Learning involves shared attention -spiritually too

At the moment, I seem to be making connections between stuff I happen across and things to do with mindfulness. Now this is a bit peripheral to what the linked article is focussing on but nevertheless it caught my... well, attention. In the context of connections to mindfulness, this sentence got me thinking:

"Shared attention is the starting point of conscious human learning"

What is intriguing me about this, I think, is that I'm coming to the theological conclusion that mindfulness is shared attention with God. Mindfulness in the sense of giving attention to something and maintaining/returning attention to it is implicated in the picture from Genesis 1 of God giving attention to what was made and what was teeming or doing its (God-given) thing and seeing that it was good. A Christian mindfulness shares God's attentiveness to what is (made), joins God in being mindful of what God has made. So the quote about shared attention in a way characterises a Christian mindfulness by potentially including God. Of course, a point to take from Genesis and systematic theology is that God is the initiator of sharing; God is inviting us to see "that it is good" one piece of the world at a time.

But let's take that further with what that quote goes on to say about conscious human learning. When I hear or read 'learning', I tend to relate that to 'formation', that is to spiritual development and growth. I see the formation as a partially overlapping semantic field with learning. When we grow spiritually it is learning that takes place. When we learn, as Christians, we are to align our learning with our spiritual outlook and experience.
And I can't help but relate that to Genesis 2 and the naming of the creatures. In the bit of the story I'm thinking of, God brings the animals to Adam to name and Adam's names stand -"that was its name". I have written elsewhere of what is implied by naming. Briefly, naming implies noticing and learning about similarities and differences. It involves, to some degree at least, classifying and deciding what is 'in' or 'out' in the application of a label /name; "Yes that is also a squirrel but it's red, while that one was grey", for example. In this story we note how attention is shared, in fact how God engineers a shared focus to which Adam responds by noticing, learning and consolidating learning by naming. It's worth noticing too that from this perspective the 'naming' which is art or science is essentially the same: focus, notice similarities and differences and render them into another medium in order to think about and share learning. So, in this story shared attention really is the starting point of conscious human learning.

The sharing bit is important too.

before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”

Is that not also present in the Genesis 2 story? God's giving being and the sense of belonging engendered by the induction into a status in the garden. It's important too because language is a shared endeavour. Language is never a solo operation. Shared attention requires trust and mutual respect: we won't share attention if we sense that in doing so we are being co-opted to our detriment. There's probably a theology of advertising lurking there ...

How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete | News | The Guardian: ' via Blog this'

Cliches -have a point (sic?)

After pointing out that the philosophers of language are wrong to be looking for a simple 'answer' to the questions about how language works and means, Prof Abhijit Banerjee reckons, in relation to cliches:

 cliches are categories with a particular type of social salience. Like categories, cliches are sets of images, stories and definitions compressed into seemingly simpler concepts that are labelled by some sort of an expression.

It seems to me that 'sets' and 'compressed' are key words there. I think that he's 'naming' the phenomenon of 'clumping' as it might be referred to in educational circles. We do it all the time; we learn that certain things have certain relationships and we find that insightful enough to wish to express it briefly in order to use the new 'unit' of meaning in sentences and to co-ordinate it with other 'units'. So cliches aren't so different from words or phrases given other labels, so what makes them deserve a different signifier?

Cliches are types of categories. Or better still, cliches are categories with a particular type of social salience

This relates to the matters touched on in the Homo Loquens tag-strand of this blog which I note is about categorisation and that categories are fluid enough to be able to nest one inside another and thus the link to clumping.

The cliche, it seems to me has some kind of kinship with Foucault's 'signature' (if I understand Agamben aright) where there is a certain meaning which is transferable to different domains or fields. Cliches capture a semantic 'something' that can be found in various situations, but where at one time it was perhaps insightful, it then passed to fashionable and from there it became a formerly-fashionable-but-now-dead-metaphor. It seems to me that the opprobrium for cliches is about their failure towards the end of their llife to produce insight.

The issue, then, is twofold: whether the application of the 'semantic something' is accurate and whether it is capable of serving the needs or aspirations of the interlocutors for insight. If those things don't take place then Banerjee's concern is realised:

Bad things happen not because somebody wants bad things to happen but because we don’t do our homework. We don’t think hard enough. We’re not open minded enough

This comment helps to connect metaphor and cliche to organisational life and thus to corporisations. There are metaphors and cliches that organisations tend to use ('bottom line'? Silos?) that tend to prompt and co-ordinate or prime behaviours and may consolidate groupthink. All of these things mean that the organisation is less able as a whole to respond intelligently and adaptively because the false friends and misdirection of the internal communications produced by cliched usage hide reality and derail insight. Sometimes bad things happen as a result.

