1 Bridges to history: biomechanical constraints in language Stephen J. Cowley Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Bradford, United Kingdom & School of Psychology, University of Natal, Durban, South Africa 1 Learning to talk What Wittgenstein calls (1958, S: 242) ‘agreement in judgements’ are necessary to learning to talk. By coming to act consistently with such agreements, babies develop biomechanical constraints necessary to encultured life. Although grooming (e.g. Hinde, 1983; Dunbar, 1993) shows many primates consistently assess status, kinship, what it is allowed and so on, they do so independently of local behavioural dispositions or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1971; 1991). Human perceptual ecology, by contrast, is irreducibly historical. As infants get caught up in a matrix of conduct, by the fourth month, they begin to participate in culturally appropriate activity. Using primate biology, they find themselves adapting to historically-derived practices. Below, I argue that these capacities for consistent behaviour enable babies to enter history. As Wittgenstein stressed (ibid.), there is something distinctly odd about capacities that enable us to reach agreement about what it is that is judged. To show how we enter history, I focus on a 14 week old who does what her mother wants. In so doing, I take an inclusive view of culture that brings out how ‘meaningful’ behavioural patterns permeate the child. To act as the mother wants, I argue is a culturally-based judgement. Since it defies classic nativist or empiricist explanation, I advocate a ‘distributed’ view. This enables me to stress that phylogenetic and ontogenetic history allows the infant to exploit two brains. At three months, ‘dual control’ provides babies and caregivers with a new way of contextualizing. Thanks to something like the motivational/ affective systems posited by Trevarthen and colleagues (e.g. Trevarthen, 1979; 1998; Trevarthen et al., 1999), infants are prompted, at times, to act appropriately. Biomechanical constraints thus develop in their interests and allow them to meet and, later, anticipate social expectations. Finally, I suggest that required motivational/affective systems derive from selection pressures on an infant–in-a-niche (Laland et al., 2000). Their primate equivalents may have changed as, in pre-historical time, caregiver activity became a cognitive resource. Today, the systems ensure new-borns act as if knowing that social life was shaped around talk. By 14 weeks, social biases and associative learning allow behaviour consistent with historically-based judgements. As culture is implanted, infants learn to contextualize, and by the end of the first year act in ways that can be analysed in terms of sounds, acts and goals. For Western adults, they speak ‘first words’. The social life of babies Behaviourism, genetic epistemology, information-processing and activity theory all examine how babies learn. The theories, however, downplay early social life. Rather than ask how culture permeates babies, they are presented as coming to know and/or learning about ‘the world’. 1 This paper was written at and supported by the University of Natal. Apart from providing funding, this was an enthusiastic research environment driven by the theoretical discussions of the mind AND world group. Since the principal author is now based in the UK, correspondence should be addressed to: <S.J.Cowley@bradford.ac.uk>