2.2.4) Differance as Supplement 246 2.3) Anti-logics 248 2.3.1) Argumentative Incompatibility 249 2.3.2) Counter-Finality 250 2.3.3) Performative ...

This is the first of the two volumes the second volume being Thomas Ballmer s Biological Foundations of Linguistic Communication (P&B III:7) treating ...

"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years (...) later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION INTELLIGIBLE AND RESPONSIBLE TALK ABOUT GOD How can we speak intelligibly and responsibly about God? This question poses one of the most ...

This third Companion To Ancient Thought is devoted to ancient theories of language. The chapters range over more than eight hundred years of philosophical enquiry, and provide critical analyses of all the principal accounts of how it is that language can have meaning and how we can come to acquire linguistic understanding. The discussions move from the naturalism examined in Plato's Cratylus to the sophisticated theories of the Hellenistic schools and the work of St Augustine. The relations between thought about (...) language and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and the development of grammar are also explored. (shrink)

This collection of previously unpublished essays presents a new approach to the history of analytic philosophy--one that does not assume at the outset a general characterization of the distinguishing elements of the analytic tradition. Drawing together a venerable group of contributors, including John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, this volume explores the historical contexts in which analytic philosophers have worked, revealing multiple discontinuities and misunderstandings as well as a complex interaction between science and philosophical reflection.

The focus of this volume is the crisis of the traditional view of the relationship between words and things and the emergence of linguistic arbitrarism in 17th ...

This is an anthology of landmark essays in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and cognitive science since 1950.

Many people find themselves dissatisfied with recent linguistic philosophy, and yet know that language has always mattered deeply to philosophy and must in some sense continue to do so. Ian Hacking considers here some dozen case studies in the history of philosophy to show the different ways in which language has been important, and the consequences for the development of the subject. There are chapters on, among others, Hobbes, Berkeley, Russell, Ayer, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Feyerabend and Davidson. Dr Hacking (...) ends by speculating about the directions in which philosophy and the study of language seem likely to go. The book will provide students with a stimulating, broad survey of problems in the theory of meaning and the development of philosophy, particularly in this century. The topics treated in the philosophy of language are among the central, current concerns of philosophers, and the historical framework makes it possible to introduce concretely and intelligibly all the main theoretical issues. (shrink)

Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express viewpoints rich in sentiment with concision, sharpness and humour. Creative irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this paper we look at one commonly used framing device for linguistic irony—the simile—to show how even the most creative uses of irony are often marked in (...) ways that make them computationally feasible to detect. We conduct a very large corpus analysis of web-harvested similes to identify the most interesting characteristics of ironic comparisons, and provide an empirical evaluation of a new algorithm for separating ironic from non-ironic similes. (shrink)

How did the concept of language come to dominate modern intellectual history? In Language Alone , Geoffrey Galt Harpham provides at once the most comprehensive survey and most telling critique of the pervasive role of language in modern thought. He shows how thinkers in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and literary theory have made progress by referring their most difficult theoretical problems to what they presumed were the facts of language. Through a provocative reassessment of major thinkers on (...) the idea of language-Saussure, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Rorty, and Chomsky, among them-and detailed accounts of the discourses of ethics and ideology in particular, Harpham demonstrates a remarkable consensus among intellectuals of the past century and beyond that philosophical and other problems can best be understood as linguistic problems. And furthermore, that a science of language can therefore illuminate them. Conspicuously absent from this consensus, he shows, is any consideration of contemporary linguistics, or any awareness of the growing agreement among linguists that the nature of language as such cannot be known. Ultimately, Harpham argues, the thought of language has dominated modern intellectual history because of its singular capacity to serve as a proxy for a host of concerns, questions, and anxieties-our place in the order of things, our rights and obligations, our nature or essence-that resist a strictly rational formulation. Language Alone will interest literary critics, philosophers, and anyone with an interest in the uses of language in contemporary thought. (shrink)

Several intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions amongst properties, current in the literature, are discussed and contrasted. The proponents of such distinctions tend to present them as competing, but it is suggested here that at least three of the relevant distinctions (including here that between non-relational and relational properties) arise out of separate perfectly legitimate intuitive considerations: though of course different proposed explications of the informal distinctions involved in any one case may well conflict. Special attention is paid to the question of whether a (...) single notion of property is capable of supporting the various distinctions. (shrink)

This paper explores speakers'' epistemic access to the semanticand syntactic features of sentences of their language. I argue that there is evidence that ceteris paribus, the actual semantic features of sentences of a language are accessible as such by typical speakers of that language.I then explore various linguistic, cognitive, and epistemic consequences of this position.

