Page 60 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

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38 Vladimir Zegarac

thing which has been designed and produced with a specific purpose in mind.
However, what makes it a cultural thing is the existence of widespread and
stable beliefs about (mental representations of) it, rather than the fact that it has
been consciously designed and produced. It should also be noted that, when
a mental representation of a psychological phenomenon, say, the emotional ex-
perience of anger, is metarepresented – in other words, when the representation
of the direct experience of this emotion is made the object of some beliefs (such
as: [this] is the way one feels when something unpleasant one does not want to
happen happens, although its occurrence could/should have been avoided) – the
direct emotional experience of anger becomes “visible” to the mind, and, there-
fore, available for symbolic representation and communication. In sum: the
metarepresentational capacity is the human mind’s capacity to think about itself
and it is the biological prerequisite for the emergence of cultural categories.
Some important differences between the communicative behaviour of
people and animals suggest that the metarepresentational capacity is unique to
humans. For example, it is often observed that animals engage in complex forms
of social behaviour: bees pass on to other bees information about the location of
pollen-rich fields and lions hunt in groups by ambushing their prey. But a bee
which “reads” another bee’s dance gets the information content directly, as it
were, without making the dance or its information content the object of beliefs
(see von Frisch 1967). To give another example, we can realistically imagine a
group of lions preparing for the hunt by taking positions through monitoring
each other’s movements and coordinating their actions in remarkably complex
ways. However, the idea of lions planning the hunt by drawing lines in the sand
and indicating with pebbles their respective positions relative to their prey is
rather far-fetched. The ability to do this would involve the lions making repre-
sentations such as: A is a pebble, the object of beliefs, such as: A is a pebble
which represents that antelope over there that we could hunt down. But lions,
bees and other animals do not have the metarepresentational capacity (i.e. the
capacity to form beliefs about mental representations). That is why they are not
capable of reasoning feats which even young children find easy and intuitive, or
of the type of symbolic communication that comes naturally to humans. (This
account of the role of metarepresentations in explaining culture simplifies
greatly. For a more detailed discussion, see articles in Sperber 1996, 2000.)
While the metarepresentational capacity provides the basis for explaining
our ability to think about our own and other people’s minds and for the possi-
bility of symbolic action, the theory of culture needs to explain how particular
cultural representations emerge and spread. For example, we ought to be able to
give an account of the way small wedge-shaped objects come to be thought of as
doorstops, or how a given symbol, such as the expression “special things” in (1),
comes to denote different sets of objects in different societies. In a series of pub-
lications Dan Sperber (see Sperber 1985, 1996) has developed the idea that ex-