Tomasello et al. give a good account of how shared intentionality develops in children, but a much weaker one of how it might have evolved. They are unduly hasty in dismissing the emergence of language as a triggering factor. An alternative account is suggested in which language provided the spark, but thereafter language and shared intentionality coevolved.

According to Bickerton, the behavioral sciences have failed to give an adequate account of human nature at least partly because of the conjunction and mutual reinforcement of two widespread beliefs: that language is simply a means of communication and that human intelligence is the result of the rapid growth and unusual size of human brains. Bickerton argues that each of the properties distinguishing human intelligence and consciousness from that of other animals can be shown to derive straightforwardly from (...) properties of language. In essence, language arose as a representational system, not a means of communication or a skill, and not a product of culture but an evolutionary adaptation. The author stresses the necessity of viewing intelligence in evolutionary terms, seeing it not as problem solving but as a way of maintaining homeostasis - the preservation of those conditions most favorable to an organism, the optimal achievable conditions for survival and well-being. The term protolanguage is used to describe the stringing together of symbols that prehuman hominids employed. "It did not allow them to turn today's imagination into tomorrow's fact. But it is just this power to transform imagination into fact that distinguishes human behavior from that of our ancestral species, and indeed from that of all other species. It is exactly what enables us to change our behavior, or invent vast ranges of new behavior, practically overnight, with no concomitant genetic changes." Language and Human Behavior should be of interest to anyone in the behavioral and evolutionary sciences and to all those concerned with the role of language in human behavior. (shrink)

Although Penn et al. make a good case for the existence of deep cognitive discontinuity between humans and animals, they fail to explain how such a discontinuity could have evolved. It is proposed that until the advent of words, no species had mental representations over which higher-order relations could be computed.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Fundamental Differences Between Language and ACSs Language as Adaptation The Protolinguistic Adaptation Modern Human Language — Innate or Learned? The Evolution of Syntax The “Cultural Evolution” of Language References Further Reading.

This target article's handling of theory and data and the range of evidence surveyed for its main contention fall short of normal BBS standards. However, the contention itself is reasonable and can be supported if one rejects the metaphor for linguistic competence and accepts that are no more than the way the brain does language.

Hurford's argument suffers from two major weaknesses. First, his account of neural mechanisms suggests no place in the brain where the two halves of a predicate-argument structure could come together. Second, his assumption that language and cognition must be based on logic is neither necessary nor particularly plausible, and leads him to some unlikely conclusions.

Müller misconstrues autonomy to mean strict locality of brain function, something quite different from the functional autonomy that linguists claim. Similarly, he misperceives the interaction of learned and innate components hypothesized in current generative models. Evidence from sign languages, Creole languages, and neurological studies of rare forms of aphasia also argues against his conclusions.

Despite problems with statistical significance, ancillary hypotheses, and integration into an overall view of cognition, Grodzinsky's demotion of Broca's area to a mechanism for tracking moved constituents is intrinsically plausible and fits a realistic picture of how syntax works.

In dealing with the nature of protolanguage, an important formative factor in its development, and one that would surely have influenced that nature, has too often been neglected: the precise circumstances under which protolanguage arose. Three factors are involved in this neglect: a failure to appreciate radical differences between the functions of language and animal communication, a failure to relate developments to the overall course of human evolution, and the supposition that protolanguage represents a package, rather than a series of (...) separate developments that sequentially impacted the communication of pre-humans. An approach that takes these factors into account is very briefly suggested. (shrink)

Mirror neurons form a poor basis for Arbib's account of language evolution, failing to explain the creativity that must precede imitation, and requiring capacities (improbable in hominids) for categorizing situations and unambiguously miming them. They also commit Arbib to an implausible holophrastic protolanguage. His model is further vitiated by failure to address the origins of symbolization and the real nature of syntax.

Constructivism is the most recent in a long line of failed attempts to discredit nativism. It seeks support from true (but irrelevant) facts, wastes its energy on straw men, and jumps logical gaps; but its greatest weakness lies in its failure to match nativism's explanation of a wide range of disparate phenomena, particularly in language acquisition.

Despite some sound basic assumptions, Wilkins & Wakefield portray a Homo habilis too linguistically sophisticated to fit in with the subsequent fossil record and thereby lose a reasoned explanation for human innovativeness. They err, too, in accepting a single-level model of conceptual structure and in deriving initial linguistic units from calls, a process far more dubious than the derivation of home-sign from naive gesture.