This enable us to see the value of the poets (understood broadly): they can produce a turn of phrase which can capture or frame an insight or slice of reality which displaces (or at least challenges) an tired or ill-fitting (that is cliched) one. Sometimes a truth needs poetry to clump the 'molecule' of insight together from its constituent atoms of noticed-realities and relationships.

This is part of what Dominik rightly notes: "Humanity is engaged in a neverending struggle of personal and public negotiation of concepts" though I think that struggle is over-agonistic: perhaps 'negotiation' would suit me better; there are times when it is not an adversarial matter but co-operative and reflective. That aside, the comment though, enables us to see cliches as part of culture making, perhaps representing metaphors ('memes'?) at a particular point in their life-cycle in the cultural-negotiation ecology.

Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice with metahor hacking and getting it back again | Metaphor Hacker:

Naming Shape-shifting dinosaurs

A refrain in this video is "Scientists like to name things..." It's a nice little study, at one level, in how perceptions and comparative observations interact with assumptions and reslut in naming...

Jack Horner: Shape-shifting dinosaurs | Video on TED.com

A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

I keep banging on about the importance of the fundamental insights in Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh. Well here's a nice brief article with an introduction to why I may not be wrong:

our rationality is greatly influenced by our bodies in large part via an extensive system of metaphorical thought.

A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network:

The Santiago Theory of Cognition - Fritjof Capra

When I read Varela and Maturana, I confess I didn't pick up one of the following implications. I got and affirm the idea of understanding cognition whole-organismally. I think that the Christian-Hebraic understanding of humans in a holistic way is not going to be upset by that but rather affirmed. What I missed was the thing about language:

In this new view, cognition involves the entire process of life - including perception, emotion, and behaviour - and does not necessarily require a brain and a nervous system. At the human level, however, cognition includes language, conceptual thought, and all the other attributes of human consciousness. The Santiago theory of cognition, in my view, is the first scientific theory that really overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter, and will thus have the most far-reaching implications. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories but are seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life - the process aspect and the structure aspect.

I think that seeing language in conjunction with conceptual thought etc as characteristics of human cognition is particularly interesting in the light of the way that my thinking on the basis of Adam's naming the animals passage in Genesis 2. Understanding the latter in terms of the former (to put it crudely, but I'll refine that at another point); it would put the naming of the animals as part of the creation of humanity by cuing humanity's cognitive dimension which flows into and out of the creation of humanity's social nature in the same passage (so I would also want to add that human cognition is social and not simply about a body with its emotion and behaviour.

The Santiago Theory of Cognition - Fritjof Capra:

Memory and representation

Broadly speaking this is a good corrective to the moral panic sort of stuff we've been seeing lately that this title refers to Google Is Not Making You Stupid : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR. I found myself, musing over a side-bar this time though.

We have evolved not to be representers-of-the-world, but to lock-in and keep track of where we find ourselves. We use landmarks and street signs to find our way around;

I'm not sure the two things are so far apart or even fundamentally different. Representation surely involves picking out particular features out of a large potential field of percepts and using those features in communication based on, among other things, a sense of what other people may pick out (and this is heavily influenced by culturally-driven convergences). These features are probably landmarks in the relevant communicative transactions and, by analogy, landmark-like things in other kinds of discourse. I'm hypothesising, I guess, that the psychological mechanism for using landmarks, therefore, is recycled into perception-for-communication: ie representation ....

chotomising in your head: starting to nam

Yeah, I just made up the word 'chotomising' (from 'dichotomy' -I didn't want to retain the idea of simply cutting into two; perhaps 'polychotomy' and a cognate verb might do the trick in some cases...). Any how, the main point is to highlight this research which shows that the already-established 'statistical learning' tool that we humans seem to have, is what enables the mental boundary-making which enables 'naming' to take place. See here:
Watching the world in motion, babies take a first step toward language:

"Although these babies were between just 7 and 9 months of age, they were already dividing the world into events" using the "tool" of statistical learning. "It is these events that will be named with words," she continues. "A few months later, when they can hook up words to the events they see, they will begin to use language."

This is something I'm now pondering in relation to my theology of culture work relating to the naming of the animals... obviously!

