In a way what follows is more an epilogue than a traditional foreword. It is an afterthought, composed not to preview the content of what follows, but to explain something that the material that follows neglected to consider (and, in fact, had no interest in considering). This was the intellectual environment in apparent opposition to which my own notions of language, culture, cognition (as developed in the essays which follow), have evolved. I say ‘apparent’ because I was, until quite recently, not cognizant of the fact that my ideas about language stand in clear opposition to an existing canon. Moreover, I seem to have been contentedly unaware of the level of commitment with which the inhabitants of this ‘other environment’ pursue their particular version of the truth and how pressing is the need for the rest of us to take this into account. I am talking about modern American linguistics and the assumptions of Noam Chomsky, in particular, whose visibility in the areas of language, psychology, and the cognitive sciences has been immense and continuous through many decades. So widely circulated are the perceptions this view gives rise to that the mere fact I discuss language and thought process (never mind evolution) in one breath obliges me to select a vehicle for the expression of my ideas which takes this ‘other reality’ into account. (The pressures I respond to issue, remarkably, not from intellectually hostile quarters, as one might expect, but from persons of fairly like mind.)

So I give in. My sense of these issues, which I had hoped might stand on its own merits, will now, for the duration of a few pages, be considered against the received wisdom of our time -- even though the latter avoids, on principle, any recognition of the identities which World from Within regards as preliminary to analysis: human language as discourse and discourse as evolutionary process. ¹ (It is difficult to believe the study of language has become so narrow in focus that conjunctions of this obvious nature are no longer interesting or philosophically relevant, yet this has occurred.)

How does Chomsky’s concept of a universal grammar fare when examined from the quite different perspective of natural discourse? (In a most general sense, natural discourse is the topic of all six of the essays before you.)

It becomes evident, upon the briefest examination, that the disparity in our respective views is immense and probably unbridgeable. In a recent e-mail message to Anne Stevenson, in response to an observation that had, in fact, nothing to do with Chomsky himself, I felt nonetheless inclined to draft a summary of this issue as I see it. This letter, portions of which are reproduced below, concluded that the concept of an 'initial state' in human language is ill-conceived if taken to mean structures which have been in place from the beginning (how and whenever that original moment is envisioned), and that language has, as a consequence, no ancestral forms! (I have modified the text in a few places in the interest of immediate relevance and explanatory conciseness.)

(March 19 02) The problem, in a nutshell, is Chomsky's view of 'nature' and the human relation to natural process.² In Chomsky's view the evolutionary progress of the human being has left all the rest of nature so far behind that it hardly pays to consider or even mention our common biology. Everything begins, for all intents and purposes, with the human being, in particular the organism's innate capacity for language -- in the beginning was the 'word' -- which is without significant analogue elsewhere in natural community, we are told... Language and speech are the surface production of an organ like any other organ in the body except that it is 'unique' to the species. It becomes necessary, for a number of reasons I do not fully understand, to assume a recent date for the emergence of language and modern humans (a mysterious pressure anthropologists and others have responded to aggressively). Chomsky is 'Cartesian' by his own admission: that is, language draws the 'true' distinction between man and animals. He is touchy on all questions of the animal origins of human language (which is most odd from the viewpoint of what must be regarded as the aims and assumptions of the modern evolutionary sciences).

The question, of course, is not whether the cognitive properties of animals living today are of the type and breadth one wishes to see in structures ancestral to human language. The real issue, for the study of evolution, ...should be the nature of discourse in the human evolutionary line itself, especially the structures that immediately precede the advent of the anatomically modern human being. To be sure, any sense of their nature can be captured only through inference since the organisms themselves -- those actually engaged in the discursive process which would eventually produce the modern specimen -- no longer exist to stimulate the scientific imagination, to fuel inquiry and discussion, to provide direct confirmation of assertions we wish to make.