The connection between the probabilities of conditionals and the corresponding conditional probabilities has long been explored in the philosophical literature, but its implementation faces both technical obstacles and objections on empirical grounds. In this paper I ?rst outline the motivation for the probabilistic turn and Lewis’ triviality results, which stand in the way of what would seem to be its most straightforward implementation. I then focus on Richard Jeffrey’s ’random-variable’ approach, which circumvents these problems by giving up the notion that (...) conditionals denote propositions in the usual sense. Even so, however, the random-variable approach makes counterintuitive predictions in simple cases of embedded conditionals. I propose to address this problem by enriching the model with an explicit representation of causal dependencies. The addition of such causal information not only remedies the shortcomings of Jeffrey’s conditional, but also opens up the possibility of a uni?ed probabilistic account of indicative and counterfactual conditionals. (shrink)

There has been a long-standing dispute in the philosophical literature about the conditions under which a behavior counts as 'intentional.' Much of the debate turns on questions about the use of certain words and phrases in ordinary language. The present paper investigates these questions empirically, using experimental techniques to investigate people's use of the relevant words and phrases. g.

Abstract: Chomsky (1986) has claimed that the prima facie incompatibility between descriptive linguistics and semantic externalism proves that an externalist semantics is impossible. Although it is true that a strong form of externalism does not cohere with descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistic theory can unify the two approaches. The resulting two-level theory reconciles descriptivism, mentalism, and externalism by construing community languages as a function of social identification. This approach allows a fresh look at names and definite descriptions while also responding to Chomsky's (...) (1993, 1995) challenge to articulate an externalist theory of meaning that can be used in the scientific investigation of language. (shrink)

TALKING HEADS synthesizes the views and works of a breathtaking range of the most influential modern theorists of the humanities and social sciences.

INTRODUCTION The title of this book is inspired by Jacques Derrida and the title of one of his works, The Margins of Philosophy. This work introduced me to ...

The work which this author planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, is unfinished.

In this book Christopher Norris develops the case for scientific realism by tackling various adversary arguments from a range of anti-realist positions. Through a close critical reading he shows how they fail to make adequate sense on any rational, consistent and scientifically informed survey of the evidence. Along the way he incorporates a number of detailed case-studies from the history and philosophy of science. Norris devotes much of his discussion to some of the most prominent and widely influential source-texts of (...) anti-realism. Also included are the sophisticated versions of verificationism developed by thinkers such as Michael Dummett and Bas van Fraassen. Central to Norris's argument is a prolonged engagement with the once highly influential but nowadays neglected work of Norwood Russell Hanson. This book will be welcomed especially by readers who possess some knowledge of the background debate and who wish to deepen and extend their understanding of these issues beyond an introductory level. (shrink)

Mallarmes madness * You think I'm mad? Someday I'll explain to you that my madness lies elsewhere. Mallarme to H. Cazalis, Mallarme inaugurates: the first ...

Professor Hilary Putnam has been one of the most influential and sharply original of recent American philosophers in a whole range of fields. His most important published work is collected here, together with several new and substantial studies, in two volumes. The first deals with the philosophy of mathematics and of science and the nature of philosophical and scientific enquiry; the second deals with the philosophy of language and mind. Volume one is now issued in a new edition, including an (...) essay on the philosophy of logic first published in 1971. (shrink)

Professor Steiner addresses the debate between deconstructionism - the 'anarchic' tendency to suppose that 'there are no rational or falsifiable decision-procedures as between a multitude of differing interpretations' of literature - and the established tradition of liberal criticism, which interprets by consensus, by common sense, and by 'a robust and fertile pragmatism'. He argues that if the acts of reading and of aesthetic judgement are to become responsible again to the vital mystery of literature and the arts they must transcend (...) the merely linguistic and pragmatic, and that the first move in this process is one towards the ethical, towards a 'courtesy of heart, not decorous or civil, but inward and moral'. The second, and radical, move is one towards the theological implications of the concepts of meaning and of understanding; it is these, Professor Steiner maintains, which much of modern aesthetics and epistemology have sought to conceal. (shrink)

Syntactic and semantic theories of quantificational phenomena traditionally treat all noun phrases alike, thus predicting that noun phrases exhibit a uniform behavior. It is well-known that this is an idealization: in any given case, some noun phrases will support a desired reading more readily than others. Anyone who has lectured on quantifier scope ambiguities to a class of unbrainwashed undergraduates will recall the amount of preparation time that goes into coming up with two or three examples that the class will (...) judge to be ambiguous in exactly the ways the theory under discussion predicts. The same experience with ``good citizens'' and ``bad citizens'' repeats itself in connection with branching, anaphora, distributive versus collective readings, extraction, event quantification, pair-list questions, and so on. (shrink)