Art, spirituality and communication

The church has a convoluted relatinship with the arts. Caught between instrumentalist propaganda on the one side and a fear of unsoundness or disturbing the faithful on the other, Christian artists are easily misunderstood. And yet many of us are aware of the power of artworks to express important and transformative perspectives and insights through which God may speak and people may be edified.
Here's what one artist says:

I am at the bottom of the artistic food chain. I work alongside those who have proven their mettle – both with skill and with the merit of their idea. They leave me speechless at their fluency in those areas where I am merely learning my vocabulary.

I'm interested in that insight because it links with one of the things that I'm wrestling with in my homo loquens project: that art is one of the (admittedly more elaborate) ways that humans have of naming the animals of our experience. We don't only give words; single words are only the simplest way we have to pick out things that interest us and try to make them available to the mental gaze of others. But when we consider the way that words -singly or in conglomerations- draw attention, offer perspective, indicate evaluation and connote status, power or other relationship, then we are in a position to realise that a painting, sculpture, song or performance are involved in the same sort of thing only in more sophisticated or elaborate ways.

That noted, I was interested to read how this artist's spirituality is formed in dialogue with art and artists.

these artists, are such a crucial piece of my own spiritual formation and my own efforts to be consistent in my soul-identity. Not because we speak the same language – in fact I sometimes feel like a babbling toddler in the presence of some – but because they are not afraid to tear open the curtain on mystery and paradox.

This is, of course, just why some Christians and churches are suspicious or even hostile to the arts. The threat of awkward (but real) questions and the questioning of authority is enough to encourage Christians with interests in the status quo to stay well-clear of this potentially disturbing area of human endeavour. Perhaps the story of Vincent Van Gogh should give us pause for thought. The shame of this response on the part of Christians to the arts is the way that it witnesses to or generates or exacerbates a gap between the institutions of Church and seeking after truth and integrity. It is saddening to find that for many people who are earnestly seeking integrity and truthful expression, the church is seen to be an obstacle.

The article referenced by the hyperlink under the title asks how we can close that gap. I think that one way is to encourage two cardinal virtues in our communities of faith: one is humility and the other is valuing questions. Humility because part of the problem we have is a sense that we 'have' the truth, our attitude should rather be that the truth has us and we are in the process permanently of apprehending and integrating 'it' into our lives; we are people in process and in dialogue with The Truth. Valuing questions is related to humility: growth comes through questioning. Our questions are a sign that we are aware that we are 'on the way' (or on the Way). Our questions are also part of making sure that we are truly contextually related: in the world (even if not 'of' it). The artists' questions often pick away at cognitive dissonance, and in hearing and respecting those questions we come to know implicit questions we ourselves have but may deny. And in hearing and respecting them we can form a community of empathy with others in which we can learn together how to handle them. That is a proper 'posture' for spiritual growth and even evangelism: side by side, in community, in respect in commitment to understanding together.
This is what, I think, Paul means by language about holding onto the bonds of peace: a commitment to staying with people no matter how awkward their questions.

In defence of lists

Lots of intriguing stuff here. I'm a bit of on Eco fan; he does semiotics in a way I enjoy. Here's an interview related to his latest book The Vertigo of Lists.
SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. What attracted my attention particularly was this: "The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries."

This is one of the things I've been wrestling with in the theological reflection on language and culture based in Adam's naming the animals. It felt validating to see Eco saying something pretty much on the same wavelength.

Imagination's power

As a some-time life coach, it's intriguing to see something that has at least anecdotal evidence to support it now has a fig-leaf of scientific respectibility: "'an idea that has long been espoused by motivational speakers, sports psychologists, and John Lennon alike: The imagination has the extraordinary capacity to shape reality.'" It's about imagining yourself doing things successfully helping to improve your success rate.

I think I'd relate this to a couple of things theologically: one is the Lord's prayer, the final clause about 'not into temptation', if prayed imaginatively (as I encourage in my book on the prayer) then this would seem to indicate that it could activate a psychological mechanism which would aid the prayist -leaving aside any divine help.n So that's maybe worth considering further.

The other thing would be the connection to language and imagination borne out of reflecting on Genesis 2 and blogged elsewhere this blog ('homo loquens').

Power Of Imagination Is More Than Just A Metaphor:

If It's Hard To Say, It Must Be Risky

I can quite believe this: though it should also be said that it may seem really shallow, however it's intriguing. Write-up is here: If It's Hard To Say, It Must Be Risky Basic outcome of research is this: "...results show that people consistently classify difficult to pronounce items as risky, and this is the case for both undesirable risks (such as getting sick on a roller coaster or hazardous food additive) as well as desirable risks (such as an adventurous amusement park ride). These findings also suggest that risk perception may be influenced by the way the items are presented - if they are difficult to process (such as hard to pronounce names), they will be viewed as being inherently riskier"
I'm guessing that this is why the cleaning product formerly known as 'Jif' has for the last handful of years been promoted as 'Cif'. I'm guessing that either 'Jif' is hard to pronounce in a number of languages (and it certainly is for a number of phonological systems in the sense that the sound is not present) or the 'licit' pronunciation of the graphemes according to the local language rules results in dysphonious or downright rude results.