My contention, which the reader will find elaborated in Part II -- Chapter Five of the present writing, is that human language does not know an original form which appeared (upon the biological and cultural landscape of the modern human) recently and quite suddenly, in biologically unanticipated fashion (as Chomsky and others attempt to establish and clarify). In fact, the concept of an initial state in human language production is as suspect as the notion of the modern human being itself who is believed likewise (by wide segments of specialists) to have emerged to prominence in an entirely unexpected manner, as from an evolutionary bottleneck -- at which point (in the popularly accepted sequel to this original moment) the new species went on to eliminate all human/hominid biological and cultural adjacency. These two notions -- language (with its infinite capacity for symbolic representation) and the anatomic modernity of the human being -- are conventionally invoked as parallel and fully interdependent developments, widely accepted in current evolutionary theory as the only plausible explanation for what scholars have called the 'cultural explosion' of the Late Upper Paleolithic. Although these ideas touch upon the truth of the matter, the perspective they give rise to greatly falsifies the evolutionary reality.

My own view of evolutionary process, as it affects the trajectory of our species, is the following. The investigation of living structure (including language and its inherent sources) must begin with two properties of nature which are necessarily interconnected (though to believe they are connected ranks among the worst of the modern heresies): (1) the meaning of action by the living organism -- i.e. the system of preferences, or affinities, which inform deliberate movement in nature; and (2) those events which constitute the outcome of such pressures; among these must be mentioned changes in the body itself as a physical structure -- it may be useful to consider the 'body' of the organism as the cumulative record of these changing predispositions.

To be sure, the causality is, in no way, direct. If those who know much better than I are even roughly in the picture, then selection will determine the ultimate result. But internally manifest systems of preference -- a limited number of elements of meaning in complex configuration (and what I shall term cross-structural alignment) -- must be considered significant factors in the shaping of the material on which selection operates, no matter how this may be thought to work itself out. If one can accept some notion of consciousness, at some complex or primitive level of operation (a leap of faith for some when it comes to considering organisms other than themselves), then the causal relation should not be hard to grasp: the organism acts, quite simply, on its preferences and becomes (within obvious limits) what it aspires to become.

These systems of preference comprise what World from Within sees as the mythic content of deliberate movement by the living organism. If an organism embarks on a course of action which selects (over time) for changes in its physical state, then the indispensable foundation for such a fateful sequence of events is the affirmation, more or less widely felt across the population in question, of mythic elements in a certain clustered arrangement. My use of 'myth' in this formative biological sense is an obvious widening of the word’s current usage and referential sweep and would be an anathema to neo-Cartesians and quasi-Darwinians when and wherever they assemble. Ethnologists and others have used the words 'myth' and 'mythology' to designate narrative structures employed by cultural primitives to account for natural phenomena... or to explain their own relation to the past. Depth psychologists and literary critics tend to see myth as the elaboration of certain collective affinities believed to underlie the behavior of humans in general (a view which bears a curious resemblance, never noted to my knowledge, to the notions generative linguists have of performance and competence [and surface and deep structure for that matter]).³ Mine is yet a further extension of usage. I hope to resolve the multifarious content of much of the above in terms of its underlying precepts and evolutionary effects. For in myth the ideological, the cultural, and the biological all come together. Myth exhibits a high level of generality in the organization of life systems and may apply, in fact, across the board.

Consider one result of the above in the awareness of a living organism, your own perhaps. Under pressure from various mythic elements (which can be left unspecified for the moment) one divides the world into (a) subjects -- oneself namely and selected others -- who importantly know, feel, experience, or variously intend and (b) objects in which such properties of the conscious organism are typically denied. A knowing subject confronts the distinctly objective portion of the world adjacent to itself, the part of the world which knows neither experience nor feeling. This reflects the presence, strong or weak in compass and expression, of the ‘objective bias’ in one’s perceived relation to the rest of the world. In the consciousness of the modern human being (and other organisms as well) much of the world external to oneself presents itself as an objective reality. It seems difficult to argue against the existence of such a bias, primitive or complex in its particular manifestation. It is a fact of life, hardly open to question.