This article shows how attention to extended metaphors provides the basis for a substantive account of what it is to understand a metaphor. Offering an analysis of extended metaphors modeled on an analysis of co-referential anaphoric chains, this article presents an account of how contexts makes metaphors. The analysis introduces the concept of expressive commitment, commitment to the viability and value of particular modes of discourse. Unlike literal interpretation, metaphorical interpretation puts the expressive commitment in the forefront of the interpretive (...) process. The analogy between extended metaphors and anaphora provides a structure for describing what it is to interpret expressions metaphorically. It generates an account that explains the affinities and differences between extension and explication, and hence of the age-old problem of paraphrase. Further, the account allows for the open-endedness of metaphor without succumbing to the view that metaphor is non-cognitive. Finally, the account developed here underscores the role of expressive commitment in metaphorical interpretation. (shrink)

Words, Ideas, and Things I. Introduction When we first learn to speak and to understand, we are surrounded by people who make noises and also by a great ...

The late 20th century saw great movement in the philosophy of language, often critical of the fathers of the subject-Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russell-but sometimes supportive of (or even defensive about) the work of the fathers. Howard Wettstein's sympathies lie with the critics. But he says that they have often misconceived their critical project, treating it in ways that are technically focused and that miss the deeper implications of their revolutionary challenge. Wettstein argues that Wittgenstein-a figure with whom the critics (...) of Frege and Russell are typically unsympathetic-laid the foundation for much of what is really revolutionary in this late 20th century movement. The subject itself should be of great interest, since philosophy of language has functioned as a kind of foundation for much of 20th century philosophy. But in fact it remains a subject for specialists, since the ideas are difficult and the mode of presentation is often fairly technical. In this book, Wettstein brings the non-specialist into the conversation (especially in early chapters); he also reconceives the debate in a way that avoids technical formulation. The Magic Prism is intended for professional philosophers, graduate students, and upper division undergraduates. (shrink)

Roger Garaudy, the Hellenic tradition, and imaginative space.--Kazantzakis' making of God.--Existentialism and language.--The argument of water.--Literature as ikonic language.--Literature and morality.

I reject Jackendoff's view of Universal Grammar as something that evolved biologically but applaud his integration of blackboard architectures. I thus recall the HEARSAY speech understanding system—the AI system that introduced the concept of “blackboard”—to provide another perspective on Jackendoff's architecture.

Corballis presents a plausible evolutionary mechanism to explain the tight linkage between cerebral lateralization for language and for handedness in humans. This argument may be bolstered by invoking Stokoe's notion of semantic phonology to explain the role of Broca's area in grammatical functions.

Skyrms–Lewis signaling games illustrate how meaningful language may evolve from initially meaningless random signals (Lewis, Convention 1969 ; Skyrms 2008 ). Here we will consider how incommensurable languages might evolve in the context of signaling games. We will also consider the types of incommensurability exhibited between evolved languages in such games. We will find that sequentially evolved languages may be strongly incommensurable while still allowing for increasingly faithful descriptions of the world.

My hypothesis is that the cognitive challenge posed by death might have had a co-evolutionary role in the development of linguistic faculties. First, I claim that mirror neurons, which enable us to understand others’ actions and emotions, not only activate when we directly observe someone, but can also be triggered by language: words make us feel bodily sensations. Second, I argue that the death of another individual cannot be understood by virtue of the mirror neuron mechanism, since the dead provide (...) no neural pattern for mirroring: this cognitive task requires symbolic thought, which in turn involves emotions. Third, I describe the symbolic leap of the human species as a cognitive detachment from the here and now, allowing displaced reference: through symbols the human mind can refer to what is absent, possible, or even impossible (like the presence of a dead person). Such a detachment has had a huge adaptive impact: adopting a coevolutionary standpoint can help explain why language is as effective as environmental inputs in order to stimulate our bodily experience. In the end I suggest a further coevolutionary reversal : if language is necessary to understand the death of the other, it might also be true that the peculiar cognitive problem posed by the death of the other (the corpse is present, but the other is absent) has contributed to the crucial transition from an indexical sign system to the symbolic level, i.e., the cognitive detachment . Death and language, as Heidegger claimed, have an essential relation for humans, both from an evolutionary and a phenomenological perspective: they have shaped the symbolic consciousness that make us conceive of them. (shrink)

Jackendoff's major syntactic exemplar is deeply unrepresentative of most syntactic relations and operations. His treatment of language evolution is vulnerable to Occam's Razor, hypothesizing stages of dubious independence and unexplained adaptiveness, and effectively divorcing the evolution of language from other aspects of human evolution. In particular, it ignores connections between language and the massive discontinuities in human cognitive evolution.

