The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind, and Culture (original) (raw)
Related papers
The extended mind model of the origin of language and culture
Evolutionary epistemology, language and culture, 2006
A model based on the evolution of notated language and chaotics is presented to explain the emergence of language. Language emerges as the bifurcation from percept-based to conceptbased thought. Our first words are our fist concepts and act as strange attractors for the percepts associated with that concept. The mind is shown to be the brain acting as a percept processor plus language.
LANGUAGE EVOLUTION, BY EXAPTATION, WITH THE MIND LEADING
It has usually been claimed that language is what makes humans uniquely human. However, I submit that it is the mind as a general problem-solving capacity for adaptations to current ecological pressures that makes humans uniquely humans. Non-linguistic communication may have provided part of the ecological niche for the emergence of languages, having predisposed hominines to pay attention to each other and to read each other's mind. The same mind that produced all these new developments (in particular complex social life and a richer cognitive capacity) also enabled hominines to develop languages as communication technologies.
Mind and Language Architecture~!2009-09-13~!2010-05-18~!2010-07-06
The Open Neuroimaging Journal, 2010
A distinction is made between the brain and the mind. The architecture of the mind and language is then described within a neo-dualistic framework. A model for the origin of language based on emergence theory is presented. The complexity of hominid existence due to tool making, the control of fire and the social cooperation that fire required gave rise to a new level of order in mental activity and triggered the simultaneous emergence of language and conceptual thought. The mind is shown to have emerged as a bifurcation of the brain with the emergence of language. The role of language in the evolution of human culture is also described.
Language and the evolution of cognition
1995
The main purpose of this article is to discuss the kinds of mental representations that are required for language to evolve. Firstly, I distinguish between cued and detached representations. A cued representation stands for something that is present in the current external situation of the representing organism, while a detached representation may stand for objects or events that are neither present in the current situation nor triggered by some recent situation. The inner environment of an agent is defined as the collection of all detached representations of the agent. The fundamental difference between signal and a symbol is that the reference of a symbol is a detached representation, while a signal refers to a cued representation. Icons also refer to detached representations, but unlike symbols, the choice of representation is not arbitrary, since an icon in some aspects resembles the thing it represents.
Language, languaging, and the extended mind hypothesis
Pragmatics & Cognition, 2009
After a brief summary of Andy Clark's book, Supersizing the Mind (2008) I address Clark's approach to language which I argue to be inadequate. Clark is criticized for reifying language, thus neglecting that it is an interpersonal activity, not a stable system of symbols. With a starting point in language as a social phenomenon, I suggest an ecological approach to the extended mind hypothesis, arguing against Clark's assumption that the extended mind is necessarily brain-centered.
Biosemiotics, 2010
Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky are the acknowledged founding fathers of two research fields which are known respectively as Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics and which have been developed in parallel during the past 50 years. Both fields claim that language has biological roots and must be studied as a natural phenomenon, thus bringing to an end the old divide between nature and culture. In addition to this common goal, there are many other important similarities between them. Their definitions of language, for example, have much in common, despite the use of different terminologies. They both regard language as a faculty, or a modelling system, that appeared rapidly in the history of life and probably evolved as an exaptation from previous animal systems. Both accept that the fundamental characteristic of language is recursion, the ability to generate an unlimited number of structures from a finite set of elements (the property of 'discrete infinity'). Both accept that human beings are born with a predisposition to acquire language in a few years and without apparent efforts (the innate component of language). In addition to similarities, however, there are also substantial differences between the two fields, and it is an historical fact that Sebeok and Chomsky made no attempt at resolving them. Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics have become two separate disciplines, and yet in the case of language they are studying the same phenomenon, so it should be possible to bring them together. Here it is shown that this is indeed the case. A convergence of the two fields does require a few basic readjustments in each of them, but leads to a unified framework that keeps the best of both disciplines and is in agreement with the experimental evidence. What is particularly important is that such a framework suggests immediately a new approach to the origin of language. More precisely, it suggests that the brain wiring processes that take place in all phases of human ontogenesis (embryonic, foetal, infant and child development) are based on organic codes, and it is the step-by-step appearance of these brain-wiring
A Co-evolved Continuum of Language, Culture and Cognition: Prospects of Interdisciplinary Research
This paper deals with questions of language evolution and discusses the emergence of linguistic communication systems in the framework of a co-evolving continuum of language, culture and cognition. Different approaches have tried to unravel the mechanisms underlying language evolution and put emphasis on different aspects, for instance, biological vs. cultural mechanisms. While both are important, I will argue that at least a strong nativism should be refuted. After comparing both approaches, evidence from various lines of research (but especially agent-based models) will be reviewed to argue for the existence of cultural evolutionary processes. In these experiments linguistic structure emerges from scratch via self-organization and selection merely due to interaction and cultural transmission. At the same time, the diversity we can observe in growing cross-linguistic data suggests that many grammatical and conceptual categories that had been considered ‘universal’ do in fact vary. These findings, especially in the semantic domain of space have led to claims about the relation of language and general cognition and a revival of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, but it remains unclear in which directions language, culture and cognition interact. Here I argue that these problems can be approached in the presented framework from an evolutionary perspective. I propose how to address them empirically by combining agent-based models, experimental semiotics and insights from comparative linguistics. I further aim to stress the importance of the ecological environment in evolutionary models and give examples of how it can be taken into account in future empirical work.
Post 13: Language and the fault line of evolutionary order (Part 3)
As far as I am aware, there are no comprehensive and comparative etymology works that focus on terms related to the human mind or psyche. Such a work could teach us much about the sources of different terminologies, and the ways in which different languages represent the functions through which we learn to interact with the world and ourselves. In Hebrew, for example, the term for 'awareness' is derived from the term for 'consciousness'; its meaning is a reflection of what is in the mind (similar to the term 'self-consciousness'). In contrast, in English these are two different terms (by root and etymologically). In Hebrew, the term for 'consciousness' has the same root as the term for 'knowledge'; in English these terms have different roots. In Hebrew, the full range of mental functions has one term -'soul'. In English, the situation is not entirely clear: the terms 'mind' or 'psyche' are sometimes used to signify the assembly of all psychological functions; at other times, they only signify the highest functions ('mind') or the lowest and most basic ones ('psyche'). Such differences show just how complicated the discussion truly is, when it comes to the functions of our own psychology. Added to this complexity is the fact that some of the terms are not properly defined (consciousness, self, etc.). It seems that different languages have mapped the entire complex and the connections between its components in many different ways.