The subject-object relation is deeply imbedded in our cultural assumptions and is discovered at multiple levels of understanding. I attempt to show, in my essay on language which follows (Part I -- Chapter Two), that this relation, which varies greatly in the intensity of its expression, is an important indicator of cultural differences among humans. A strident subject-object juxtaposition is peculiar to English and culturally related languages and the messages these convey. Not surprisingly, it is the favored approach to inquiry in the West, certainly familiar (since Aristotle) to all who investigate the grammars of languages. The issue arises significantly in modern linguistic paradigms which, as I now see them, have become a kind of apologetics for Western myth. The objective bias is firmly ensconced in the syntax of the so-called ‘sentence’ which is the severed output of the knowing subject as an individual. Thus we find Noam Chomsky in spirited defense of the very ideology he deplores in his role as social and political critic where he sides, in general, with the collective. Moreover, the rules pertaining to language production occupy the center niche, we are told, in the larger domain of individual psychology where the collective has neither place nor significant function. Chomsky’s approach to language, though it disavows any evolutionary implication, is in this respect Darwinist to the letter and has been so interpreted (and so adopted) by others. (This has been, in fact, the wider basis of Chomsky’s contribution to evolutionary psychology and related research endeavors.)

In the course of a debate on the validity of Wittgenstein’s ‘skeptical paradox’ (which sought to demonstrate [according to Saul Kripke] that the concept of rule-following is nonsensical if the rule-follower is considered apart from community), Chomsky rejected explicitly any suspicion of a ‘social model’ for linguistic ‘knowledge’ or ‘competence’.⁴ Despite his disavowal of any principle of selection (or of evolution itself for that matter) in the emergence of language structure -- human language is biologically isolated, after all, both vertically and laterally--we find Chomsky devoted to the single precept of Darwinian analysis which serves the mythology of our age most egregiously, the idea, namely, that the individual is the center of natural process. It fell to Chomsky to apply an explicit form of this precept to the study of language. The initial state, or universal grammar (see Footnote #1), was the biological endowment of the human individual exclusively.

The ‘sentence’ of grammatical convention and rule turns out to be the perfect neo-Darwinian assemblage, complete (it would seem) in itself. Because Hume’s “original hand of nature” fails to extend to discourse and the collective, the sentence encounters no feedback of near comparable depth and standing. The subject-object relation of the prevailing grammar-mythology appears thus unrestrained. In this mythology of language the subject-object relation surfaces in twin guises: as a structural relation embedded in the utterance itself, where it serves as a formative paradigm in the creation and maintenance of imbalance in social relations, and as a representation (incomplete but clearly indicated) of a certain quality of social relation, i.e. the relation of an active speaker to a notably silent listener. The listener is clearly present in the sentence of the Chomskyan-Aristotelian imagination, but because nature has not blessed the ‘interaction’ of the two, she or he is denied an active role. This throws speaker and listener themselves into the relation of subject to object, a relation which is dramatically clarified in the so-called imperative mood where the speaker functions as the knowing subject while the listener, present only by implication, becomes the mere object of a demand, a peculiar social circumstance which may, in fact, be ‘isolated’ in the biology of humans. (The fact that grammatical convention may view him or her as the ‘subject’ of the sentence does not alter the social reality the myth-based relation gives rise to.) Under the influence of a universal grammar, two-way exchange easily yields to one-directional ‘communication’ -- an odd word to describe such an obvious perversion of the discursive function, yet this is the name we give it.

The issue is not remote and fancifully conceived. The sense of the subject-object relation is painful in cultures where the denial of internal process is institutionalized and countervailing structures are inhibited or blocked altogether. There the feeling may be widespread among individuals that they are objects, not subjects, of the social enterprise. One can argue, of course, that the subject-object relation of a biology-grammar-culture assumes the operation of mitigating mechanisms, formal structures which provide for reciprocity and the exchange of roles. (I take my turn, you take yours.) Such structures are, in fact, ubiquitous in human language and social institutions, the probable residue of ancient adaptive strategies. But one cannot depend on relief from the pressures in question; for the structures that gnaw at the heart of the communal enterprise are hardly inclined to back off and preside over their own disassembly and dispersal. The initial state is exclusive and intransigent in its demands.

