Tomasello (1999) begins his examination of The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition with a quotation from Peirce: ‘all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals’ (EP1:369). Although it is always the first person speaking, yet a whole history speaks through that voice. One example: precursors of Tomasello’s central ideas can be found in Merleau-Ponty (1964), ‘The Child’s Relations with Others.’ – Yet Tomasello does not cite Merleau-Ponty; nor is there any reason why he should. The deeper an idea, the more primary and pervasive it is, the less we are able to locate its origin. Indeed it is ‘easily traced back to almost any desired antiquity’ (Peirce again).
Like any text (or any life), Turning Signs is woven out of path-crossings; like any conscientious researcher, i’ve done my best to point toward some of the paths i’ve crossed with other authors. Wherever i have drawn upon specific “sources,” i’ve documented them in the parenthetical way standard in the sciences of the time. But the more pervasive an idea becomes in one’s thinking and reading, the less point there is in citing “sources” for it.
Some of my “sources” may go uncited simply because their thoughts have sunk so deeply into mine that i can no longer trace them. However, all the sources of which i have been conscious during the writing are listed in the reference list at the back of the book. (The quote marks around “sources” are reminders that a text like this one is not and cannot be assembled from others, any more than your body is assembled from preexisting parts. Rather, each quotation or reference marks a point where another line of thought has crossed paths with this one. (‘Strictly speaking, every word in the book should be in quotation marks’ (Gregory Bateson (1979, 108)).))
Long after inserting this Bateson quote into my draft, i found what amounts to an explanation of it by Michael Polanyi. As he explains it, using quotation marks in this way calls the usage of the word thus marked into question.
We may place a word in quotation marks, while using language confidently through the rest of the sentence. But the questioning of each word in turn would never question all at the same time. Accordingly, it would never reveal a comprehensive error which underlies our entire descriptive idiom. We can of course write down a text and withdraw our confidence from all its words simultaneously, by putting each descriptive word between quotation marks. But then none of the words would mean anything and the whole text would be meaningless.
— Polanyi (1962, 251)
More generally: there is no belief that can’t be questioned, but in practice you can only question one at a time, because the questioning process itself requires the rest of your belief system to function implicitly.