An intervening gestural stage in language evolution, though seductive, is ultimately redundant, and is not necessarily supported by modern human or chimp behaviour. The findings and arguments offered from mirror neurones, anatomy, and lateralization are capable of other interpretations, and the manipulative dextrality of chimps is under-recognized. While language certainly possesses certain unique properties, its roots are ancient.

Mirror systems must be supplemented by a planning capability to allow language to evolve. A capability for creating, storing, and executing plans for sequences of actions, having evolved in primates, was applied to sequences of communicatory acts. Language could exploit this already-existing capability. Further steps in language evolution may parallel steps seen in the development of modern children.

One way of dealing with the proliferation of conjectures that accompany the diverse study of the evolution of language is to develop precise and testable models which reveal otherwise latent implications. We suggest how verbal theories of the role of individual development in language evolution can benefit from formal modeling, and vice versa.

Computational approaches based on autonomous agents share with new ape language research the same principles of dynamical system paradigms. A recent model for the evolution of symbolization and language in autonomous agents is briefly described in order to highlight the similarities between these two methodologies. The additional benefits of autonomous agent modeling in the field of language origin research are highlighted.

This paper presents the hypothesis that linguistic capacity evolved through the action of natural selection as an instrument which increased the efficiency of the cultural transmission system of early hominids. We suggest that during the early stages of hominization, hominid social learning, based on indirect social learning mechanisms and true imitation, came to constitute cumulative cultural transmission based on true imitation and the approval or disapproval of the learned behaviour of offspring. A key factor for this transformation was the development (...) of a conceptual capacity for categorizing learned behaviour in value terms - positive or negative, good or bad. We believe that some hominids developed this capacity for categorizing behaviour, and such an ability allowed them to approve or disapprove of their offsprings- learned behaviour. With such an ability, hominids were favoured, as they could transmit to their offspring all their behavioural experience about what can and cannot be done. This capacity triggered a cultural transmission system similar to the human one, though pre-linguistic. We suggest that the adaptive advantage provided by this new system of social learning generated a selection pressure in favour of the development of a linguistic capacity allowing children to better understand the new kind of evaluative information received from parents. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the (...) natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the “logical” problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

There is both theoretical and experimental reason to suppose that no-one could ever have learned to speak without an environment of language-users. How then did the first language-users learn? Animal communication systems provide no help, since human languages aren't constituted as a natural system of signs, and are essentially recursive and syntactic. Such languages aren't demanded by evolution, since most creatures, even intelligent creatures, manage very well without them. I propose that representations, and even public representations like sculptures, precede full (...) languages, which were devised by the first human children as secret tongues to create fantasy realms inaccessible to their proto-human parents. Language, in brief, is not required for truth-telling or for the convenience of hunters. It is a peculiar modification of public representation, which permits us to construct new public worlds. (shrink)

Falk's contribution to a continuity theory of the origins of language would be complemented by an account of the origins of displaced reference, a key characteristic distinguishing human language from animal signaling systems. Because deception is one situation in which nonhumans may use signals in the absence of their referents, deception may have been the starting point for displaced reference.

Language and life history can be related functionally through the study of human ontogeny, thus usefully informing our understanding of several unique aspects of the evolution of species. The operational principles outlined by Locke & Bogin (L&B) demonstrate that the present can provide a useful framework for understanding the past.

We examined the role of fitness, commonly assumed without proof to be conferred by the mastery of language, in shaping the dynamics of language evolution. To that end, we introduced island migration (a concept borrowed from population genetics) into the shared lexicon model of communication (Nowak et al., 1999). The effect of fitness linear in language coherence was compared to a control condition of neutral drift. We found that in the neutral condition (no coherence-dependent fitness) even a small migration rate (...) – less than 1% – suffices for one language to become dominant, albeit after a long time. In comparison, when fitness-based selection is introduced, the subpopulations stabilize quite rapidly to form several distinct languages. Our findings support the notion that language confers increased fitness. The possibility that a shared language evolved as a result of neutral drift appears less likely, unless migration rates over evolutionary times were extremely small. (shrink)