But there is a felicitous side to an otherwise grim state of affairs -- one which involves, to be sure, the operation of the ‘social model' which Chomsky rejects. If we are to make our way to a better understanding of human cognition generally (and language in particular), then the model Chomsky discards is the one that needs our attention most. I make the present collection of essays available in the prospect of such a widened understanding, for I feel all is not lost.

I would point out that authentic social interaction has held its own through eons of evolutionary change, this in apparent defiance of the wishes of latter-day linguistic philosophers, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary psychologists. That is, the process by which (and wherever) community has been extended, for humans as for other organisms as well, has meant a distinct weakening of the objective bias. I would go out on a limb and suggest that this has been, in a very general sense (if only to a certain point which I will specify in a moment), the direction of evolution on earth. Although the terminology (and the mythology implicit in these terms) may pose a hurdle for some, the idea that evolutionary process has entailed the recognition by the organism that entities other than itself possess feelings, and a capacity for internally directed action, should not be too difficult to accept -- though science may be of a separate mind on this most crucial of issues. Despite the dictates of common sense to the contrary, the trend in the biological sciences at least (as in the culture at large) has been to turn what was merely a bias of nature into a paradigm of rather sweeping implication.

We now approach what appears to be the center of the issue. As we have seen, in his insistence that our ‘innate capacity’ for language arises independently of our need for community (and its regulatory effects), Chomsky affirms the exclusive mythology of our age. But in so doing he has wandered out upon ice which is dangerously thin. The fact his position has not imperiled the entire superstructure of generative linguistics is a miracle of sorts. Humans show, well in advance of significant language acquisition, an authentic knowledge of social relationship. (You smile at a baby and the baby smiles back. You laugh and she laughs too.) ‘Even children understand’, seemingly intuitively, that complex factors enter the picture besides the objective bias, this naturally occurring obstacle to social integration (which holds so the attention of the human sciences). If left to their own devices and preferences, children tend to conjure a fully animated reality, ⁵ one not unlike the comprehensive social interactions we see in folk tales worldwide, a world in which intent and feeling are widely distributed, attributed (in fact) to physical objects in general. It is embarrassing to have to call special attention to such an elementary feature of natural organization. But if something like community is to be considered a part of the immanent reality of nature, then the individual’s encounter with the world out there simply has to be seen as discourse in part, as the meaning-filled interaction of two entities (minimally), each of which is a subject in its own right, each of which has the capacity to know, to feel, to intend, etc. It is perhaps fortuitous that linguists avoid the word ‘discourse’ in technical usage, as they avoid the word ‘myth’. This frees these lexical items for productive use elsewhere.

The evidence for authentic discursive interaction exists on the very surface of our experience as sentient and knowing individuals and should require little discussion. Biological structures appear to have acquired early-on, in the evolutionary experience common to life-forms (probably in tandem with the appearance of the senses themselves), the perception that the world was more than the surface reality which the objective paradigm (and the modern evolutionary sciences) envisions for it. Within the growing consciousness of the living organism a subjective construction of the material universe took residence alongside the output of the objective bias. (As we have seen, the phenomenon wears two hats. It is a reality of nature as well as an article of theory or belief. We can call it a ‘paradigm’ because inquiry has raised this ‘natural bias’ to the level of such.) In many (if not most) developing beings there was the sense that the limits of one’s personal identity included, in some meaningful and principled form, significant portions of the world out there. In the first of the essays which follow (Toward a Biology of Discourse) I propose reviving, and revising somewhat, the ancient concept of the self so that it includes this expanded sense of biological identity.

