The linguistic and cognitive sciences have severely underestimated the degree of linguistic diversity in the world. Part of the reason for this is that we have projected assumptions based on English and familiar languages onto the rest. We focus on some distortions this has introduced, especially in the study of semantics.

Henrich et al. convincingly caution against the overgeneralization of findings from particular human populations, but fail to apply their own compelling reasoning to our nearest living relatives, the great apes. Here we argue that rearing history is every bit as important for understanding cognition in other species as it is in humans.

Developmental psychologists identify propensities for social engagement in human infants that are less evident in other apes; Sarah Hrdy links these social propensities to novel features of human childrearing. Unlike other ape mothers, humans can bear a new baby before the previous child is independent because they have help. This help alters maternal trade-offs and so imposes new selection pressures on infants and young children to actively engage their caretakers’ attention and commitment. Such distinctive childrearing is part of our grandmothering (...) life history. While consequences for other cooperative activities must surely follow, the novel rearing environments set up by helpful grandmothering can explain why natural selection escalated preferences and motivations for interactivity in our lineage in the first place, and why, unlike other aspects of infant development, social sensitivities are not delayed in humans compared with genus Pan. (shrink)

Numerous evolutionary linguists have indicated that human pointing behaviour might be associated with the evolution of language. At an ontogenetic level, and in normal individuals, pointing develops spontaneously and the onset of human pointing precedes as well as facilitates phases in speech and language development. Phylogenetically, pointing behaviour might have preceded and facilitated the evolutionary origin of both gestural and vocal language. Contrary to wild non-human primates, captive and human-reared nonhuman primates also demonstrate pointing behaviour. In this article, we analyse (...) the debates on pointing and its role it might have played in language evolution from a meta-level. From within an Applied Evolutionary Epistemological approach, we examine how exactly we can determine whether pointing has been a unit, a level or a mechanism in language evolution. (shrink)

This thesis presents a communicative account of personhood that argues for the inseparability of the metaphysical and the practical concepts of a person. It connects these two concepts by coupling the question “what is a person” with the question "how does one become a person". It argues that participation in social interactions that are characterized by mutual recognition and giving-and-taking reasons implied by the practical concept of a person is in fact an ecological and developmental condition for an entity to (...) possess the kind of characteristics and capacities such as reflexive self-consciousness addressed by the metaphysical concept. The chief theoretical contribution of the dissertation research lies, accordingly, in demonstrating that an adequate metaphysical concept of a person has to make reference to the kind of social processes that are necessary for the emergence and development of the distinguishing attributes of persons among other moving, perceiving, desiring and cognizing agents. Methodologically, it undertakes an original philosophical analysis that is enriched by an interdisciplinary investigation of several notions and insights from semiotics, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive science and anthropology. The main argument of the thesis is that one becomes a person through internally recreating a social, communicative process; namely, that of dialogical transformation of habits. We find the paradigmatic case of this social process in mutual persuasion. The internalization of this process in the form of an inner dialogue cultivates a social self that is in ongoing communication with the embodied, organismic self of uncritically habituated attitudes, convictions and desires. This inner dialogue can be conceived as a temporally extended process of self-persuasion, which is characterized by an ongoing strive for attaining higher degrees of self-control; that is, for achieving a more coherent alignment between our habits and the kind of person we would like to be. It starts with self-interpretation and self-evaluation, and culminates in the formation of higher-order desires that facilitate habit-change and novel habit formation in accordance with certain social, moral, aesthetical or intellectual categories and norms one comes to endorse. For this reason, self-induced, deliberate habit-change is also a process of appropriation or self-appropriation, through which we strive to cultivate habits of feeling, thinking, acting that we can deem more truly ours. The thesis demonstrates that the capacity for engaging in this kind of self-persuasion consists chiefly in the capacities for metasemiosis, perspective-taking, and for cultivating habits of reflexivity. It explicates how all these capacities have a social origin and ultimately a social function by showing that they all presuppose certain higher-order communicative patterns that arose through an evolutionary and cultural history, and develop through the internal reconstruction of these patterns as cognitive-semiotic processes. The thesis concludes that becoming a kind of being who can engage in self-persuasion, thus a person, consists ultimately in internalizing the patterns of communicative social interactions in the form of an ongoing auto-communication. (shrink)

This is a selective review of the published literature on object-choice tasks, where participants use directional cues to find hidden objects. This literature comprises the efforts of researchers to make sense of the sense-making capacities of our nearest living relatives. This chapter is written to highlight some nonsensical conclusions that frequently emerge from this research. The data suggest that when apes are given approximately the same sense-making opportunities as we provide our children, then they will easily make sense of our (...) social signals. The ubiquity of nonsensical contemporary scientific claims to the effect that humans are essentially--or inherently--more capable than other great apes in the understanding of simple directional cues is, itself, a testament to the power of preconceived ideas on human perception. (shrink)

The concept of recognition (Anerkennung in German) has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the „recognitive attitudes‟ of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it (...) explores the possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground (at least among the most intelligent animals currently known to exist), then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (shrink)