But I'm also thinking: does this have an angle that relates to naming the animals in Genesis 2? Is there, after all, an element of 'control' in naming; somehow naming something can have the effect of reducing the perceived risk in it? That may be a bit of a stretch in terms of the evidence here, but it would link with another piece of recent research about naming and feelings which I flagged up here a few days back.

Magicology: Casting a spell on the mind

Good to see that this is being taken seriously: for several years I've been thinking that we should be paying more attention to the mindgames that come out of the work of illusionists and mentalists. So ...Magicology: Casting a spell on the mind - life - 24 December 2008 - New Scientist: "neuroscientists and magicians have been getting together to create a science that might be called 'magicology'. If successful, both sides stand to benefit. By plundering the magicians' book of tricks, researchers hope to develop powerful new tools for probing perception and cognition. And if they find any tricks they can't explain, that could lead to new knowledge about how the brain works. Similarly, magicians hope that the collaboration will lead to new magic tricks by alerting them to perceptual or cognitive weaknesses that they didn't already know about."
And briefly, this is why it works: "in neuroscience terms, misdirection relies on the fact that the brain has a very limited supply of attention. Over the past decade or so it has become clear just how scarce attention is: focusing on one thing can make you oblivious to other things that would otherwise be obvious."
Which relates to my point (well, not mine but a point I think is important to pick up when discussing language and communication) about language having necessarily to pick out particular features of our experience/world. Language is a way of communicating the things that we attend to -that is give our attention to. It's lack of being able to say everything is not a weakness; it's a necessity. It is also what enables a lot of interesting and creative things that we value.

The Language Of Intoxication

At one level this seems obvious, but it's significant that researchers are taking the linguistic dimension of socially-related research seriously. In this case recognising that in asking about attitudes and behaviour around alcohol there are a lot of terms used colloquially for being under the influence and (natuarally) they tend to differentiate into different degrees of intoxication and -significantly- usage by gender may be misleading because there is an ideological dimension (looks a bit like 'gentlemen perspire, ladies glow', to me). The Language Of Intoxication: The Term 'Drunk' Doesn't Really Cut It Any More Here's the rub: "'Their use of 'tipsy' reflected an average of four drinks over two hours, which actually meets binge-drinking criteria for women but not men,' he said. 'Therefore, women could be binge drinking while psychologically perceiving their level of intoxication as being 'tipsy' or relatively benign, as opposed to heavier levels of intoxication that would be described with less euphemistic terms, such as 'hammered' or 'wasted.' Such a perception could potentially mislead women, for example, to feel as though they are capable of driving after drinking because they are 'only tipsy.''"
My interest, is back to the 'giving names to the animals thing', again. The way that naming still goes on, the dividing of experience into significan chunks and the influence of ideology and culture on the way that naming and paradigmatic relations pan out.

A name where there had been none

On the strenghth of this quotation from A name where there had been none | Culture Making which goes like this: "God is perfectly capable of naming every animal and giving Adam a dictionary—but he does not. He makes room for Adam’s creativity—not just waiting for Adam to give a pre-existing right answer to a quiz, but genuinely allowing Adam to be the one who speaks something out of nothing, a name where there had been none, and allowing that name to have its own being.
—Culture Making, p.109"
I moved the book from my pending file to ordered: it puts well the kind of thing I've been developing under the tag 'homo_loquens' ... and actually written some papers about. Time to dust 'em off, perhaps and head for publication if it's not too late.

Psychological priming

This, it seems to me, relates to what elsewhere I refer to under the term 'mimesis' (probably I've broadened the scope of the term). Here's an insight into the significance from Edge: EDGE MASTER CLASS 2008—CLASS 4: "... people are responding to the symbolic representation, in a way as if it were the real thing. It goes on from there. I'll now give you a few more examples. That's called a priming paradigm. But the word 'priming' in this context is like priming a pump, and you'll see it the most clearly in the case of recognizing a word that is presented. You are primed, you are ready, to recognize that word; more ready than you are to recognize other words."
It's fascinating and important to understand for reasons of realising how priming predisposes us to certain ways of reacting (and in a sense we see that underlying the temptation story in Genesis) and also demonstrates the way that language is rooted in our bodily -neurosomatic- experience/being.