By means of a sensory apparatus, which was becoming relatively more evolved, the body of the living organism, in particular its physical exterior, came to function in a striking two-fold capacity: (1) in addition to enabling the organism to feel its way in the world, its body developed mechanisms for the feedback of information between its sensory exterior and some means of conscious process (rudimentary or complex⁶), fostering eventually the formation of internal images which were somehow commensurate with the external probing (or feeling) by the individual. These allowed it to manage, from a vantage point within (so to speak), its progress through a growing labyrinth of experience. But (2) the organism became equipped, additionally, with external signaling devices that enabled it to convey these images to others -- whereby an evolutionary watershed was reached of unequalled expanse. By means of surface boundary receptors specific to its kind the responding individual learned to take these signals in, to process them as images of its own, and to assimilate (finally) some sense of the experience which underlay their original formation. Discourse was and is, by any reasonable definition or standard we propose, a process of mutual assimilation, a momentary (often enduring) expansion of the limits of the personal self, a widening of vantage. Thus the view from within acquires a radically extended context and meaning. Discourse was/is empathetic by nature. For in human and animal discourse

...feelings [tend to] course from the interior of one individual into the interior of another, interrupted only momentarily by their respective visceral exteriors (World from Within Part I Chapter One).

This mode of interaction with the world would have remarkable evolutionary effects. The sense (in an organism otherwise alienated) of an abiding connection with external reality would become the basis of social integration in nature, an extraordinary development in the story of life on earth.

In other words, the developed organism’s contacts with the world appear to be of two basic kinds: either they reflect what we have termed the objective bias, whereby the knowing organism excludes, for one reason or another, the adjacent organism, or object, from the compass of its functional identity, rejecting any potential for the imagination of experience in that other (and for its own empathetic reconstruction of the images generated); or they are discursive in the sense appealed to in World from Within: that is, the contact in question provides an opportunity to mend a prominent defect of nature, an opportunity to further the integration of perceived reality through the exchange of feeling among individuals. ⁷ Naturally, contacts of the first kind cause no difficulty for the science Chomsky espouses. It is appropriately exclusive across a broad spectrum of experience, human and other. Integration, by contrast, which inheres in a rather different set of mythic assumptions, has posed a major stumbling block -- for Chomsky in his linguistic-philosophical musings as for nature in general.

Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that each mode of desired experience has a long and venerable history in evolutionary process. The desire of the organism to include (to incorporate [in the literal manifestation of the precept]) the world adjacent to itself forms the mythic substratum of the activities of eating, drinking, and inspiration and was/is thus essential to life process, affirmed as no other set of predispositions has been. All the structures evolution would bring forth as discursive adaptations -- here we must include grooming among mammals, complex vocalization of all kinds, human language in its benign forms, as well as sexual interactions of every description -- may be considered metaphoric extensions of this fundamental set of biological preferences. Meanwhile, to shun that same objective reality -- though conditionally necessary as a protective response -- was probably tangential to that other elemental need, tinged moreover with negative affect. To breathe out (the physical basis of most spoken language paradoxically) was to terminate the discursive cycle, to ‘expire’.

There is, in my estimation, no line of conjecture more compatible with the emergence of specifically hominid physical structures (bipedal anatomy and increasing encephalization to take the representations which stick out the most) than the assumption that, for a certain population of primates living in (and interacting with) a certain Ice Age environment, a dramatic reduction took place in the intensity and scope of the objective bias. This occurred within a relatively recent timeframe, the period approximately of the Early through the Middle Pleistocene -- from about one-million-and-a-half years ago to one to two hundred thousand years Before Present. We are speaking of the vast period from the time ‘we’ left our regional habitat in the river valley milieu of Northeast Africa (to embark upon what may well have been the most consequential venture of ‘our’ evolutionary experience in toto: namely the exploratory probing of the wide continent of Eurasia and perhaps lands beyond) to that evolutionary moment just prior to, but not including (it appears), the so-called cultural explosion of the Upper Paleolithic.

