Languages build communities; communities build languages

The title should be obvious, because languages are - ultimately - human inventions. This concept sits at the centre of Wittgenstein’s private language argument. In that argument, Wittgenstein strongly declares that private languages don’t make any sense. What is the point of a language if it is used only within a person and not between people to express ideas between people? All meaningful languages are public, and languages generate their meaning through shared public understandings. (Battling over the control of shared public meaning is an important side conversation, but it isn’t one that I will enter into now.)

Shared understanding is at the essence of Wittgenstein’s beetle in a box thought experiment, though. In this thought experiment, Wittgenstein asks the audience to imagine a group of people who all have a box in front of them. In each box, there is said to be a beetle, but the individuals cannot look into each other’s box. The box is full of all of an individual's gathered experiences of the concept (the beetle) under discussion. This isn’t problematic, though. There is enough shared understanding that each person can imagine what is in each other’s box. Whilst each beetle might be slightly different, each person has a general shared understanding, and any differences can also be elicited by even more language, which is shared amongst the group. The group knows to ask certain additional questions in order to gain a greater appreciation of the beetle inside the each box. They can talk about things … together … collaboratively. Disagreements can arise, and these disagreements can occur because of fundamentally different views of the concept under discussion. There is also negotiation, consensus making and divisions. These are all social acts, and the whole process is an act of socialisation.

Why am I writing about this now, though? And after such a long break from the blog? It was sparked by both an article and personal experience.

“The combination of languages spoken in a given place, known as language ecology, matters for the wellbeing of Indigenous language speakers, according to a new study from The Australian National University.

“Our research shows that, in communities where Indigenous languages are predominant, speaking either a traditional or new language is positively associated with higher wellbeing and lower psychological stress,” says study lead author Dr YONATAN DINKU.

“Conversely, in environments where English is widely spoken, Indigenous language use correlates with increased psychological distress, due perhaps to factors such as social isolation, cultural disconnection and discrimination.”

The authors, also including Dr Francis Markham, Dr Denise Angelo, and Professor Emerita Jane Simpson, call for a language ecology approach to target 16 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which aims to increase the number and strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages spoken by 2031.

“We need more nuanced, context-specific policies. A language ecology approach to differentiating target 16 initiatives would respect language diversity, ensuring no context is left behind,” they say.”

— https://research.anu.edu.au/research-innovation-news/anu-study-finds-strong-link-between-place-language-and-wellbeing-for-first

The research is very important to pay attention to. Languages bring people together, and they shape a strong sense of community and knowledge sharing. The research provides additional relevance to Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box thought experiment. The research reminds us that languages are part of a process of generating shared meanings, and - within that process - there is value in the cultivation of meanings inside the boxes. His thought experiment also evokes an image of people coming together and who are able to have rich conversations about experiences that they share with one another.

Recently, my colleagues and I had an opportunity to reflect upon this through certain Indigenous Language projects. We have been looking at them through the lens of coming/gathering together. One in particular has involved a series of Elder-youth camps that have been joyful, collaborative and transformative for many of the young people (and Elders) involved. They create time in the calendar that people look forward to. This involves a process of the Elders filling the young people’s boxes with rich new Language that is built up through shared, immersive experiences. Over time, the young people are gaining enough language knowledge to partake in these share language experiences. They can have beetle in the box conversations, and take pride in the understandings that they are developing. Equally, the Elders are both excited and relieved that the next generation is joining them at the table. In this context, the Elders and youth are able to shape how shared concepts guide them in their daily lives. They are reviving a common language that has profound, unspoken histories (within the walls of boxes). Whilst the Elders may have more experiences filling their boxes on a particular concept, this still means that the young people can take part in these conversations and fill their boxes with more and more experiences over time.

In another project, we have watched daily evening community Language lessons firmly take hold through space generously offered by a local Indigenous Knowledge Centre. This has become a safe space where people of all ages gather and share in knowledge and curiosity. It has taken a number of years to get to this stage, and many important resources have been developed in that process, but it has made a world of difference for the community. It has filled a gap in the day that many didn’t know that they were missing, and the lessons have served as a vehicle to shape new relationships. Many bonds have been formed as the community has grown in Language together. This can take many years, and each community is different, but they can learn from one another.

Sometimes Indigenous Language work can be seen as an end in itself. In this case, we look at the beetle itself rather than view the beetle through the eyes of the community who is imbuing the beetle with meaning. It is important to see it as a journey that many are on together.