Homo Creator

Interesting little post from Maggi Dawn. maggi dawn: "Only God can create ex nihilo, but our creative powers go far beyond simply reproducing or rearrainging what was there before". Nice quote from Schillebeekx to support.

Bonobos May Have Greater Linguistic Skills Than Previously Thought

I'm still reflecting on the significance of this, but I think that it is important. I suspect over the next year or so, there will be further thoughts from various quarters. See the whole report here: Bonobos May Have Greater Linguistic Skills Than Previously Thought. The guts of the resulsts seem to be these:

After applying conversational analysis tools, Pedersen asserted that language is more than the simple act of transferring information, but a conversational interaction between active participants. Language-competent bonobos use lexigrams, which are made up of arbitrary symbols that represent words, as the basis for conversations with humans. Pedersen said linguistic aspects of the conversation included turn taking, negotiation, pauses and repetition, and went far beyond information sharing made possible through the use of lexigrams symbols.

Preliminary thoughts on my part: it seems to be that if there is the ability to use symbols and to form the idea of exchanging information, then turn-taking strategies are a natural outcome; so I'm not sure about how significant that is. I have a question about how far forward this takes us: it is already known that apes can use symbols if taught them, however it seems that they don't develop or 'get' syntax. So simple symbolising has an intrinsic entail of communication and it would be mere 'mechanics' to develop strategies of turn taking in exchanging symbols. I want to see more evidence about syntax and more complex semantics such as are developed in cultural exchanges. I think.

Incidently, as someone who is comfortable, theologically, with evolution as a mechanism/entail of creation, I don't really have a problem with linguistic abilities in other animals; in fact I would expect it to some degree. It's part of the implication, symbolically and theologically, of creating Adam from the dust of the earth.

Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

Now this is a useful little article: Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags it explores briefly what is involved in categorisation and the technology-enabled emerging alternative, tagging. What I'm interested in is the theological link to my biblical theme of the moment, the naming of the animals and the theological/philosophical reflections arising from that. But I'm also interested in the way that it begins to change the way we think; to shift culture. Here's what I think is really important in the article in this respect:

Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's view of the world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.
The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.

Babies, memory, categorising and 'chunking'

Interesting research just published (mentioned in New Scientist): "Babies also remember only three things at a time, and they get past the limitation by categorising.". The 'alo' refers to the general human capacity. Which indicates that our memory is not about dloping brains but about developing thinking tools and skills. Another blow to genius. Needless to say, this fits with the insights about the importance of 'chunking' in learning and I'm adding it to my ongoing theological reflection relating to the importnace of 'naming' for human culture and development (see 'homo loquens' tag).

Towards a theological reflection on language and linguistics

An attempt to reflect on the fact of language in the light of Genesis 1 & 2


Introduction:
My first degree is in Linguistics (otherwise known as linguistic science) and I have read a number of books in the intervening years that attempt to bring together linguistics and theology. Either they have been mostly about how linguistics can help textual studies or understanding some elements of background to biblical or even doctrinal investigations or they have been very much focussed on the philosophy of language in order to inform hermeneutics and enquiries related to metaphorical and analogical matters in relation to God-talk. All of those things are important, and interesting, but not what I was really looking for.
What I was looking for was a theology of language rather than theology with language or theology via language. What I have been seeking to do is to address the perceived lack and reflect theologically on the phenomenon of human language from the perspective of one formed by the discipline of linguistic science. The framework for this reflection is the pastoral cycle, a major tool of reflection in practical theology which sketches out the main aspects of reflective thinking and practice and so gives structure to the reflective process.
This reflection I see as a kind of dialogue between the characteristics of language in my analysis so far, and some apparently key and certainly intriguing passages in Genesis 1-12. This approach would correspond to Green's 'intuition'1 on the reflection epicycle.

1 experience
Quite simply the experience is of conducting much life in and through the medium of English but also of using other languages from time to time and finding interesting questions about the structure of speech sounds, syntactical relationships, linguistic variation in respect of social and psychological matters and how the human condition is reflected in and refracted through language. There are, then, two main facets of the experience for me.
1.1 human language
Is fairly unique as far as we can tell. The claims about teaching other primates to use sign language are contested in regard to whether they are actually using grammar or merely isolated vocabules in sequence. Being part of linguistic communities is basic: no community, no language.
1.2 linguistic science
is simply the attempt to study the phenomenon of language systematically, descriptively (as opposed to proscriptively: beware grammar marms!) and with a view to formulating testable hypotheses.