For many years the evolution of language has been seen as a disreputable topic, mired in fanciful “just so stories” about language origins. However, in the last decade a new synthesis of modern linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has begun to make important contributions to our understanding of the biology and evolution of language. I review some of this recent progress, focusing on the value of the comparative method, which uses data from animal species to draw inferences about (...) language evolution. Discussing speech first, I show how data concerning a wide variety of species, from monkeys to birds, can increase our understanding of the anatomical and neural mechanisms underlying human spoken language, and how bird and whale song provide insights into the ultimate evolutionary function of language. I discuss the “descended larynx” of humans, a peculiar adaptation for speech that has received much attention in the past, which despite earlier claims is not uniquely human. Then I will turn to the neural mechanisms underlying spoken language, pointing out the difficulties animals apparently experience in perceiving hierarchical structure in sounds, and stressing the importance of vocal imitation in the evolution of a spoken language. Turning to ultimate function, I suggest that communication among kin (especially between parents and offspring) played a crucial but neglected role in driving language evolution. Finally, I briefly discuss phylogeny, discussing hypotheses that offer plausible routes to human language from a non-linguistic chimp-like ancestor. I conclude that comparative data from living animals will be key to developing a richer, more interdisciplinary understanding of our most distinctively human trait: language. (shrink)

We propose that the fine discrete movements of the tongue as used in speech are what account for the extreme lateralization in humans, and that handedness is a mere byproduct of tongue use. With regard to syntax, we support the Armstrong et al. (1995) proposition that syntax derives directly from gestural motor movements as opposed to facial expressions.

Locke & Bogin (L&B) suggest that theoretical principles of ontogenetic development apply to language evolution. If this is the case, then evolutionary theory should utilize epigenetic theories of development to theorize, model, and elucidate the evolution of language wherever possible. In this commentary, I evoke principles of dynamic systems theory to evaluate the evolutionary phenomena presented in the target article.

Human languages, such as French, Cantonese or American Sign Language, are socio- cultural entities. Knowledge of them (`competence') is acquired by exposure to the ap- propriate environment. Languages are maintained and transmitted by acts of speaking and writing; and this is also the means by which languages evolve. The utterances of one generation are processed by their children to form mental grammars, which in some sense summarize, or generalize over, the children's linguistic experiences. These grammars are the basis for the (...) production of a new avalanche of utterances to which the next generation in its turn is subjected. (This picture is simplified, of course, as generations overlap.) Languages inhabit two distinct and separate modes of existence, which have been called (by Chomsky, 1986) `E-Language' and `I-Language'. E-language is the external observable behaviour --- utterances and inscriptions and manifestations of their meanings. E-language is regarded by some as so chaotic and subject to the vicissitudes of everyday human life as to be a poor candidate for systematic study. (E-Language corresponds to what Chomsky, in earlier terminology, called `performance'.) Out of this blooming buzzing confusion the individual child distils an order internal to the mind; the child constructs a coherent systematic set of rules mapping meanings onto forms. This set of rules is the child's I-Language (where `I' is for `internal'). No two individuals' I-Languages have to be the same, although those of people living in the same community will overlap very significantly. But there will usually be at least some slight difference between the I-language features prevalent in one generation and those prevalent in the next. This is the stuff of language evolution, in the sense of the historical development of individual languages, such as Swedish, Navaho or Zulu. (shrink)

Species evolve, very slowly, through selection of genes which give rise to phenotypes well adapted to their environments. The cultures, including the languages, of human communities evolve, much faster, maintaining at least a minimum level of adaptedness to the external, non- cultural environment. In the phylogenetic evolution of species, the transmission of information across generations is via copying of molecules, and innovation is by mutation and sexual recombination. In cultural evolution, the transmission of information across generations is by learning, and (...) innovation is by sporadic invention or borrowing from other cultures. This much is the foundational bedrock of evolutionary theory. But things get more complicated; there can be gene-culture co-evolution. Prior to the rise of culture, the physical environment is the only force shaping biological evolution from outside the organism, and cultures themselves are clearly constrained by the evolved biological characteristics of their members. But cultures become part of the external environment, and influence the course of biological evolution. For example, altruistic cultures with developed medical knowledge reduce the cost to the individual of carrying genes disposing to certain pathologies (such as diabetes); and such genes become more widespread in the populations maintaining such cultures. Assortative mating can affect biological evolution, and particular cultures may influence the factors which are sorted for in mating. (For a careful discussion of the effects of cultural evolution on natural selection, see Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer, 1971:774- 804). This paper examines mechanisms involved in the co-evolution of a biological trait, the critical period for language acquisition, and a property of human cultures, the size of their languages. A gene/culture interaction will be shown that can be described as a kind of symbiosis, but perhaps more aptly as an `arms race'. In this introduction, we will sketch the basic mechanics of the interaction in very broad terms; the rest of the paper will explain and justify the details. The implications of our model for second language acquisition are given toward the end of the paper. (shrink)

Considerations from an interaction-based approach to the evolution of language and the role of word-sentences therein show that the object-attribute ontology is arrived at a much later stage. Therefore, Hurford's arguments, by focusing on the predicate-argument structure, seem to miss out on most of the interesting aspects of the early stages in language evolution.

