Human language and self-consciousness - Shepard essay #2 continued

I'm going to finish summarizing the essay On Animal Thinking today and reflect on the observations of the past two days, tying it together. Shepard thinks the key to human language is that the shift from primate scavenging to hominid hunter/gathering. This shift caused to us to combine the predatorial mode of attention to other animals with the primate attention to the group. Primate sociality was not fitted for a hunting creature as it is characteized by pecking orders, infighting and an overall concern with social relations and ranking. What was needed was the carnivore attention to environment and away from themselves, the concern with "...symbiotic relations with prey species." (Shepard, 43)

The vague sense of past and future possesed by primates and carnivores combines in an important way. Primates used their time-sense to establish kinship. Carnivores used it to create knowledge of the ecosystem. When combined in man, "He begins to apply the idea of kinship obligations to the interplay of other species." (Shepard, 44) The neurological nexus of the primate hunter gave birth to mythology, explaining the orgins of our species in relation to the rest of existence. It allowed humans to view our social arrangements in terms of the ecosystem. For the transmission of these abstract idea to take place humans needed speech and its counterparts, song and dance.

For Shepard, song and dance are a conservative force that gives cohesion and continuity to the group, countering the social frictions of primate sociality which undermine the need for cooperative hunting. Speech gives us history, the mythological explantions tie us into the ecosystem and uses its order as metaphors for our own social arrangements. While music gives connectedness and an identity beyond the individual, speech dissects and classifys. In classifying the natural world through observation of similarities and differences, names are given and the use of these linguistic symbols by others, and the basis of human cognition is created.

The use of names to direct our attention to past expierences parellels the searching, comparing, and data integration of the hunt. It allows us to recreate the hunt with speech and give sequence to an otherwise unordered mess of stimuli. Shepard postulates that these early linguistic hominids used the charateristics of named animals to classify and examine human emotion, personality, and social categories. Human culture, which is learned, is full of abstract and intangible notions of past and future, spirtuality, personality, acceptable behavior, social roles. There is no image we can associate these things with, so we use the behavior animals, which do have names and can be visualized, as metaphors.