Language and thought as complex adaptive systems

Along the lines of the complex adaptive systems we call humans, this piece from embodied cognitive scientist Mark Turner notes the immense complexity involved in language and thought. The more complex the system, the more can go wrong. Constant vigilance required. And yet we do manage to think and communicate, sort of. (And another resource is this free e-book, Cultural Conceptualizations and Language. See particularly Chapters 2.3 and 3.1.)

"A substantive answer to this question would be very long because it would be a theory of the evolution of conceptual structures and linguistic forms. Such a theory would be highly complicated since human thought and language arise through the interaction of several complex adaptive systems, including biota (all living things through all time; a unit is a gene pool and all its ancestor gene pools); a given gene pool (a unit is a gene); all conceptual systems in all individuals over all time; a conceptual system shared by a community, and all the conceptual systems that are ancestors of that conceptual system; a conceptual system within a single individual, and all the conceptual systems that were, in the individual, ancestors of the current conceptual system; human language, all of it, over all historical time; a human language shared by a linguistic community and all the diachronic linguistic structures that are ancestors of that language; and a human language, in an individual, and all the linguistic systems that were, in the individual, ancestors of that current linguistic system.

"This list, already paralyzing in its complexity, is actually more complex, since its elements overlap and interact. Modeling thought and language (and therefore thought and language that feel "figurative") involves modeling its interacting complex adaptive systems. The network model is only a modest gesture in this direction. In it, existing conceptual and formal elements and their pairings are inputs to an operation of integration that is selective and that results in emergent structure. Outputs of integration can become inputs to integration. The result is pathwise development of a system in which elements stand in relation to other elements. What can arise in the system at any moment in its evolution depends on what has already arisen that survives. The system is dynamic; it never stands still."