(Most prominent in the evidence for the latter eruption of energy are the cave paintings discovered in France and Spain in the past century which date from approximately thirty-two-thousand [32,000] to twelve-thousand [12,000] years B.P. Twenty thousand years at least in a timeframe that may still be open at the deep end! a continuity and stability of cultural experience which, in my opinion, is far too prolonged to be reasonably termed explosive. Be that as it may, in the time of this enormous cultural outpouring the physical changes, which would result in the ‘sudden appearance’ of homo sapiens sapiens, are presumed to have been long complete. Without counter arguments, that I am aware of, the gifted artists and craftspersons of this period are taken to be fully developed human beings, anatomically modern in every known respect. They were certainly not Neanderthals or other excrescent offspring of homo erectus! This view notwithstanding, the issue remains, I believe, unresolved.)

But the period we are drawn to in the context of the present discussion is the earlier one, the thirteen or fourteen-hundred-thousand years when our forebears were engaged in an enterprise which is so astonishing in scope, implication, and consequence that the cultural achievement of the European Upper Paleolithic pales beside it! Yet, a positive appraisal of the period flies in the face of the accepted wisdom which considers it a time of unrelieved tedium in human cultural evolution, a time when “nothing happened,” as paleo-anatomist Leslie Aiello puts it.

The period has been an embarrassment to nearly all branches of the contemporary human sciences, this for a cluster of reasons I shall approach in a moment (and which will be more fully elaborated in Part Two -- Chapter Five of the present volume). Cranial residue indicates that the primate brain evolved (during this ‘boring’ and ‘uneventful’ time) from an organ a little larger than that of a chimpanzee to something nearly three times as big! (Note that this enormous increase in encephalization occurred long in advance of the appearance of human language, as Chomsky and others envision this moment of genesis.) But there is much more to the story than mere brain size, although that should in itself be sufficient indication that an extensive widening of animal experience was in progress. Reasonable inference points to evidence which, though hidden from direct observation, may be as real as any collection of skulls one can assemble. One can assume, with little hesitation I believe, that certain forms of eye-muscle coordination were developing apace with the extensive (and newly acquired) freedom of the hominid’s forelimbs and fingers to move independently, a complex set of adaptations which, taken together, have been secondary in importance only to prehension in the human evolutionary experience and bipedal locomotion itself. It is a certainty, moreover, that facial musculature began at this time to achieve the level of integration and complexity now exhibited by humans alone -- and, as with much so-called body language and gesture, with seemingly universal concurrence as to meaning. Yet these unique aspects of human evolutionary adaptation are rarely mentioned. They play no role in the operation of what is thought to be a universal grammar, the reason, I would suggest, being quite simple. They are derived, namely, from the inclusive realm of metaphor -- i.e. the discourse we share with the rest of nature -- not the alienating domain of symbol which, as evolutionary psychologists (and possibly Noam Chomsky himself) would gratefully affirm (given the assumption of the stated [though normally unrecognized] difference in meaning between the two concepts), is ‘isolated’ in human experience.

All this is perplexing to anthropologists and linguists, in particular, because these formidable properties of the developing specimen, pregnant with implication for a powerful discourse among early humans (and buttressed by the hard reality of increasing encephalization), appear to have arrived at a most inappropriate time. That is, they reached their astonishing level of development in the near absence of a durable material culture and -- to make matters incalculably worse -- amidst scanty signs of a symbolic ordering of the collective experience (with its arbitrary fixing of image and feeling). These strides forward are dear to the hearts of linguists and cognitive scientists and presumed to be co-evolved with the emergence of language. If I may quote again from my message to Anne Stevenson:

