange?”

Blottisham opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

Quillibrace took another sip of tea.

“Perhaps we have been looking in the wrong place.”

Blottisham frowned.

“Where should we have looked?”

“Not at whether mathematicians talk to one another.”

He tapped the paper.

“At what a mathematical proposition makes possible.”

Elowen nodded.

“A proposition can be stated. It can be supported. It can be questioned. It can be challenged. It can be accepted. It can be rejected.”

“And none of those possibilities requires a second person to be physically present,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham looked thoughtful.

“But surely you are not suggesting that mathematics is a conversation.”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Not an ordinary one.”

“Better.”

“The point is rather that mathematics can organise relations between propositions in a way that gives them something resembling the status of conversational moves, without requiring conversational turns.”

Blottisham considered this.

“So the proof is answering the objection that has not yet been made?”

Quillibrace smiled.

“Now you are beginning to understand.”

“But that is absurd.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. A mathematician cannot answer an objection that nobody has made.”

Elowen closed her book.

“Perhaps a proof does not answer a particular objection. Perhaps it makes the proposition answerable to possible objections.”

Silence.

Blottisham looked down at the equation.

Then up at Elowen.

Then at Quillibrace.

“I don't like this.”

“I had suspected as much.”

“But I still have one objection.”

“Only one?”

“One principal objection.”

Quillibrace waited.

“If mathematics has interpersonal meaning without anyone taking turns, then what exactly are the turns for?”

Elowen smiled.

“They may be optional.”

Blottisham looked horrified.

“Optional turns?”

Quillibrace picked up his tea.

“Welcome to mathematics.”

Blottisham stared at the three lines on the paper.

x + 2 = 5

x = 5 − 2

x = 3

After a moment he said:

“Very well. I concede that mathematics can apparently be challenged without anyone actually doing the challenging.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“I shall now go and challenge it.”

“You would need an argument.”

“I have one.”

“What is it?”

Blottisham stood.

“Mathematics is mathematics.”

Elowen laughed.

Quillibrace sighed.

Some conversations, it appeared, did require turns after all.

When Mathematics Became a Proposition: VII. When Mathematics Became a Conversation Without Taking Turns

We began with something that looked almost too simple to contain a grammar:

x = 3

But the equation turned out to have a textual organisation, an ideational organisation and an interpersonal one.

It could be a Theme and Rheme.

It could construe an identifying relation between Token and Value.

It could function as a proposition: something that could be stated.

Then we followed what happens when we solve an equation.

x + 2 = 5

x = 5 − 2

x = 3

One statement became many. Each new clause depended on the validity of what came before. The unknown was progressively brought into the position of the Identified, until its value could be stated.

And then another property appeared.

The propositions could be challenged.

A step could be valid or invalid. A conclusion could follow or fail to follow. A proof could establish a proposition, or a counterexample could defeat it.

Mathematics therefore has a peculiar kind of interpersonal organisation.

It does not need two people taking turns.

A proof can be written by one person, read by another, or simply worked through silently. Yet the propositions remain open to challenge. They carry a status that matters to the unfolding argument.

In this sense, mathematical reasoning begins to look rather like a conversation — but without conversational turns.

Each proposition responds to what has already been established. Each new proposition places something further into play. What comes next is constrained not only by what the symbols mean, but by what can legitimately be claimed.

The interpersonal dimension has therefore not arrived from outside mathematics.

It was there in the proposition.

Once a mathematical clause could function as something that might be accepted or challenged, mathematics was no longer merely construing relations between quantities. It was also construing relations between claims.

That may explain why mathematics can look so purely ideational while nevertheless supporting proof, argument, demonstration, objection and agreement.

Its symbols tell us what is being related.

Its propositions also tell us what may be claimed.

And once something can be claimed, it can be challenged.

Mathematics never needed to take turns.

It only needed propositions that could answer to one another.

When Mathematics Became a Proposition: VI. When a Proposition Could Be Challenged

Consider again:

x + 2 = 5

x = 5 − 2

x = 3

We have seen that these are not merely successive arrangements of symbols. Each is a proposition: something that can be stated as the case.

