ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
ern human activity. Those traits whose resulting behavior granted the individual or
group no advantages would have likely disappeared. Nor would it be possible to glean
these self-same activities in the human DNA records, fossils, neural activity, and historico-anthropological records. But these very data are traceable, locatable, identifiable. If one focuses on the (self-refuting) statement that homo sapiens is a social/linguistic construct, surely one will be asked, How far down into the nature of our
species can a linguistic/constructivist theory hope to delve? How far into the nature of
what it means to be human can cultural theory go? Surely what is meant is the social
human, the linguistic side of human activity, and not the neural processes and cellular
activity, and so on. And if the biological properties are to be ignored or subsumed and
only the conscious cognitive properties are emphasized, then what is presented is a
return to a type of dualism, here between the biological/evolutionary and the linguistic, or worse, the claim that language creates consciousness.vii
A new conscious state, new information, an epiphanic moment, is not a purely novel
reconstitution of the world, just as the brittleness of a hip-bone is constitutive of the
bone itself and not merely the whim and caprice of the person identifying that brittleness (and very much less the language or term used in the identification). In this, John
Searle would argue that “Consciousness is literally present throughout these portions
of the brain where consciousness is created by and realized in neuronal activity
[which] runs contrary to our Cartesian heritage that says consciousness cannot have a
spatial location” (2004: 63). It is a reconfiguration of neural activity and stimuli to a
particular brain composed of brain-stuff which cannot be reduced or exactly replicated, thus sloughing off charges of reductionism (or epiphenomenalism) or the grotesqueries of solipsism. It has to do with brain states in a brain evolved (teleologically
ateleological) to grant meaning to itself, and that self-ascribed meaning might be labeled ‘belief’. “The point is precisely that [these beliefs] are complex dispositions including dispositions to respond to/to use sentences in a public language, or other nonnatural signs; it is the dispositions, not the sentences, that are in the head” (Haack,
2012: 231). Beliefs and sentences about beliefs have proven quite useful for the human species, and both belief and evolved abilities have proven incredibly advantageous.
Christian notes (2005: 140) that the total amount of energy controlled by the human
species from the Paleolithic to the present has grown nearly 50,000 times, suggesting
the incredible adaptability and intelligence of the human species largely due to the
power of what he calls ‘collective learning’, a bringing together in language of particular skills, forms of knowledge and observation; as Christian sums the figure, “This is
a staggering amount of energy to be controlled by one species, and it helps to explain
why our species has had such an impact on the entire biosphere” (2005: 140). Here is
an example that seems to blend together – or at least blur distinction – between the
natural sciences and the status of sociality/culture in homo sapiens. Yet, interestingly,
as a species, humans are 99.9 similar genetically (Witherspoon, et al., 2007: 351). In
fact, “(M)ost of the genetic variety within modern humans occurs within African populations, which suggests that this is where humans lived the longest” (Christian, 2004:
177).viii How can any constructivist model which claims plasticity in human character
and behavior by linguistic model alone thereby account for the remarkable lack of
variation in the genes of the total human population? Language and belief have an
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