It is astonishing to me that Chomsky can consider a recent date for the emergence of all these complex properties [and products] of human cognition without adducing the slightest evidence other than the alleged fact that they are biologically isolated at the present time, a phrase which is recurrent in his writings on the topic. [Among these properties is the phenomenon Chomsky calls discrete infinity -- one, two, three -- which appears related, it seems, to the specifically human aptitude for the serialization of experience, thought by more than a few to be a problem in human adaptation. Chomsky does not explore, to my knowledge, the possible downside of his insight.] I take issue also with the speculative trend his thinking has encouraged in the evolutionary sciences… The properties that he and others regard as innate to our species were, in fact, not species-wide but merely the outcome of a particular mythology (albeit one which has raged unchecked since Ice-age times). The construction of the world that this mythology requires is exclusive, in my opinion, and heavily symbol-based, depending besides upon a greatly elaborated material culture, all of which has had a simplifying (and notably harmful) effect on human discourse and social relations. Besides, in positing an initial state in human linguistic awareness (and thus limiting the concept 'human' to the products of the mythology in question) we must, of necessity, ignore indications (wide-spread in surface manifestations of human language and culture) of a lively state of discourse (and the mind) which was clearly antecedent to the phenomena Chomsky regards as universal, yet fully human in its scope and dispositions.

The problem is most complex and requires, as I have attempted to demonstrate, unbiased (or differently biased) inquiry into our own mythology which attaches extravagant value to symbol and the material artifact and their simplifying effects (wherein lies the potential pathology of this set of ‘uniquely human’ dispositions).

Readers who continue into the main body of my text will discover (1) that a lively human culture-technology can and, in fact, did exist in which permanence, as a collective value, was attached to process essentially (as opposed to the varied material consequences of collective and individual action); that (2) the crucial distinction between a symbolic and an essentially analogical (or metaphoric) ordering of experience has been obscured for the practical purposes of research and ordinary understanding; with the result (3) that we seem now to be cognitively ill-equipped to perceive the difference between our own present collective proclivities -- I refer to the mytho-cognitive material which immediately underlies the social and cultural expectations of moderns -- and the structures which were in place before this: that is, the formations which were on the scene for the better part of the extraordinary evolutionary development noted above; the culture, in brief, which science now ignores altogether, though it nourished all the properties of the species which must be regarded as truly adaptive and brought them to an advanced level of refinement. These were, in addition to the physical changes noted above (which were really merely the external embodiment of changes which were fundamental in origin), the sense of enduring process and the capacity to view the totality of material existence metaphorically (or, as Stafford Beer has said, by means of ‘filters’ rather than through analysis), all of which entailed an integrated and immensely expanded social awareness, the ability to construct the world from within. The dramatic extension and wide application of this distinctly social capacity in the human biological endowment was, indeed, a unique event in the story of natural process on earth, though it left little behind for archaeologists and others to ponder. Nonetheless it lingers, as viable structure (one hopes), in the hidden recesses of human awareness, though the species may be headed today in a rather different direction.

It would be neat if an up-beat summary could be considered even roughly on target, if the facts permitted us to imagine the present experience of sapiens sapiens as the fulfillment of nature’s ancient dream, the promise of integration through an elaboration of social discourse. Unfortunately, however, this is not what has transpired. Thus the downside in this evolutionary trajectory must be addressed, the second (but the most urgent) message of World from Within: i.e. the striking failure of an adaptive strategy in human evolution.

Let me conclude these preliminary remarks on a personal note that moves in the drift of the above. In my letter to Anne Stevenson I wrote that Noam Chomsky, in his

...search [presumably] for a suitable conceptual framework for the initial state... is led into areas of lexically conveyed meaning which are by no means trivial. I don't want to burden you with the detail of his arguments but his insights were, in fact, an inspiration for my own probing into the question of mythic primitives and the biology of discourse, the central topic, really, of the essays now on the inter-net... If you do decide to go through my text (in some fashion or other) you may want to begin with the last essay in the group (on the Loss of the Interior Perspective). I wrote this in 1997...

soon after the publication of Chomsky’s Powers and Prospects (1996), the first chapter of which contained an inkling of a direction in research which -- to my imperfect knowledge -- has yet to be pursued by linguists (or semanticists) in consequential fashion. The idea that our natural cognitive endowment provides

...complex perspectives that offer us highly special ways to think about things... (Powers and Prospects, p. 22.)