Why We Do What We Do? Coda

I'd like to have one last contribution to the series Why We Do What We Do?, which I hope to edit and present in full in an upcoming essays section to the site. Presently, I would like to bring the series to an end by providing a quote from a journal article that I read recently. I feel it sums up what the series attempts to express, particularly if read in conjunction with an except from a related journal article presented in an earlier blog entry.

An excerpt from Gerrans, P. (2005). Tacit knowledge, rule following and Pierre Bourdieu’s philosophy of social science. Anthropological Theory, 5(1), 53-74.

On Bourdieu’s account of dispositional tacit knowledge, agents learn to agree in practice without explicitly or consciously representing concordance as a goal. Thus the hierarchy of respect in the barrio is reproduced even though each individual is not consciously thinking that the rule which governs his actions is to ‘preserve the hierarchy of respect’. The idea goes back at least to Aristotle’s contrast between learning by habituation and learning by intellectual instruction in the Nichomachean Ethics

Now some think that we are made good by nature, others by habituation, others by teaching. Nature’s part evidently does not depend on us, but as a result of some divine causes is present in those who are truly fortunate; while argument and teaching we may suspect are not powerful with all men, but the soul of the student must first have been cultivated by means of habits for noble joy and noble hatred, like earth which is to nourish the seed . . . The character, then, must somehow be there already with a kinship to virtue, loving what is noble and hating what is base. (Nichomachean Ethics 1179b-31)

Aristotle’s point is that virtue, which on his account is a form of knowledge, is originally a matter of character rather than intellect. Furthermore, that character cannot be acquired alone. One acquires a character as second nature through living in a society in which standards for virtuous behaviour are embodied in practice. Aristotle’s word for this type of socially embodied representation acquired through practical immersion in a culture is Hexis: Bourdieu captures the same concept by a term first used by Aristotle’s medieval translators: habitus.

The liberal conception of the autonomous self-interested individual is obsolete

 An excerpt from Olssen, MEH (2010) Discourse, Complexity, Life: Elaborating the Possibilities of Foucault’s Materialist Concept of Discourse In: Beyond Universal Pragmatics. Interdisciplinary Communication Studies, 4 . Peter Lang Pub Inc, Geneva, 25 - 58

As for Wittgenstein (2001), Foucault does not see language as an expression of inner states, but as an historically constituted system, which is social in its origins as well as in its uses … The rules of language were themselves seen as a bundle of interactional and public norms. Meaning is generated within the context of the frame of reference (for Wittgenstein, a game; for Foucault a discourse). Hence to understand a particular individual we must understand the patterns of their socialisation, the nature of their concepts, as well as the operative norms and conventions that constitute the context for the activity and the origin of the concepts utilised. If mind operates, not as a self-enclosed entity, as Descartes held, attaching words to thoughts, as if they were markers, but rather operated in terms of publicly structured rule-systems, then meanings are in an important sense public.

… The thesis here is that the social nature of practices defines a community context in one very important sense, a sense which is fundamentally inescapable. Such a theoretical revolution, which has largely developed in the twentieth century, has rendered the liberal conception of the autonomous self-interested individual as obsolete.

In most cases … May (1997) explains that it is multiple, or what he calls ‘overlapping practices’ that constitute a community. The central claim is that ‘a community is defined by the practices that constitute it’. This defines, he says, what it means to be in community. Practice he defines as ‘a regularity or regularities of behaviour, usually goal directed, that are socially and normatively governed’ (p. 52). While, in this sense, practices are ‘rule governed’, such rules need not be formal, or even explicit. A second feature of practices is that their normative governance is social, which is to reject the idea of a private language. This is to say that not only is the <em>governance </em>of practices social, but the <em>practices </em>are also social. Even solitary practices, like diary writing are social in this sense. In this way, says May (p. 53), ‘the concept of practice lies at the intersection of individuality and community’. Thirdly, he says, ‘practice [...] involves a regularity in behaviour. In order to be a practice, the various people engaged in it must be said to be “doing the same thing” under some reasonable description of their behaviour’ (p. 54). As a consequence of these three definitions, says May, practices must be seen as discursive, meaning that they involve the use of language. This entails:

some sort of communication between participants in order that they may either learn or coordinate the activities that the practice involves [...]. Moreover, this communication must be potentially accessible to nonparticipants, since without such accessibility the practice would cease to exist when its current participants dropped out. The communication required by a practice, then, must be linguistic. The idea of linguistic communication can be broadly constructed here, needing only a set of public signs with assignable meanings. (May, 1997: p. 55)