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.

Although Carruthers’ proposals avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls that face analysts of the language-cognition relationship, they are needlessly complex and vitiated by his uncritical acceptance of a highly modular variety of evolutionary psychology. He pays insufficient attention both to the neural substrate of the processes he hypothesizes and to the evolutionary developments that gave rise to both language and human cognition.

That both language and novel life-history stages are unique to humans is an interesting datum. But failure to distinguish between language and language use results in an exaggeration of the language acquisition period, which in turn vitiates claims that new developmental stages were causative factors in language evolution.

Falk has much of interest to say on the evolution of mothering, but she fails to address the core issue of language evolution: how symbolism or structure evolved. Control of infants does not require either, and Falk provides neither evidence nor arguments supporting referential symbolism as a component of mother-infant interactions.

Though Bloom makes a good case that learning content-word meanings requires no task-specific apparatus, he does not seriously address problems inherent in learning the meanings of functional items. Evidence from creole languages suggests that the latter process presupposes at least some task-specific mechanisms, perhaps including a list of the limited number of semantic distinctions that can be expressed via functional items, as well as default systems that may operate in cases of impoverished input.

BASTARD TONGUES: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages. Author: Derek Bickerton (270 pp. Hill & Wang. New York - 2008. $ 26.) Review by Leonardo Caffo.

This is a major work in moral philosophy, the long-awaited follow-up to Parfit's 1984 classic Reasons and Persons, a landmark of twentieth-century philosophy. Parfit now presents a powerful new treatment of reasons and a critical examination of the most prominent systematic moral theories, leading to his own ground-breaking conclusion.

Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...) that most of us will find very disturbing. (shrink)

This is the second volume of a major new work in moral philosophy. It starts with critiques of Derek Parfit's work by four eminent moral philosophers, and his responses. The largest part of the volume is a self-contained monograph on normativity. The final part comprises seven new essays on Kant, reasons, and why the universe exists.

It’s intuitive to think that an intentional action requires that the agent knows that she’s doing so. In light of some apparent counterexamples, Setiya suggests that this intuitive insight is better captured in terms of credence: performing an intentional action requires the agent to have a higher credence that she’s doing so than she would have otherwise. I argue that there is no such thing as an agent’s credence for what she’s doing. After distinguishing this thesis from an idea some (...) defend under the slogan “deliberation crowds out prediction”, I explore the thesis’s broader epistemological implications for the belief-credence relation. (shrink)

Mengzi states that our human nature consists of our ability to feel compassion, disdain, respect, and (dis-)approval: all human beings have them. But he also states that we lose these four emotional capacities if we don’t reflect on or attend to them. There is an apparent contradiction in saying that all humans have them, but some have lost them. This essay offers a close reading of Mengzi’s phrase “to lose it” that helps explain away this appearance of contradiction. In doing (...) so, Mengzi is interpreted to be offering an ethics of attention about how we should attend to ourselves and others selectively to have a functional social life. (shrink)

French social and philosophical thought has played a very significant role in the development of European and American social theory. This detailed, timely book provides a map of the production and reception of French social thought within a global sociological context. Critically comparing the work of five key theorists Derek Robbins examines how their ideas were produced and received before persuasively setting out the key differences between their philosophical and ideological positions. The book sensitively traces the cross-currents of social (...) theory and confidently leads the reader through the complex foundations of Western social thought. Each chapter represents a textual analysis of the production of a critical intellectual and focuses upon the work of: Althusser, Foucault, Aron, Lyotard, Bourdieu. This carefully crafted volume represents a significant contribution to the globalization of theory and will be essential reading for anyone interested in Western social theory and the foundations of sociological thought."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Tragedy and Citizenship provides a wide-ranging exploration of attitudes toward tragedy and their implications for politics. Derek W. M. Barker reads the history of political thought as a contest between the tragic view of politics that accepts conflict and uncertainty, and an optimistic perspective that sees conflict as self-dissolving. Drawing on Aristotle's political thought, alongside a novel reading of the Antigone that centers on Haemon, its most neglected character, Barker provides contemporary democratic theory with a theory of tragedy. He (...) sees Hegel's philosophy of reconciliation as a critical turning point that results in the elimination of citizenship. By linking Hegel's failure to address the tragic dimensions of politics to Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Judith Butler, Barkeroffers a major reassessment of contemporary political theory and a fresh perspective on the most urgent challenges facing democratic politics. Derek W. M. Barker is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation. (shrink)