In asking about the origins of human language, we first have to make clear what the question is. The question is not how languages gradually developed over time into the languages of the world today. Rather, it is how the human species developed over time so that we–and not our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos–became capable of using language.

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those (...) that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals’ communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.’s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky’s conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This paper is more about the questions for a theory of language evolution than about the answers. I’d like to ask what there is for a theory of the evolution of language to explain, and I want to show how this depends on what you think language is.

The goal of this study is to reintegrate the theory of generative grammar into the cognitive sciences. Generative grammar was right to focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem, leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However, generative grammar was mistaken in assuming that the syntactic component is the sole course of combinatoriality, and that everything else is “interpretive.” The proper approach is a parallel architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are autonomous generative (...) systems linked by interface components. The parallel architecture leads to an integration within linguistics, and to a far better integration with the rest of cognitive neuroscience. It fits naturally into the larger architecture of the mind/brain and permits a properly mentalistic theory of semantics. It results in a view of linguistic performance in which the rules of grammar are directly involved in processing. Finally, it leads to a natural account of the incremental evolution of the language capacity. Key Words: evolution of language; generative grammar; parallel architecture; semantics; syntax. (shrink)

The commentaries show the wide variety of incommensurable viewpoints on language that Foundations of Language attempts to integrate. In order to achieve a more comprehensive framework that preserves genuine insights coming from all sides, everyone will have to give a little.

Traditional ways of characterizing humans and persons are vague and simplistic. For example, persons are often defined as having free will and responsibility – but what actual powers underlie these vague metaphysical abstractions? Traditional answers like "rationality" and "creativity" are still vague, and also simplistic. Similar traits appear as defining traits of humans, yet we’re far too complex to be distinguished from other species in such simple and tight ways. But there may be a looser hallmark of humans that just (...) serves to best distinguish our complex package of traits from those of other species. It will be argued that while humans and persons differ, the underlying hallmark of both is their innately powerful, symbolically organized minds and societies. This seems to capture what is most distinctive about humans without the vagueness or oversimplification above. It explains how creativity, rationality, etc. arose in stages from precursors, and what is distinctive about their human forms. It also helps clarify what underlies the free will and responsibility of persons. It might also say interesting things about persons that may have evolved elsewhere, for example, that we have similar mentalities and evolutions, and that we are capable of mutual understanding. Finally, it might help weigh our evolutionary importance. (shrink)

Ontogeny, specifically the role of language in the human family now and in prehistory, is central to Locke & Bogin's (L&B's) thesis in a compelling way. The unique life-history stages of childhood and adolescence, however, must be interpreted not only against an exceptionally “high quality” human infancy but also in light of the evolution of co-constructed, emotionally based communication in ape, hominid, and human infancy.