2 analysis
In this section I will mention the main characteristics of human language as they appear to me from my experience. These are the communal nature of language, it finiteness, its assimilation to and disclosure of human power, solidarity and identity, and that it is rule-based and generative.

2.1 communal
The only examples of languages which have only one speaker are those shortly to be dead languages or artificial languages. In the former case a linguistic community once did exist. In the latter it exists in the imagination of the author (Sindarin or Quenya might be cited here and Esperanto when first devised). Language is a communal possession: it belongs to a speech community who negotiate it tacitly in usage and sometimes explicitly in arguments or observations about habits or differences of speech.

2.2 Finite and focal
However big a word count a language can muster, it is still a finite number, and a smaller number of words that will be in active regular usage. Finiteness means it is partial, connotative and unstable. Focal means that as a finite tool it brings things into focus, excluding others thereby from topicality.

2.2.1 partial
Language is partial in that it is constrained to draw attention to some things. It cannot refer to everything. And even what it does focus on can only be partially described by picking out salient features of perceived reality while leaving others assumed and unstated. This is an important feature to note because some theological positions assume that the partialness of language implies an imperfection that would not be part of Eschatological reality. I doubt this -as will be seen below.

2.2.2 connotative
Because it is partial, language -indeed any sign system, also tends to invest its components with a penumbra of connoted meanings: things that may be implied or implicated, associations. These meanings are often very influential but unnoticed consciously.
2.2.3 unstable
By virtue of a vocal tract operated by fatigue-prone musculature in a frequently sub-optimal environment relying on 'receiving equipment' of variable quality, language changes. By virtue of facing novel dimensions of human experience (at least existentially), language changes. By virtue of artistry, fashion and the felt need to stake out identities, language changes. It is unstable.

2.3 interacts with power, solidarity, identity etc
Language use can identify one as belonging to certain groups, it can use the connotative meanings of, for example, accent to intimidate or to welcome. Vocabulary can be used to include or exclude. Syntax can slow others' apprehension down.

2.3.1 moral dimensions
Therefore, language has implication for ethics and politics as well as for the simple tasks of daily getting on with others, remember James' “taming the tongue”.

2.4 structured, rule-based and generative
Despite being finite, the range of possible meaningful sentences is infinite. Many rules of grammar are potentially recursive. Language then, is creative in offering the potential to use limited means to produce many distinct ends.

3 reflection
The things mentioned in the foregoing analysis section are fairly basic observations about language within linguistic science. What follows is to bring those observations into reflection on Genesis 1 and 2 and in particular the acts of creation and naming. For the sake of brevity I am not going to include further reflections on the temptation story and the Tower of Babel story.

3.1 Things I notice in the texts as a linguist
First of all let's look at Gen1.1-5. How should we understand the relationship between 'God created' and 'Let there be light'. In short, I'm taking it that "Let there be light" is to be understood as an act beginning to bring the formlessness and void to order. So we have an act of performative language bringing about what is spoken. Then we have acts of naming of what has been brought about.

3.1.1 God speaking
I don't read Genesis 1 as literal history, but it is interesting and important to start within the framework of the story. So I find myself wondering as a linguistic scientist: what 'said' can mean without mouth to speak; what medium the signal is supposed to be carried through; what linguistic community is implied? Now, there is an important sense in which these questions are simply 'wrong'. They are asking things that are beyond the purview of the story, particularly if it is not a literal story. (Of course, if it were taken to be a literal story, then the difficulty in coming up with sensible answers to these questions would tell against treating the story as being of a literal kind of genre). But let's stay with it for just a while longer.

"Said" seems to entail 'imagining' God -for the purposes of the narrative- as having a vocal tract and to be functioning within a medium capable of carrying sound. In other words the picture is literally contradictory to the rest of the narrative by envisaging it taking place in the world that is still to be created. So what are we to make of this? It does play into the later stories which see God walking around and in anthropomorphic terms. If we leave aside the anthropomorphisms or rather, if we seek to find in them pointers to non-literal meanings or ideas about God (as all religious language must do, it's just that this is 'cruder' than we usually play with), then what could we say; how could it help us to understand God and the world better?

The question may be better taken as why it is presented as a speech-act and not, say, as a feat of engineering, or manual labour. Maybe because light is 'ethereal', though that would not hold for the subsequent acts of speeched shaping. I'm going to suggest that the important thing about it may be that speech and words, hint at mind in a way that other kinds of actions do not. Speech is used among humans mostly for 'mind reading', so speaking is more closely associated with 'what's on your mind'. There's a closer relationship between intention and expression; less room for recalcitrance on the part of what is being 'performed upon'. For many people there is a close relationship between language and thought because much thought is mediated and processed in language.