Such a theory of practice, says May (p. 55) ‘is akin to Wittgenstein’s idea that language games are central components of forms of life’. The central theoretical point concerning practices is that they embody actions organized according to rules which are both linguistic and cultural. As Theodore R. Schatzki (2001a: p. 48) points out, ‘practices are organized nexuses of activity’, and constitute ‘a set of actions [...] constituted by doings and sayings’. In this sense, he says, (p. 45) ‘the social order is instituted within practices’. Schatzki defines the social order as ‘arrangements of people, and the organisms, artefacts, and things through which they coexist’ (p. 43). They coexist within what Schatzki (2001b: p. 2) calls ‘a field of practices’ which constitutes ‘the total nexus of interconnected human practices’. Such practices are ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understanding’. Referring to Foucault, Schatzki (p. 2) notes how ‘bodies and activities are “constituted’ within practices”’. It can be said, further, echoing Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, that the practices that make up the social order comprise both ‘discursive’ and ‘extra-discursive’ elements. In this way, the idea of practices highlights ‘how bundled activities interweave with ordered constellations of nonhuman entities’ (p. 3).

References

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, Sheridan, A. (tr.), London: Tavistock.

May, T., (1997) Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press.

Schatzki, T.R. (2001a) ‘Practice Mind-ed Orders’ in: Schatzki, T.R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London and New York: Routledge, pp.42-55.

Schatzki, T.R. (2001b) ‘Introduction: Practice theory’ in: Schatzki, T.R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London and New York: Routledge: pp. 1-14.

Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Philosophical Investigations. 3rd Edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Literacy is a complex and multifaceted skill which changes enormously as it is acquired

The following is a paragraph from a chapter written by Catherine Snow that I am keen to share. Why? The paragraph (and the chapter) engages with the changing nature of literacy as the child (or individual) develop, which requires teachers to be vigilant in providing the right instruction, opportunities and extension at the right time. Please enjoy ... and also seek out the chapter.

From Snow, C. (2004) What counts as literacy in early childhood? In K. McCartney & D. Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of early child development. Oxford: Blackwell.

"Everyone agrees that literacy is a complex and multifaceted skill which changes enormously as it is acquired ... [For instance], the typical three-year-old can recognize some books by their covers, knows how to hold books upright and turn pages, listens when read to, expects to be able to understand pictures in books, may distinguish pictures from print, may recognize some letters, and produces purposeful-looking scribbles.

"The typical four year old has learned to recite the alphabet and to recognize several letters, connects events in stories to ‘real life,’ understands that stories are different from notes or lists, may produce rhymes or alliterations, and may scribble, pretend-write, or draw with a communicative purpose.

"The typical kindergartner knows about titles and authors of books, may track the print when being read to from familiar simple books, can name all and write most of the letters, can recognize and spell some simple words, spontaneously questions events in stories and information books, and uses mostly invented spelling in writing.

"The typical first grader is starting to get a serious handle on the system of writing, is able to read accurately and fluently texts that include previously taught spelling patterns, uses letter-sound correspondence to sound out new words, spells with a combination of conventional and invented spelling, monitors her own writing and reading for correctness, and understands the differences among a wide variety of texts (informal notes, informative texts, stories, poems, slogans, lists, and so forth).

"In 2nd and 3rd grade, the typically developing child becomes increasingly accurate and fluent with an ever wider variety of spelling patterns, becomes able to tackle more complex texts independently, knows how to seek help from a dictionary or an adult with difficult words or ideas, writes a wide array of text-types increasingly conventionally and with ever greater capacity to revise independently, and infers the meanings of unfamiliar words encountered in otherwise comprehensible text.

"Of course, literacy growth continues after grade 3—the capacity to read with different purposes, to learn from reading, to critique the text, to compare and contrast points of view when reading, and in other ways to produce and process complex tests may continue to develop through adulthood. But the skills acquired by 3rd grade (acquired only, of course, if children enjoy home, preschool, and primary grade environments that support these learnings) constitute the firm foundation on which those more complex skills depend."

Quote on the 'Social Theory' of Language Acquisition

From Dr Daniele Moyal-Sharrock's paper entitled "Coming to Language: Wittgenstein's 'Social Theory' of Language Acquisition" presented Solutions Focused Learning Conference in Budapest (6 - 8 May 2010)

The initiate must be "a biologically and socially adept human being ... susceptible to training ... [with] fundamental trust [in] the authority of the teacher ... [engaged in] socio-linguistic interaction ... transmissible ... through enculturation" and which transforms one's capacity to see, practice and conceptualise language in fluent and meaningful ways.