The present paper is the result of a long struggle to understand how the notion of compositionality can be used to motivate the structure of a sentence. While everyone seems to have intuitions about which proposals are compositional and which ones are not, these intuitions generally have no formal basis. What is needed to make such arguments work is a proper understanding of what meanings are and how they can be manipulated. In particular, we need a definition of meaning that (...) bans all mentioning of syntactic structure; it is not the task of semantics to state in which way things are put together in syntax. The present paper presents such a theory of meaning. This, in tandem with some minimal assumptions on the syntactic process (that there can be no deletion) yield surprisingly deep insights into natural language. First, it rehabilitates a lot of linguistic work as necessary on semantic grounds and defends it against potential claims of redundancy. For example, θ-roles and linking are an integral part of semantics, and not syntax. To assume the latter is to put the cart before the horse. Second, as a particular example we shall show that Dutch is not strongly context free even if weakly context free. To our knowledge, this is the first formal proof of this fact. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between sense (Sinn) and meaning (Bedeutung) is his most influential contribution to philosophy, however central it was to his own projects, and however he may have conceived its importance. Philosophers of language influenced by, or reacting against the distinction, and historians of philosophy commenting on it, have all contributed to the voluminous literature surrounding it.1 Nonetheless in this essay I hope to shed new light on the distinction by considering it in the context of the development of Frege’s (...) thought, and connecting it more intimately than is usually done with Frege’s interests in logic, especially his views on judgment, truth and inference, which were central to his own projects as he conceived them. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century Epicureanism is often viewed as radical, anti-religious, and politically dangerous. But to what extent does this simplify the ancient philosophy and underestimate its significance to the Enlightenment? Through a pan-European analysis of Enlightenment centres from Scotland to Russia via the Netherlands, France and Germany, contributors argue that elements of classical Epicureanism were appropriated by radical and conservative writers alike. They move beyond literature and political theory to examine the application of Epicurean ideas in domains as diverse as physics, natural (...) law, and the philosophy of language, drawing on the work of both major figures (Diderot, Helvétius, Smith and Hume) and of lesser-known but important thinkers (Johann Jacob Schmauss and Dmitrii Anichkov). -/- Table of Contents -/- Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz, Epicurus in the Enlightenment: an introduction -/- Elodie Argaud, Bayle’s defence of Epicurus: the use and abuse of Malebranche’s Méditations chrétiennes -/- Hans W. Blom, The Epicurean motif in Dutch notions of sociability in the seventeenth century -/- Thomas Ahnert, Epicureanism and the transformation of natural law in the early German Enlightenment -/- Charles T. Wolfe, A happiness fit for organic bodies: La Mettrie’s medical Epicureanism -/- Natania Meeker, Sexing Epicurean materialism in Diderot -/- Pierre Force, Helvétius as an Epicurean political theorist -/- Andrew Kahn, Epicureanism in the Russian Enlightenment: Dmitrii Anichkov and atomic theory -/- Matthew Niblett, Man, morals and matter: Epicurus and materialist thought in England from John Toland to Joseph Priestley -/- James A. Harris, The Epicurean in Hume -/- Neven Leddy, Adam Smith’s critique of Enlightenment Epicureanism -/- Avi S. Lifschitz, The Enlightenment revival of the Epicurean history of language and civilisation -/- Bibliography -/- Index. (shrink)

It has long been claimed that Homo sapiens is the only species that has language, but only recently has it been recognized that humans also have an unusual pattern of growth and development. Social mammals have two stages of pre-adult development: infancy and juvenility. Humans have two additional prolonged and pronounced life history stages: childhood, an interval of four years extending between infancy and the juvenile period that follows, and adolescence, a stage of about eight years that stretches from juvenility (...) to adulthood. We begin by reviewing the primary biological and linguistic changes occurring in each of the four pre-adult ontogenetic stages in human life history. Then we attempt to trace the evolution of childhood and juvenility in our hominin ancestors. We propose that several different forms of selection applied in infancy and childhood; and that, in adolescence, elaborated vocal behaviors played a role in courtship and intrasexual competition, enhancing fitness and ultimately integrating performative and pragmatic skills with linguistic knowledge in a broad faculty of language. A theoretical consequence of our proposal is that fossil evidence of the uniquely human stages may be used, with other findings, to date the emergence of language. If important aspects of language cannot appear until sexual maturity, as we propose, then a second consequence is that the development of language requires the whole of modern human ontogeny. Our life history model thus offers new ways of investigating, and thinking about, the evolution, development, and ultimately the nature of human language. (shrink)

In Why we Talk, cognitive scientist Jean-Louis Dessalles presents an original, in-depth account of the nature and evolution of human language. Written in a clear and engaging manner, Why we Talk is an impressive achievement. Dessalles reviews and contributes to most controversies about human language. He compares human language to other systems of communication found in the animal world, arguing for the originality of the former; he clearly shows that language is a biological trait and that we should study its (...) evolution as we do for other biological traits; he analyzes the nature of grammar; he distinguishes two distinct semantic contributions made by assertions; he proposes several distinct stages in the evolution of language; and, finally, he proposes a new hypothesis about the selective pressures explaining the evolution of our linguistic faculty. In what follows, I will focus exclusively on this new hypothesis: I will argue that it poorly accounts for several important aspects of linguistic communication. Here is how I will proceed. In Section 1, I will review Dessalles’s hypothesis about the evolution of language. In Section 2, I will empirically evaluate this hypothesis. (shrink)

Considering the close relation between language and theory of mind in development and their tight connection in social behavior, it is no big leap to claim that the two capacities have been related in evolution as well. But what is the exact relation between them? This paper attempts to clear a path toward an answer. I consider several possible relations between the two faculties, bring conceptual arguments and empirical evidence to bear on them, and end up arguing for a version (...) of co-evolution. To model this co-evolution, we must distinguish between different stages or levels of language and theory of mind, which fueled each other’s evolution in a protracted escalation process. (shrink)

Abstract In Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar argues that speech developed from primate vocalizations as a replacement for grooming. Dunbar convincingly shows that language is just a highly developed form of primate communication. But Dunbar's thesis about the relationship between speech and optimal group size is problematic: his focus on strong ties leads him to overlook the integrative force of weak?tie networks.

