Premack 2004: Language, Writing, and Systems of Symbols
I revisited Premack’s 2004 Science piece on human uniqueness ("Is language the key to human intelligence?" 16 Jan., p. 318) and particularly his response to a question about humans having 6 symbol systems (Language and Systems of Symbols). A number of interesting points:
- Perhaps the least important but most coincidental, Premack raised punctuations as an example of a symbol system. He did not elaborate on this. I have an in-press chapter that examines the role of punctuations in the history of writing as well as eye movement planning during reading.
- All 4 "invented" symbols (symbol systems) are written notations. I don’t think Premack would count marks on musical instruments as musical symbols; he meant written musical notes and all other notes. This brings up two questions:
- Is human intelligence — I think implicitly we are talking about intelligence in the literary society or at least holding that as the ideal — predicated on written notes? That is, something that can be shared across time and space, copied verbatim, improved up on, and translated and transformed into different languages/domains.
- Similarly, is intelligence predicated on becoming consciously aware of the symbolic nature of the notation system? One could argue that one can speak without being aware of language, but it’s almost unthinkable of someone who could read and writing without having to realize it involves interconnected symbols with rules.
note that both would exclude preliterary communities. That’s part of why these questions are raised: We talk about intelligence as if it’s destined to be like what we have now. What if writing (of all these 4 symbol systems) were invented 6,000 years later than it did? What if we had video camcorders and youtube before writing? Would we still have to same intelligence?
- Lastly, Premack made a strong argument of how writing has chaged the world and homo sapien.
Written language has had a more profound effect on human history than any other code. According to some accounts, writing developed as visual marks that identified the ownership of agricultural surplus (produced when foragers became farmers) (4, 5). Spoken knowledge–such as the hunter-gatherer’s knowledge of plants and animals–did not change in character over generations. It was written knowledge that changed radically.
Written knowledge was edited, revised, and subjected to the standards of brevity, parallel argument, and deductive principles–criteria unique to writing. The informal folk knowledge of speech eventually turned into the scientific knowlege of writing. Science led to technology. Technology changed the environment, and the changed environment in turn changed the people. Hunter-gatherers, despite possessing a human brain, lacked writing. They did not therefore radically alter their environment. Their environment remained stable from one generation to the next. But writing, a simple code, led to yet another unique aspect of the human species–unpredictable changes from one generation to the next (6).
Humans are a code-writing species, producers of symbol systems for both natural (e.g., number) and invented (e.g., punctuation) domains. They have indeed written more than four codes. This prolixity is compatible with the point made in the Perspective: Only humans write codes, and they do so because they alone evolved speech.
The last sentence is intiguing: we have speech, and then we write it down, and then we are smarter than any other species. But why did it take the homo sapien n years (n= Year_of_First_Summerian_cuniform - Year_of_first_speech) to come up with the idea and method to write things down? What happened to intelligence in between?