Therefore, this "Let there be..." is both relatively effortless and hints at a very close connection to the mind of God. Here we do not have the effortful and violent myths of other cultures' creation stories with a gods having to make do with something that is being recycled from the body of an opponent, for example. Rather we have a clear expression of God's mind which can truly be called "good"2.

3.1.2 God naming
Let's now move on to the next part.

And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Gen1.4-5

Here we have God portrayed as naming "day" and "night". Again, I don't think that it is very useful to ask what language3; the point is the act of naming not the phonemes.

It does seem to me that portraying God as naming tells us that God affirms language. There are those who, aware of the limitations of language which hermeneutics rubs our noses in, view language as necessarily imperfect and therefore as a condition of fallen human existence to be overcome and removed in the Age to come. I see in this part of the passage a hint that language is part of God's purposes and is not necessarily allied with the fall. Of course it must partake of the fall, but hermeneutics is not a science that must disappear in the new heavens and the new earth4.

The fact of God naming gives a legitimacy to the endeavour of language. The tasks of recognising similarities and differences and creating or refining semantic fields, of creating symbols to carry ideas, concepts and emotions between minds is a god-imaging task. In this passage we see God recognising reality and representing it in some way symbolically. To be sure it is tied to finiteness, createdness. But it is not thereby ungodly.

But it should be noted that the finitude is part of the point of language. It selects or highlights certain things about what we are aware of and leaves so many other things unlabelled, unsaid because they are not the focus. We can either assume others know them already or that they are not sufficiently important to name at that point for the purposes of communication then and there. God creates something finite, bounded, and immediately it is capable of being symbolised. Yes, God knows with total immediacy every quark, molecule, energetic trajectory, cell, planet and galaxy, but to recognise boundaries, differences and similarities, is to do something more than 'merely' be aware of all and each. Recognition opens up into seeing finite things in themselves and in relationship, and that in turn opens into the possibility of representation in symbol.

I'm not convinced by the idea that language in this passage shows in some way power over things. To me it seems that it is more akin to God seeing that what is, is good. It is about recognising the way things are, understanding them to some degree, seeing them in relationship, affirming them. It is first an act of contemplation, even of thanksgiving-in-embryo and then it is a calling to focus for others. Far from being a sign of fallenness, language is other-oriented of necessity in two dimensions: the signified is other and the receiver is other. Language represents an attempt to transcend the self; it is grounded in an agapeic movement.

3.1.3 God's self-talk
Verses 26-28 is the first time reader-wise that God is portrayed as talking to godself. A first-person "Let us..." instead of "Let there be ..." and similar third-person phrases. I can't help feeling that this is significant. Significant too that these are phrases not aiming to inform or describe but to accomplish things, underlining the apprehension that speaking is not just, or even primarily, about the modernist norm of reasoning.

Language really implies community. We don't learn to speak unless there is a language community to learn from and with. Language is a collective possession belonging to all who use it [notwithstanding the attempts to police it by the grammar-marms and 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells']. So, though I know it's exegetically perilous, I can't help seeing a plurality implied in God being portrayed as speaking; it's not a royal 'we', its a simple recognition of a linguistic community. And it seems to imply that the communicative community that is God is being widened to include humans. Especially as God goes on to instruct the newly-formed divine-image bearers directly: second-personwise.

So it also seems to me interesting that the divine image seems to be associated with communication and therefore personal relationality. So to me, it doesn't seem at all far-fetched to find here a hint at personal relationality and community 'in' God. And it seems to me that we have the embryo of human beings being invited to share in the divine community-life.

'Ruling over' the earth and 'subduing' it, seems to imply that being included in God's [speech-]community brings with it a share in God's privilege of ruling, and naming things may be a key aspect of how to understand ruling and subduing.

3.1.4 Adam's act of naming
We turn next to Genesis 2:19-20a. It is this naming by Adam that seems to be the most fascinating. And again, it doesn't seem to me to be about taking power over. It seems, rather to be more of a contemplative act. Perhaps more than contemplative: an act of understanding, of taxonomy; and act of seeing in connection with other things and in differentiation. In actual fact, in doing this we seem to have a parallel to God's acts of naming in Genesis one.

Of course, the difficulty we have with that is that it is almost certain that chapter one has a different origin to that of chapter two. However, we may want to ask further questions of potential intertextual histories, but I don't want to hang around that issue here; merely note that I think that perhaps this theological similarity may indicate that there is one.