But a proposition can also be challenged.

We can ask:

Does it follow?

Is it valid?

Can it be demonstrated?

Does it contradict what has already been established?

These questions do something different from asking what the symbols mean. They concern the status of the proposition.

Suppose someone writes:

x + 2 = 5

x = 5 + 2

The second clause is perfectly intelligible. Its symbols are correctly formed. But the transformation is not valid. The proposition cannot simply be accepted because it has been successfully formed.

Mathematical meaning therefore involves more than construing a relation. A proposition occupies a position with respect to other propositions. It may follow from them, contradict them, support them, or require further justification.

Proof makes this especially visible. A proof does not merely accumulate statements. It establishes relations between them so that one proposition can be taken to support another.

And this is where the interpersonal dimension becomes difficult to ignore.

The proposition is not merely there. It has a status: it can be asserted, questioned, accepted, rejected, demonstrated or refuted. Someone may challenge a proof, and the proof must provide what is required for the proposition to stand.

None of this requires an ordinary conversation. There need not be two people taking turns. A mathematical argument can remain a single continuous sequence of clauses.

But the propositions within that sequence are nevertheless not equal in status. Each is answerable to what has already been established and open to what might be established next.

Mathematics has begun to reveal something that was easy to overlook.

Its interpersonal meaning is not necessarily a matter of people talking to one another.

It may begin when a proposition becomes something that can be challenged.

When Mathematics Became a Proposition: V. When a Statement Had to Be Valid

When we solve an equation, we do not simply produce one statement after another.

Each new statement has to be valid.

Consider:

x + 2 = 5

x = 5 − 2

x = 3

The second equation is not acceptable merely because it looks plausible.

It has to follow from the first.

The third has to follow from the second.

If we wrote:

x = 5 + 2

we would still have produced a perfectly grammatical mathematical clause.

But it would not be a valid transformation of the original equation.

This distinction is important.

Meaningful is not the same as valid.

A mathematical expression can be meaningful without being mathematically correct.

And a mathematical proposition can be stated without being accepted.

This gives mathematical discourse a peculiar interpersonal character.

The proposition does not simply represent a relation.

It presents that relation as something that can be tested.

A mathematical statement is therefore not finished merely because it has been written down.

Its status remains at issue.

Is it valid?

Does it follow?

Can it be demonstrated?

Does it contradict what has already been established?

These are not questions about what the symbols mean in isolation.

They are questions about what can be claimed with those symbols.

That is why the successive steps in solving an equation matter.

When we write:

x + 2 = 5

we have made a statement.

When we write:

x = 5 − 2

we make another statement, but we also implicitly claim that the second is warranted by the first.

And when we write:

x = 3

we make a further claim whose validity depends on the preceding steps.

The mathematical argument therefore carries a kind of obligation with it.

Each new proposition has to be accountable to what has already been established.

This is why a mathematical proof is not simply a collection of true statements.

It is an organised sequence in which the relations between statements are themselves made explicit.

One proposition supports another.

One proposition may entail another.

A contradiction may undermine a claim.

A counterexample may defeat a generalisation.

A proof may establish a proposition in a form that can withstand challenge.

The interpersonal dimension of mathematics begins to appear here—not because mathematicians happen to talk to one another about mathematics, but because mathematical propositions have a status that can be negotiated.

They can be accepted or rejected.

They can be challenged or defended.

They can be shown to follow—or shown not to follow.

And this gives us a more precise way to think about what happens when a mathematician solves an equation.

The mathematician is not merely transforming symbols.

They are continually making statements whose validity is at stake.

There is still no conversational exchange.

There may be no second participant present at all.

But the proposition is nevertheless oriented towards a possible response.

It can be checked.

It can be questioned.

It can be accepted.

It can be rejected.

The equation has therefore taken us somewhere unexpected.

What looked like the purest case of ideational meaning has revealed an interpersonal dimension—not because the mathematics has ceased to be about quantities and relations, but because what is said about them can be valid or invalid.

And if that is so, we can now ask a larger question.

What happens to mathematical meaning when a proposition is actually challenged?