I discuss a stochastic model of language learning and change. During a syntactic change, each speaker makes use of constructions from two different idealized grammars at variable rates. The model incorporates regularization in that speakers have a slight preference for using the dominant idealized grammar. It also includes incrementation: The population is divided into two interacting generations. Children can detect correlations between age and speech. They then predict where the population’s language is moving and speak according to that prediction, which (...) represents a social force encouraging children not to sound out-dated. Both regularization and incrementation turn out to be necessary for spontaneous language change to occur on a reasonable time scale and run to completion monotonically. Chance correlation between age and speech may be amplified by these social forces, eventually leading to a syntactic change through prediction-driven instability. (shrink)

By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans (...) underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realization of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced as the sacred (but today we know it as "the world" – as opposed to our immediate natural environment and that of other animals). Thus, although we, the human species, are but one species among innumerable others, we differ in kind, not degree. This quality is our symbolically enabled self-consciousness, the fortress of cultural identity that empowers but also imprisons awareness. (shrink)

Book Information The origins of complex language. By Carstairs-McCarthy Andrew. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1999. Pp. vi + 260.

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those (...) that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals’ communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.’s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky’s conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Human syntactic language has no close parallels in other systems of animal communication. Yet it seems to be an important part of the cultural adaptation that serves to make humans the earth’s dominant organism. Why is language restricted to humans given that communication seems to be so useful? We argue that language is part of human cooperation. We talk because others can normally trust what we say to be useful to them, not just to us. Models of gene-culture coevolution give (...) one plausible explanation for how language, cooperative institutions, and the genetic basis for both could have evolved. Why did the coevolutionary process come to rest leaving a huge space for the cultural evolution of language? We argue that language diversity functions to limit communication between people who cannot freely trust one another or where even truthful communications from others would result in maladaptive behavior on the part of listeners. (shrink)

At the end of the seminar, I suggested that most researchers on language and its evolution (including Derek Bickerton I suspect, though I've only read snippets of his work), mistakenly ignore a host of other competences that are present in far more species.

What evolved first: Languages for communicating, or languages for thinking (Generalised Languages: GLs)? (PDF) http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks/#glang Presented to Language and Cognition Seminar, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. 19th Oct 2007..

The evolution of human symbolic capacity must have been very rapid even in some intermediate stage (e.g. the proto-symbolic behavior of Homo erectus). Such a rapid process requires a runaway model. The type of very selective and hyperbolically growing self-organization called “hypercyle” by Eigen and Schuster could explain the rapidity and depth of the evolutionary process, whereas traditional runaway models of sexual selection seem to be rather implausible in the case of symbolic evolution. We assume two levels: at the first (...) level the species is adapted to ecological demands and accumulates the effects of this process in the genome. At the second level a kind of social/cultural knowledge is accumulated via a set of symbolic forms, one of which is language. Bühler’s model of three basic functions of signs can also be elaborated so that its cyclic structure becomes apparent. We assume that the hypercyclic process of semiosis and functional differentiation was triggered in 2 my BP (with the Homo erectus) and got more and more speed with the species Homo sapiens and later. The consequences for the evolutionary stratification of human languages will be drawn in the last section of the paper. The basic aim of the paper is to provide a semiotic (and not just a linguistic) explanation of the origin of language which can be linked to relevant models in evolutionary biology and which exploits the possibilities contained in self-organizing systems. (shrink)

Jackendoff's scenario of the evolution of language is a major contribution towards a more rigorous theory of the origins of language, because it is theoretically constrained by a testable theory of modern language. However, the theoretical constraints from evolutionary theory are not really recognized in his work. We hope that Jackendoff's lead will be followed by intensive cooperation between linguistic theorists and evolutionary modellers.

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby have argued that pornography might create a climate whereby a woman’s ability to refuse sex is literally silenced or removed. Their central argument is that a failure of ‘uptake’ of the woman’s intention means that the illocutionary speech act of refusal has not taken place. In this paper, I challenge the claims from the Austinian philosophy of language which feature in this argument. I argue that uptake is not in general required for illocution, nor is (...) it required for refusal in particular. I conclude with remarks on the relationship between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts. (shrink)