It is interesting how this naming is presented. It is not something that Adam snatches at while God isn't looking, it is not an act of fallen humanity [though it is intriguingly bracketed by things that later contribute to the fall]. Rather it is an act which God engineers by bringing before Adam what is to be named. And although it is in the passive, there is more than a hint of Divine endorsement in "that was its name". It is as if God is giving Adam -that is humankind- the freedom to make connections and discoveries, taxonomies and poetries. In short, it seems to me, it is implied in this little scene that God opens up a space for human culture to evolve with some degree of freedom from God. God is not creating a Divinely-sanctioned Borg collective where individuality is effectively erased and cultural development is only permitted along certain very tightly constrained lines. No, Adam can make names, give names and those names stand. Humans can contemplate the world, explore its nature, its components and its 'inter-ousiality' and assign signs and codes to think further and together about it and that sign-empowered marshalling of thinking understanding and celebrating is allowed to stand; it is accepted by God. God seems to want to see what we will make of the Creation, how we will understand it and wonder at it and how we will speak of it. And when I write 'speak', I mean to include the languages of the arts as well as the more 'scientific' or formal linguistic registers.

It seems to me that this basically favours a constructivist approach to learning. Not a strong variety where there is no objective reality and we entirely construct our own world, but a moderate version which accepts the [God-] givenness of the world but sees God as leaving room for us to see what we make of it and be creative with what we discover and how we 'taxonymise' it. This contrasts with a strong sovereignty view of God, such as that which seems to be implied in the Qur'an,5 which seems to minimise human creativity and responsiveness. The Qur'an seems to imply that language is God's and the implication for us would be to relearn those original names with all that implies for conforming to particular ways of taxonymising and cultural understanding.
This has important consequences for theology of mission, culture, science and education.

3.2 language and the image of God
Linguist Mark C Baker writes6:
In the Judeo-Christian scriptures language is, then, a property of humankind by virtue of the fact that God creates humans "in his own image" (Gen. 1:27). All other animals are called forth out of the ground, implying that they have a physical nature and are subject to the same physical principles as inanimate matter 9Gen. 1:24). The creation of humanity, however, has a second step: 'The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being" (Gen. 2:7). In other words, humanity is given a spiritual nature that is specifically said to be parallel in many respects to God's. Among other things, this means that since God is a linguistic being, so are humans.
Is God really a linguistic being? I have trouble with saying that God is a linguistic being. The text of Gen 1-3 does present God speechfully including the “let us” passage mentioned above. But it would be going too far to claim that this was more than anthropomorphism. When we reflect on the nature of language, we understand why: language necessarily involves partialness as we select topics and ignore -or leave assumed- other things. Language is, of necessity, tied up with the work of dividing up and demarcating creation. So to say that God is a linguistic being is problematic: are we really saying God talks to Godself in Gods own inner being? Let's further reflect that God has no vocal tract (except in incarnation) and presumably no barriers between the persons of the Trinity to full disclosure and therefore no need for the partialness of speech.
Yet clearly God condescends to communicate in some way corresponding to verbally with Adam. So perhaps it is not that God is linguistic so much as God is communicative and language is a chief means to communicate in a context involving finitude both of environment and of agents? Being communicative is an aspect of loving: it is going out to the other, touching the other, overcoming the separation. Perhaps we can see language at its best as a reflection of the Divine perichoresis. Language images God in terms of finitude and biologically-emergent matter, not only in terms of communicativeness, but also and relatedly in terms of socialness, for language is a community affair.
So the implications of language for thinking about the image of God seem to devolve to being particular cases of the general issues which come to a head in incarnation and ascension.

4 planning
At this point I have not explored the planning phase of the cycle. So Let me outline the work still to be done. Further reflection on passages from Genesis 1-12, particularly the temptation narrative and the Tower of Babel and its precursor. There is more to be said about constructivism particularly in relation to education and via semiotics about culture and the arts. In turn it may be that this should be related to the New Jerusalem and an eschatological account. There is also some exploration due of the way that language's implication in incarnation may be thought about further.

notes
1 Buckley & Green, Let's do Theology
2 There is an ideological dimension here that need not detain us now as it is covered in other reflections on the history and meaning of this passage.
3 . It happens here to be in English translated from Hebrew -which is the original language of the text as we now have it. However, it would seem that the Hebrews picked up what we know as 'Hebrew' from the Canaanites, having presumably spoken Aramaic in patriarchal times.
4 There is a helpful treatment of this issue in Smith, 2000.
5 “Allah taught Adam all the names of everything”, Q.2.31
6 Baker, p.512

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